The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Male succession is the whole point of the old myth of the equine goddess who comes down to earth to have human children, and female chastity is essential to that succession, another reason for the trials of Sita. Rama experiences the agonies of love in separation (viraha) that later characterized the longing for an otiose divinity; in this, as in so much of the plot, Rama is to Sita as a devotee is to a deity. His separation from Sita is also part of the divine plan to destroy Ravana: Long ago, in a battle of gods against antigods, the wife of the sage Bhrigu kept reviving the antigods as fast as the gods could kill them; Vishnu killed her, and Bhrigu cursed Vishnu, saying, “Because you killed a woman, you will be born in the world of men and live separated from your wife for many years (7.51).” So Rama has a previous conviction of abusing women even before he is born on earth. And as we will soon see, he has an even stronger track record for killing ogresses. Rama’s mistreatment of Sita creates a problem—the justification of Rama—that inspires later Ramayanas to contrive ingenious solutions.

  Sita walks out on Rama in the end (as Urvashi does in the Veda but not in the Brahmanas), an extraordinary move for a Hindu wife. Moreover, unlike the paradigmatic good Hindu wife, Sita very definitely is not reunited with her husband in heaven. For while she goes down into the earth, returning to her mother, he goes (back) up to heaven when he dies years later, returning to Vishnu. Both of them revert to their divine status, but in opposite places. When Brahma is chastising Rama for doubting Sita, he reassures Rama that Sita is an incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi and will be reunited with him in heaven (6.105.25-26), but we never see that happen. Rama’s return to heaven as Vishnu is described in great detail, and the monkeys revert to their divine form, and everyone you’ve ever heard of is there to welcome him in heaven (including the ogres), but not Sita (7.100).

  Yet the more Sita is a goddess, the more the pattern of the myth of equine goddesses requires her to be mistreated—as if she were nothing but a human woman. Like Urvashi, Sita is treated less like a goddess and more like a mortal as her husband takes over the position of the immortal in the couple. Her banishing is portrayed in entirely mortal terms, and she suffers as a mortal woman. Like Rama, she regards herself as a mortal and forgets her divinity; she says, when she is imprisoned on Lanka, “I must have committed some awful sin in a previous life to have such a cruel life now. I want to die but I can’t. A curse on being human, since one can’t die when one wants to (5.23.18-20).” Since she (wrongly) thinks she is a mortal, she thinks she cannot die, which goes against common sense; moreover, the ironic implication follows that if she were an immortal (as she is), she could die when she wanted to—precisely what she does in the end when she enters the earth. And just as Rama has to be mortal to kill Ravana, so Sita plays the mortality card in order to resist Ravana and hence to destroy him; Ravana’s ogress consorts remind her that she is a human woman, and she acknowledges this fact, incorporating it into her resistance: “A mortal woman cannot become the wife of an ogre (5.22.3, 5.23.3)” (a remark that could also be read as a warning against intercaste marriage).

  Sita is subject to mortal desires and delusions and is vulnerable even though she is said to be invulnerable. For instance, Rama insists (when he claims that he knew all along that Sita was chaste and that he made her go through fire only to prove it to everyone else), “Ravana could not even think of raping Sita, for she was protected by her own energy (6.106.15-16).” Yet that very verb, meaning “to rape, violate, or assault,” is used when Ravana grabs Sita by the hair (3.50.9), a violation from which her chastity does not in fact protect her. When Ravana plots to capture Sita, he gets the ogre Maricha to take the form of a marvelous golden deer, thickly encrusted with precious jewels, which captivates Sita—the princess in exile is delighted to find that Tiffany’s has a branch in the forest—and inspires her to ask Rama to pursue it for her. Lakshmana rightly suspects that it is the ogre Maricha in disguise, and Rama agrees, but Sita insists that Rama get it for her. The deer leads Rama far away from Sita, and when Rama kills the deer and it assumes its true form as an ogre, Rama realizes that he has been tricked and has thereby lost Sita, whom Ravana (by taking the form of an ascetic and fooling Sita) has captured in Rama’s absence (3.40-44). So while Rama ultimately yields to the addiction of hunting, following the deer farther and farther than he knows he should, Sita falls for two illusions (the deer and the ascetic) that make her vulnerable to Ravana and, for many years, lost to Rama.

