In the end, the woman’s husband arrives and, after an initial attempt to beat up his wife’s high-born stalker, this untouchable too demands, ‘Haven’t you read the Sastras?’ Irony, in fact, is writ across the composition, where the low-born out-brahmin the brahmin—and so is brilliant comic effect. When the woman’s husband reminds Morobhatlu about the godly path, the brahmin responds: ‘Final freedom is that state of no pain, no pleasure, no qualities, nothing—or so some idiot said. But when a ravishing young woman … is free from her clothes—that’s freedom for me.’
At long last, then, the husband agrees to present his wife to the brahmin, only for the latter to belatedly heed his pupil’s voice (‘Have a little detachment; think of the subtle meaning of Vedic words’). In the course of events that follow, the husband is upset, the wife is bewildered, and finally Shiva arrives and liberates everybody from this hilarious, singular quandary. (A little too hilarious, perhaps, for later commentators, who argued that much of the literary patronage extended by Shahuji was for ‘vulgar’ texts such as this one.)
The Sati Dana Suramu is, on the face of it, a simple parody. But viewed in its context, Shahuji, we find, was making a comment on society itself. As the scholar Sanjay Subrahmanyam notes, ‘the play was written … for public performance’ at a major festival, which means its irreverence was consumed by large numbers of pilgrims and locals. Not only does it combine on one stage brahmins and untouchables, it also cleverly exalts Shiva (Shahuji’s preferred deity), who swoops in to save the day at a site associated with Vishnu. Questions are raised on ethics and morality, on lust and the role of women. But the larger point Shahuji seemed to make—and make with much mirth and laughter—was that asking questions and turning some tables was not such a bad idea after all. As this Maratha prince in Tamil country asks us at the end of his Sanskrit–Telugu production: ‘You, who have seen this play, decide for yourselves and tell us: Who, among these four, is the best?’
A MUSLIM DEITY IN A HINDU TEMPLE
India is a palimpsest of the most curious tales. And very often, seemingly incongruous elements from the realm of fable and myth lend an ironic congruence to the concrete world of men. All through history, a generous fabrication of mythology has helped politics navigate the awkward corners in which its protagonists land themselves. Shivaji is a case in point. The Maratha warrior had emerged as a real force in the late seventeenth century, with armies, treasure and swathes of territory at his command. But rivals, including local families of a provenance superior to his own, painted him merely as an over-strong rebel—a warlord with a frightful number of swords at best—so that in addition to actual power, what the Maratha hero urgently needed was legitimacy. The answer to Shivaji’s woes came in 1674, when he decided to promote himself from warlord to king, with classical ritual in extravagant display. A genealogy was ‘discovered’ connecting him to an ancient royal line, and ostentatious rites permitted him to claim ‘pure’ kshatriya status, when hitherto local brahmins deemed him, like other Marathas, much lower in caste. It was a masterstroke: Shivaji now formally soared above all other Maratha clans (which remained in their previous, relatively inferior position), while simultaneously alerting his Mughal foes that they could no longer dismiss him as a ‘mountain rat’. He was a lawful, anointed monarch after that day, and his investment in ritual paid the expected dividend soon enough: when he met the Qutb Shah of Golconda shortly afterwards, he was received with an embrace reserved only for a royal equal.
As a society, India has often negotiated disruptive change through such inventions of tradition. When Muslim might arrived in northern India alongside invaders, a new chapter was inaugurated in the story of the subcontinent. The old order collapsed in many places and a fresh structure was fashioned, with Islamicate ideals in the ascendant. One way in which elites on both sides tried to rationalise these painful changes was, to borrow historian Aziz Ahmad’s terminology, through epics of conquest and resistance. Thus, for instance, we have Muslim accounts that exaggerate the ‘destruction of infidels’ in India, when, in reality, even the terrifying Muhammad of Ghor’s early coins prominently featured the ‘infidel’ goddess Lakshmi without irony—the former legitimised him in the wider Islamic world through literary bombast and bravado, while the latter was a practical concession as he sought to rule a country full of non-Muslims. This was countered, as the scholar Richard H. Davis notes, by Hindu elites with their own exaggerations of suffering and valour, the case of the Rajput queen Padmavati preferring fire to a Muslim’s harem being merely one prominent example. On all sides of power, rhetoric was amplified, legends and tales competing for narrative dominance even as realpolitik was guided on the ground by battles and great armies. Both went hand in hand, adding yet another layer of detail in an already complex land.
