The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  As the bhakti movement increasingly imagined a god who combined the awesome powers of a supreme deity with the compassion of an intimate friend, it reinforced the vision of Rama as someone who was both limited by human constraints and aware of his divinity.

  Commentators argued that Rama had intentionally become ignorant30 or that he merely pretended to forget who he was,31 and in some later retellings, Rama never does forget that he is Vishnu. But it is worth noting that though the Ramayana tells a long, detailed story to explain why the monkey Hanuman, the great general of the monkey army, forgets that he has magic powers (to fly, to become very big and very small, etc.), except when he needs them to get to Lanka (7.36), it never explains why it is that Rama (who does not have such magic powers) forgets that he is an incarnation of Vishnu. Both Rama and Krishna (who is an avatar of Vishnu in the Mahabharata) flicker between humanity and divinity in spatial as well as temporal terms; they are not only part-time gods but partial or fractional parts of Vishnu, who remains there, fully intact, always a god, while his avatars function on earth, always human. The two avatars are born of human wombs, and when they die, they merge back into Vishnu. Like Rama, Krishna sometimes does, and sometimes does not, act as if he (as well as the people with whom he interacts) knew that he was an avatar of Vishnu.

  In a sense, the double nature of incarnation develops in a direct line from the Upanishadic belief that we are all incarnations of brahman but subject to the cycle of reincarnation. And some gods appear on earth in disguise already in the Veda, particularly Indra, the great shape shifter, while, later, Shiva often appears briefly in human disguise among mortals in the Mahabharata. If you put these ideas together, you end up with an all-powerful god who appears on earth in a complete life span as a human. Why do these two great human avatars appear at this moment in Indian history? Perhaps because an avatar was a way to attach already extant divinities to the growing sect of Vishnu, a way to synthesize previous strands and to appropriate other people’s stories. Not only did some of these strands and stories come from Buddhism and Jainism, but the avatar was an answer to one of the challenges that these religions now posed for Hinduism.

  For by this time the Buddha and the Jina had successfully established the paradigm of a religious movement centered upon a human being.eg But Rama and Krishna beat the Buddhists and Jainas at their own game of valorizing the human form as a locus of superhuman wisdom and power, for Rama and Krishna are humans with a direct line to divinity, drawing their power from a god (Vishnu) far greater than any Vedic god and at the same time, through the incarnations, grounded in humanity.

  WOMEN: BETWEEN GODDESSES AND OGRESSES

  Being human, Rama is vulnerable. Despite his divine reserves, he is tripped up again and again by women—his stepmother Kaikeyi, Ravana’s sister the ogress Shurpanakha, and, ultimately, his wife, Sita.

  Sita is not only the ultimate male fantasy of the perfect woman but has as her foil a group of women and ogresses who are as Bad as Sita is Good. No one, male or female, could fail to get the point, and no one did. When Rama, the eldest, the son of the oldest queen, Kausalya, is about to ascend the throne, the youngest queen, Kaikeyi, uses sexual blackmail (among other things) to force Dasharatha to put her son, Bharata, on the throne instead and send Rama into exile: She locks herself into her “anger room” (India’s answer to Lysistrata), puts on filthy clothes, lies down on the ground, and refuses to look at the king or speak to him, and the besotted Dasharatha is powerless to resist her beauty (2.9.16-19). Kaikeyi is the evil shadow of the good queen, Kausalya. But Kaikeyi herself is absolved of her evil by having it displaced onto the old hunchback woman who corrupts Kaikeyi and forces her, against her better judgment, to act as she does. For bringing about the sufferings that will overwhelm Kausalya, Sita curses not Kaikeyi but the hunchback, whose deformation is itself, in the Hindu view, evidence that she must already have committed some serious sin in a previous life. On the other hand, when Shatrughna (Lakshmana’s twin brother) abuses the hunchback, he yells curses on Kaikeyi. In this text, even the shadows have shadows.

  THE LOSS OF SITA

  Sita never dies, but she vanishes four times. First she vanishes when Ravana carries her off, and Rama gets her back. Then she parts from Rama three times, into three natural elements—a fire, the forest, and the earth—as a direct result of that first estrangement: Rama keeps throwing her out now because Ravana abducted her years ago.

