Women, Gender and Power in Bheel Mahabharata 2

Part of a paper presented by the author at the national seminar on Mahabharata organized by National Manuscripts Mission and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Government of India at India International Centre, New Delhi in February 2007.


Continued from Part 1.

Lesser women than Kunti, Draupadi and Ganga too are no less independent and sufficient to themselves in the Bheel Bharath. Take the Naga king Vasuki’s daughter Hirapath for instance. Arjuna goes to her land in search of virgin gold which he requires for use in a sacrifice the Pandavas are conducting so that their father Pandu, reborn as a dog after his sinful death, may get absolution from sin. The snakes guarding the palace grounds bite him and he dies. It is then that Hirapath sees him and falls in love with him. To revive him, Hirapath gets magical substances from her father who initially tries to deceive her by giving her poison in place of ambrosia. Hirapath is no lovelorn helpless lass. She knows her father and suspects he might do exactly this. She tries out the contents of the bottle her father has sent her on a donkey and the donkey dies instantly. A furious Hirapath now threatens her father Vasuki with a curse – unless she is given ambrosia instantly, she would curse and reduce Vasuki’s land to ashes. Her father complies instantly. However, competent woman that she is, she knows that Arjuna might leave her the instant he is brought back to life to complete whatever his mission is without giving a thought to her. So she takes the independent decision to marry him – on her own, with the knowledge that her father does not approve of her decision. He asks her maids to fetch everything needed for the wedding and conducts the marriage on her own with the dead Arjuna, and he is brought back to life by her immediately after the wedding with the help of the ambrosia and other magical substances obtained from her father. On finding out that Arjuna is in search of virgin gold, she procures it for him.

Interestingly, one of the substances the sacrifice requires is a man sold by a woman. Bhima obtains such a man from a prostitute in Kamrup.

The gender switch in the famous story of the Yakshaprashna also speaks of the changed gender perception of the Bheel Bharath. While in Vyasa’s Mahabharata the man testing the Pandava brothers is a male, a yaksha, here it is a female, the jal-jogani, a water sorceress. It is no more a man testing another man, but a woman testing a man. And appropriately, it is not a test of cerebral matters men are so preoccupied with that the test is in, but in matters of the heart – in love, acceptance and commitment.

It is in the context of the senetaro sacrifice that the Pandavas conduct to save their father Pandu who has been reborn as a dog because of his sin that we come across the jal-jogani. One of the samagris, ingredients, required for the sacrifice is virgin water. Nakula volunteers to fetch it. He reaches the tank where virgin water is and gathers it in his pot and then the jal-jogani speaks, demanding that he cannot carry her, a virgin, away just like that, he must first marry her. [She is both a water sorceress and the water in the tank in which she lives. She is a virgin and since the water is she herself, the water too is virgin.] Nakula excuses himself saying he has no time for it right then, he is too busy with the sacrifice and has to take the water immediately to Hastinapur for the sacrifice. The jal-jogani asks him to look at her and pour the water back into the tank. As their eyes meet, Nakula faints and falls down. He dies there.

It is Bhima who comes now with a pot in hand, to look for Nakula and to fetch water. Bhima too gives the excuse of not having time and he too falls down and dies. Sahadeva who comes now sees the dead bodies floating in the water. The jal-jogani appears and tells him the same fate awaits him if he tried to take her, the virgin water, away without marrying her. When Sahadeva gives the excuse of not having time, the jal-jogani asks him to give a promise to marry her afterwards and Sahadeva does so. She brings Bhima and Nakula back to life and allows Sahadeva to carry the virgin water away with him.

The jal-jogani of the Bheel Bharath is another empowered woman. She is proactive and assertive. Instead of passively allowing men to have her, she demands her rights. Before a man can have her, he must marry her, commit himself to her. It is only to such a man she would give herself. And she is not for anybody’s taking – until she gives herself to a man, she is not his. And she is strong enough to turn to stone any man who tries to force himself upon her, to have his way with her against her wishes. The jal-jogani, a minor character in the Bheel epic, behaves as Kali Satyavati, a major character, does in her encounter with Parashara in the Mahabharata.

