First of all, it’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow knowing that all women are destined to be mean; cheaters and willing to do anything to keep their lustful desires alive. But that’s something you have to accept because we don’t know the society in which it was written; the social mores may be skewed in favor of women and the authors may have been losers of some sort, if not male chauvinists. And all of that has to be taken with a grain of salt.
The first story in this anthology is that of the prostitute Panchachuda, who admits that “women have been given an evil dharma, they only fulfil their dharma when they seduce and destroy men”. The story of Vipula, the young disciple who has to protect Ruchi from the advances of Indra – although he does not say so clearly – takes on the role of the guardian and “enters” her so that Indra does not do so. But the younger man is filled with terrible remorse and he confesses to the Guru how he saved Ruchi. The older man blesses his disciple and the three ascend to heaven.
If the same person is male and then female, which of the two is more desirable? In the case of Bhangasvana, he chooses the sons he had as his wife to live with, saying that women feel more. This is taken to mean that women enjoy sex more, and Yudhishthira has his answer. There is the case of Richira who gives his wife Satyavati Charu to drink so that she can have a wise Brahmin son, but her mother persuades her to give her the drink and thus her Vishvamitra is born, while Satyavati’s grandson Parshu Rama kills many Brahmins.
How to avoid disasters is told in the story of the three fishes, one of whom is negligent and that is exactly what kills him. There is the story of a sage who keeps transforming his dog into larger and larger animals until the true nature of a dog comes to light and the sage transforms it back into its original form. In this story, the great sage Vishvamitra eats a dog carcass when he is very hungry; the story of the ungrateful Gautama who ate a pious heron and had to pay for it with his life.
Reading this book, one is fascinated by the questions that Yudhishthira grappled with and sought to answer. It is clear that the origin stories of many peoples and races come together in this fascinating text. The stories of certain sages, their wives, the gods and the animals: they all combine in some way to create for us the foundations of our society.
We thank Wendy Doniger for expanding the perception of the Mahabharata from the story of the Pandavas and their creation to these two Parvanas, which contain the wisdom of all time.