  First, right after the defeat of Ravana, Rama summons Sita to the public assembly. Then:

  SITA ENTERS THE FIRE

  Rama said to her: “Doubts have arisen about your behavior. Go, then, wherever you wish. I can have nothing to do with you. What man of good family could take back, simply because his mind was so tortured by longing for her, a woman who had lived in the house of another man? How can I take you back when you have been degraded upon the lap of Ravana? Set your heart on Lakshmana or Bharata, or on Sugriva [the king of the monkeys], or [Ravana’s brother] Vibhishana, or whoever will make you happy, Sita. For when Ravana saw your gorgeous body, he would not have held back for long when you were living in his own house.” Sita replied to Rama, “You distrust the whole sex because of the way some women behave. If anyone touched my body, it was by force.” Then, to Lakshmana: “Build a pyre for me; that is the medicine for this calamity. I cannot go on living, ruined by false accusations.” As the fire blazed, she stood before it and said, “As my heart never wavered from Rama, so may the fire, the witness of all people, protect me.” And she entered the blaze. As the gods reminded Rama who he was, Fire rose up with Sita in his lap and placed her in the lap of Rama, saying, “Here is your Sita; there is no evil in her. Though she was tempted and threatened in various ways, she never gave a thought to Ravana. She must never be struck; this I command you.” Rama said, “Sita had to enter the purifying fire in front of everyone, because she had lived so long in Ravana’s bedrooms. Had I not purified her, good people would have said of me, ‘That Rama, Dasharatha’s son, is certainly lustful and childish.’ But I knew that she was always true to me.” Then Rama was united with his beloved and experienced the happiness that he deserved (6.103-6).32

  “Dasharatha’s son is certainly lustful” is a key phrase. Rama knows all too well what people said about Dasharatha; when Lakshmana learns that Rama has been exiled, he says, “The king is perverse, old, and addicted to sex, driven by lust (2.18.3).” Rama says as much himself: “He’s an old man, and with me away he is so besotted by Kaikeyi that he is completely in her power, and capable of doing anything. The king has lost his mind. I think sex (kama) is much more potent than either artha or dharma. For what man, even an idiot like father, would give up a good son like me for the sake of a pretty woman? (2.47.8-10).” Thus Rama invokes the traditional ranking of dharma over sex and politics (kama and artha) and accuses his father of valuing them in the wrong way, of being addicted to sex. He then takes pains to show that where Dasharatha made a political and religious mistake because he desired his wife too much (kama over artha and dharma), he, Rama, cares for Sita only as a political pawn and an unassailably chaste wife (artha and dharma over kama). Rama thinks that sex is putting him in political danger (keeping his allegedly unchaste wife will make the people revolt), but in fact he has it backward: Politics is driving Rama to make a sexual and religious mistake; public concerns make him banish the wife he loves. Rama banishes Sita as Dasharatha has banished Rama. Significantly, the moment when Rama kicks Sita out for the second time comes directly after a long passage in which Rama makes love to Sita passionately, drinking wine with her, for many days on end; the banishment comes as a direct reaction against the sensual indulgence (7.41). Rama’s wife is above suspicion, but Rama suspects her. His ambivalence, as well as hers, is expressed in the conflicts between the assertions, made repeatedly by both of them, that Ravana never touched her, that he did but it was against her will, and that physical contact is irrelevant, since she remained true to him in her mind.

  When Ra
ma publicly doubts Sita and seems unconcerned about her suffering, the gods ask how he can do this, adding, “Can you not know that you are the best of all the gods? You are mistreating Sita as if you were a common man.” Rama, uncomprehending, says, “I think of myself as a man, as Rama the son of King Dasharatha. Tell me who I really am, and who my father is, and where I come from (6.105.8-10).” Rama is not thinking straight; the gods have to reveal his avatar to him and use it as an argument to catapult him out of his trivial and blind attitude to Sita. Later still, when Rama has renounced Sita, and Brahma has again reminded him that he is Vishnu, Shiva gives Rama and Sita a vision of the dead Dasharatha, who says to Sita, “My daughter, don’t be angry because Rama threw you out. He did this in your own interest, to demonstrate your purity.eh The difficult test of your chastity that you underwent today will make you famous above all other women. My daughter, you need no instructions about your duty to your husband, but I must tell you that he is the supreme god (6.107.34-35).” And when Sita has vanished again into the earth, this time for good, and Rama is raging out of control, Brahma comes with all the gods and says to him, “Rama, Rama, you should not grieve. Remember your previous existence and your secret plan. Remember that you were born from Vishnu (7.88).”33

