The Hindus (115 page)

Over the centuries, Sita’s ordeal has proved problematic for different reasons to different South Asians, from pious apologists who were embarrassed by the god’s cruelty to his wife, to feminists who saw in Sita’s acceptance of the “cool” flames an alarming precedent for suttee, and, most recently, to Hindus who objected to alternate
Ramayanas
that called into question Sita’s single-minded devotion to Rama. Some peasant retellings emphasize Sita’s anger at the injustices done to her and applaud her rejection of Rama after she has been sent away, while Dalit versions even depict Sita’s love for Ravana (“indicating perhaps that this may be a subterranean theme of even the orthodox version in which she is only suspected”). Maharashtra women praise Sita for disobeying Rama, going to the forest with him when he told her not to. In a folk poem from Uttar Pradesh, Sita refuses to go back to Rama even when Lakshsmana has been sent to bring her and instead raises her sons on her own.
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Sita has also been made, counterintuitively, into a champion of women’s rights. There is a Sita temple without Rama (far more unusual than a Rama temple without Sita) in a village in Maharashtra, commemorating the year in which Sita wandered, pregnant and destitute, after Rama kicked her out; the temple legend states that when Sita came to this village, the villagers refused to give her food, and she cursed them, so that no grain would ever grow in their fields. In recent years a reformer named Sharad Joshi urged the villagers to redress the wrongs that Rama did to Sita and to erase the curse that has kept them from achieving justice or prosperity, by redressing their own wrongs to their own women, whom they have kept economically dependent and powerless. He told them the story of the
Ramayana,
often moving big, burly farmers to tears, and suggested that Valmiki had introduced the injustice to Sita
not
to hold up Sita’s suffering as an example for other wives but rather to warn men not to behave like Rama. (“He could have made Ram into as perfect a husband as he was a son. Instead . . . Valmiki wants to show how difficult it is for even supposedly perfect men to behave justly towards their wives.”) Finally, he argued that they should not wait for government laws to enforce the economic rights of women but should voluntarily transfer land to their women, thus paying off a long-overdue debt to Sita. Hundreds of Maharashtrian villagers have done this.
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In contrast with the ambivalent practical effects of powerful goddesses with their shakti, it was Sita’s
lack
of power that seems to have done the trick here.

Sita’s curse was also felt elsewhere in Maharashtra, at an abandoned Sita temple in Raveri. “Rakshasas built it,” the villagers say. After Sita was driven out of Ayodhya, she settled in Raveri and begged for food, house to house, because she had two small babies and could not work. When the villagers refused her (on the ground that such an abandoned woman must be a “bad woman”), she cursed the village so that it could not grow wheat. Activists used this myth to get peasants to put land in the names of the women of their family.
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Shashi Tharoor retold the
Mahabharata
as
The Great Indian Novel,
in which the self-sacrificing Bhishma (the son of Ganga, in the Sanskrit text) becomes Ganga-ji, a thinly veiled form of Gandhi, while Dhritarashtra is Nehru, with his daughter Duryodhani (Indira Gandhi). Karna goes over to the Muslim side and becomes Jinna (where the original Karna sliced his armor off his body, this Karna seizes a knife and circumcises himself) and is eventually exposed as a chauffeur, the “humble modern successor to the noble profession of charioteering.” As Tharoor remarks, “It is only a story. But you learn something about a man from the kind of stories people make up about him.”
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Sita is not alone in serving as a lightning rod for Hindu ideas about female chastity; her
Mahabharata
counterpart, Draupadi, remains equally controversial. One Dalit woman’s take on the disrobing scene, in which Karna teases Draupadi, is skeptical: “Now, even with five husbands didn’t Draupadi have to worry about Karna Maharaj’s intentions?”
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Dalit women are equally dubious about Satyavati and Kunti: “One agreed to the whims of a rishi in order to remove the bad odour from her body, the other obeyed a mantra! What wonderful gods! What wonderful rishis!”
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And a popular song among lower-class women in nineteenth-century Calcutta imagined the objections that Ambalika might have expressed when her mother-in-law, Satyavati, insisted that she let Vyasa impregnate her:

Despite Satyavati’s checkered, to say the least, sexual record, this possibility apparently never occurred to Vyasa (in either of his characters, as author of the Sanskrit
Mahabharata
or, within the text, as the grandfather of its heroes), for a very good reason that Ambalika seems to have overlooked: Satyavati is Vyasa’s mother.

The
Mahabharata
story of the burning of the five Nishadas in the house of lac undergoes a major moral reversal in a contemporary retelling by the Bengali feminist novelist Mahashweta Devi (1926- ):

In Vyasa’s
Mahabharata,
Kunti does die in a forest fire, but she never does remember the Nishadi. It is the genius of the modern version to unite these two traditional episodes of a woman and fire, a theme with other overtones as well, to make an entirely new point.

