Wendy Doniger and the mythology of the ring

Doniger offers fascinating insight into complex relationship between genders down the ages

The ring on your finger has a long and quilted history, in parts gruesome, exciting, erotic and, sometimes, romantic. From an insignia of power to a symbol of ownership to being a cue for a forgotten sexual liaison or a secret assignation; a ring is anything but a fancy bauble in the world of the ancients. Above all else, as The Ring of Truth: Myths of Sex and Jewelry by Wendy Doniger reveals, a ring (and other pieces of circular jewellery) stands in for the fraught and complex nature of relationship between genders through the ages.

The role of the ring in the many versions of the Dushyant-Shakuntala story or the Solomon stories is reflective of the way women and men were viewed at the time. And sometimes the many variants of the same myth show us how gender equations changed with every telling. For example, by the time Kalidasa wrote his version (4 century BCE) of the Dushyant-Shakuntala story from the time it was first recorded, the woman’s identity as well as that of the ring underwent many changes. 

In the Mahabharata where we find the earliest documented version of the story, there is no ring, no curse and no fish. Shakuntala is the daughter of a sage and a celestial nymph who abandons her soon after her birth. King Dushyant spots her in the forest, is transfixed by Shakuntala’s beauty and persuades her to marry him by "the rite consisting of nothing but private, mutual desire". She extracts a promise in return that her son will be made king. Dushyant leaves, promising to send for her but he never does and then the story follows the familiar trajectory. 

In the Jatakas (where Shakuntala is unnamed) the king gives the girl a ring but tells her that if she bears a son, he should be brought to the court and the ring used to prove his identity. If, however, it is a daughter, the ring should be sold and the money used to rear her. 

By the time Kalidasa puts his version down, Shakuntala is transformed into a dreamy damsel and Dushyanta is a sensitive king who loses his memory because the ring is lost and all of this has transpired because an angry sage cursed Shakuntala and her carelessness led to the ring slipping off her finger and being swallowed by a fish.

Myths ascribe magical powers to rings and bring out the visceral connections that jewellery has with the body. The ring becomes the person who wears it, gives it or receives it as a token of his/her service. In its loss and recovery are trapped the fate of kings and princesses, lovers and courtesans. The story of Solomon and his ring, is a case in point. The ring is a marker of Solomon’s identity; without it, he ceases to be the man he is known to be. Once he loses the ring or is tricked into parting with it, he is put through several trials and finally emerges victorious only after he regains the ring. Solomon is helped by a princess in one variant of the tale but women are part of the problem and not the solution in many others. 

King Solomon’s ring is a marker of his identity. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In stories across time and civilisations, where rings and gradually other pieces of circular jewellery have come to occupy centre stage, the story tellers have mostly been men. There have been a few women too; for instance an oral tale about Shiva Parvati and a Korpalu (tribal and low caste) woman recorded in the Tulu language that Doniger uses in the book is told by a woman. The story is rather dismissive of Shiva who is exposed as just another cheating husband by Parvati disguised as a tribal woman. 

Why do men tell these stories that show them in poor light? For one, as Doniger says, the tellers of these stories do not view gender as we do. Their tales “reflect the rationality of their time and place”. The connections between jewellery, women and men are drawn on the basis of the then prevalent gender equations. So if a woman was too clever, she had to be taught a lesson. If a woman was deceitful, she was cheated by the jewellery she held dear. And if she had to get herself a royal throne, the ring would test if she was worthy for the king.

The Ring of Truth
And other myths about sex and jewelry
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Pages: 424
Price: Rs 899

In some stories the ring is used by men to exact revenge for rejection. In a story told by the Agrawals about their goddess, Shila Mata, this is the underlying theme. The goddess was born a radiantly beautiful girl into a common but wealthy home. She was married off to the minister of Sialkot but when the king of the region heard about her beauty, he wanted her for himself. So he sent his minister out on some pretext and landed up at his home. The young wife turned him away. Furious, the king ordered the maid to put his ring on the woman’s bed. The ring became a symbol of the woman’s infidelity  to her husband who banished her from his home. The king had his revenge although the story goes on to show how a repentant husband rushed after her when he found out the trick but died on the way. The wife was distraught when she heard about this and set herself on the funeral pyre and became a goddess. 

The ring serves as an effective narrative device too. It helps deliver a dramatic twist in the tale, draw the listener into the unfamiliar with the use of a familiar motif and create an opening for fate to play her hand. 

Doniger says she began collecting stories and ideas about rings sometime in the 1990s, when she was working on her book The Bedtrick. The book nets the lore of the ring from every corner of the world; from the Kamasutra, Sanskrit plays and the epics to Nordic sagas and Greco Roman tales and even Shakespeare and Hollywood. Doniger straddles all these worlds with the familiarity of a seasoned traveller, weaving in and out with personal anecdotes and observations. 

Doniger has been writing on Hinduism and mythology for more than five decades, most of it spent peaceably (by her own admission) in pursuit of scholarship. Violent, hate-spewing criticism that we have now come to associate with her work began only in 2002, almost 40 years since she first started writing about Hindu mythology. 

For many today, Doniger is the archetype for an arrogant Western scholar out to show the Indian culture in poor light. This book may well rekindle the hate fires that led to the pulping of her last book. But that would be disastrous as we would then be denied yet another chance to understand the varied richness of the stories that we have inherited.