by Sudhir Kakar
‘The king agreed to this condition and the old woman said, “Son, tomorrow night at ten, Angadhwaja, the king of this city, will be bitten by a snake and die. That is why I’m crying. Where will we ever again find such a virtuous king?”
“‘O mother, just as you have told me the reason for your weeping, kindly also tell me from where this snake will come,” the king said.
“‘Son, outside the western gate of this city there is temple of Shiva. Near the temple there is a banyan tree and the snake lives in a hole at the root of the tree. The snake is an enemy of the king from its previous birth and now wishes to avenge itself for the earlier enmity,” the old woman said.
“‘Mother, tell me also why the snake is an enemy of the king?” the king asked.
“‘Son, this king was a merchant called Manisen in his last incarnation and his wife was named Kesar. She was 20 years old and very beautiful. One day Manisen went off to a distant land on business leaving Kesar at home with an 18-year-old servant. In his absence the lord of love, Kama, sorely afflicted Kesar’s body and her fancy turned toward the young servant. She called the boy, asked him to sit on the bed with her and frankly expressed her desire for him. The boy folded his hands and said, “O merchant’s daughter! I shall never perform the act with you since I have heard from elders that a person who feeds and clothes you is like a parent and a man who does the bad act with his mistress goes to hell.” Hearing the boy, Kesar said, “It will go badly with you if you do not make love to me.” She threatened him in various ways but the boy was adamant. After some days when Manisen returned, the wife thought that she would get into trouble if the boy ever told the husband what had transpired while he was away. So she thought of something which would both protect her and punish the boy for the insult he had offered her.
‘When Manisen came home he found his wife sad. “O Beloved! why are you lying listless today?” “O Lord! you have returned. Now take care of your house because I am going to kill myself,” Kesar replied. “What is your unhappiness that you want to give up on life?” Manisen asked. “Lord, I have no sorrows for your glory has given me all possible happiness. But in your absence your servant did me grievous injury and you must punish him, otherwise I shall die,” Kesar said. “What did he do to you? Tell me frankly,” Manisen said.
“‘O Lord! One night as I was sleeping on the roof he climbed up on my bed, seated himself on my breasts and wanted to do the bad act with me. But I awakened and seeing him astride my body I cried out aloud and only then did he leave me. On hearing my screams people came up, but out of shame I could say nothing to them. Only God protected my virtue that night,” Kesar said. Hearing this, Manisen became red with anger and said, “O my beloved! Why be unhappy? Have your bath, eat, and enjoy yourself. The boy shall be punished this very night for what he has done to you.” When night fell, Manisen stabbed the boy repeatedly with a knife and buried the body in his courtyard. Manisen has been now reborn as the king and that boy is reborn as a snake who seeks vengeance.’ On hearing this the king went back to his palace.
The parrot said, ‘O myna! Think about it. What was the poor boy’s fault that the woman did not have any pity on him and had him murdered?’ The starling replied, ‘In this affair both the man and woman are at fault since the man killed the youth merely on the say-so of his wife without further inquiring into the matter.’ The parrot said, ‘O Myna! I have already said earlier that when a woman in her attractive form embraces a man and infatuates him with her sweet words and desire’s arrows then the man loses all his reflective power.’
‘Let me reply to that,’ said the starling.
‘First let me finish my story and then you may give your reply,’ said the parrot.
‘When the king returned to his palace he could not fall asleep because of worry. His hand went to his pocket and he found the second piece of folded paper given to him by the brahmin. He opened this and read therein that one’s enemy should be honoured. He said to himself, “What the brahmin wrote down on the first scrap of paper certainly came true. Let me also try out his second piece of advice. At the moment I have no other enemy than the snake so I must show him all respect.3” In the morning he called his chief minister and other courtiers and told them that a snake would come to bite him that night. “So you should clean up the road from my bed to the snake’s hole. Sprinkle the whole way with perfume and rose petals and line it with cups of perfumed milk,” he instructed.