Indra’s wife Indrani is another empowered woman in the Bheel Bharath who is fiercely independent and sufficient unto herself. Unlike Indrani in mainstream mythology, she would not be dominated by her man. To her, devotion to her husband means something entirely different from blind obedience to his wishes. She is a person in herself, authentic, with full autonomy, and does not find the meaning of her existence in her unquestioning service to Indra. If Indra does not treat her with the dignity she deserves, with the honour Indra owes her as an equal human being, she would walk away from him, as a modern woman would do and choose to live on her own, or with whomsoever she chooses. It is important to her that her man commands her respect because of his dignity, courage and honour.

The Anushasana Parva of Vyasa’s Mahabharata tells us the story of Oghavati and her husband Sudarshana . Oghavati was the daughter of King Oghavan and Sudarshana was the son of Agni, the fire god, and Princess Sudarshanaa. Having taken a vow that he would conquer death while leading the family way of life, one day Sudarshana tells his wife that she should never do anything against the wishes of their guests. “Give our guests whatever makes them happy; even if you have to give yourself to them to make them happy, do so without a second thought,” he tells Oghavati and she agrees to obey his least wish, including this. One day a guest comes to their home, a Brahmin, while Sudarshana is away. Oghavati receives him, offers him ritual offerings and asks him what else she can do for him, what else he desires. And he Brahmin tells her he wants her, it is her body that he desires. Oghavati tries to persuade the Brahmin to ask for something else but he refuses and sticks to his demand. The princess blushes in shame and embarrassment but eventually yields to his demand so that she obeys her husband and her husband does not fall from his vow, from his dharma. The Brahmin takes Oghavati inside the house, to her bed, and it is then that Sudarshana returns after collecting samit, kindling for ritual fire, from the jungle. Not finding Oghavati waiting for him as she always did, he calls out her name repeatedly. She does not answer for she is ashamed of herself; she has been polluted by the Brahmin – she has become his ucchishta, his ‘left-over’, that is how Oghavati puts it to herself.

It is interesting to note the difference in Indrani’s behaviour under similar circumstances in the Bheel Bharath. Indra boasts to a group of sages that his wife is a perfect sati and she would do anything he wishes. He invites them home so that they can have proof for this. The sages come and they start misbehaving with Indrani. One of them winks at her sexually, another rubs against her foot with his foot, and a third pinches her at her waist. Indrani will not have any of this. She shouts at the sages and threatens them with dire consequences unless they behaved. Indra interferes and tries to pacify Indrani – she is proving herself to be short of being a true sati and he is losing his honour. She does not care. His attempts enrage her. “From where the hell did you get such rotten guests,” she asks him. “One winks at me, another caresses my foot with his foot and a third pinches me at my tender waist, making it bleed. These guys are rogues and I won’t put up with their shamelessness. What do they think they are doing? Do they think that a woman’s body is something for them to etch their artwork on?” When Indra does not stand up for her and begs her to put up with the behaviour of the sages, she walks away from their home, leaving Indra forever.

She goes and offers herself to the Kauravas as a wife but they dread Indra and refuse her. She then goes to the Pandavas and offers herself as the wife to one of them, and they too refuse her out of fear for Indra. Eventually the twelve-year old Abhimanyu takes her home and makes her his. An infuriated Indra offers a fight through Vayu, the lord of winds, and Abhimanyu beats him in a fierce encounter. Indra runs away in terror from Abhimanyu. In the last scene of this episode, we find Indrani in the arms of Abhimanyu in a tight embrace of love and the two of them swinging together merrily on a swing.

Let’s take yet another woman now – Uttara, young Abhimanyu’s wife. If Abhimanyu is an unsurpassed young hero in the Mahabharata, his heroism is several times multiplied in the Bheel epic. The Mahabharata war in the Bheel epic is essentially a battle between him on the Pandava side all alone against the Kauravas [who are seventy-eight in number and not a hundred], though on the last day of the war he is assisted by Bhima. [Arjuna is lying dead in Patala where he had gone to fetch rhinoceros skin for making shields for the war, though he would be revived later and reach Hastinapura after the war is over.]

The Uttara of the Mahabharata, however, is no match for Abhimanyu – in fact, we know hardly anything about her as a person in Vyasa’s epic. She is a mere shadow figure there. In the Bheel Bharath, though, she is a magnificent woman, splendorous in her womanliness. Like all other women in the Bheel epic, she is proactive and does not wait for life to come to her but goes out and meets it on the way. Her marriage is a splendid event described in great details. After her marriage, she is left behind with her parents, as per the traditional custom, until her gauna can take place when she would go to her husband’s place for the first time.