One such remarkable story from the fourteenth century features a Muslim woman revered to this day as Tulukka Nachiyar (literally, ‘Tughlaq Princess’ or ‘Turkish Princess’), who is said to have fallen in love with a Hindu god. Even a mere outline of the legend is fascinating: When Muslim troops from Delhi plundered temples in southern India, on their list was the great Vaishnava shrine at Srirangam in Tamil Nadu. The temple chronicle, the Koil Ozhugu , tells of the attack of the invading armies, and the fall of a heroic warrior in defence of the temple. The sultan’s men then seize the idols, and the image of the deity is transported to Delhi. Unknown to the soldiers, a good woman devoted to the lord travels with them to the north in disguise, even gaining access to the sultan’s residence and confirming that her beloved deity is now parked in a palace storeroom. This lady, recalled hereafter as Pin Thodarnda Valli (‘she who followed’), now returns to Srirangam where she at once informs the temple authorities of the whereabouts of their lost deity. Liberated from their anguish and sorrow, the Vaishnava bhaktas rejoice, and led by their informant, sixty of them make their way to the court of the sultan to reclaim their god. Coming into the imperial presence there, they entertain the king with music and dance, and ask for the deity of Srirangam to be returned to his rightful place in the south. Pleased with their performance, the Tughlaq sultan happily grants them this wish, commanding his men to go to the storeroom and retrieve Srirangam’s deity. Everyone is rather pleased with the turn of events, and there is hope in the air of a happy conclusion.
This is where the twist occurs. It so happens that the sultan’s daughter had long before gone into the storeroom and collected the idol, taking it to her apartments and there playing with it as if it were a doll. The implication, however, is that by dressing him, feeding him and garlanding him, as is done to deities in Hindu temple rituals, the princess was essentially worshipping the image, winning divine affection—while during the day he kept her company in the form of an idol, at night, the Koil Ozhugu mischievously suggests, he played with the princess in a completely human avatar. As soon as the appeal from the Srirangam party is heard, however, the deity puts his Muslim beloved to sleep and agrees to return with his original devotees. With the consent of the sultan, who is somewhat startled by the animate image, they set out immediately, only for the Tughlaq princess to wake up distraught. She hastens to catch up with the brahmins, who meanwhile have split so that one group can conceal the idol in Tirupati, lest it be kidnapped again. For the princess, this separation is unbearable—arriving in Srirangam but finding her beloved absent, she perishes in the pangs of viraha . Her sacrifice is not for nothing, though, for when eventually the deity comes home—which is a separate adventure altogether—he commands the priests to recognise his Muslim consort. She is commemorated in Srirangam in a painting on the wall, where during his processional round, to this day, the deity appears before her in a colourful lungi (the costume associated with the peninsular Muslim) and accepts north Indian food which features such items as chapatti.
The story is a memorable one, with an exact parallel in the Melkote Thirunarayanapuram temple in Karnataka—in this tale, however, the princess is enshrined as a veiled idol in a shrine of her own
and not in a wall painting. What is fascinating in either case is not the legend itself but what it seeks to convey. Though it seems unlikely that a Tughlaq princess actually came to the south, head over heels in love with an idol that nightly took human form, could it have been that a Muslim woman was instrumental in having Hindu idols released from Delhi? Or is it, as Davis suggests, a ‘counter-epic’ where the roles are reversed: Instead of a Muslim king chasing after Hindu princesses, we have a Muslim princess besotted with the Hindu divine? By accepting the concept of a Tulukka Nachiyar within the temple, were the leaders of the time creating a space to locate newcomer Muslims within the world of the orthodox Hindu? Were they seeking to prevail over Islamicate principles by celebrating the Hinduised daughter of a sultan? The truth probably lies in a combination of these, but we can be sure that what we have here is a colourful, revealing narrative with a splendid cast and an exchange between actors who are usually held to be firmly separate and even bursting with unconcealed hatred for one another. It tells us once again that while there were moments of tension between India’s principal faiths, legend and myth allowed them to see eye to eye and engage on fresh ground, even while competing in the realm of ideas—a lesson we would be wise to remember in our own contentious times, when revenge is sought from people long dead and gone, and violence justified in the name of so many gods.
