everal religious and cultural traditions, varying in period and place, class and perspective of the myth-makers, appear to be incorporated in the range of stories contained in the Puranas. The Supreme Goddess, the demoness, the chaste wife, the temptress, the female ascetic, the healer, the nature spirit, the evil one, all such contradictory roles and concepts, are not only showered on the females in their myths, but even many such aspects fused into each other in myths about the same woman. Perhaps, the woman in the myth is endowed with such perplexing complexity because of the accretions to the original story added by later story-tellers, who moulded characters, or explained them, to suit their times, or the use they made of myths.
The most persistent, and unique genre of myths, perhaps, derived from an ancient pre-Hindu Indus Valley culture, describe the power, the shakti, of the Goddess. Myth after myth about Shiva, called the supreme God, record him to be withdrawn from the world in deep celestial meditation till he is awakened by the love of his consort, Parvati. It is when he is in union with her, when the divine male and the divine female are together, sometimes exemplified in an androgyne form, that the world, nature and people flourish. When Shiva loses Parvati, there is chaos and destruction. Parvati is Shiva’s shakti, his creative energies, who wakes him, who enables him to be the supreme God.
In the myth of the powerful buffalo demon Mahisa, who routs and torments the gods, Devi, the Supreme Goddess, is created by all the male gods, Shiva, Visnu, Brahma, Indra, and all the lesser gods, fusing their identities and energies together. Her terrible destruction of the demon is celebrated annually in India in the most popular festival of Dussera. The Supreme Goddess, the Mother Goddess, is most popularly worshipped by the Hindus of India, in her puissant form as Kali, or Durga mounted on a lion, as an avenger of wrongs, and a destroyer of evil. No other god, male or female, gives Hindu worshippers the same sense of approachability, or the same sense of overwhelming and terrible power. It should be remembered that the festival of Divali, which rivals Dussera, celebrates the killing of another frightful demon, Narakasura, by Satyabhama, the consort of Krishna.
The cultures that produced the Vedas and the Upanishads also see knowledge as power. Brahma the creator produces creation through his consort, who gives birth to the Vedas, the ragas, the yogas, the rituals, as well as the ages, the Krittikas or the Pleiades, consorts of the Seven Sages or the Great Bear. Hindu children commonly worship Saraswati as the Goddess of Learning.
The dark, shadow, side of divine power is that which can harm. Brahma himself creates Death, also in the form of a maiden. A terrible rupa or form of Kali is as Shitali, the goddess of disease, especially smallpox. The myth of the churning of the celestial ocean by the gods and the demons produces not only ambrosia, but also poison, from which comes its eldest daughter, Jyestha, the goddess of misfortune.
Sexuality, and female sexuality is another potent theme in early Hindu myths. The coupling of the gods is the creative energy that produces the universe and life. No distinction is made between agape, sacred love, and eros, profane love. The sexuality, which is creative power, of the Goddess is celebrated, and the maiden and the wife remain auspicious figures in Hindu society. Yet, a patriarchal priesthood is uneasy with sexuality at the same time. The concept of maya or illusion is itself seen as female. At the churning of the celestial ocean, Visnu takes the form of Mohini, a beautiful temptress, who deceives the demons and gives ambrosia only to the gods. Possibly a later myth relates how the demons are ultimately rendered powerless, and turned into ascetics, possibly Jains and Buddhists, under instruction from Brihaspati, the Brahmin guru of the gods; while their own guru has been tempted to bed by Jayanti, the daughter of Indra, the king of the gods. Fearing the growing power of the sage Vishvamitra, the gods send the celestial nymph Menaka to seduce him. From their union is born Shakuntala, the subject of one of the greatest works in Sanskrit literature by Kalidasa, and the mother of Bharata, after whom India itself is named Bhartakanda.
This recognition of sexuality, and fear of it, mark much of Hindu mythology. Parasurama unleashes a terrible war on Kshtriyas because his mother was carried off by a king; the Ramayana’s battles are caused by the abduction of Sita; a key event in the Mahabharata is the attempted disrobing of Draupadi by the Kauravas. These epics and myths relate stories derived from a time, when apparently patriarchal Hindus were fighting and fusing with other cultures, some perhaps matrifocal. Everyone of Kunti’s children is fathered by a different god. And she is the mother of the great Pandavas, whose victory the Mahabharata celebrates as an upholding of dharma. Draupadi is married equally to all of the five Pandava brothers. Both are very strong noble women, whose tragic fate is another sub-theme of the epic, and on whom it casts no blemish. Ahalya, the wife of the sage Gautama, sleeps with Indra, but the curse from her husband is lifted when she offers hospitality to Rama.
The wife unsurpassed in her chastity, of course, forms the third main theme for the treatment of females in myths. Sati, the daughter of Dakha, the Prajapati or chief of the gods, loves and marries Shiva. When her father insults her husband during a great yagna, or sacrifice, she throws herself into the flames in expiation. From her name is derived the terrible custom of ‘suttee,’ and even today bigoted men in some backward areas of Rajasthan have extolled the immolation of women on the pyre of their dead husbands. In the Savitri-Satyavan myth, a reversal of the Orpheus myth, Savitri refuses to let Yama the God of death take away the soul of her husband, and against impossible odds wins him back to life. Girls are commonly adjured to be like “Sati-Savitri.”
The noble character of Sita is also perennially held up for emulation in India. Her single-minded devotion to her husband Rama; following him in exile to the forest for 14 years; her fierce constancy which prevents even her abductor Ravana from touching her; her uncomplaining acceptance of trial by fire to prove her chastity after Rama has won her back; all are graces of the pure woman that even ordinary mortal girls should try to acquire. The consorts of the Seven Sages, or the Great Bear constellation are the Pleiades. Indra lusts after them, and Svaha, one of the daughters of Daksha the chief god, who lusts after Indra, takes their forms in turn and sleeps with Indra. But she is unable to assume the form of Arundati (the lesser in magnitude of the binary-star Mizar, sixth of the Great Bear constellation). It is customary even today that the marriage priest show the young married couple the two stars, with Arundati close to her husband, the sage Vasishta. Again, such constancy is celebrated in India’s great sacred rivers. The Ganga is the elder sister of Parvati or Uma, and brings up Shiva’s son Kartikeya. The Yamuna is supposed to be none other than the twin sister, Yami, of the god of death, Yama. The Narmada is where the later Puranas say the ascetics, Jains and Buddhists, go to mediate when they renounce the world.
Though such contradictory images of the feminine are projected to people through vedaparayanas or explicatory discourses by gurus; stories told by grandmothers; traditional street theatre; and commercial films, belief in the power of the Goddess is central to the religious observances of common people, worshipped under several different local names. While Durga Puja is spectacularly celebrated in Bengal every year; goddess worship in southern India, for example, extends to daily services at small Amman koils in Tamil Nadu; at the temple consecrated to Chenchu Lakshmi, named after a remote tribein the Nallamalai hills of Andhra Pradesh; or at the ‘Tuluka Nachiar,’ temple of the muslim wife of Srinivasa, or Visnu. At the Vellankini church of the Virgin Mary in Madras, she is worshipped very much like a Hindu goddess.
Female sexuality, so long an ignored reality under the deadening pressure of India’s several patriarchal religions, is now finding cathartic expression in the thousand or so commercial films produced every year, whose heroines’ sensuality is accepted as readily as their chastity. The dutiful wife image, however, finds fewer takers under the economic necessity of having educated, independent, wage-earning wives.
