THE BIRTH OF VYASA
Once a fisherman caught a fish, found a baby girl in its belly, and raised her as his daughter. A powerful Brahmin sage seduced the fisherman’s daughter, Satyavati, as she ferried him across the river. She gave birth to her first son, Vyasa, on an island in the river and abandoned him (he had instantly grown to manhood). The sage restored her virginity (and removed her fishy smell) (1.57.32-75).
Vyasa is of mixed lineage, not merely Brahmin and Kshatriya (for though Satyavati’s mother was a fish, her father was a king; it’s a long story) but human and animal (for his grandparents were a Kshatriya, a female fish, and, presumably, a Brahmin man and woman). This double miscegenation will be repeated several times, always with variations, in this lineage.
The birth of Vyasa’s natural sons (Satyavati’s grandsons) is more complex and correspondingly more subtly problematic:
THE BIRTH OF VYASA’S CHILDREN
Satyavati later married King Shantanu and gave birth to another son, who became king but died childless, leaving two widows, the Kshatriya princesses Ambika and Ambalika. Satyavati, who did not want the lineage to end, summoned Vyasa to go to the beds of the two widows in order to father children with his half brother’s widows. Vyasa was ugly and foul-smelling; his beard was red, his hair orange. Since Ambika closed her eyes when she conceived her son, Dhritarashtra, Vyasa cursed him to be born blind. Ambalika turned pale and conceived Pandu the Pale. When Vyasa was sent to Ambika a second time, she sent in her place a slave girl [dasi]. The girl gave Vyasa great pleasure in bed, and he spent the whole night with her; she gave birth to a healthy son, Vidura, but since his mother was not a Kshatriya, he could not be king (1.99-100).
Though Hindu law allows the levirate (niyoga), the law by which a brother begets children on behalf of his dead or impotent brother (the Artha-shastra [3.4.27-41] says any male in the family can do it), it is often, as here, disastrous.19 Vyasa appears in the Mahabharata as a kind of walking semen bank, the author both of the story of the Pandavas and of the Pandavas themselves (just as Valmiki not only invents the poetic form of the Ramayana, the shloka, but tells the story and raises, though he does not beget, the poets). The widows reject him because he is old and ugly and smells fishy, a characteristic that he apparently took from his mother when she lost it. He is also the wrong color, and this, plus the mother’s temporary pallor, results in the birth of a child, Pandu, who is the wrong color—perhaps an albino, perhaps sickly, perhaps a euphemism for his future impotence.20 Dhritarashtra’s mother-to-be closes her eyes (and, presumably, thinks of Hastinapur), and so her son is blind. A slave girl who functions as a dispensable, low-class stand-in (like the Nishadas burned in the house of lac) gives birth to Vidura, the incarnation of Dharma in fulfillment of Mandavya’s curse that he should be born as the son of a Shudra woman. Where Rama and his brothers have different mothers and different wives but share both a single human father and a single divine father, the five Pandavas have one mother (and one wife) and one human father but different divine fathers.
In this disastrous levirate, two wives give birth to three sons (two of whom have, for great-grandparents, a female fish, two Brahmins, and five Kshatriyas, while the third has a Kshatriya, a female fish, two Brahmins, and four slaves. Are you still with me?). In fact the arrangement was originally more symmetrical, for there had been a third woman, Amba,fv who had been carried off by Bhishma, yet another son of Satyavati’s husband Shantanu (it’s another long storyfw); but she departs before Vyasa arrives on the scene, and she eventually dies in a complex transsexual act of revenge against Bhishma (yet another long story).21 Ambika’s and Ambalika’s hatred of their surrogate lover, though much milder than Amba’s hatred of Bhishma, results not in their deaths or his but in a confusion over the throne, because the women’s recoiling from Vyasa results in physical disabilities in their children that disqualify them from the kingship: blindness, pallor, and low class. This confusion leads to war and ultimately to the destruction of almost all the descendants of Pandu and Dhritarashtra.