  Sita walks into fire determined either to kill herself or to win back the right to go on living with the very much alive Rama. The ordeal is not, however, a suicide, though she says she “cannot go on living”; on the contrary, it is an antisuttee, ei in which she enters the fire when her husband is very much alive, not to join him in heaven (as suttees usually do) but as a kind of threat either to leave him or to win back the right to go on living with him here on earth.ej As a threat it works: Rama takes her back, and they plan to live happily ever after, a fairy-tale ending. But we may see a touch of irony in the closing statement that he “got the happiness that he deserved,” for it does not last; the rumors return, and Rama banishes Sita, though she is pregnant; she goes to Valmiki’s hermitage and gives birth to twin sons. That is the second time Sita leaves him after her return from Lanka.

  Perhaps Valmikiek thought there was something unsatisfactory about this banishment that inspired him to add on another, more final and more noble departure for Sita. It begins years later, when the twins, now grown up, come to Rama’s horse sacrifice and recite the Ramayana, as Valmiki has taught it to them. The Ramayana lays great emphasis on the paternity of Rama’s twin sons, on their stunning resemblance to Rama; the crowds of sages and princes at Rama’s court “waxed ecstatic as they seemed to drink in with their eyes the king and the two singers. All of them said the same thing to one another: ‘The two of them look just like Rama, like two reflections of the same thing. If they did not have matted hair and wear bark garments, we would have no way of distinguishing between the two singers and Rama’ (7.85.6-8).” Yet Rama pointedly recognizes themel as “Sita’s sons” but not necessarily his own (7.86.2). This is an essential episode, for male identity and female fidelity are the defining desiderata for each human gender in these texts; no one is interested in female identity or male fidelity.34 These concerns play an important role in the treatment of Sita.

  This is the moment when Rama summons Sita again, for the last time, and she herself brings about the final separation:

  SITA ENTERS THE EARTH

  Rama sent messengers to Valmiki to say, “If she is irreproachable in her conduct and without sin, then let her prove her good faith.” Valmiki then came with Sita, and swore by his unbroken word of truth that the two boys were Rama’s children and that he had seen Sita’s innocence in a vision. Rama replied, “I agree entirely; Sita herself assured me before, and I believed her and reinstated her in my house. But there was such public condemnation that I had to send her away. I was absolutely convinced of her innocence, but because I feared the people, I cast her off. I acknowledge these boys to be my sons. I wish to make my peace with the chaste Sita in the middle of the assembly.” Then Sita swore, “If, even in thought, I have never dwelt on anyone but Rama, let the goddess Earth receive me.” As she was still speaking, a miracle occurred: From the earth there rose a celestial throne supported on the heads of Cobra People [Nagas]; the goddess Earth took Sita in her arms, sat her on that throne, and as the gods watched, Sita descended into the earth.

  His eyes streaming with tears, head down, heartsick, Rama sat there, thoroughly miserable. He cried for a long time, shedding a steady stream of tears, and then, filled with sorrow and anger, he said, “Once upon a time, she vanished into Lanka, on the far shore of the great ocean; but I brought her back even from there; so surely I will be all the more able to bring her back from the surface of the earth (7.86.5-16, 7.87.1-20, 7.88.1-20).”

  But he cannot bring her back. When Sita enters the earth, she leaves the king alone, without his queen. She abandons and implicitly blames him when she leaves him, turning this second ordeal (again she asks for a miraculous act to prove her complete fidelity to Rama) into a sacrifice as well as, this time, a permanent exit.

  Sita’s two ordeals prove her purity, but they are also a supreme, defiant form of protest.35 Sita is no doormat. She does not hesitate to bully her husband when she thinks that he has made a serious mistake. When Rama tries to prevent her from coming to the forest with him, she says: “What could my father have had in mind when he married me to you, Rama, a woman in the body of a man? What are you afraid of? Don’t you believe that I am faithful to you? If you take me with you, I wouldn’t dream of looking at any man but you—I’m not like some women who do that sort of thing. But you’re like a procurer, Rama, handing me over to other people, though I came to you a virgin and have been faithful to you all this long time.” Rama then insists that he had said she couldn’t come with him only in order to test her (2.27.3-8, 26). Yeah, sure; she will hear that “testing” line again. Her assertion that Rama is confusing her with other, less faithful women is also one that we will hear again, for she repeats it years later, when Rama accuses her of having been intimate with Ravana.

