Mythology for the Millennial: On Shakuntala, Dushyanta and the one ring that bound them both

I have this print of Raja Ravi Varma's Shakuntala on the wall of the staircase leading up to our house. Perhaps you know it. It shows three young women in the woods, mountains in the background. Two of the women are talking to each other, the one who has her head turned away from us is carrying a basket of flowers. And then there's a third woman, her hand resting on her companion's shoulder for balance as she grips the base of her foot, apparently pretending to take a thorn out of her heel so she can take a backwards look at her lover. We see her face, but she's not looking out at us. Instead, her whole form is one of yearning, her mouth is unsmiling, her eyes eager, her shoulders tilted backwards, so much does she long to be in a part of the painting that we cannot see. There's also an old woman walking ahead of the younger ones, but if there is an explanation for who she is, I cannot find it.

Shakuntala, by Raja Ravi Varma. Image via WikimediaCommons

Ironically, Shakuntala, the heroine of perhaps one of the best-known love stories in Hindu mythology, was not born from a place of love. I've written about her sage dad/apsara mom before in this column, but let's recap:

[Sage Vishvamitra] was chugging along at his meditations when the god Indra decided to test him — the gods were big on surprise quizzes — and sends Menaka down to earth to seduce him. Menaka was an apsara, a celestial woman created just for sensual pleasure in heaven for men and gods, no word yet on what the women got. Duly seduced, Vishvamitra lives with Menaka for ten years, and then she eventually has a kid, a daughter named Shakuntala, at which point Vishvamitra's suddenly terrorised by the idea of fatherhood and curses her into becoming super ugly in her next birth.

Anyway, this baby was found by another sage, but a much kinder one, a guy called Kanva, who found her in the reeds where Vishvamitra abandoned her, but surrounded by sakunta birds, who, much like the wolves and Mowgli, were doing a pretty good job looking after her and keeping her alive. (Unclear about which birds, but the Sambhava Parva book of the Mahabharata does mention vultures were keeping an eye on her, which would be curiously against the common perception of those much-maligned birds as evil or scavenging creatures.) So Kanva calls the baby Shakuntala, ie person protected by birds, and raises her in his ashram, where she lives an idyllic Disney princess type existence, little birds dressing her each morning, lots of fresh air and activities, some young friends who think the world of her and so on. She grows to young womanhood in this innocent environment and that's when the trouble starts.

Of course, the problems all begin with a man barging in where he's not wanted. Dushyant is hunting and shoots a deer, but he can't find it, because the creature's limped off, so he tracks it and stumbles upon the ashram where he sees Shakuntala nursing the deer, and he's overwhelmed by her beauty and wants to have sex with her right there on the ashram floor so he suggests a Gandharva marriage, which is this very interesting loophole to the traditional Hindu wedding ceremonies with like, ten days of pomp and circumstance. It's one of the eight classical forms of Hindu weddings (more on this in a future column!) and is solely dependent on the bride and groom taking a fancy to each other. In fact, it's super important that the bride is into the groom in this case, because it was one of the few times that women had control over their futures. You didn't need a priest, and most importantly, you didn't need your parents' consent. Obviously, as time went on, and patriarchy tightened its views about women as property, this sort of wedding fell out of fashion, but it did see a nice lot of weddings in its time.

Although the Shakuntala-Dushyanta story should not be used as an example for a successful Gandharva wedding. After he marries her, he has to go off back to his kingdom, and he's like, “Okay, make up a party and come to me when you're ready.” In Kalidasa's version, which I'm using as canon here, since that's the story people are most familiar with: Dushyanta gives his wife a ring, so she can identify herself as his wife, and then leaves. She's pregnant at this point, but no one knows that yet.

So, she's mooning about, dreaming about Dushyanta and generally being a sixteen year old in love, when the sage Durvasa, whose role is basically to curse people and move a story along, appears in her dad's ashram. Because she's lost in thought and does not immediately jump to do his bidding, he tells her that whoever she's thinking about will forget her, just like she's forgotten Durvasa. Great guy, Durvasa. Really a pearl among sages. (Did he ever curse men or was all his rage reserved for women?)