The Mahabharata goes on to tell us how in the next generation, Pandu was cursed to die if he ever made love with any of his wives, for having mistaken a mating man for a mating stag (1.90.64; 1.109.5-30). Fortunately, Pandu’s wife, Kunti, had a mantra that allowed her to invoke gods as proxy fathers of Pandu’s sons: Dharma (who fathered Yudhishthirafx), the Wind (father of Bhima), and Indra (father of Arjuna) (1.90, 1.101). Kunti then generously lent her mantra to Madri, Pandu’s second wife, who invoked the Ashvins to father the twins Nakula and Sahadeva. Years later Pandu seduced Madri one day when he was overcome by desire for her; he died, in fulfillment of the stag’s curse and in imitation of the stag’s death: a fatal coitus interruptus, the sweet death transformed into a bitter death.
But Kunti had already had one son, secretly, out of wedlock. When she was still a young girl, she had decided to try out her mantra, just fooling around. The sun god, Surya, took her seriously; despite her vigorous protests and entreaties, he raped her and afterward restored her virginity. She gave birth to Karna, whom she abandoned in shame; a Charioteer and his wife adopted him and raised him as their own (1.104; 3.290-94; 5.144.1-9). Karna is in many ways the inverse of Vidura: Where Vidura is an incarnate god, raised royally, and has both a surrogate father (Vyasa) and a surrogate mother (the maid in place of Ambika), Karna is of royal birth, raised as a servant, and has a divine father (Surya), a royal mother (Kunti), and two low-class surrogate parents (the Charioteers).
Beneath the sterile or impotent fathers lie angry women. The lineage of the heroes is a series of seductions and rapes: of Satyavati, Amba, Ambika, Ambalika, Kunti, and Madri. For Satyavati and Kunti, the seducer or rapist restores the woman’s virginity afterward, and the resulting children are abandoned, as if to erase the entire incident or at least to exculpate the women.
POLYANDRY
Other events in the lives of these women suggest their unprecedented and, alas, never again duplicated freedom.
Polyandry (multiple husbands) is rampant in the Mahabharata, and the text offers us, in four consecutive generations, positive images of women who had several sexual partners (sometimes premarital). Satyavati has two sexual partners (her legitimate husband, Shantanu, and the sage who fathers Vyasa on the island). Ambika and Ambalika have two legitimate partners (the king who dies and Vyasa, through the levirate). Kunti has one husband (Pandu, legitimate but unconsummated) and four sexual partners (gods, quasilegitimate). Madri has three partners (Pandu, legitimate and fatally consummated, and two quasilegitimate gods). Another Mahabharata queen, named Madhavi, sells herself to four kings in succession, for several hundred horses each time, and restores her own virginity after each encounter (5.113-17). But the prize goes to Draupadi, who has five legitimate husbands, the five Pandavas. Her polyandrous pentad is truly extraordinary, for though polygyny (multiple wives) was the rule, and men could have several spouses throughout most of Hindu history (as, indeed, each of the Pandavas, except Yudhishthira, had at least one wife in addition to Draupadi; Arjuna had three more), women most decidedly could not. Since there is no other evidence that women at this time actually had multiple husbands, these stories can only be suggestive, if not incontrovertible, evidence either of women’s greater sexual freedom or, perhaps, of men’s fears of what might happen were women to have that freedom. Draupadi’s hypersexuality may simply have validated an ideal that was understood to be out of reach for ordinary women, imagined precisely in order to be disqualified as a viable option. What else, then, can these stories mean?
Hindus at this period were apparently troubled by Draupadi’s polyandry, for which the Mahabharata gives two different excuses (always a cause for suspicion). First, it says that Arjuna won Draupadi in a contest and brought her home to present her to his mother; as he and his brothers approached the house, they called out, “Look what we got!” and she, not looking up, said, as any good mother would say, “Share it together among you all (1.182).” And so all five broth
ers married Draupadi. Not content with this rather farfetched explanation, the Mahabharata tries again: Vyasa says that all five Pandavas are really incarnations of Indra (which does not contradict the statement that only Arjuna was the son of Indra, since as we have seen, these are two different processes: Dharma becomes incarnate in Vidura and fathers Yudhishthira), and Draupadi the incarnation of Shri (the goddess of prosperity, the wife of Indra and of all kings).fy Still not satisfied, Vyasa offers a third explanation:
DRAUPADI’S FIVE HUSBANDS
The daughter of a great sage longed in vain for a husband; she pleased the god Shiva, who offered her a boon, and she asked for a virtuous husband. But she asked again and again, five times, and so Shiva said, “You will have five virtuous husbands.” And that is why she married the five Pandavas. She objected, saying that it is against the law for a woman to have more than one husband, for then there would be promiscuity; moreover, her one husband should have her as a virgin. But Shiva reassured her that a woman is purified every month with her menses and therefore there would be no lapse from dharma in her case, since she had asked repeatedly for a husband. Then she asked him if she could be a virgin again for each act of sexual union, and he granted this too (1.189; 1.1.157).
