Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Finding a suitable object in her husband, Rano’s hostility against the ‘race of men’ is split off from her erotic promptings. Without the tenderness of love to neutralize or transform it, her rage is rampant, unappeased even by Tiloka’s murder. When she views Tiloka’s corpse, Rano’s first impulse is to celebrate by decking herself in all finery. She has to squeeze an onion into her eyes and remind herself of the miserable fate awaiting her as a widow before she can shed the tears expected of her. She can cry only for herself. Rano’s love, both in its affectional and sensual currents, has to seek another object within the family.

  Traditionally, this object has often been the husband’s younger brother. For a time in Indian social history, the erotic importance of the brother-in-law—in the sense that he would or could have sexual relations with his elder brother’s widow—was officially recognized in the custom of niyoga. The custom itself goes back to the times of the Rig-veda where a man, identified by the commentators as the brother-in-law, is described as extending his hand in promised marriage to a widow inclined to share her husband’s funeral pyre.5

  Though the custom gradually fell into disuse, especially with the prohibition of widow remarriage, surviving only among remote communities such as the hillsmen of Utter Pradesh, the psychological core of niyoga, namely the mutual awareness of a married woman and her younger brother-in-law as potential or actual sexual partners, is very much an actuality even today. The awareness is present in the chastest of mythical wives, Sita, who, in the Ramayana, accuses Lakshmana of hesitating to help her husband and his brother, Rama, because of his feelings for her. As Lakshmana later reports the conversation to Rama: ‘Sita said to me, “Evil one, an excess of feelings for me has entered you. But if my husband is destroyed, you will not obtain me.’6 Expressed in a certain tenderness, in erotically tinged banter, or cases of actual physical intimacy, the relationship is very much a part of a marriage’s emotional space.7 In clinical practice, I have found that women who are on terms of sexual intimacy with a brother-in-law rarely express any feelings of guilt. Their anxiety is occasioned more by his leaving home or his impending marriage, which the woman perceives as an end to her sensual and emotional life.

  The disquieting murmurs of incestuous tensions have been the stuff of much drama and the distress of Rano and Mangla at their impending marriage are riveting for this reason alone. Mangla’s suffering, however, in the face of a long-awaited denouement to the incestuous wish, the embodiment in the flesh of fantasy hitherto entertained in the imagination alone, is much greater than Rano’s. He is like the boy who feels he bears the full culpability of being aroused by his mother. Beleaguered by his erotic yearnings for her, he does not truly conceive of hers for him. Rano, in contrast, is relatively more matter-of-fact and accepting of the paradoxes of the sexual realm. Perhaps like many other women, she seems better able to cope with the guilt of incestuous urgings than her ‘son’ who must first beat her for their impending transgression before he can accept his disturbing and dangerous sensual immersion.

  Krishna Sobti’s Mitro Marjani, another novel with a similar theme, is less a story than a portrait of a woman, with a lower-middle-class family life sketched in as the background.8 The book is dominated by its heroine, a young Punjabi woman called Mitro. Her husband, the two brothers-in-law and their wives, the husband’s old parents, are all bit players in the dramatization of her desire, existing only to enhance and provide counterpoints to Mitro’s moods and actions.

  As in Ek Chadar, the beginning of the novel features a violent quarrel between the husband and wife. Sardari, Mitro’s husband, is hitting her while Mitro stands still, her eyes raised to his face in defiance. ‘Will you lower your eyes or not?’ the husband keeps asking her with each blow. A stubborn Mitro refuses to look down, denying him this token of her submission. The mother-in-law, a representative of the older generation of women, pleads with her, ‘If he is stubborn, why don’t you lower your gaze, daughter? How can we helpless women confront men who are our lords?’