So of course, our heroine loses the ring her husband gave her and turns up at his kingdom with her dad and extended friends from the ashram, only for Dushyanta to tell her he's never met her before in his life. Worse, he's all, “How do I even know this baby is mine?” Weeping, Shakuntala leaves, and that's the end of the story for about three or four years, until a fisherman shows up with a ring he's found in the belly of a fish. It's—duh—Shakuntala's missing ring, and Dushyanta goes in search of her, we're hoping he's kicking himself after doing all that royal ghosting. He finds a little boy wrestling a lion, it's his son! Bharat! And the family is reunited and that's I think the last we hear about Shakuntala.

Kalidasa made Dushyanta into a more sympathetic guy though. In the Mahabharata, Shakuntala goes to him only after she's had her son, and reminds him that he promised to make their son his heir. Dushyanta remembers but pretends not to, and says he has no idea who she is. Shakuntala makes a plea for her own behalf, tells him she's a good wife and it's a sin to cast her and their son aside and so on, a nice flowery speech, to which Dushyant says (and I will quote directly from the text here, so you can see what a dirtbag he is): “O Shakuntala, I do not know having begot upon thee this son. Women generally speak untruths. Who shall believe in thy words? Destitute of all affection, the lewd Menaka is thy mother, and she cast thee off on the surface of the Himavat as one throws away, after the worship is over, the flowery offering made to his gods. Thy father too of the Kshatriya race, the lustful Viswamitra, who was tempted to become a Brahmana, is destitute of all affection. However, Menaka is the first of Apsaras, and thy father also is the first of Rishis. Being their daughter, why dost thou speak like a lewd woman?” Wow.

I hope Shakuntala was able to forgive Dushyanta after all that — no matter what version of the story you prefer, he still forgot her and their kid.

(Source: Firstpost)

The ring changed Dushyanta from a lying cad to an honourable man: Wendy Doniger

In Wendy Doniger’s ingenious new book, The Ring of Truth: Myths of Sex and Jewelry, she traces the story of the ring across tales and cultures: from Shakuntala’s ring to Portia’s, from Rama’s ring that Sita recognises to DeBeers’ engagement rings. The ring often signifies the woman’s self, it saves honour, reveals identity, ignites memory and marks desire while the wearing of the ring imitates the act of sex. In an email interview with Charmy Harikrishnan, Doniger, who is the Mircea Eliade distinguished service professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, talks about the evolution of the signet ring in some of the prominent Indian texts, how the ring helped Kalidasa whitewash Dushyanta’s erotic record, and how Indians are now confusing their great myths with ancient history, and hurling racial and sexist abuses at scholars like her and Audrey Truschke. Excerpts:

"Kalidasa created his Shakuntala at a time when the power of women —
which was fairly robust in the Mahabharata; think of Draupadi! — had
significantly waned," Wendy Doniger said. 

When and how did the signet ring appear in Indian texts? It has a significant presence in literature — from the Ramayana to Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa to Kalidasa’s Abhinjana Shakuntalam. 
The texts you mention, which I discuss in the book, are the earliest ones I know that refer to signet rings. It’s generally thought that such rings came into India with the Greeks under Alexander the Great in 326 BCE. But I think, since we have hundreds of examples of seals, though not seal rings, from the Indus Valley Civilisation before 2000 BCE, someone in India may well have had the bright idea of using a seal on a ring long before the Greeks came to India.

In the earliest version of Shakuntala’s story in the Mahabharata, there is no ring but the woman is wise, vocal and discourses on dharma. But Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, as you say, is ‘hardly more than a child and says little’. 
Kalidasa created his Shakuntala at a time when the power of women — which was fairly robust in the Mahabharata; think of Draupadi! — had significantly waned. The perfect heroine would no longer be able to defend herself as the Mahabharata’s Shakuntala was able to do, to chastise King Dushyanta and teach him a lesson in dharma. So Kalidasa had to give his heroine some help, in the form of the magic ring that first erased and then restored Dushyanta’s memory of her.