  SHADOW WOMEN: OGRESSES

  When Sita defends herself against accusations that she has broken her marriage vows, and earlier, when she scolds Rama in the forest, she explicitly contrasts herself with “some women” who behave badly, unnamed shadows who may include not only Kaikeyi and the hunchback woman but also, perhaps, the lascivious ogre women as well as mythological women like Ahalya, the archetypal adulteress, whose story the Ramayana tells not once but twice.39 The polarized images of women in the Ramayana led to another major split in Hinduism, for though the Brahmin imaginary made Sita the role model for Hindu women from this time forward, other Sanskrit texts as well as many vernacular versions of the Ramayana picked up on the shadow aspect of Sita, the passionate, sexual Sita,40 an aspect that is also embedded in this first text, only partially displaced onto other, explicitly demonic women. Yet the later Brahmin imaginary greatly played down Sita’s dark, deadly aspect and edited out her weaknesses to make her the perfect wife, totally subservient to her husband. How different the lives of actual women in India would have been had Sita as she is actually portrayed in Valmiki’s Ramayana (and in some other retellings) been their official role model. The Valmiki Ramayana thus sowed the seeds both for the oppression of women in the dharma-shastric tradition and for the resistance against that oppression in other Hindu traditions.

  Rama’s nightmare is that Sita will be unchaste, and the sexually voracious ogresses that lurk inside every Good Woman in the Ramayana express that nightmare. In a later retelling, the Bala-Ramayana, the ogress Shurpanakha takes the form of Kaikeyi, and another ogre takes the form of Dasharatha, and they banish Rama; Dasharatha and Kaikeyi have nothing to do with it at all! The entire problem has been projected onto ogres, and the humans remain pure as the driven snow. In Valmiki’s text, however, Kaikeyi and Sita still have their inner ogresses within them, expressed as the natural forces that prevent women from realizing the ideal embodied in the idealized Sita. The portrayals of rapacious ogresses hidden inside apparently good women make us see why it was that Sita’s chastity became a banner at this time while the other aspects of her character were played down; they help us understand why women came to be repressed so virulently in subsequent centuries: to keep those ogresses shackled.

  There are three particularly threatening ogresses in the Ramayana. Rama kills the ogress Tataka (1.25.1-14), after a sage reminds him of the mythological precedents for killing a woman (1.24.11-19). Lakshmana cuts off the nose and breasts and ears of Ayomukhi (“Iron Mouth”) after she suggests to him, “Let’s make love (3.65.7),” and he cuts off the nose and ears of Shurpanakha when she similarly propositions Rama (3.16-17).en This multilation is the traditional punishment that the dharma texts prescribe for a promiscuous woman, an adulteress.

  The mutilation of Shurpanakha is the only assault against a woman that has serious consequences for Rama, because she is Ravana’s sister. When she attempts to seduce Rama, he teases her cruelly: “I am already married and couldn’t stand the rivalry between co-wives. But Lakshmana is chaste, full of vigor, and has not yet experienced the joys of a wife’s company; he needs a consort. You can enjoy him and you won’t have any rival (3.17.1-5).” That’s when Lakshmana cuts off her nose.eo She flees in agony and humiliation and tells Ravana about Sita, praising her beauty and thus triggering the war, for Ravana takes the bait (Sita) as the gods intended from the start. Shurpanakha’s attempt to replace Sita in Rama’s bed, which Rama and Lakshmana mock, exposes a deep resemblance between the two women and a deep ambiguity in the text’s a
ttitude to Sita’s sexuality. On the one hand, Sita is the epitome of female chastity. On the other hand, she is, like Shurpanakha, a highly sexual woman,41 a quality that may explain not only why Ravana desires her but also why he is able to carry her off.