In the meantime Abhimanyu, whom the Bheels know as Balo Emmant, Child Courage, accepts the war with the Kauravas all on his own in the distant land of Hastinapura and Uttara in her heart feels the dread that Abhimanyu does not feel. She sees dreams in which she senses the events to come and is restless to go and meet him. Her fear is not that he would die in the war, but that he would die a virgin, which is unacceptable and a great sin. In her dream she sees that people have come from Hastinapura to take her to Abhimanyu and jolted out of her sleep, she realizes this is true.

She breathlessly urges her parents to hurry and complete the rituals so she could go immediately. She realizes the danger her young husband is in and wants to take with her an amarkuppi, containing the magical nectar that brings the dead back to life, and gets it from her mother. Fate though is against her on this night and she forgets to take the amarkuppi with her as she hurriedly leaves for Hastinapura, jumping onto the back of the camel that travels at the speed of the wind so that she could reach there before dawn when the war would begin. En route she remembers her mistake, sends her escort to fetch the amarkuppi, and Krishna, who wants Abhimanyu dead because he is in fact a demon reborn as Subhadra’s son, makes him forget it and instead of the nectar of immortality, it is a bottle of kerosene oil that he fetches. There is no more time to lose, so Uttara hurries to Hastinapur without the amarkuppi and what she sees there is Abhimanyu leaving for the war. She runs after him, calls out to him again and again, begging him to turn around and look at her just once, but the brave Abhimanyu, whose heart longs for her dearly, knows it is not right for him to turn around and look at her then and forces himself to move on ignoring her pleas. His eyes shed tears of blood for her.

On the Kaurava side all the seventy-eight brothers would die in the war. On the Pandava side, the only death would be of her husband Abhimanyu with whom she hasn’t spent a single moment alone. Fate was against the poor girl. As was Krishna, who treacherously kills Abhimanyu while the youth is resting in the middle of the war.

Subhadra, Krishna’s sister, comes to us as another woman of substance in the Bheel Bharath. True her ‘womanly curiosity’ gets her into trouble when she opens a casket Krishna has specifically forbidden her to open and the demon Iko Danav, trapped inside the casket by Krishna, escapes from it, enters her through her mouth and she becomes pregnant. It is Iko Danav that grows up as Abhimanyu in her womb. But apart from this one incident that is so characteristic of female characters in folklore traditions across the world, we find Subhadra as a highly competent woman throughout. When the Pandavas allow Abhimanyu to accept the war with the Kauravas all alone, she has the courage to walk straight into the Pandava assembly and upbraid the Pandava brothers for their shameless cowardice and meanness in allowing her young child to face the war all alone.

Finally, a quick look at two female characters who appear in the Bheel Bharath for just one instant: Ambika and Ambalika, who have no names there, so brief is their appearance. In the Bheel Bharath, they are ‘the widows of Chitrangada and Vichitravirya’. After the death of their husbands, one day they approach their mother-in-law and ask her what they should do to obtain children and she advises them to walk naked before Gangeya in the rising sun. They do so and that is how they beget Dhritarashtra and Pandu. Even these two female figures that appear so briefly show themselves different from their selves in the Mahabharata. Here they are more independent, and their pregnancies are not forced on them by others but are results of their own initiatives and a fulfilment of their own natural desires. It is interesting that while following their heart, they seek the advice of their mother-in-law and in the moments of their encounter with Gangeya, they do not lose their womanly shame. One of them covers her eyes in embarrassment, resulting in the birth of a blind child, Dhritarashtra, and the other hides her private parts with her hand and her child is born impotent.

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A letter from a collection of articles and letters from Manushi published under the title In Search of Answers, says: “The ideals, ethics and morality heaped on women since time immemorial are suffocating and killing. The adjectives used to praise us have become oppressive. Calling us loving, they have locked us in the closed room of culture, calling us gentle, they have reflected us in a mirror of helplessness, calling us kind, they have tied us in cowardice, they have handcuffed us with modesty and chained our feet with loyalty, so that far from running, we have not been able even to walk.” Well, the women of the tribal land of Bheel Bharath are certainly not locked in, they are not helpless, they are not cowards, nor are they handcuffed or chained.

In her fascinating work Women who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estes says wildlife and wild woman are both endangered species. “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.”