Like other polyandrous women whose virginities were restored, sometimes after premarital seduction or rape, Draupadi will be restored to purity each month after willing conjugal sex. In this case there is no need to justify or purify her, but there is a perceived need, if she has a different husband each month, to avoid promiscuity—samkara (“con-fusion” or “mixing”), the same word that is used for the reprehensible mixture of classes.
The mythological extemporizings were not sufficient to protect Draupadi from frequent slurs against her chastity. When Duryodhana has Draupadi dragged into the assembly hall, much as Rama summons Sita to the public assembly, and Duhshasana attempts to strip her, despite the fact that she is wearing a garment soiled with her menstrual blood (the same blood that was supposed to purify her), the enemies of the Pandavas justify their insults to her by arguing that a woman who sleeps with five men must be a slut (2.61.34-36). Yet all her children are legitimate; they are called the Draupadeyas (“Children of Draupadi”) by a matronymic, which may be nothing more than a way of getting around the awkward fact that though she is said to have one son from each husband, people often lose track of which Pandava fathered which son. So too the multiply fathered sons of Kunti are often called Kaunteyas (“Children of Kunti”) although they are also called Pandavas, since they have a single legitimate, if not natural, father, Pandu.
The later tradition was not satisfied by any of the official excuses; various retellings in Sanskrit and in vernacular languages during the ensuing, less liberal centuries mocked Draupadi. In one twelfth-century CE text, the evil spirit of the Kali Age incarnate suggests to five gods that are in love with one woman, “Let the five of us enjoy her, sharing her among us, as the five Pandavas did Draupadi.”22 Even the permissive Kama-sutra quotes a scholar (or pedant) who said that any married woman who is known to have had five men is “available” (i.e., can be seduced without moral qualms). For “five men or more” (panchajana ) is an expression for a crowd, a group of people, as in the panchayat, the quorum of a village (KS 1.5.30-31). The thirteenth-century CE commentator unpacks the implications: “If, besides her own husband, a woman has five men as husbands, she is a loose woman and fair game for any man who has a good reason to take her. Draupadi, however, who had Yudhishthira and the others as her own husbands, was not fair game for other men. How could one woman have several husbands? Ask the authors of the Mahabharata!”
Yet the power of Draupadi’s own dharma, her unwavering devotion to her husband(s), is what protects her when Duhshasana tries to strip her; every time he pulls off a her sari, another appears to cover her nakedness, until there is a great heap of silk beside her, and Duhshasana gives up; the implication is that her chastity protects her (2.61.40-45).fz The text often reminds us that Draupadi is no mere mortal but a creature from another world; there is a prediction that Draupadi will lead the Kshatriyas to their destruction, fulfilling the gods’ intention (1.155). How different the lives of actual women in India would have been had Draupadi, instead of Sita, been their official role model! Many Hindus name their daughters Sita, but few name them Draupadi.
It is always possible that the Mahabharata was recording a time when polyandry was the custom (as it is nowadays in parts of the Himalayas), but there is no evidence to support this contention. Indeed Pandu tells Kunti another story explicitly remarking upon an archaic promiscuity that is no longer in effect, pointedly reminding her, and any women who may have heard (or read) the text, that female promiscuity was an ancient option no longer available to them:
THE END OF FEMALE PROMISCUITY
The great sage Shvetaketu was a hermit, people say. Once, they say, right before the eyes of Shvetaketu and his father, a Brahmin grasped Shvetaketu’s mother by the hand and said, “Let’s go!” The sage’s son became enraged and could not bear to see his mother being taken away by force like that. But when his father saw that Shvetaketu was angry he said, “Do not be angry, my little son. This is the eternal dharma. The women of all classes on earth are not fenced in; all creatures behave just like cows, my little son, each in its own class.” The sage’s son could not tolerate that dharma and made this moral boundary for men and women on earth, for humans, but not for other creatures. And from then on, we hear, this moral boundary has stood: A woman who is unfaithful to her husband commits a mortal sin that brings great misery, an evil equal to killing an embryo, and a man who seduces another man’s wife, when she is a woman who keeps her vow to her husband and is thus a virgin obeying a vow of chastity, that man too commits a mortal sin on earth (1.113.9-20).