Interestingly, you and critics like Romila Thapar point to Kalidasa’s use of the device of the ring to protect the king from ‘blame’ and ‘the royal sin’ of abandoning a woman. 
Yes, the ring changed Dushyanta from a lying cad (which he was in the Mahabharata) to a perfectly honourable man who was the victim of a curse — carried by a ring — that clouded his memory. Since Kalidasa’s patrons, the Gupta dynasty, traced their lineage back to Bharata, the son of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, it was in Kalidasa’s best interests to whitewash the king’s erotic record.

How did the ring become a repository of so much even when it doesn’t hold huge symbolism in the society at large in India? Even wedding rings are rather recent. 
Rings signify an enduring promise of love, but they also signify the identity of the lover. The idea of endurance is suggested by the material that the ring is made of, usually a form of metal. And the idea of sexual love is suggested by the relationship between the ring and the finger. Given as an emotional pledge of affection, rings often end up as vital legal evidence of marriage and paternity. As for their prominence in India, they play an important part in the earliest literature of India, which is in Sanskrit, and the use of Sanskrit at first was limited to the very small upper crust of the Indian population.

The rings in these texts, therefore, usually belong to kings and princesses, though also to merchants. Some of those stories about rings filtered down into the folk literature in several vernacular Indian languages; for instance, the story of the clever wife — who uses a ring to prove to her husband that he fathered her child — is told in many folk traditions ‘in society at large in India’. But wedding rings are not prominent in these folk tales, or in Indian popular culture; bangles and anklets and nose rings really play a larger part there. Still, they are rings (circular jewellery)!

You trace the presence of the ring across cultures. How different is it in Indian literature? 
The Indian stories share many of the more general meanings — of love, marriage and betrayal — that are found throughout the corpus in the Indo-European world, but they have a particular inflection of their own, growing out of ideas, unique to India, about the nature of women, the customs of marriage, the physical process of paternity and the distribution of wealth. And, in my humble opinion, the Indian stories are the best, the most ingenious and the most richly embellished, simply because the Indian tradition of storytelling is the most vivid and robust.

In India, why is there a tendency to approach literature/ myths as historical truths rather than as texts?
India has always had a rich tradition of literature and myth, and it has also always had a rich tradition of science, in the form of the shastras: the sciences of mathematics, grammar and astronomy, architecture, medicine, the care of horses and elephants, and much more. These two realms of myth and science were always quite distinct. But in reaction to the scorn of the British during colonisation, and Indian admiration for colonial scientific achievements such as trains, some Hindus began to insist, first, that Europe might have science but India had spirituality; and, then, that Hindu religious texts (particularly the Vedas) also had science — such as airplanes — long before the British did.

Dayanand Saraswati argued that Krishna and Arjuna had flown to North America during the Vedic period (so that when Columbus landed in 1492 and called the people there ‘Indians’, he was right). This sort of colonial-period ‘science envy’ of the West has recently been revived by Hindu nationalists, against whose fabrications genuine Indian scientists have vehemently protested. Hindutva factions have also mixed myth and history by asserting that the Babri Masjid was built over the place where Rama was born and by opposing the construction of a shipping canal between India and Sri Lanka by insisting that such a canal would destroy a causeway that, according to the Ramayana, an army of talking monkeys built in order to attack the fortress of a ten-headed demon.

How do you see the ‘Hinduisation’ of present-day India by the editing out of Mughals — from renaming roads and railway stations to changes in school and university syllabi? 
Hindutva factions are, again, at the heart of these attempts to replace history with myth, in this case anti-Muslim myth. In a similar way, PN Oak’s argument that Hindus built the Taj Mahal was revived this month when the Central Information Commission reportedly ‘sent a directive to the Union Culture Ministry to clarify its stand on whether the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum built by Shah Jahan or a Shiva temple’.