What we see in the Bheel Bharath is perhaps a bit of the spiritual lands of the Wild Woman that have refused to be plundered or burnt, dens that have resisted bulldozing, and natural cycles that have survived against attempts to force them into unnatural rhythms to please others.

Speaking of the Wild Woman archetype, Estes says: “Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s words sound like they were written to describe the women of the Bheel Bharath.

~*~

Note: All translations from Sanskrit are by the author. ‘Mahabharata’ always refers to Vyasa’s Mahabharata. When the Bheel version is referred to, it is mentioned as Bheel Bharath [the ‘th’ in Bharath pronounced as the ‘th’ in katha, a story].

Women, Gender and Power in Bheel Mahabharata 1

Part of a paper presented by the author at the national seminar on Mahabharata organized by National Manuscripts Mission and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Government of India at India International Centre, New Delhi in February 2007.

An epic of one culture incarnated in another is at once the same as the original and yet very different from it. It is not that its soul is the same and body is different. No, it becomes a different entity altogether, with a different identity, a different flavour, a different feel, perhaps even a different heart and a different soul, and yet it retains its original being. That is why such an incarnation is a kind of miracle.

The Bheel Bharath, the incarnation of Vyasa’s Mahabharata in the tribal world of the Bheels, is a miracle for its marvellous beauty, its unbelievable simplicity and elemental quality, and the ineffable charm of its rusticity. It is a miracle for the way it so perfectly reflects the world in which the Bheel lives: a world that is still shrouded in primordial mystery, where things are possible because you can imagine them, where everything appears clothed in a dream-like quality, where men and women walk on the earth without masks on their faces, where each hunger of the body and thirst of the heart appears naked, where the dark fears in our depths stalk us in the open.

The many transmutations the story and characters of the Mahabharata undergo in their Bheel incarnation and what these transmutations reveal to us about the world of the tribal Bheel are fascinating. It is intriguing, and entrancing, to see how the Mahabharata looks when it leaves its traditional world and incarnates in an entirely different world – in the world down under, as it were; in the world of those who live on the fringes of Indian society, in the world of those whom our society has always kept either at its lowest rung, or perhaps even outside its boundaries.

This paper, however, focuses only on two aspects of the endlessly fascinating different facets of the Bheel Bharath. The dynamics of male-female relationship in terms of equality, dominance and submissiveness in the epic [in this part]; and attitudes towards sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular in the Bheel Bharath [in the second part of the paper].

This study is based on the text of the Bheel Bharath by Dr Bhagavandas Patel, who spent four years among the Doongri Bheels studying the epic that is an oral tradition among them and recording the narrations of the epic on four hundred and fifty audio cassettes, thus making an invaluable contribution to literature in general and folk literature and Mahabharata study in particular. The book has been published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi with an excellent Hindi translation of its prose by Dr Mridula Parik.

Created in the Image of the Goddess

The dynamics of the male-female relationship in the Bheel Bharath differs from that in mainstream India and in the Sanskrit Mahabharata. We see that gender, the socially constructed differences between the male and the female, is portrayed here in tones that are very distinct. The women we encounter in the Bheel epic are not exactly creations of a lesser God, lacking in wisdom and created with great imperfections, incapable of acting without male assistance, whose every decision has to be taken for them by their men. They are not women abjectly dependent for their protection on their fathers in their childhood and adolescence, on their husbands in their youth and middle age, and on their sons in their old age. In the Bheel Bharath, the traditional gender construct of men being dominant and women being submissive or passive in relation to them is frequently absent.

In the mainstream Indian culture, power, prestige and an unyielding personality are usually associated with men and in the Bheel Bharath, we often find female characters possessing these qualities. If, as Gerda Lerner puts it, “gender is a costume, a mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance,” these costumes, masks and straitjackets are different in the Bheel Bharath. And, at least in part for these reasons, we find the leading women in the Bheel Bharath, unlike the leading women in Vyasa’s epic, do not have shades of neurosis to them. They are, unlike in the Mahabharata, quite comfortable with themselves, at peace with their social and psychological selves.