‘When the time came, the snake, full of anger, emerged from its hole and started moving towards the king’s palace. But it was completely captivated by the perfume and the rose petals lining its way. In whichever direction it turned there was delicious milk to be drunk. In its contentment the snake said to itself, “The king, knowing me to be his enemy, still looks after me so well. I shall not bite him. I must go and tell him that I have forsworn my revenge.” When the snake entered the king’s bed chamber the minister reached for his sword. But the king forbade him from drawing the weapon. He then extended his had and said, “O Lord Serpent! Now take your revenge by biting me.”
“‘Glory be to you, O king, and glory to the parents who have sired such a courageous and virtuous son. I am very pleased with you and shall not harm you.” So saying the snake went away.
‘On seeing all this the people were amazed. Then the queen addressed her husband thus, “O King! Please tell me how you knew about the snake?”
“‘O Queen! I cannot do so because the person who told me warned me that I shall be turned to stone if I ever revealed the secret,” the king replied. “Whether you turn into stone or not, you must tell me the story otherwise I shall give up my life,” said the queen. The king was very upset for he loved his wife dearly and could not bear to be without her for even a moment. He was so blinded by his love that he did not reproach her for her stubbornness and only said, “Well, if I must turn into stone I shall do so at the banks of the river Ganges. Then, as a stone, I shall at least lie in the sands of the holy water.”
‘The king then prepared to proceed to the Ganges. The king’s servants and many others from the city accompanied him on his journey. His minister tried to reason with him saying. “If there is life you’ll get many other queens. You are otherwise so sensible yet are bent on losing your life because of a woman’s whim.” But the king was so infatuated that he did not heed this wise counsel. Then the minister went to the queen and said, “O Queen! Renounce this wilfulness so that the king’s life may be saved. If he reveals the secret and turns into a stone where will you again find such a king? Will his successor give you any respect? Every headstrong woman has always suffered for her wilfulness.”
“‘Which woman has paid for her stubbornness? Tell me the story of even one such woman.” said the queen.
‘The minister said, “O Queen! there was a city called Srusen ruled by King Rupadutta, who was very handsome. His wife, Chandrakanta, was very beautiful, but she had become immoral even before her marriage. When she came to her husband’s home after marriage she brought her lover along with her in the guise of an eunuch. During the king’s absence in his court she enjoyed herself with the lover. One day the king came to know this and he tried to reason with the queen. But the queen said, ‘I have given my heart to my lover. You can do what you like but I shall never give him up.’ The king had both her ears and her nose cut off and banished her from his city while the eunuch was hanged. The woman who does not listen to her husband always comes to a bad end. Now leave this stubbornness of yours because your husband is a king and no one can ever be sure of a king’s moods. Some poet has rightly said:
A king, a yogi, fire, and water
Have a contrary nature
One should always avoid them
For their affections are uncertain.
But the queen remained adamant in her wish to know the king’s secret and the hapless minister retreated.
‘In the morning they all left the city and at noon came to a river where the king rested. He went to th
e river to wash himself and saw a herd of goats come to the stream to drink water. All the goats left after slaking their thirst except for one who saw a fruit floating on the current. The goat wanted the fruit badly. When the billy goat saw that one goat remained behind, he asked her the reason for not joining the others. The goat answered, “If you get me the fruit from the river I’ll come with you otherwise I shall not move.”
“‘What if I drown?” asked the billy goat.
“‘Whatever happens I will not move without the fruit,” was the reply. The billy goat was furious. Eyes red with anger, it said, “You don’t know me well enough. I am not a fool like King Angadhwaja who, infatuated with a woman, goes to the Ganges to lay down his life.” It then started butting the goat till she rejoined the herd.
‘The billy goat’s remarks went straight to the king’s heart, who said to himself, “I am even lower than a goat in my infatuation. Today I realize that the queen whom I love so much is hungry for my very life. Some poet has indeed rightly remarked:
A woman is a mother to give birth
A girl, for intercourse
A goddess, to receive worship
And death, to take life back.”