  The running battle between husband and wife, we learn later, is not only around the theme of dominance and submission, a trial of strength over the distribution of power between the two sexes. Mitro’s husband suspects her of promiscuous tendencies, a belief the spirited young woman does nothing to dispel. Indeed, she underlines this impression by the evident pride she takes in the fullness and bloom of her body, the sexual banter she carries on with her brother-in-law, and the candid confession of her sexual hunger to her sister-in-law. ‘Have you seen such breasts on another woman?’ she asks in innocent yet deeply sensual self-satisfaction as she strips off her clothes. ‘Your devar (younger brother-in-law, i.e., Mitro’s husband) does not recognize my disease. At the most he approaches me once a week or fortnight…this body is so thirsty that it thrashes around like a fish out of water.’ The sister-in-law, a good, conventional wife, is scandalized. For her, a woman’s body is not an object of pride or pleasure but something that is made impure every day, an abode of sinfulness. Angrily, she counters Mitro’s desires with the sanctimonious cultural definition of the woman’s role in Hindu society: ‘For daughters and daughters-in-law the ways of her home and household are like Lakshmana-rekha.a Knowingly or unknowingly, if this line is ever breached….’, the unfinished sentence leaving behind in the trailing silence a stark intimation of disaster.

  Mitro, however, is frankly open in the expression of her physical needs as a woman and in the mockery of her husband’s inability to satisfy them. Once, when her mother-in-law mentions the pregnancy of her elder sister-in-law and seeks to console Mitro by saying, ‘When you open up it won’t be one but seven who will be playing around in the courtyard’. Mitro retorts:

  If it was in my power I would bear one hundred kauravas (the ‘evil’ clan in the epic Mahabharata) but, mother, first do something about your son to produce some movement in that useless statue of stone.

  The family, already reeling under the dishonest business dealings of the youngest son, who has left the house along with his wife, fear that Mitro’s brazen behaviour will soon cause further scandal. They ask her to go to her mother’s home for a while. Mitro, anticipating the freedom and ample opportunity for erotic liaison available at her mother’s home—the mother is widely regarded as a fallen woman for her longstanding affair with a village official—is overjoyed at the prospect. Sardari, her husband, accompanies her on the visit. Mitro narrates her predicament to her mother who offers to help her out, to ‘call a gardener for her garden’ as she puts it. She even offers to keep a guard over the sleeping son-in-low’s door and arranges for the daughter to visit her own lover. On the evening of the assignation, Mitro dresses like a dancing girl. In trying to make her husband drunk she behaves with the coquetry of an expensive whore in a high-class brothel, to the inebriated Sardari’s early horror and eventual delight. When the husband sinks into a drunken stupor, Mitro is ready to go to the waiting man but is stopped by the weeping mother who has had second thoughts. Mitro goes back to her husband’s room. When they wake up in the morning, she embraces him tightly and covers his face with kisses, expressing her affection for the husband as intensely as she had shown desire for adulterous sex in the previous evening.

  My choice of Ek Chadar and Mitro Marjani has been dictated by my feeling, based on personal and professional experience, that their protrayal of the man-woman relationship has aspects with considerable potential for generalization. As with Freud’s Rat Man, a single case history which later proved to be psychodynamically representative for a host of other cases of obsessional-compulsive neurosis, fictional family histories too may illuminate significant themes in Indian marriages in situations quite different from their novelistic origins. That these themes relate to conflict in marriage, rather than to happiness and contentment, is of course embedded in the nature of the fictional enterprise itself. If happy families, as Tolstoy asserted, are all alike, then happy marriages have no history and consequently, ‘They lived happily ever after
marks the end of the story rather than its beginning or middle. Of course, the abstraction of these themes from the novels in the form of generalizations must emerge through a careful engagement with other cultural-historical and social-anthropological materials dealing with marriages and the man-woman relationship in India. Fiction and what I like to call cultural psychology—the psychic representation in individuals of their community’s history and social institutions—can reciprocally illuminate each other.

  In her frank sexuality, and restlessness, and in her straining against the confines of cultural role she finds too restrictive, Mitro is certainly a woman unusual for her milieu and class. Superior to the role in life in which she finds herself struggling against a confining cultural fate. Mitro is the kind of troubled character who, all over the world, is a favorite of both novelists and healers of the soul. Like many women in India, in fiction and in life, she expresses her rage through words, or better, verbal barbs poisoned with ridicule and sharpened with the cutting edge of sarcasm. Yet even at the beginning of the story, we sense that Mitro’s conflict, as she pushes against restraining cultural walls, is too deep to be bridged by creative coining of sarcastic phrases. We fear that if she is unable to get greater space for herself, she will become violent, self-destructive, or apathetic.