Anais Nin refers to Lawrence Van der Post, the Jungian psychologist and poet, in her A Woman Speaks and says “there is a beautiful part in one of his books where he says the Africans never suffered from loneliness as we have; they never suffered from the feeling of the meaninglessness of their life, as we occasionally have.” Reading the Mahabharata, we have the perpetual feeling that the women there are very lonely – be it the young fishermaid Kali wedded to the old emperor Shantanu and later the widowed Empress Satyavati, or the bright and bold Gandhari wedded to the blind, cowardly Dhritarashtra, or Kunti and Madri wedded to their impotent husband, or Draupadi wedded to her five husbands. Kunti on one occasion specifically speaks of her loneliness when she refers to her life at Kuntibhoja’s place after her father gave her away to him. Draupadi is nathavati anathavat – like an orphan, though she ‘belongs’ – all through her life, and she ends her life in utter, unspeakable loneliness on the Himalayas where she falls down towards the end of the pilgrimage and her five husbands walk away without a word to her, without a backward glance at her, without slowing down their steps. We do not find such loneliness in the lives of the women of the Bheel Bharath, nor do we find any of the women here suffering from meaninglessness in their lives, which too is the lot of practically all the women in the Mahabharata.

Let us begin with the first major female character we encounter in the Bheel Bharath, Ganga, who is perhaps closest to her self in the Sanskrit epic. When we first meet her in the tribal epic, she is taking a bath in the river Ganga, for which she has come up from the thirteenth Patala, the thirteenth netherworld. Subsequently, she marries Shantanu after rejecting his attempts to woo her in two lifetimes. The Bheel Bharath builds on the unequal relationship the two have in the Mahabharata and while Ganga is a river goddess with supernatural powers in Vyasa’s epic too, in the Bheel epic she is awesome.

As per her conditions Shantanu had agreed to prior to their marriage, Ganga asks Shantanu to drown one by one the children born to them. Three children are born to them, Gagivar [Gangeya, Bheeshma], Setar [Chittar, Chitra, Chitrangada] and Vihag [Vichitra, Vichitravirya], and Shantanu, against the desires of his heart, kills them all by dashing them against rocks in the Ganga. His heart does not allow him to kill the fourth child, a girl, though, and he saves her by giving her away to his guru. Interestingly, it is a girl he tries to save, not a boy, and part of the reason for this is given as the hope that the girl would look after him in his old age.

We find Ganga walking to the sea to find out if Shantanu has followed her wishes about killing the girl even as Shantanu returns from his secret trip to give away his daughter. In a breathtakingly beautiful scene filled with thrilling folk magic we are shown Ganga going to the sea and bowing down before it. She plants two rows of barley and standing on one foot , prays to God to reveal the truth to her, calling upon him by the power of her truth. As she looks at the barley again, she finds some of them have dried up. Ganga now knows the truth: Shantanu has broken his word to her. She returns to the palace.

Back at her cloud palace she dresses up in all the sixteen shringaras. She prepares an elaborate dinner for Shantanu and serves it to him by herself. During the dinner, she asks him: “Raja, tell me the truth. How many children have you killed?” Shantanu says four. A shiver passes through Ganga at Shantanu’s lie. She asks him again and again, giving him chances to come out with the truth, her words and voice telling him their relation has come to an end but Shantanu still persists with his lie. In the end Ganga claps her hands and at each clap a child appears before her – Gangeya, Chitra and Vichitra, the three children whom Shantanu had killed. The girl child, whom Shantanu had saved, fails to appear. Ganga now calls him a liar and informs him their relation has ended. She disappears giving Shantanu a gold bangle through which she would be able to recognize him in her next birth and leaving in his hands five strands of her hair that break off as he tries to hold her back by her tresses.

One interesting aspect of the relation between Ganga and Shantanu is that it is Ganga, the woman, who is dominant throughout. It is she that takes initiative in the sex act between them and not Shantanu, the man. At each step of the elaborate ritual of their mating, lovingly described by the tribal narrator, Ganga has the upper hand[for details see Female Sexuality in Bheel Mahabharata by the author]. Shantanu, almost puppet-like, follows her suggestions, which are really her orders to him. Her pregnancies are results of her deliberate decisions to conceive, and not accidents, nor results of her submitting herself to her man. Shantanu is in awe of her, dreads her, though he loves her dearly; and her upper hand in their relation remains till the end, though in spite of this she is never unkind to him, even when she leaves him. It is with a promise to be his wife again in her next life that she abandons him finally.