The king said to himself, “I am a big fool. Fie on my intelligence! Fie on women who control men by their sweet words and fie on those men who lose everything and become slaves to these bundles of wickedness!” He then called his minister and the queen and said, “O Queen! I shall now tell you the secret and then become a stone. What is your wish?”
“‘O King! whatever may happen, you must tell me the secret,” the queen answered. The king then picked up a whip and thrashed the queen. She begged forgiveness but the king was implacable. He called his executioners and told them to pluck out the queen’s eyes and leave her in the jungle. The executioners followed the orders and the queen received due punishment for her deeds.’
The parrot said, ‘O Myna! The race of women is indeed not to be trusted.’
The starling answered. ‘O Parrot! Do not exaggerate, I too can tell you of the unfaithfulness of men.’
The next night, in reply, the starling tells the story of four princes who got lost while hunting in a forest. When they finally emerged from the forest they came to a city inhabited by sorcerers. After wandering around in the city the princes sought out an inn where they could rest for the night. The innkeeper was a sorceress who had four beautiful daughters. The girls were infatuated with the princes and at night had them carried to their rooms through their magic. The three older girls turned three princes into sheep whom they fed well during the day and then transformed back into men at night for the purpose of sexual enjoyment. The youngest daughter, however, fell in love with the youngest prince and kept him as a man without employing any magic spells at all. Their love grew so much that they could not stay apart for a moment. One day, the youngest prince became very sad as he sorely missed his parents. On being asked the cause for his sadness he told the girl about the unhappiness being caused to his parents at the separation from all their sons. He asked her to employ her skills in sorcery so that the brothers could be released from their enthralment and go back to their parents. He further suggested that she too accompany him back to his father’s kingdom where they would be married and she become a princess. In her devotion to the man, the young sorceress followed his wishes, thus earning the wrath and vengefulness of her sisters. She fled the city together with her lover and his brothers. On the way to the prince’s kingdom, while resting for the night in a forest, the youngest prince deserted the sleeping girl. After many tribulations, the sorceress reached her lover’s city and wanted to be together with him again. He, however, threw her into prison for the night and had her hanged in the morning.
Of the many narrative forms, the folktale, it seems to me, is closest in reflecting the concerns of the ego of the Freudian tripartite model, an ego which mediates between the instinctual desires of the id and the imperatives of the superego. In the folkale, the primitive aspects of the id and the superego are relatively underplayed. The analysis of the folktale would then ideally keep closer to the surface of the text. In addition, the analyst would look for a single fantasy (in contrast to the novel where fantasies are generally multiple) which would help him structure the surface elements of the tale into a new pattern, revealing a new emphasis.
A major feature of the Tota Myna stories is the marked lack of any tender feeling or mutuality between men and women who move across their pages as if they were members of different species altogether. At the conclusion of each tale, one of the lovers is routinely mutilated, stabbed, thrown alive in a well, or decapitated by the other, with the female more likely to meet a bloodier end than the male. The stories can be more correctly described as erotic fantasies of hatred than love, the hostility and aggression between the sexes far outweighing any affectionate promptings.
In the tales, the male perception of the woman as an erotic partner is of a sexually voracious being who is completely ruled by the dictates of her body. Especially vulnerable to the power of eros, the phrase jab uske sharir ko kamdeva ne sataya (‘when her body was sorely troubled by the god of love’) is used solely in connection with a woman, never a man. She is the initiator of sexual advances and loses all sense of proportion and moral constraints when in the grip of erotic passion. At such times, in her quest for sexual satisfaction, she would blithely sacrifice her parents, husband, or children. When sexually intoxicated, the woman takes one lover after another without discriminating between young and old, handsome and ugly, rich and poor. In many tales, women perversely favour fakirs and yogis as lovers, doubtless also because the dishevelled ‘holy’ men, with their unkempt beards and matted hair, are fantasized by Hindus and Muslims alike to be possessors of great virility, capable of satisfying the most insatiable of women. It goes without saying that women are also deceitful and unpredictable, with motivations that are an enduring puzzle to men. As one of the folk proverbs in a story puts it, Triya charitra na jane koye, Khasam mar ke sati hoye. (‘No one knows the character of a woman; she will first kill her husband and then mount the funeral pyre as a sati.’)