  When they first enter the forest, Sita asks Rama why he carries weapons in this peaceful place, especially when he has adopted the attire (and, presumably, the lifestyle and dharma) of an ascetic.em Rama claims that he needs the weapons to protect her and all the other defenseless creatures in the forest. In an impassioned discourse against violence, Sita tells Rama that she fears he is by nature inclined to violence and that simply carrying the weapons will put wicked thoughts in his mind (3.8.1-29). (Indeed he kills many creatures in the forest, both ogres that deserve it and monkeys that do not. Even the ogress Shurpanakha echoes Sita’s concerns by querying Rama’s apparent commitment to the conflicting dharmas of asceticism and married life [3.16.11].)

  THE GODDESS SITA

  Sita is not, however, just a woman; she is very much a goddess, though never as explicitly as Rama is a god. In contrast with Rama, whose divinity increases in the centuries after the Valmiki text, Sita was a goddess before Valmiki composed her story. Sita in the Ramayana is an ex-goddess, a human with traces of her former divinity that the story does not erase but largely ignores, whereas Rama is a god in the making, whose moral imperfections leave traces that future generations will scurry to erase. The two meet in passing, like people standing on adjacent escalators, Rama on the way up, Sita on the way down.

  One Rig Vedic poem to the deity of the fields analogizes the furrow (which is what the word “Sita” means) to the earth cow who is milked of all foods (RV 4.57.6-7). When Rama weds Sita, he actually marries the earth, as the king always does; the goddess Earth is the consort of every king. But this time he also marries someone explicitly said to be the daughter of the Earth goddess. Sita’s birth, even more supernatural than Rama’s, is narrated several times.36 On one occasion, Sita’s father, King Janaka of Videha, tells it this way:

  THE BIRTH OF SITA

  One day in the sacrificial grounds, I saw the ultimate celestial nymph, Menaka, flying through the sky, and this thought came to me: “If I shoul
d have a child in her, what a child that would be!” As I was thinking in this way, my semen fell on the ground. And afterward, as I was plowing that field, there arose out of the earth, as first fruits, my daughter, who has celestial beauty and qualities. Since she arose from the surface of the earth, and was born from no womb, she is called Sita, the Furrow.37

  Rama is well aware of the story. Grieving after Sita has entered the earth, he says to Earth, “You are my own mother-in-law, since, once upon a time, King Janaka drew Sita out of you when he was plowing.” More particularly, Sita was born when Janaka was plowing the sacrificial arena, in preparation for the ceremony of royal consecration, and she goes back down to earth during Rama’s horse sacrifice; both her birth and her death are framed by sacrifices. Like Rama, Sita becomes incarnate as part of the divine plan to kill Ravana. Sita, not Rama, is primarily responsible for the death of Ravana. Ravana’s brother Vibhishana (who eventually abandons Ravana and fights on Rama’s side) tries in vain to persuade Ravana to give Sita back to Rama and finally says to Ravana, “Why did you bring here that great serpent in the form of Sita, her breasts its coils, her thoughts its poison, her sweet smile its sharp fangs, her five fingers its five hoods?”38 Shiva promises the gods that “a woman, Sita the slayer of ogres,” will be born, and that the gods will use her to destroy the ogres (6.82.34-37).

  At the end of the Ramayana, when Sita keeps disappearing and reappearing in a series of epiphanies, she is scorned and insulted until she commits two acts of violence that prove both her purity and her divinity. In this pattern, she resembles a god, particularly Shiva, who vandalizes Daksha’s sacrifice when Daksha disdains to invite Shiva to it (MB 12.274). But Sita’s story more closely follows the pattern of equine Vedic goddesses like Saranyu and Urvashi: She comes from another world to a mortal king, bears him children (twins, like Saranyu’s), is mistreated by him, and leaves him forever, with only the twin children to console him. She can be set free from her life sentence on earth, her contract with a mortal man (Rama), only if he violates the contract by mistreating her.