  To me, Mitro Marjani is one of the more explicit renderings of a muted yet extremely powerful theme in Hindu marriages: the cultural unease, indeed, the fear of the wife as a woman, i.e., as a sexual being. More exactly, it is the age-old yet still persisting cultural splitting of the wife into a mother and a whore which underlies the husband-wife relationship and which explains the often contradictory Hindu views of the woman. The mother-whore dichotomy is of course a well-known Freudian syndrome which describes the separation of sexuality from tenderness, the object of desire from the object of adoration. Freud has described the psychodynamics of this occurrence in which a man idealizes one kind of a woman, generally of his own social class. She is seen as ‘higher’ and ‘purer’ than him, but he is impotent with her, while on the other hand he is capable of sexual relations with a woman of a lower social station, very frequently a prostitute.9 This split can often be traced back to the anxiety surrounding incestuous imaginings, and with it, a horror of ‘de-idealizing’ a mother on whose image, in its purity, the man-boy still relies for nurturance and undying support. The splitting of the mother-image into the goddess and whore allows the man to have a modicum of sexual life without being overwhelmed by anxiety.

  The mother-whore dichotomy or, in its Hindu version, the mother-whore-partner-in-ritual trichotomy, is crucial for understanding the culture’s public and official attitudes toward women and wives. Manu, the Hindu law-giver, and his subsequent commentators, who have formulated the society’s formal view of the other sex, have perhaps been unjustly branded as misogynists. A careful reading of their texts shows that misogyny as well as the praise of women follows a purely contextual course. In other words, a wife is not a wife in and for all seasons; it is the context which determines whether she is regarded as good, bad, or divine. As a partner to her husband in the prescribed sacrifices to ancestors and gods, that is, in the context of the ritual, the wife is a respected being. Manu can thus say, ‘Where women are honored, there the gods are pleased; but where they are not honored, no sacred rite yields rewards.’10 In her maternal aspect, actual or potential, a wife is again a person deserving of all reverence. ‘Between wives who [are destined] to bear children, who secure many blessing, who are worthy of worship and irradiate [their] dwellings and between the goddesses of fortune [who reside] in the houses [of men], there is no difference whatever.’11 It is only just as a woman, as a female sexual being, that the patriarchal culture’s horror and scorn are heaped upon the helpless wife.

  It is clear from its context that the oft-quoted verse. ‘Her father protects her in childhood, her husband protects her in youth and her sons protect her in old age; a woman is never fit for independence,’12 refers to a ‘protection’ not from external danger but from the woman’s inner, sexual proclivities. Thus the previous verse talks of controlling her attachment to sensual enjoyments. The subsequent one calls reprehensible the father who does not give her away in marriage at puberty; the husband who does not approach her sexually when she is in her season (ritu); and the son who after his father’s death does not protect the mother—from the attentions of other men and from her own urges, the implication is clear.

  In fact the first 26 stanzas of the chapter ‘Duties of Husband and Wife’ in The Laws of Manu, which form the cornerstone of the culture’s official view of women, can be read as a fantasy around the theme of the adult woman’s possible sexual abandon and potential infidelity. The fantasy is very much that of the Oedipal boy who imagines the mother turning away from him and toward the father and his man-sized penis. She is a siren and has but seduced and abandoned him.

