We live in a country where Sita and Draupadi are idolized – not for their strength of character but for their submission to the male phallocentric order. This is a country where women are repressed, beaten, tortured, raped, mutilated, and killed every day for – well, being women!
Centuries of the ‘knowledge-power/power-knowledge’ discourse handed down by groups of entitled men who have interpreted religious texts and scriptures to serve their own twisted agenda have perpetuated a deeprooted, but a false sense of what is right and wrong, and what defines a man and what defines a woman. And what better way to instil this false consciousness but to have an entire society believe that the epitome of womanhood lies in the selfless sacrifices of female figures who are worshipped as goddesses across the country? But really, are images of women who have suffered relentlessly in the hands of presumptuous, power-seeking, false masculinity an ideal image? At least that is how they are made to appear.
Let us take a moment to look back at the two epic female characters that every child is made familiar with in India – the day he or she can start reading on their own. Sita, the beautiful, long-suffering wife of the dutiful Lord Rama, and an avatar of the Goddess Lakshmi, spent 14 years in exile because her husband had to keep his word. She was then abducted and imprisoned by the demon Ravana, until the time that she was saved by Rama, only to be asked to attest to her unwavering virtue by undergoing the agnipariksha, and then was banished to the forest while pregnant, following which she became a single mother to the twins Luv and Kush. Finally, she prayed to Mother Earth, to swallow her into the depths of the earth when upon meeting her Rama asked her, yet again, to step into the fire! Thus runs the popular version of the Ramayana, where Sita is the helpless damsel in distress forever having men decide her fate for her and always submitting to the unfair, unjust demands of society, and her highly principled husband.
In this version, Sita is the ideal Indian woman – a woman who dedicates her life and happiness to the whims of her husband, who puts dharma first, and who is selfless and understanding to the extent that she would willingly subject herself to the test of virtue, simply upon being instructed by her husband, and in order to maintain his image among his people. That is the image of Sita that every Indian man and woman bear in mind, the image of the victim who needed to be saved by the hero, the epitome of chastity and love. Yet, how many of us see the sheer strength in her character — the steely determination required to stand by your love despite his seeming lack of faith, to bring up two young kids on one’s own, and to finally put one’s foot down, instead of begging and submitting? How many of us see her as an inspiration for the empowered woman, the woman who chose or not chose to do certain things. Very few indeed, since we are conditioned to see her in a certain light – as the woman who suffered, and who got worshipped for that. Very interestingly, reiterations of her story seem to cleverly gloss over the part where she left Rama – focusing only on her vulnerability and helplessness.
Take Draupadi, for instance. The epitome of the tortured woman – yet another icon of Indian womanhood. From being instructed by Lord Krishna on whom to marry, to getting ‘equally divided’ among her husband and his four brothers, to being pawned in a game of chess as a goat or a mule by one of her husbands, to being molested and de-robed in a hall full of the gatekeepers of dharma, to having all her five children killed mercilessly in the dark of the night – the list of her suffering is endless. And, it is in her commodification and victimization, we are told, that her sacrifice, and therefore, her greatness lies. The violence against her, for violence it is – both emotional and physical—is glorified; she suffers and to avenge her suffering, her husbands, who ‘share her’ like she was a piece of cake, go to battle. Some even see her as a seductress, and not in a good way, sexualizing her – presumably because she was forced to sleep with more than one man, and because the very society that forced her to do so apparently gets the license to call her a whore.
Draupadi does suffer, but she does not suffer silently. She does not hang her head in shame, but scratches and kicks her way through, questioning the dubious morality and double standards of the so-called elders who kept their mouth shut in the face of the bestial treatment she is made to endure. She stands up for herself when clearly all the king’s men and all the king’s horses fail to do so. She is a formidable force within the epic, not a woman to be pitied but to draw inspiration from. Yet, for the bulk of the masses, she is either a victim or an enchantress, not the fearless feminine that she was.
Ours is a society steeped in traditions idolizing female figures who are shown to be powerless and weak. It is time we changed the way we read our epics, it is time we re-imagined them not only in scholarly articles or expensive novels but for the masses. For as long as we bow our heads in reverence to stories of women being tortured, and worship sagas of violence committed repeatedly against women, the perpetrators of crime will always have an excuse to fall back upon, to flaunt their depraved, insecure masculinity, and violate millions of Sitas and Draupadis that are born in every Indian home. There is no ‘Indian’ feminine or masculine. There is only human.
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