The stories of Swayamvaras are some of the more interesting myths that Indians ever came up with – my favourite is that of Draupadi. The idea of the Swayamvara – a word that literally means self-choice, connoting marriage by choice – represents a chasm between rhetoric and action. The woman chooses by allowing herself to be the prize in the contest set by her father and brothers – a fish must be shot at for no one less than the greatest archer in the land may wed Draupadi. So the princess of Panchala waits, as man after man fails and the fish’s eye still stares menacingly down. Then a young, handsome Brahman stands up and proudly picks the bow up. He strings it, looks down and shoots. The eye is pierced and Draupadi is won. In the original (or what we now can accept as the “original” – it would be the wrong place to debate authenticity of versions of the Mahabharata), she walks up to Arjuna, garlands him and takes him by hand – an unprecedented show of desire on the part of a woman. It is curbed, however, soon enough, and Draupadi is divided up between Arjuna and his brothers. When she dies, she passes through hell for a time, for just that sin: showing her desire for Arjuna.
Folk literature and music in India is replete with the idiom of the woman in love – unbounded and in abandon, she seeks her lover; she is scorned by society, thought to be ill or mad: she must become the whore, the slut, “sell herself in the marketplace”, as Janabai wrote in one of her songs, if she must hope to reach the man she loves. Devdas is still a celebrated character: Paro is the heartless bitch who left him in her pride, his drunkenness, dissolute life hence are forgiven, even indulged. But Chandramukhi must remain the whore. Sarat Chandra’s sketching of the Tawaif who cohabits with his protagonist is beautifully layered. Chandramukhi leaves her home as a young teenager, to elope with her boyfriend. He, however, sees her willingness to elope with him as a sign of her looseness of character and leaves her. She has nowhere to turn to – in “decent” society, she is tarnished – a woman who actually ran after a man. So she chooses to do the very thing that society now accuses her of – selling sex to men.
Akka Mahadevi exemplified, in many ways, the idea of female desire in India. A Kannada poet of the 12th century, Akka is said to have chased her transcendental love of Chennamallikarjuna (her name for Shiva), giving up household life, as she wandered over South India, naked – standard for male ascetics but shocking for a woman. Her verse reflects this abandon and is stark. She wrote
“Not one, not two, not three or four
But through eighty-four hundred thousand vaginas
Have I come.
I have come
Through unlikely worlds
Guzzled on
Pleasure and pain.”
Closer to our perceptions, imaginations and popular culture is Meerabai, whose unfortunate appropriation by the Victorian brigade of Hindu conservatism has obscured the sensual beauty of her lyrics. She is transcendental, in that her “lord” is an idea – an ideal lover, who would respond to the call of Meera, without judgement or question. She writes about finding false pretexts to meet her lover “by accident”, to advance the affair on her own agency – she is not the shy bride.
In the 1960s, Satyajit Ray created a stir with his Charulata, a film based on Tagore’s story, Nastanirh, an account of love between a woman and her husband’s cousin. The camera moves with Charu, in the film, as she swings, softly humming, as Amol, the brother-in-law lies on the grass. He is regarding a feather, almost too carefully, and her eye pans over him. It is she who is the voyeur, the agent of desire. Later on in the film, Charu, in a burst of passion hugs Amol, weeping on his shoulder. She is not a seductress or even archetypal as a sexy woman. She is merely the mover – the agent of desire in the love affair.
The rhetoric of these stories and songs is still terribly relevant. Sexual desire still makes the slut. Its repression makes the good woman – the “slut” image getting more and more popular doesn’t obliterate the fact that the sexual image associated with the “slut” is still violent – a sexuality of power and domination where the woman adds to the excitement by being what she is.
Source: Satyajitray.org
The Author Sneha Krishnan is an economics-obsessed, pasta-loving history student bound for Oxford this fall. She is usually found curled up in sofas with her ever-present macbook perched on some surface in the vicinity. Sneha first started thinking about doing Sa when she and Shweta realized that they were ranting about the day's news/ happenings practically everyday and everything they said had something to do with their feminist convictions. So they wondered how it would be to write about these things and more... and KaBoom... seven months and laborious code-learning (trial and error, the only method for us) sessions later, Sa came to be. Sneha’s favourite pastimes, besides feminism and Sa, are reading the New York Times, playing Scrabble and watching every movie that looks remotely interesting.
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