The Ganga we find in the Bheel Bharath is comfortable with herself, comfortable with her body and her sexuality, with her social and psychological selves. Within the dynamics of their male-female relationship, she wields the power. Though she is dominant, she is never domineering. She is assertive, she is unwilling to demean herself by compromising where she should not compromise. Every single time she speaks, her words have finality, without ever being rude.

Tryambakayajvan, beginning his classic Sanskrit treatise on the duties of women, Stridharmapaddhati, says: the most important duty of a woman as enjoined by the scriptures is service to her husband. Subsequently concluding the book he says again: since a woman should serve her husband even ignoring her life, since she should accept even her husband’s selling her, since she should fulfil his wishes even when they are in conflict with her other prescribed duties, it is clear that the ultimate dharma of a woman is obedient service to her husband. The central thrust in all scriptures dealing with women’s duties is that women should find their fulfilment in serving their husbands and that on its own their existence has no meaning to them. To underscore the view that the focus of their life should be the obedient, humble service of their husbands and nothing else matters, women are told again and again that there is no need for them to perform any religious ritual – since service to their husbands alone will take them to heaven.

Through Ganga, the Bheel Bharath gives us a different dynamics of power between the male and the female. And this different dynamics of power continues in the case of other leading women as well.

Kunti, for instance, is another awe-inspiring woman in the Bheel Bharath. She is born of Shakti, of the blood and flesh of Shakti in the form of a bird that dies on a sage’s trident. In a powerful scene that happens at midnight, her awesome power and her true nature are revealed to Bhima, her son.

Bhima once requests Draupadi to reveal the secret of her immense power to him, and she asks him to go and hide on an ancient banyan tree in the open ground outside the city at night and observe whatever happens underneath the tree. He does so and sees Indra, the lord of the gods, arriving there at midnight and cleaning the grounds. Thrones descend from the heavens and arrange themselves on the cleaned ground. Soon a great commotion is heard and all the nine hundred thousand gods come down to the earth and occupy their seats according to their status. God himself comes down from Vaikuntha and occupies a silver throne. It is only after God has taken his seat that Kunti arrives.

Her arrival is preceded by the sound of deep bellows. Soon Kunti is seen approaching riding a young buffalo. She alights sprightly from the buffalo and, in contrast to God who occupies a silver throne, occupies a golden throne.

Later, in the morning, after the meeting of the gods is over and they have departed, after Kunti has gone back to the palace, Bhima rushes to her and falls at her feet in obeisance and addresses her as jagajjanani, the mother of the universe.

If Kunti is thus awesome, still greater is the glory of Draupadi in the Bheel Bharath. Like Kunti, she too is a dain, a witch, but unlike Kunti who is brought into existence by yogic powers from the flesh and blood of Shakti as a bird, she is unborn. The Pandavas find her in a banana plantation and she is a full-grown woman then.

Since all of them found her together, she couldn’t be any one brother’s wife, so all five of them marry her and install her in her seven-storeyed ‘cloud palace’. Except Yudhishthira, the other four brothers are soon trapped in Draupadi’s magic [maya]. Yudhishthira is more cautious; he fears her nature and instead of sleeping with his wife, offers her ritual worship. Hearing the sound of the conch and bells ringing from her room one morning Bhima peeps in through the window and sees Yudhishthira lying in prostration at Draupadi’s feet. He sees him getting up after the prostrations and offering her an arati accompanied by all the rites of ritual worship to a goddess. Subsequently, questioned by Bhima, Draupadi asks him to watch her from the banyan tree at night if he wants to learn the truth about her. That is how Bhima hides on the banyan tree and witnesses his mother’s immense power that awes even the gods.

The occasion is the festival of Draupadi. If it is on a bellowing buffalo that Kunti arrives at the assembly of the gods, it is on a roaring lion that Draupadi comes sometime after Kunti has arrived. She holds a lit lamp in one hand and has a drawn sword in the other. Seeing her approaching, God gets up from his silver throne and receives her. Her own throne is of pure gold, like that of Kunti.

Numerous other occasions prove the great status of Kunti and Draupadi in the tribal epic. No important decision, be it of a wedding or of war, is ever taken in the Bheel Bharath without their involvement.

