Heroines out of the shadows

Books on Draupadi and on Sita are common sightings at the few bookstores that still survive

HEROINES

Ira Mukhoty

Aleph

211 pages; Rs 499

There has been a spate of feminist retellings of myths and epics in recent times. Books on Draupadi, on Karna’s wife, on Sita and even her sisters are common sightings at the few bookstores that still survive. This is a welcome development, if not always a fulfilling one. The new books force a gust of fresh air into the old stories and expand their scope by giving voice to the female characters who, although important to the narrative, were relegated to the shadows by earlier writers and commentators.

The problem is that not all authors can pull off a good tale and some are so burdened by the task at hand that they let the charm and magic slip out of their retellings. Heroines does not sink like many others in the genre have done, but it does fall prey to some common faults. For one, it mixes up heroines from epic and folklore with mythical characters. This is not just a technical quibble, the distinction matters to the analysis. Myths are different from folktales which are different from legend. Myths, by and large, provide the motifs, beliefs and cultural context within which the characters from epic and folklore flourish. To blur the lines between the two reflects poor scholarship.

For example, Valmiki’s Sita is a heroine from the epic Ramayana. Her character draws upon many mythical motifs; her walking through fire to prove her purity is an example. Fire and purity are commonly associated in fire-worshipping civilisations. To disregard the distinction is to leave out a significant piece of the puzzle in the understanding of the character and the context.

However, an even bigger gap in the book is the exclusion of Sita from the list of eight heroines. This is perplexing given her huge popularity and the opportunity she represents, as very few Indian authors have ventured to reimagine her in the modern context.

Author Ira Mukhoty does not give us any reasons for keeping Sita out of the mix, although she makes it clear right at the start that she has chosen to stay with heroines from the north. In her introduction she writes, “This is partly to contain the scope of this book and also to reflect a certain historical continuity.” Now this is a pity because it would have been interesting to see how heroines differed from each other between the different regions of the country. 

But that is the author’s prerogative and Ms Mukhoty has the right to choose the women she wants to write about.

One of the most interesting characters in the book is Radha. Her story stands out for the celebration of adulterous love, of love between an older woman and a boy or of forbidden love, as Ms Mukhoty writes. The author brings her vast knowledge of the texts to bear upon Radha’s story but then makes sweeping generalisations that take away from the analysis. 

Ms Mukhoty writes about Radha as being one of the few women who were not daunted by the mysteries of the forest, basing her view on the poetic renditions of the love between Radha and Krishna. She writes, “For the other heroines of Indian mythology the forest will be an area of lurking uncertainty.” Not exactly; Draupadi, for instance, is also a goddess of the forest. She has two lives in the Indian imagination. She is the heroine of Mahabharata and wife to five Pandavas but she is also a fierce goddess of the forest. The two personas come together in south Indian versions of the epic. 

The women from history are better etched out. Raziya Sultan, Jahanara Begum and Rani Laxmibai are stories well told. For Jahanara Begum, for instance, Ms Mukhoty looks at the way in which she managed her father’s affairs and battled bazaar gossip about incest and illicit lovers. She also touches upon the Sufi influence on the princess. 

Heroines is a well-researched book and could have been a great one, but for these lapses and the rather bland narrative style. This is a pity because the book fills an important gap as it is one of the few that does not fictionalise the stories of the women but chooses instead to examine the evolution of the stories over time and through different media (poetry, performance, books, television serials and so on). Ms Mukhoty notes that modern writers are often more conservative in their depiction of the women than the original poets and performers were, but does not dig deeper into the social realities that have led to this transformation, and that is another big gap.