  The fantasy thus starts with the wish to ‘guard’ a woman from her overwhelming sexual temptation and from the interlopers who would exploit it for their own and her pleasure. Yet guarding her by force is not realistically possible, and perhaps it is better to keep her throughly engaged in household work and thus fancy-free. ‘Let the [husband] employ his [wife] in the collection and expenditure of his wealth, in keeping [everything] clean in [the fulfilment of] religious duties, in the preparation of his food, and in looking after the household utensils.’13 On the other hand, even the dam of ‘busy-ness’ is really not enough to constrain her erotic turbulence and our Oedipal lover appeals to her conscience, the inner sentinel. ‘Women confined in the house under trustworthy and obedient servants, are not (well) guarded, but those who of their own accord keep guard over themselves, are well guarded.’14 Both the recourse to the external world and to the woman’s own superego do not prove to be sufficient as the more primitive images in the jealous and disappointed lover’s fantasy break through to the surface. ‘Women do not care for beauty, not is their attention fixed on age; [thinking], “[It is enough that] he is a man,” they give themselves to the handsome and the ugly.’15 ‘Through their passion for men, through their mutable temper, through their natural heartlessness, they become disloyal toward their husbands, however carefully they may be guarded in this [world].’16 ‘[When creating them] Manu allotted to women [a love of their] bed, [of their] seat and [of] ornament, impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and bad conduct.’17 Anger and retaliation now follow wherein the woman must atone for her lapse before she can again be resurrected as the pure and the needed mother. The mantra she needs to recite for the ‘expiation of her sins’ is not hers but in fact that of the son: ‘If my mother, going astray and unfaithful, conceived illicit desires, may my father keep that seed from me.’18 Punished and repentant, the whore finally disappears, to be replaced by the untainted mother who, in subsequent verses, is praised and equated with the goddess (of fortune).

  The image of the wife as the needed mother and the feared whore is even today reflected in the proverbs of all the major Indian languages, a testimony to the cultural unity of the subcontinent in the way fundamental human relationships—between spouses, siblings and generations—are viewed.19 As one would surmise, woman’s infidelity is the major theme in the various proverbs seeking to grasp the nature of the feminine. ‘Only when fire will cool, the moon burn or the ocean fill with tasty water will a woman be pure,’ is one of the many Sanskrit pronouncements on the subject. ‘A woman if she remains within bounds; she becomes a donkey out of them,’ say the Tamils. The exceptional proverbs in praise of wives, for instance in Assamese and Bengali, invariably and predictably address their maternal aspect—’Who could belittle women? Women who bear children!’ A Punjabi proverb puts the husband’s dilemma and its resolution in a nutshell, ‘A woman who shows more love for you than your mother is a slut.’

  It is evident that with such a collective fantasy of the wife, the fate of sexuality within marriage is likely to come under an evil constellation of stars. Physica
l love will tend to be a shame-ridden affair, a sharp stabbing of lust with little love and even less passion. Indeed, the code of sexual conduct for the householder-husband fully endorses this expectation. Stated concisely in the smritis (the law codes), elaborated in the Puranas (which are not only collections of myths but also contain chapters on the correct conduct of daily life), modified for local usage by the various kinds of religiosi, the thrust of the message seems to be, ‘No sex in marriage please, we’re Indian.’

  Consider: A husband should only approach a woman in her season (ritu), a period of sixteen days within a menstrual cycle. ‘But among these the first four, the eleventh and thirteenth are [declared to be forbidden], the remaining nights are recommended.’20 The availability of ten nights a month for conjugal relations is only an apparent largesse. The Hindu counterparts of Blake’s priests in ‘black gowns, walking their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires’ have not yet finished with their proscriptions. Since the all-important sons are conceived only on even nights, while daughters are conceived on uneven ones, the number of recommended nights straightaway shrinks by a half. Then there are the pravas, the moonless nights and those of the full moon, on which sexual relations lead either to the ‘hell of faeces and urine’ (Vishnu Purana) or to the birth of atheist sons (Brahma Purana). In addition, there are many festival days for gods and ancestors which are forbidden for any erotic transports. Thus the likelihood that most of the remaining five nights are sexually safe decreases greatly. Moreover, it is not a matter of permitted and forbidden nights (sex during the day is, of course, beyond the pale). The question is of a general disapproval of the erotic aspect of married life, a disapproval which is not a medieval relic but continues to inform contemporary attitudes. This is quite understandable since changes in sexuality occur at a more gradual pace than transformations in the political and social sphere; sexual time beats at a considerably slower pace than its chronological counterpart.