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Continued.... Part 2

Shantaram and The Human Zoo

Desmond Morris is the celebrated author of such bestsellers as The Naked Ape, The Human Zoo, Manwatching, Intimate Behaviour and so on. They are powerful books that give deep insights into human nature, particularly the nature of the urban man. I remember reading and reading greedily The Naked Ape as a teenager and then The Human Zoo when it was published later. The books changed the way I looked at men and women and the world around me. The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo are the first books on what is today known as Sociobilogy and Desmond Morris, a brilliant pioneer in his chosen field.

In The Human Zoo Morris compares animals in the wild and animals in captivity, as in a zoo. He also compares people living in the openness of villages and people in big cities. He then compares people in these two different states with animals in the two different states. According to Morris, the neurosis and psychoses that the urban man frequently displays is akin to similar behaviours exhibited by animals in captivity. Morris ascribes human violence, his frustration and anger, his boundless aggression, his hysteria, the madness that often possess him and so on to his being captive to urban civilization.

Reading a passage from Gregory David Roberts’ international bestseller Shantaram, I remembered Morris. Roberts describes the sudden violence that erupts on a Bombay street – and I am sure those who are familiar with Bombay would agree that Roberts is doing no more than describe what happens in some part of Bombay or the other every day. In fact, in some part or the other of every metropolis in India and in many other parts of the world.

When the passage begins, Lin, who is the narrator of the story and Prabaker [Prabu], his friend and guide, are in a taxi. Prabu has promised Lin to take him to the ‘real’ Bombay, which European visitors rarely get to see. The taxi driver is reckless and rude and in an irate mood – apparently that is how this driver always is. An accident has just been avoided because Lin shouted a warning to the driver in time.

O0O

“The taxi driver—a burly, dark-skinned man with a bristling moustache—seemed to be outraged at my impertinence in saving our lives. When we first took the taxi he’d adjusted his mirror until he saw nothing in it but my face. After the near miss he glared at me, snarling a growl of insults in Hindi. He drove the cab like a getaway car, slewing left and right to overtake slower vehicles. There was an angry, bullying pugnacity in his attitude to everyone else on the road. He rushed to within centimetres of every slower car in his path, sounding his horn, then all but nudging it out of the way. If the slower car moved a little to the left, in order to let him pass, our driver drew beside it, pacing it for a time and shouting insults. When he spied another slow vehicle ahead, he sped forward to repeat the procedure. From time to time he opened his door and leaned out over the road to spit paan juice, taking his eyes off the traffic ahead for long seconds as we hurtled along in the rattling cab.”

Eventually an alarmed Lin and Prabu ask the driver to stop the car. But that only makes the driver more enraged.

“With the car hurtling along at top speed, he turned his head to snarl at us. His mouth was wide open, and his teeth were bared. His eyes were huge, their blackness streaked with rage.

“Arrey!” Prabaker shrieked, pointing past the driver. It was too late. The man turned quickly. His arms stiffened at the wheel, and he hit the brakes hard. There was a skating, sliding second ... two seconds ... three seconds. I heard a guttural gasp of air from deep in his throat. It was a sucking sound, like the lifting of a flat stone from the moist clay on the edge of a riverbed. Then there was the whump and crash as we slammed into a car that had stopped in front of us to make a turn. We were thrown forward into the back of his seat, and heard two thumping explosions as two other cars rammed into us.

“Shattered glass and chrome fragments rattled on the road like thin metallic applause in the sudden silence that followed the impacts. My head had hit the door in the tumble spill of the accident. I felt blood flowing from a cut above my eye, but I was otherwise unhurt.”

Prabu now shouts urgently that they must get out of the car. “Out! Out of here! Now!” he says.

But the door on his side is jammed shut, and he begins to push at it with his shoulder. He can’t budge it. He reaches across to Lin to try the door on his side, but sees at once that another car is jammed against it, pinning it shut. With great difficulty, after a nerve-wrecking struggle, they manage to get out of the damaged car. Lin tries to pull the driver out of the car, but Prabu shouts, ““Don’t touch him! Leave him and get out. Get out now!” Prabu takes a confused Lin to a safe distance, and from where they watch what is happening at the accident site.

“We stood, stretching the ache from shoulders and whip-lashed necks, and looked toward the wreckage some ten metres away. About thirty people had gathered around the four crashed vehicles. A few of them were helping drivers and passengers from the damaged cars. The rest huddled together in groups, gesturing wildly and shouting. More people streamed toward the site from every direction. Drivers of other cars that had been blocked from travelling further left their vehicles and joined the crowd. The thirty people became fifty, eighty, then a hundred as we watched.