  ANIMALS

  THE HORSE SACRIFICE

  Sita’s final disappearance takes place on the occasion of a horse sacrifice. This is appropriate, for she herself lives out the paradigm of an equine goddess, and she is brought to the horse sacrifice by her twin sons, who are bards, related to the Charioteer bards who perform in the intervals of the ritual. The names of the sons, Kusha and Lava, are the two halves of the noun kushilava, designating a wandering bard, as if one son were named “po-” and the other “-et.” By coming to Rama’s horse sacrifice, Kusha and Lava preserve Rama’s family, and as the kushilava they preserve the story of Rama’s family. So too Valmiki both invents the poetic form, the shloka, and raises the poets.

  The horse sacrifice plays a crucial role at both ends of the Ramayana. At the start King Dasharatha, childless, performs the horse sacrifice not for political and martial aggrandizement but to have a son, another express purpose of the ritual. Yet the list of kings whom he invites to the sacrifice constitutes a roll call for the territories that had better come when he calls them, and it is a wide range indeed, from Mithila and Kashi to the kings of the east and the kings of the south (1.12.17-24). The stallion roams for a year and is killed, together with several aquatic animals, while three hundred sacrificial animals, reptiles, and birds are killed separately. Queen Kausalya herself cuts the stallion open with three knives and then lies with him for one night, as do the two other queens (1.13.27-28). The king smells (but does not eat) the cooked marrow. The sacrifice, described in great detail, is a total success: Vishnu becomes incarnate in Rama and his half brothers.

  Years later, after Rama has banished Sita, he resolves to perform a ceremony of royal consecration, but Lakshmana tactfully persuades him to perform, instead, a horse sacrifice, “which removes all sins and is an infallible means of purification (7.84.2-3).” To persuade him, Lakshmana tells him stories of two people who were restored by a horse sacrifice: Indra was purged of Brahminicide after killing a Brahmin antigod,ep and a king who had been cursed to become a woman regained his manhood. Thus Rama performs the ceremony to expiate his sins, which are never mentioned, but which surely include his killing of Ravana (a necessary Brahminicide, but Brahminicide nonetheless, for Ravana, though an ogre, is not only a Brahmin but a grandson of Prajapati), corresponding to Indra’s killing of several Brahmin antigods, and the banishing of Sita, a sin against a woman that corresponds, roughly, to the error of the king who became a woman. Lakshmana follows the horse as it “wanders” for a year. But since Rama has banished Sita, there is no queen to lie down beside the stallion or to bear the king an heir.eq It is therefore necessary for Sita (and the heir[s]) to return, and they come to the horse sacrifice (7.86-8).

  These two horse sacrifices are successfully completed, though the second one is flawed by the absence of the queen, who reappears only to be lost again. This second sacrifice, intended to produce offspring, does so indirectly (by attracting Kusha and Lava), but it is also intended to give the king, through the queen, the fertile powers of the earth.er In the end Rama loses both the queen and his connection, through her, with the earth, her mother.

  MONKEYS

  The central characters of this text—Rama, the perfect prince; Sita, his perfect wife, and Lakshmana, his perfect half brother (later to form the template for the perfect worshiper of the fully deified Rama)—were born to be paradigms, squeaky clean, goody-goodies (or, in the case of the perfectly ogric ogre Ravana, a baddy-baddy). If that were all there were to the Ramayana, it would have proved ideologically useful to people interested in enforcing moral standards or in rallying religious fanatics, as, alas, it has proved all too capable of doing to this day in India, but it would probably not have survived as a beloved work of great literature, as it has also done. We have seen how the ogresses express the shadow side of Sita. The bears and monkeys, the two species often said to be closest to the human in both their appearance and their behavior, give the male characters their character. Let us concentrate on the monkeys, as the bears play only a minor role.