Why has it become so difficult for scholars to study, analyse and write about India? After the case against your book The Hindus: An Alternative History, there was the vicious trolling of Audrey Truschke over her book on Aurangzeb? 
The difficulty comes not in the writing — some excellent writing about India has been published by Indian scholars in recent years — but in the ability of authors and publishers in India nowadays to avoid violent repercussions against serious works of scholarship. Despite a lawsuit, my books are still available in India and are widely read; some people like them, some people don’t, as should always be the case with scholarship that deals with volatile issues.

But some booksellers are afraid to carry them, or to carry them openly, and, given the violence of some of the Hindutva censorship tactics, I certainly cannot blame such booksellers, though I applaud the courage and integrity of those who do in fact sell the books. The attacks on Audrey Truschke are more of the same; such attacks have nothing to do with the author or the treatment of the subject, but with an anti-Muslim agenda backed by physical violence that the present government of India shows no inclination to control. The attacks, on both me and Dr Truschke, are laden with sexism and anti-Semitism that have nothing to do with the issues raised by our books — issues that should instead inspire spirited discussion of the actual historical.

Have you looked at some of the popular retellings of the epics and puranas? 
I have indeed, and some of them are truly wonderful. I particularly love Amruta Patil’s retellings, and Chitra Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusion, and Arshia Sattar’s version of the Ramayana for children, but there are many others. They bring out threads and connections and undertones that are really there in the Sanskrit texts but are muted and hidden, easy to miss until these modern writers bring them out. The old Amar Chitra Katha reduced all the stories they retold and bowdlerised them; these modern retellings, by contrast, make the stories stretch and expand into the modern world, taking on deeper meanings.

Apart from rings, jewellery is central to Chilapatikaaram and Mrichhakatika. Was it indeed the line that a woman can be identified by the jewellery she is wearing? 
Indian jewellery, in particular, is beautifully wrought in silver and gold; Indian craftsmanship is rightly famous throughout the world. Such pieces would therefore be unique, and make it possible to identify the woman who owned them, as in fact Sita’s jewellery identifies her in the Ramayana. And India has been the home of fabulous jewels, often unique rubies and emeralds, the pearls of Sri Lanka and the diamonds of Golconda, the source of so many European stories of the stolen idol’s eye and other enormous jewels with equally enormous curses upon them. So it is not surprising that jewellery should identify the women in some of the greatest works of ancient Indian literature, and that this mythology should also find its place in popular folklore.

(Source: ET)

In mythology, adoption is not an act of desperation, but a kindly choice

Mythology does not always reaffirm the motherhood myth. Motherhood is not necessarily a woman’s fate and future; neither defining nor ‘completing’ her, writes author Kavita Kane on She The People TV. Read on: 

Sita. Karna. Kunti. Satyavati. Shakuntala. What do they have in common?

They were all ‘adopted’. If adoption is another mode to have a child, mythology is much more complex when it comes to adoption.  There are various kinds for various reasons, not always because of childlessness, the most cited yet strong enough for adopting a child.

The celibate Rishi Kanva adopts an abandoned girl he finds nestled among a flock of the birds shakun, thereby earning her a name Shakuntala and a foster father. Unmarried, he brings her up as his daughter in his ashram, and could well be called a single father.

Adoption, interestingly, makes for some fine fathers.  Like Rishi Kanva, Dasharaj, a fisherman, brings up a foundling girl as his daughter Daseyi or Matsyagandha later to be famously known as Satyavati, the matriarch of the royal Kurus in the Mahabharata, though ironically it was her bloodline that tinted the royal dynasty.

King Shantanu of Hastinapur is another father who adopts the abandoned twins Kripa and Kripi lying in the woods.  A distraught Shantanu, whose wife Ganga had recently left him with their new born son Devavrat, yearns for a child and immediately picks them up and takes them to his palace.  Suspecting them to be the children of a rishi, he brings them up as one.

While the other alternative of having a child was surrogacy – as discussed in my previous article – adoption was a common practice, be it planned or accidental.

Mythology often questions everything about the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood and through the various cases of adoption it proves this point, wherein each individual case and way almost unquestioningly refutes this supposed naturalness, ascribed only to women.