“One man was the centre of attention. It was his car that had been trying to turn right, his car we’d smashed into with the brakes on full lock. He stood beside the taxi, bellowing with rage... His hand had been cut from the palm to the wrist. As the staring crowd grew more silent, subdued by the drama, he smeared blood from the wound on his face and beat the redness into the grey of his suit, shouting all the while.

“Just then, some men carried a woman into the little clear space around the man, and placed her on a piece of cloth that was stretched out on the ground for her. They shouted instructions to the crowd, and in moments a wooden cart appeared, pushed by bare-chested men wearing only singlets and short lungis. The woman was lifted onto the cart, her red sari gathered up in folds and wrapped about her legs. She may have been the man’s wife — I couldn’t be sure — but his rage suddenly grew hysterical. He seized her roughly by the shoulders and shook her. He pulled at her hair. He appealed to the crowd with enormous, histrionic gestures, flinging his arms wide and then striking his own bloodstreaked face...”

“As the semi-conscious woman was trundled away on the humble cart, the man hurled himself at the door of the taxi, wrenching it open. The crowd reacted as one. They dragged the dazed and injured taxi driver from his cab in an instant and flung him on the bonnet of the car. He raised his arms in feeble pleading, but a dozen, twenty, fifty hands punched and tore at him. Blows drummed on his face, chest, stomach, and groin. Fingernails scratched and ripped, tearing his mouth open on one side almost to the ear, and shredding his shirt to rags...”

“We’ve got to do something ...” I said lamely.

“Enough people are doing, baba,” Prabaker replied.

“No, I mean, we’ve got to ... can’t we help him, somehow?”

“For this fellow is no helping,” he sighed. “Now you see it, Lin. Accidents is very bad business in Bombay. Better you get out of that car, or taxi, or what is it you are in, very, very quickly. The public are not having patience for such business. See now, it is too late for that fellow.”

“The beating was swift, but savage. Blood streamed from many cuts on the man’s face and naked torso. At a signal, perceived, somehow, through the howl and shriek of the crowd, the man was lifted up and carried off at head height. His legs were pressed together and stretched out, held rigid by a dozen hands. His arms were splayed out at right angles to his body and held fast. His head lolled and fell back, the soft, wet flap of skin hanging from cheek to jaw. His eyes were open, conscious, staring backward and upside down: black eyes, scudded with fear and imbecile hope. Traffic on the far side of the road parted to let the people pass, and the man slowly disappeared, crucified on the hands and shoulders of the crowd.”

“What ... what are they going to do with him?” Lin asks Prabu.

“They will take him to police, I think so. Behind Crawford Market is one police station, for this area. Maybe he will have the luck—maybe alive, he will reach there. Maybe not.”

O0O


This is the hysteria that Desmond Morris is talking about in The Human Zoo. This is the aggression and violence, the brutality and mercilessness, the mad rage in the human heart that Morris talks about. Our crowded urban lifestyles and living conditions frequently reduce us to this.


In Munnabhai MBBS, a movie I love, there is a similar scene. It is again Bombay – one of the crowded railway stations, Churchgate perhaps, or maybe VT. Munna’s father [Sunil Dutt] is in Bombay to meet his son, and at the station he discovers that someone is trying to pinch off his purse. He shouts and the thief is caught. The next instant the public pounces upon the pickpocket, hitting him, kicking him, shouting at him abuses and giving vent to their blind fury in any way that comes to each. After a minute or so, Dutt interferes. Those who have seen the movie would recall what Dutt tells the pickpocket and the crowd is precisely what Desmond Morris says in The Human Zoo.


Metropolises are a fact of life. They cannot be avoided, they cannot be wished away. But it is also a fact that each of us needs more space for ourselves than these crowded metropolises permit us. Space in our life, and space out there. Without space there can be no serenity, and man needs to get in touch with his serenity every now and then, even if he cannot be always in touch with it. When that serenity, inner solitude, inner sanctuary, is denied to him, he goes berserk. It is this inner serenity that keeps man sane, and when that is denied to him, he goes insane. Without serenity and open spaces, man ceases to be an individual and becomes part of the mob.


Unfortunately, open spaces are fast disappearing. Both from our cities and from our lives.


O0O