What begins as a rape somehow concludes with a law against willing female adultery, as uncontrollable male sexuality is projected onto the control of allegedly oversexed women. Pandu tells this story to Kunti in order to convince her that it is legal for her to give him children by sleeping with an appointed Brahmin,ga an emergency plan that prompts her then to tell him about the mantra by which she can summon the gods to father her children; he is thus carefully distinguishing the permitted Brahmin from the loose cannon Brahmin in the Shvetaketu story. We recognize Shvetaketu as a hero of the Upanishads, the boy whose father teaches him the doctrine of the two paths; here his father defends promiscuity, using cows as paradigms not, as is usual, of motherly purity, but of bovine license, as cows, of all people, here become the exemplars of primeval female promiscuity. (Perhaps because they are so pure that nothing they do is wrong?)
The Mahabharata keeps insisting that all this is hearsay, as if to make us doubt it; it invokes a vivid, quasi-Freudian primal scene to explain a kind of sexual revulsion. A Brahmin’s right to demand the sexual services of any woman he fancied23 evoked violent protest in ancient Indian texts,gb and Draupadi herself is subjected to such sexual harassment (unconsummated) on one occasion when she is in disguise as a servant and not recognized as the princess Draupadi (4.21.1-67). We may read the story of Shvetaketu in part as an anti-Brahmin (and anticow purity) tract, depicting, as it does, a Brahmin as sexually out of control, and cows as naturally promiscuous animals, as well as an explicit rejection of archaic polyandry. The Kama-sutra (1.1.9) names Shvetaketu as one of its original redactors, and the commentary on that passage cites this Mahabharata story to explain how a chaste sage became simultaneously an enemy of male adultery and an authority on sex.
The persistent polyandry in the lineage of the heroines is therefore, I think, a remarkably positive fantasy of female equality, which is to say, a major resistance to patriarchy, and the Mahabharata women—Satyavati, Kunti, and Draupadi—are a feminist’s dream (or a sexist’s nightmare): smart, aggressive, steadfast, eloquent, tough as nails, and resilient. Draupadi, in particular, is unrelenting in her drive to help her husbands regain their kingdom and avenge their wrongs.
Other women in the Mahabharata show remarkable courage and intelligence too, but their courage is often used in subservience to their husbands. The wives of the two patriarchs, Pandu and the blind Dhritarashtra, are paradigms of such courage. Gandhari, the wife of Dhritarashtra, kept her eyes entirely blindfolded from the day of her marriage to him, in order to share his blindness. Pandu’s widows vied for the privilege of dying on his pyre. When he died, Madri mounted his funeral pyre, for, she insisted, “My desire has not been satisfied, and he too was cheated of his desire as he was lying with me, so I will not cut him off from his desire in the house of death (1.116.26).” This is a most unusual justification for suttee, Madri’s intention being not merely to join her husband in heaven (as other suttees will state as their motivation) but to complete the sexual act in heaven. Yet Kunti too wishes to die on Pandu’s pyre, without the peculiar justification of coitus interruptus, but simply because she is the first wife. One of them must remain alive to care for both their children; Madri gets her way and mounts the pyre.gc Kunti and Gandhari later die alongside Dhritrarashtra in a forest fire from which they make no attempt to escape (15.37). The four wives of Vasudeva (the father of Krishna) immolate themselves on Vasudeva’s pyre and join him in heaven; they all were permitted to die because by this time all their children were dead (16.8.16-24).
The association of women with fire is worthy of note. Draupadi, who does not die on her husbands’ funeral pyres (because [1] she dies before them and [2] they don’t have funeral pyres; they walk up into heaven at the end of the story), begins rather than ends her life in fire; she is born out of her father’s fire altar:
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