Review By Harsimran Kaur

THE STORY OF TALES…      

Tales are alluring, manifested form the deepest impulse of pride, greed, egomaniacal pursuits and the incorrigible attending to the priggish power within, often enlightened by celestial foreboding.

Tales are deceptive; the mighty owes allegiance to deceit, and the mendacious lives on falsehood like a lamprey. Can the prevalent-self ingratiate the ‘Guru’ or the ‘wise’ to bestow it with usurped power? What would one call it? Imprudence! And if it is not, does it conjure up as a disillusioned authority by the receiver?

What about tales with imprecations? How one received solemn blessings? A woman turned into stone is either a wrath of the sage or is it an enlightened prophecy? The screams of forgiveness, ‘Have Mercy’ swallow in; remorse turns out to be the cold mackerel. 

So, who are these unfaithful wives? Are they the soi-distant seductress who enchant other men for their own pleasures or follow the ‘Dharma’ to be nestled in their inherent predisposition to pointillism of illusionary discursives? Can a woman be good or bad? The moral tales from‘The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals’ by Wendy Doniger is in fact not a sacrilege of women but celebration of their ‘power’ amid salutary bargains, and disinterring their desires rumbled in a daiquiri of the desirous and denude.

THE TRAILS OF THE TALES…

Yudhishtra asks Bhishma in bemusement, ‘what makes women incandescently blur to arrogance and deceit. Is their glory imbued in blarney and why their invigorating charm has often led men astray? Is all this a ‘truth’? Is wind always responsible for the splurge of dust washing our face—if woman is the irresistible wind, what makes her good or bad?

The Tales thus validate—

• The instructions given by the famous Sage Devasharman to his pupil Vipula to protect his wife ‘Ruchi’ from God Indira.  The sage knew that the intemperate desires of his wife must be controlled before Indira inconspicuously makes her the poisoned chalice.
• Wicked women thrive in their malicious delinquency. Inappropriate it may sound, the mother caparisoned by deceit invokes her daughter ‘Richika’ to exchange the pudding made of milk and rice in casuistry to bear the embryo created for her daughter.

Women in these stories follow trails of virtue. Although laden by phantasm of seduction and the impropriety to drive in promiscuous vagaries, does she retain the virtue of being a good woman? Esoterically seductive and enthralling, the book ubiquitously places ‘desire’ as repulsive and raffish albeit a recherché. ‘Desire’ is often airy fairy! If it can make the pernickety Lord Indira copulate with wives of sages & kings or it can let the earthen ‘Jackal’ loose its demonic consanguinity to be more virtuous, then ‘desire’ is also contemplative.  One asks,

• Is ‘desire’ related to Dharma?
• If ‘desire’ is toxic, does it relinquish itself from ‘Dharma’?
• Can righteousness be only evangelical? If the ‘duty bound’ follows the desideratum to submit one’s conscious for a pyrrhic victory, ‘Dharma’ does prevail.

The book offers many questions that Yudhishtra asks Bhishma about the ‘Dharma of Kings’ and ‘What if a weak king is surrounded by powerful enemies; is there a strategy to combat them’? Yudhishtra is deluded by the ‘deuce’ that envelops women. What a de trop? He bemoans at their perfidy and at the same time is consumed by their goodness like the last drops of rain stick to the leaf.

In fact, stories do carry morals! It could lead to avaricious temptations or fall heavily on the nerve to disinter mysteries of the world. Reflective, these selective stories from Mahabharata profess the incessant role of ‘Dharma’ in sustaining life. The sages, the kings and the ‘Gods’ too have their stories; the roaring thunderbolt raged by Indira into the serpentine dragon ‘Vitra’ led to the inception of incandescent fever, a terror called Brahminicide, that finally killed Vitra. The origin of this ‘fear’ is questioned by Yudhishtra, and another tale surfaces. The exasperation of ‘Shiva’ of not being invited to a ‘horse sacrifice’ by the kings makes him use the power of yoga and wreck the sacrifice; from his sweat is born the ‘intemperate fire’.

Many such stories enunciate the ‘formidable power’ and ‘tapas’ of the sages and kings.

TAKE AWAY

A mystic story-telling…