In any case, Pattanaik’s categories seem sweeping and not useful. In allowing Ram the privilege of splitting into the man who loves his wife, and the king who must reject his queen, Pattanaik allows “honour" in by the back door.Įventually, if the Ramayan has been “criticized by feminists" and “deconstructed by academicians", there are real reasons for it. Men, meanwhile, are expected to acquire the wives of the men they slay, and considered honourable when they “accept" them as wives, rather than take them by force.īut while Pattanaik points to the killing of Tadaka by Ram as signalling the epic’s “acceptance of male violence against women", he seems not to acknowledge the violence done to Sita by Ram’s spurning of her.
There, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of patriarchy: to keep “honour" alive, women must die. Ram declares that he has fought a war, but only to restore the honour of his family name Sita is nothing but “grit in eye", for she has chosen to live under another man’s roof rather than kill herself. Reputation is everything, and it is not in a woman’s hands. And anyway, as the supremely tragic example of Sita shows, being “pure of thought and body" cannot protect any woman from having her reputation besmirched. Throughout the Ramayan, the married woman’s embrace of another man is heavily punished even when unintentional (the classic case being Ahilya’s of Indra, who has taken the form of Ahilya’s husband Gautama).
But Pattanaik’s insistence on Sita’s status as goddess (“I cannot be abandoned by anyone") elides the fact that neither Sita’s world-nor, sadly, our own-is prepared to do women any such favours.
It is a hope we have all nurtured: to cease to be identified only with our bodies.
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