  Neither so glamorous as horses nor so despised as dogs, the monkeys are the star animal act in the Ramayana. The Ramayana draws a number of parallels, both explicit and implicit, between the humans and the monkeys.42 The appropriateness of these parallels is supported by such factors as the human characters’ assumption that though they cannot understand the language of the deer (Rama explicitly laments this fact when he runs off after the golden deer that he suspects—rightly—of being an ogre in disguise), they do not comment on the fact that they can understand the language of monkeys, who are called the deer of the trees. Hanuman not only speaks a human language, but he also speaks Sanskrit. When he approaches Sita on the island of Lanka, he anxiously debates with himself precisely what language he will use to address her: “Since I’m so small, indeed just a small monkey, I’d better speak Sanskrit like a human. I must speak with a human tongue, or else I cannot encourage her. But if I speak Sanskrit like a Brahmin, Sita will think I am Ravana, who can take any form he wants [as she mistook the real Ravana, a notorious shape changer, for a Brahmin sage]. And she’ll be terrified and scream, and we’ll all be killed.” He finally does address her in Sanskrit (he begins to tell a story: “Once upon a time there was a king named Dasharatha . . . ”), and she is suitably impressed. She does not scream (5.28.17-23, 5.29.2).

  Special monkeys are the sons of gods, as special people are. Sugriva is the son of Surya (the sun god), Valin is the son of Indra (king of the gods), and Hanuman is the son of Vayu, the wind. (Hanuman later became a deity in his own right, worshiped in temples all over India.43) But monkeys also unofficially double for each of the major human characters of the Ramayana. These monkey doubles are, ironically, more flesh and blood, as we would say, more complex and nuanced, indeed more human than their human counterparts. Or rather, added to those original characters, they provide the ambiguity and ambivalence that constitute the depth and substance of the total character, composed of the original plus the shadow. All the fun is in the monkeys.

  After Ravana has stolen Sita, Rama and Lakshmana meet Sugriva, who used to be king of the monkeys and claims that his brother Valin stole his wife and throne. Rama sides with Sugriva and murders Valin by shooting him in the back when he is fighting with Sugriva, an episode that has continued to trouble the South Asian tradition to this very day. Why does Rama kill Valin at all? Apparently because he senses a parallel between his situation and that of Sugriva and therefore sides with Sugriva against Valin. But Rama sides with the wrong monkey. The allegedly usurping monkey, Valin, is, like Rama, the older half brother, the true heir; the “deposed” king, Sugriva, the younger brother, originally took the throne (and the monkey queen) from the “usurping” brother, and Valin just took it back. Valin, not Sugriva, is the legal parallel to Rama. Yet Rama sympathizes with Sugriva because each of them has lost his wife and has a brother occupying the throne (and the queen) that was his. The plots are the same, but the villains are entirely different, and this is what Rama fails to notice. Moreover, unlike Sita, but in keeping with Rama’s fears about Sita, Valin’s wife was taken by the brother who took the throne. On another occasion, Rama says he would gladly give Sita to Bharata (2.16.33). Does he assume that you get the queen when you get the throne? He kills Valin because the rage and resentment that he should feel toward his half brother and father, but does not, are expressed for him by his monkey double—the “deposed” monkey king, Sugriva—and vented by Rama on that double’s enemy, Valin. We have noted that when Bharata is given the throne instead of Rama, the half brothers graciously offer each other the kingdom (2.98). But the monkeys fight a dirty battle for the throne, and for the queen too.

  Even if we can understand why Rama kills Valin, why does he shoo
t him in the back? The monkeys’ access to human language also grants them access to human ethics, or dharma. The dying Valin reproaches Rama, saying, “I’m just a monkey, living in the forest, a vegetarian. But you are a man. I’m a monkey, and it’s against the law to eat monkey flesh or wear monkey skin (4.17.26-33).” Rama defends himself against the charge of foul play by saying, “People always use snares and hidden traps to catch wild animals, and there’s nothing wrong about this. Even sages go hunting. After all, you’re just a monkey, but kings are gods in human form (4.18.34-38).” Rama is on thin ice here; the text judges him to have violated human dharma in his treatment of the monkey. And the monkeys remind him that he is a man (i.e., higher than a monkey), just as the gods elsewhere remind him, when he behaves badly, that he is a god (i.e., higher than a man).

  Valin also takes on the displaced force of Rama’s suspicions of another half brother, Lakshmana. The text suggests that Rama might fear that Lakshmana might replace him in bed with Sita; it keeps insisting that Lakshmana will not sleep with Sita. It doth protest too much. (Recall that when Rama kicks Sita out for the first time and bitterly challenges her to go with some other guy, he lists Lakshmana first of all.)