Elsewhere, I have traced this view of the woman’s rampant, heedless sexuality to the ‘sexual mother’ of early childhood.4 She is a figure of male imagination, constructed from the boy’s perception of an actual maternal eroticism, heightened in the Indian context, combined with the projection of his own desire toward her. The sorceress who uses the prince for sexual enjoyment at night while she turns him into a helpless sheep during the day—night being the diurnal home of fantasy and imagination—the merchant’s wife who, Phaedra-like demands that the servant boy gratify her desire or risk severe retribution, are two of the many masks of the ‘sexual mother’ which women wear in these tales. The ‘Oedipal’ fantasy of many stories is further underscored by the lovers women serve or choose in preference to and in betrayal of the hero. Often enough the lover is a fakir and yogi who, as Robert Goldman suggests in the case of the guru in legends from Sanskrit epics, may well be a substitute for the father who lays sexual claim to the mother.5
Although most stories mark the passage of the Freudian mother in the man’s fantasy, there are also a couple of tales which herald the appearance of the Kleinian one; the defence against the anxiety around genital sexuality being replaced by reassurance against the earlier ‘oral’ fears of devouring and being devoured by the mother. In one story, for example, a goddess fires a king in oil every night, eats his flesh and then the next morning sprinkles nectar (amrita) on the bones by which he is resurrected in his original form. In return for this service, the king daily receives a large quantity of gold from the gratified goddess.
The female perception of man in Tota Myna is of a creature of shortlived passions whose only experience of love is lust. Once erotic passion retreats and lust is satisfied, the man is revealed as a being full of guilt who will unceremoniously desert the woman he has loved to distraction only a short while earlier. The ma
n’s guilt is chiefly toward the parents for his desertion of them in order to initiate adult sexual relations. In one story after another, the hero proves to be vastly more attached to his parents than to the beloved. Given the perception of the man as someone who is infantile in his attachments, volatile in his affections, and cruel in his anger, the woman’s choice in love, the stories seem to suggest, is limited to appeasement and masochistic surrender.
Serpents as Lovers and Spouses
In literature, folklore, myth, ritual, and art, the snake and especially the cobra (nag) plays a prominent role in Hindu culture. Born of one of the daughters of Prajapati, the Lord of Creation, snakes are carried by Shiva, the Destroyer, around his neck and arms, while there is no more popular representation of Vishnu, the Preserver of the Hindu trinity, than of his reposing on the Sesha, the seven-headed cobra. Sculpted into the reliefs of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu temples, snakes, both single and entwined, are a ubiquitous presence in Indian sacred space. On a more mundane level, nag is a popular name among both men and women and Naga-Panchami, the festival of snakes on the fifth day of the Bhadon month in the rainy season, is celebrated all over India with the ritual worship of the cobra.
One would therefore expect that the motif of the snake lover, of both men and women, is widespread in popular Indian narrative, and this expectation is not belied. This motif can trace its antiquity to the myths of the Mahabharata where the great ascetic Jaratkuru married the sister of Vasuki, the king of snakes. The redoubtable warrior-hero Arjuna, too, married Ulipi, Vasuki’s sister, and bedded a serpent princess during the one year of his banishment.6 The first tale of the snake lover that I would like to narrate and interpret here is the second part (quite unconnected with the first) of the story of Princess Standing Lamp. This story, well-known as a folktale in other parts of South India, is part of a Tamil collection of tales mentioned earlier in the chapter, Matankamarajan Katai—The Story of King Matanakama—and my version is condensed from the English translation of Kamil Zvelebil.