THE TALE OF TWO SHAKUNTALAS
In 1791, when Goethe first encountered the legend of Shakuntala, he was moved to the extent of declaring that if heaven and earth were to combine in a name, that name would be hers. Indeed, the German thinker’s passion for Kalidas’s epic heroine lasted a lifetime, and even on the eve of his death, he was referring to Shakuntala as ‘a star that makes the night more agreeable than the day’. Goethe was hardly alone in his fascination for the Abhijñānaśākuntalam , which captured Europe’s imagination after Sir William ‘Orientalist’ Jones produced his famous translation, Sacontala, or The Fatal Ring in 1789. Since then, this Indian heroine has emerged as one of our most widely recognised mythological characters, featuring in Raja Ravi Varma’s canvases as well as on the movie screen, not to speak of endless literary works, at home and abroad. As time passed, as the historian Romila Thapar notes, Shakuntala was swiftly enthroned as the ideal of Indian womanhood, her integrity and blamelessness going down as virtues to be emulated by every good daughter and every self-sacrificing wife.
The Shakuntala Kalidas conceived, however, is markedly different from the original template that appears in the Mahabharata. In this older avatar, Shakuntala is a remarkably direct and confident figure. When Dushyanta, who has killed ‘thousands of deer’ in the course of his royal hunt, arrives unexpectedly at her adoptive father’s hermitage, he calls out, ‘Who is here?’ Shakuntala appears without a hint of coyness or reserve, even as the royal visitor studies her ‘beautiful hips’, ‘lustrous appearance’ and ‘charming smile’. Having welcomed him, our protagonist asks how she may be of service, and in the course of their conversation also explains her half-celestial origins. It is only a matter of time before the king is moved to declare: ‘Be my wife, buxom woman!,’ suggesting to this ‘girl of the lovely thighs’ that they ought to marry right away, in the gandharva style, where passion compensates for lack of ceremony (or patience). Shakuntala initially asks him to wait but is eventually persuaded that this is indeed a legitimate form of marriage. But even then, she seeks first a promise: Her son from this union must be the king’s heir. ‘If it is to be thus, Duhsanta, you may lie with me,’ she declares. The lady in the Mahabharata is sensible, in other words, and able to command from the king a significant pledge.
The Shakuntala Kalidas’s exquisite poetry breathed into life and who went on to inspire Goethe and his generation, was not, as the scholar Kanchana Mahadevan writes, ‘the assertive woman of the epic’. Unlike in the Mahabharata, she barely even talks to Dushyanta directly—she is too innocent and sweet to do anything of the sort. In fact, as a companion explains, she is ‘as delicate as a jasmine’, which also means she knows nothing of the ways of the world. She falls in love with the king, in any case, and he is tempted by this ‘flower that no one has smelled’. Their mutual attraction results soon enough in a consummation, and in a twist that might have been inspired by a Buddhist tale, the king departs after handing over to Shakuntala his ring. While she is lost in romantic dreams and yearnings, one day soon afterwards, a sage with a frightful temper appears at the ashram. And not finding her up to the mark in his service, he issues that devastating curse—the lover who so dominated her mind and thoughts when even in the sage’s hallowed presence will forget her altogether. Following entreaties by others, he subsequently allows a caveat that when the king beholds the ring he left behind, he will remember Shakuntala, paving the way for a reconciliation. And so, in this version, matters are taken beyond human control to the realm of fate that serves, in essence, to absolve our male lead of his subsequent betrayal.