Sita, of course, is the most famous ‘adopted’ child again ‘found’ by the childless King Janak and his wife Sunaina in a furrow by the field, thus getting her name, Sita. This raja-rishi does not pine for a son like his friend King Dashrath of Kosala nor does he wish to ‘adopt’ a son: but is passionate about the joys of adoption and treasures the importance of it, refuting the common premise that ‘naturalness’ means nothing in motherhood. The royal couple later have a daughter Urmila, the ‘natural-born’ child but it is always Sita who is known as Janaki and Vaidehi, the daughter of her father Janak of Videha.

A charioteer Adirath finds a beautiful baby in a basket afloat on the river. He and his wife Radha are childless and a happy man, he gladly adopts this unknown,child, little knowing that he is the illegitimate son of the unmarried princess Kunti and the Sun god, Surya.  Naming him Vasusena, the child of wealth (because of the glittering kavach-kundal), he   is believed to be lucky for them as later the couple is blessed with several sons, but the adopted boy who grows up to be the glorious Karna remains their favourite and the most devoted. Years later, when his royal birth is revealed, Karna refuses to abandon his parents. For him, Radha is his mother, never Kunti.

Kunti, herself was adopted but the reason for her adoption is very unusual, unlike her eldest son. Born as princess Pritha to King Sursen, she is given away to his childless friend King Kuntibhoj, who renames her Kunti after himself.

A similar case is seen in the Ramayana with Shanta, the daughter of King Dashrath of Kosala and Queen Kausalya who is later adopted by the childless King Romapad of Anga and his wife Vershini, Kausalya’s sister.

Two odd instances are of Krishna and Kartikeya. Krishna though born to princess Devaki of Mathura, is brought up by an unsuspecting foster mother, Yashoda, the wife of Nanda, the chief of the Gopas, in far off Gokul.

Likewise, Kartikeya is raised by numerous ‘mothers’ –  goddesses like Parvati, Ganga, Sharavana (the goddess of the forest) and the Krittikas, the six star-goddesses besides a pair of male gods as well –  Agni (the fire-god) and Vayu (the wind-god) bringing out the unconventional definition of family, where a child is known by the person who rears him and not incontrovertibly who bears him.

Motherhood is not necessarily a woman’s fate and future; neither  defining nor ‘completing’ her.

With adopted fathers like Kanva, and Dasharaj the concept of selflessness, a prerogative attributed to maternal love, is redefined. You need not be a mother to bear a child or become a father by begetting one.  When the apsara Menaka abandons her two daughters Pramadvara (from the gandharva Vishwavasu) and Shakuntala (from rishi Vishwamitra), she does not feel guilty, or that she has missed her destiny. Other apsaras too are known to desert their children to be later adopted by either kings or rishis.

Touching affiliated topics like illegitimacy, bigamous marriages, spousal abandonment, mythology ironically does not always reaffirm the motherhood myth. It quite often shatters the stereotype of the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood or the ‘curse’ of childlessness and the dread of barrenness.  King Bharat disillusioned with his nine sons, adopts another – Bhumanyu – to declare him his heir.

An abandoned Shakuntala instills the life of Kanva with a new purpose. For King Janak or the fisherman Dasharaj, it is not about a life of lacking, with a loss of what might have been: they adore their daughters.

All these tales in mythology reveal the surrogate form of families, where a father bring up a child without a wife, a mother loves another’s child as her own and children of such giving parents grow up to be happy, healthy adults, always the winner, never the whiner.

Adoption is rarely shown as an act of desperation but a kindly choice, even a happenstance or an odd circumstance, but it leaves all with a contented, fulfilled life.

Adopted Children in Hindu Mythology:
Sita
Shakuntala
Karna
Kripa and Kripi
Kartikeya
Bhumanyu/Vitath
Satyavati
Kunti
Shanta

It rings for Shakuntala

Wendy Doniger looks into the trope of jewellery that occurs so prolifically in myth, literature and culture and ties it to a wellspring of desire and eroticism, writes Sreemoyee Piu Kundu on the Outlook, reviewing the book, The Ring of Truth: Myths of Sex And Jewelry. Read on: 

Renowned American indologist Wendy Doniger’s new book, The Ring of Truth: Myths of Sex and Jewelry, commences with a rather interesting personal anecdote about Doniger’s mat­e­rnal uncle Harry, who her mother claims is a ‘gemologist’.