The TV
Mahabharata
also expressed a belated sense of guilt on behalf of the Pandavas, taking pains to note that the Nishadas who burned to death in the house of lac had been its architects; that Duryodhana had planned to kill them, in order to silence them; and that the Pandavas knew this and felt that since the Nishadas were going to die anyway, there was no harm in killing them.

One particular Nishada, Ekalavya, plays an important role in the life of contemporary Dalits, who make Ekalavya do for them what the myths did not reveal him doing for himself: revolt.
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One Dalit poet says, “I am conscious of my resolve,/ the worth of the blood of Ekalavya’s finger.”
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A movement to gain water rights for Dalits on the Ganges River used the symbol of Ekalavya:

Another poem, by Tryambak Sapkale (born in 1930), a railway ticket taker on the Dhond-Manmad railway line until his retirement, is a kind of extended meditation on an aphorism by the ancient Greek philosopher Archimedes, about a lever and a fulcrum: “Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the earth”:

And a final example was composed by Surekha Bhagat, a widow, born in 1949, who is an Ambedkar Buddhist and works in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Buldhana, Maharashtra:

The televised
Mahabharata
made a big point of the Ekalavya story, playing it out at great length. There are Ekalavya education foundations in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. The Ekalavya Ashram in Adilabad, a northern district bordering on Maharashtra, on the banks of the Godavari River, is a nonprofit tribal welfare facility established in 1990. Run by people from the local business community, it serves underprivileged tribal people who cannot afford to educate their children.

The cross-dressing men of the Third Nature in the
Kama-sutra
may be the cultural ancestors of the Hijras of contemporary India, cross-dressing and sometimes castrated male homosexuals, often prostitutes, who worship the goddess Bahuchara Mata.
^lp
Perhaps fifty thousand strong in India today,
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the Hijras descend upon weddings, birth celebrations, and other occasions of fertility, dancing and singing to the beat of drums, offering their blessing or, if they are not paid, their curse, which may take the form of lifting their skirts to display the wound of their castration. Their ambivalent ability to blackmail through a combination of blessing and curse eventually struck a resonant chord with some government agency charged with tax collection. As a result, in 2006 the Municipal Corporation of Patna, the capital of Bihar, one of India’s most impoverished states, hired about twenty Hijras to go from shop to shop (later from house to house), asking the owners to pay overdue municipal taxes, which apparently ran into the millions. The new tax collectors met with considerable success from their very first day on the job, often settling the outstanding arrears on the spot; in lieu of salary, they received 4 percent of the amount they collected.
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Kannappar’s eyes, like Ekalavya’s thumb, lived on in later parables, entering Indian folklore, both northern and southern, as a symbol of violent self-sacrifice (though Kannappar is seldom invoked in Sanskrit texts, which generally prefer a more muted bhakti). An Englishman living in India told this story about an event in 1986:

One might see in the mistaking of a non-Kannappar statue for a Kannappar statue the mischievousness of the god or the proof of a religious placebo effect, or simply the common confusion between one god and another. Twenty years later, in 2006, the chief education officer in a campaign in India to promote corneal replacements and other medical measures to avoid blindness “recalled that Kannappa Nayanar, a hunter-turned-saint, was the first eye donor.”
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Indian goddesses continue to evolve. At a festival in Kerala, in January 2008, the goddess Bhagavati got on her elephant and visited her “twin sister,” the Virgin Mary, at the church down the road.
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In South Indian rituals, when the goddess Minakshi marries Shiva (a gendered alliance of a local goddess and a pan-Indian male god) and her brother-in-law Vishnu comes to the wedding (a sectarian alliance of Vaishnavas and Shaivas), Vishnu stops along the way to the wedding to see his Muslim mistress (an interreligious alliance); the next morning he is in a much better mood, and that is when his worshipers ask him for favors.
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The Delhi High Court ruled that it was not plagiarism for a private citizen in Kolkata to use, for his float in Durga Puja, a gigantic marquee of the imaginary castle of Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s school, built in canvas and papier-mâché, as well as statues of Rowling’s literary characters.
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And new goddesses spring full grown from the head of Bollywood. The goddess Santoshi Mata, first worshiped in the 1960s by women in many cities of Uttar Pradesh, has no base in any pan-Indian Puranic myth but suddenly crossed over into national popularity in 1975, largely as the result of a mythological film,
Jai Santoshi Ma.
The film depicted her birth (from the god Ganesha) and the origin of her worship; during screenings, the theater became a temple, and women made offerings,
pujas
of fruit and flowers, on the stage in front of the screen.
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The medium was certainly the message here. Now worshiped throughout India, Santoshi is propitiated by comparatively simple and inexpensive rites performed in the home without the intercession of a priest. She grants practical and obvious blessings, such as a promotion for an overworked husband or a new household appliance.