The ring and the curse are interesting additions by Kalidas. In the Mahabharata, our heroine, after a pregnancy that lasts thirty-six months, appears at Dushyanta’s court with their son to remind the king of his word. ‘Remember,’ she commands, ‘the promise you made long ago when we lay together, man of fortune, in Kanva’s hermitage!’ Dushyanta, however, quite deliberately chooses not to recognise her. ‘I do not know that this is my son … Women are liars—who will trust your word?’ he sneers. A powerful exchange follows, and while Shakuntala is angry, she remains full of furious self-assurance. ‘Even without you, Duhsanta, my son shall reign over the four-cornered earth,’ she declares. ‘My birth is higher than yours, Duhsanta! You walk on earth, great king, but I fly the skies.’ Eventually, a magical voice confirms that the boy is the king’s son, upon which Dushyanta announces that he had known Shakuntala was telling the truth all along. As Wendy Doniger translates: ‘I knew … that he was my own son. But if I had accepted him … just from her words, there would have been doubt among the people.’ The king, for reasons of public approval, then, had been loudly stating an untruth. And without irony, he then proceeds to forgive Shakuntala for her harsh words! (Clearly, patriarchy is as old as any Indian tradition.)
In Kalidas, this very episode is completely transformed, in a reflection of the changing mores of the poet’s own time. In his version, Shakuntala is pregnant, and accompanied by others who speak for her in court—as mentioned earlier, cultured women like her do not presume to have a voice. The king does not recognise her and suggests that she is trying to pass off another man’s seed as his own. ‘Don’t cuckoos let other birds nurture their eggs and teach the chicks to fly?’ he asks in an unkind taunt. But through the device of the curse—which means the king has genuinely forgotten Shakuntala—Kalidas exonerates him, whereas, in the Mahabharata, Dushyanta is guilty and telling a calculated lie. The fact that Shakuntala has lost the all-important ring complicates matters. But unlike, to quote Thapar again, ‘the spirited woman who argues her right’ in the epic, Shakuntala in Kalidas’s retelling sheds pious tears till her mother, the celestial nymph Menaka, comes to her rescue and takes her away. Eventually, after the ring reaches the king through the means of a dead fish, he remembers everything and sets out to reunite with his wife and child. Nobody is to blame here—Shakuntala is pure, the king’s crudeness was the result of a curse, and what really determined matters was a tragic twist of fate, not human choice and action.
Kalidas’s was a tremendously popular retelling of the story given that the hero and heroine are both romantic victims. But the play also encapsulates a moment when the powerful woman of the epic makes way for a new ideal—an ideal that was embraced by Western audiences in Goethe’s day, and which Indians too accepted (in a nineteenth-century Urdu translation, Shakuntala is so chaste she even wears a veil). This Shakuntala, who travelled seamlessly from Kalidas’s Sanskrit verses to the Victorian imagination, still eclipses the more remarkable woman who first appears in the great Indian epic: one who does not conform to notions of patriarc
hal correctness and stands proud, instead, as a challenge to the world of men.
A DALIT AT THE TEMPLE DOOR
In 1784, administrative officers of the Peshwa in Pune, the formal headquarters of the Maratha Confederacy, issued orders to the authorities in Pandharpur concerning the prominent shrine of Vithoba in that pilgrim town. There was, they pointed out, a stone image commemorating a low-caste Bhakti saint outside the principal temple, and untouchable men and women often gathered there to worship. However, ‘the place is so narrow and crowded’, the order observed, ‘that the visitors [to the temple in general] are touched to one another and the brahmins are opposed to this. Therefore the untouchables should perform worship from near the stone-lamp’, which stood close by, ‘or from a nearby untouchable hamlet’, steering clear of the path used by brahmins and their other high-born neighbours. ‘Those who [continue worshipping in the old way],’ the despatch warned in conclusion, ‘shall be punished.’
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