“Every weekday of his life, well into his eighties, he went from his home in New Jersey into the Diamond Exchange in New York; he also claimed to have inv­ented a way of making perfect dia­monds, very cheap, and to have been somehow cheated, or threatened, out of his formula by the De Beers cartel. Whenever Uncle ­Harry came to our house for dinner, after the dessert plates were cleared, he would take out of his inside breast pocket a rolled-up piece of black velvet, which he would unroll and unfold to reveal a series of pockets, each containing a piece of lov­ely jewelry, or a few unusual gems, particularly fire opals, all suspiciously inexpensive, no questions to be asked. My father would be pressured into buying some of them, and I still have several pieces that I cherish, tho­­ugh every time I wear them I glance about nervously in fear that som­eone will come up to me and claim ownership of it. So the dicey side of jewelry is in my blood.”

It is this generous splattering of personal narratives that dot the book’s central, all pervasive theme—why are sex and jewellery, particularly finger rings, so often and so viscerally connected? Why do rings feature so prominently in stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and rec­overy, identity and masquerade?

What is the mythology that makes finger rings symbolic of permissible, or as the case could perhaps be, impermissible love throughout the world—panning cross cultures and civilisations and people. And while the book can be a bit tedious for the average Doniger fan in terms of its sheer volume and attention to detail, what makes it a fascinating historical and cultural presentation—I can see being kept in libraries and taught in universities—is the sheer swiftness and felicity with which Doniger shifts from Sanskrit and Greek epics and the plays of Kalidasa and Shakespeare, vib­rant folklore and familiar fairy tales to touch upon Hollywood and pop songs, while establishing just how rings have time and again essayed a key role in drastically altering the course of human eng­agement and action.

The character of a woman is also refl­ectively linked through the prism of jewellery. To establish the critical link, Doniger, for instance in the section called Sita’s Jewels, draws attention to the phrase ‘dimmed with constant wear’, as a compromise move (as was her amb­ivalence about wearing jewellery into the forest in the first place).

“In general,” writes Doniger, “the married woman who wears jewelry in her husband’s abs­ence is a bad wife. But, since Sita is a princess, jewelry is an essential part of her being; therefore she remains a good wife even when she wears her jewelry in exile from her husband”. In the same way, Doniger draws attention to the friction between royal jewellery and an innocent girl of the forest, linked symbolically through the folk motif of the ring in the fish.

“Here again the king’s signet ring, like Rama’s, is an essential clue (as it is throughout the genre of kings who use signet rings to seduce their female subjects), but unlike Sita and Ratnavali, the heroine of the story has no jewelry of her own”, she states.

“I wrote several articles about rings almost 20 years ago, and gave lectures on them too. Each time I gave a lecture, someone in the audience would come up afterwards and tell me a story about a ring. Later, as I was teaching courses on Sanskrit texts, Greek myths and Shakespeare plays, and watching old movies, I began to notice the rings in them too,” claims the 76-year-old Doniger in an  interview to the media.

WendyDoniger

While describing the great role rings have played in actuating human agency, Doniger flits from Sanskrit, Greek epics, Kalidasa and Shakespeare, folklore and Hollywood with great ease.
She reiterates this same, evocative int­er­est over 316 pages that concludes with Tom Zoellner’s quote on the ring through the story of the first girl he loved. “I still believed—despite all my scepticism—that an engagement ring did carry some kind of mystical charge, even though logic said otherwise.”

The ring, concludes Doniger, “conjures up deep-sea­ted ideas about jewelry and women and desire and deceit that continue to hold us in their thrall, no matter how much we learn that blatantly contradicts our gut feelings or even the song that our culture is singing at the moment. And so the myth carries the day; the ring rings true”.

Book review: Shakuntala: The Woman Wronged

My latest book review: Shakuntala: The Woman Wronged in Sakhi magazine. Here's the link: