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Wendy Doniger, "The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals: Some Moral Tales From The Mahabharata" (Speaking Tiger, 2024)
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New Books Network.
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Shruti Jain
Hello and welcome to another episode of New Books Network Channel, New Books in South Asian Studies. I am your host, Shruti Jain, a PhD student at the University of Oxford. And for this episode we have with us Wendy Doniger, who will be Talking about her 2024 book, the Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals, Some Moral Tales from the Mahabharata, published by Speaking Tiger. Wendy Doniger is one of the leading and most renowned experts in Indology, in contemporary Indology, with a career spanning over more than five decades. If I'm right, she obtained her PhD from Harvard and did a DPhil at Oxford and has published extensively on Hindu mythology, including Hindu epics and Mahabharata. And she analyzes these stories from a psychoanalytical point of view as well as to uncover the socio, political and religious themes in these stories. So Professor Donegal, thank you very much for accepting my invite and being here on nben. It's a pleasure hosting you.
- [02:35]
Wendy Doniger
It's an honor to be with you.
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Shruti Jain
Thank you very much. And to kickstart our discussion, I think a good beginning point can be the title of your book, which I think is the first thing which attracts the reader, the Dharma of the unfaithful wives and faithful Jekylls. So why did you choose this title and what does it signify, actually?
- [02:56]
Wendy Doniger
Well, so much of the Mahabharata is about dharma in the classical sense, the king's Dharma in particular, and how people should behave and all the rules for all the things you're supposed to do. But many of the stories which are not so well known are about Adharma non Dharma or difficult Dharma, or wrong Dharma, or the Dharma that is actually followed but is not prescribed in the texts. So I was talking about those aspects of Dharma rather than the regular laws of Manu, do this, do that, stories in which people do other things. So the unfaithful wives, obviously, is a violation of dharma. You expect, you hope that wives will be faithful. So what dharma can there be for a wife who's not faithful? And on the other hand, jackals are known in Indian stories to be dishonest, slimy. They follow lions around. The lions are the kings and have dharma, and the jackals are bad and evil and basically dishonest people. So how can there be a faithful jackal? You'd expect a jackal to be unfaithful. And at the same time, how can an unfaithful wife have a dharma? So I wanted the reader to say, well, I guess Dharma is more complicated than I thought. I think I'll read this book. Right.
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Shruti Jain
And which parts of the Mahabharata do you look in this book? And what was the motivation behind it?
- [04:26]
Wendy Doniger
So I had previously published a book of the last. It's called after the War, which is a translation of the last three books of the Mahabharata, 16, 17 and 18, where they die and go to heaven. So in books 12 and 13, which come. And a little of 14 as well, and I had a little of 15 in the last book as well. 12 and 13 are very long and very boring books about Dharma in which King Yudhishthira learns to do this and don't do this and to learn this and that. So people like me who are interested in stories usually don't read those books. They're books for legal scholars and so forth. But if you look carefully at books 12 and 13 and with an eye for the tricky bits, you see that there are many stories about people who violate dharma. There are as many, not as many. There are many stories about Adharma non Dharma, anti dharma. And those are usually ignored when people say, well, in this text, Yudhishthira learns how to be a good king. He learns this and that. But if you read these other stories, you see that another tale is also being told which challenges the conventional idea that women should be faithful and that jackals are never faithful. So I put the reversed ideals in the title to attract readers who want to say, what is this?
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Shruti Jain
Right. So also, it also signifies that Dharma can be contradictory. There can be a lot of contradictions in Dharma.
- [06:05]
Wendy Doniger
Yeah. That in a way, Dharma is impossible, that Dharma really requires us to do things that nobody can do except in a storybook epic. And that the way humans, human beings really live with Dharma is getting around it, violating, making up for it, changing it, making it flexible. And that's what these stories are about, the tricky parts of Dharma.
- [06:27]
Shruti Jain
Right. Also, speaking of tricky part, one thing which I really found interesting in the introduction to the book is that you mentioned your penchant for Adharma. Right. And so my question would be that how do these stories reflect a discourse not only on Dharma, but on Adharma as well? And how do these stories, these tales, represent cracks beneath the smooth layering of morality, as the writers of the Mahabharata would like to present?
- [06:53]
Wendy Doniger
Well, those are good and big questions. So one of the things about the Mahabharata is that although it is in Sanskrit, and therefore was basically written, originally spoken, and then transmitted orally, and then written again by Brahmins teaching Dharma, the stories have other sources. It is my belief that a lot of them are folktales and that folk tales, as we know, old wives tales, we call them, in English, are often told by women. And it seems to me that these grown up Brahmin men who wrote the Mahabharata, composed the Mahabharata orally, and eventually conveyed it in writing, had mothers and had in particular, nurses. And as we know from Ramanujan's work, women, even in Brahmin families, often spoke the vernacular dialect, and nursemaids certainly did not speak Sanskrit. So that a lot of these stories came from women and from people of lower castes, which were learned by these Brahmin men, who then kind of put them into Sanskrit and put them into the Mahabharata. So that the main texts are the standard misogynist male Brahman ideas. This is Haru dabi. Women who disobey these ideals get into a lot of trouble, are always punished. Those stories are sort of the party line. But other stories often make fun of those morals. And people like women and jackals often win out in the end and prove to be more effective. And in some Ways better people than the men and the lions that represent the nobility of the Kshatriya of the royal line. So that the Mahabharata is really a much more complicated book than, for instance, the Manavadharma Shastra, the Laws of Manu, where he says, do this, don't do that, do this, don't do that. The Mahabharata sometimes does that too. But then these stories come in saying, well, there are some times when you need to do that rather than this. And here are some people who succeeded and got ahead in the world by playing by rules of a different game than the strict games of Dharma. And these stories just got into books 12 and 13 and a little bit in book 14. And those are the stories that caught my eye. And Mamie said, I think I'd like to write about this.
- [09:31]
Shruti Jain
Right. So in a way, they do not prescribe adharma, but they do show a different side to it. That, okay, sometimes in some places, in some context, adharma might be more effective or it can lead better results.
- [09:45]
Wendy Doniger
That's right. That's right. And people like women and jackals are often the source of a kind of knowledge of Dharma that the men and the kings don't have.
- [09:55]
Shruti Jain
Right? So just a digression, but it suddenly occurs to me that is it possible that what Dharma is for the male or for the lion, the upholder of nobility, might not be the Dharma of the women or of the jackal? And the Dharma of the women in jackal might not be the Dharma of the nobility? So do we find multiple visions of Dharma or multiplicity of Dharma here?
- [10:18]
Wendy Doniger
We certainly do. We certainly do. I mean, we know that even in the theoretical world of the four Varnas, the Brahmans, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas and the Shudras, each of them had a different Dharma. There's no such thing as one Dharma. Books 12 and 13 are mainly about Kshatriya Dharma, the Dharma of kings and rulers. They're not so much about Brahman Dharma and so forth, but even there, there are variations. And then there are other dharmas in other situations where Dharma is, as they say, Dharma is complex. Dharma is complex. Subtle. Dharma is subtle is the expression. So you can say, well, never tell a lie. But there are times when you can save your life and maybe somebody else's life by telling a lie, and then you tell a lie. We know this even in Western ethical systems too. And Dharma is just as clever as anybody else. It's a brilliant system. And it knows that there are times when you need to break the rules in order to do the right thing. And a lot of these stories are about that, which is why they're so interesting.
- [11:26]
Shruti Jain
Right. So first of all, thank you very much. That is very fascinating. And then moving forward to the contents of your books, of your books. So a large part of your book deals with stories about women or stories about quote, unquote, bad women. And we can easily find a very rampant misogyny, an inherent misogyny in such stories. So my question would be that how do you understand this innate misogyny depicted in these stories? And what kind of anxieties, fears and viewpoints led to their circulation and their composition in the first place?
- [12:04]
Wendy Doniger
Yeah. Oh, that's, that's, that's a good question. A lot of these stories about that. So there's this really interesting Sanskrit verb, raksha, which means to protect and to guard and to control. So if you say we want to protect the women, that's very nice. Thank you very much. You keep them from being raped and you keep them from being. But if you say you want to guard them, that's not quite such a nice word. And if you translate it as control, that's an even worse word. And raksh has all those meanings in it. If you want to really protect your women, you have to guard them and control them. So that is the basic fear. The fear is that if you don't keep an eye on the women, they're going to behave very badly. And there are long passages telling you exactly what the women will do if you don't watch them and what the women will do if they don't watch them. And there are a lot of these stories. There's a whole genre here where you have a very old sage married to a very pretty young wife, and one of his pupils is a very handsome young man. This is a recipe for disaster. And it is one of the standard openings of these tales of the Rishis in their ashramas. And not surprisingly, very often the young student goes off with the pretty young wife, or Indra, the king of the gods comes down and seduces you. So there's this nervousness built into the story and which is that the wife is vulnerable in part because she is attractive and in part because her husband is not. Her husband is old and feeble. So many of the stories begin this way. The best known of these, perhaps is the story of Gautama and his wife Ahalya. Old man, pretty young wife. And in this case it's not a handsome young student. But the king of the gods himself, Indra, who's also supposed to be gorgeous and very sexy and all that sort of thing, he comes down and he seduces Ahalya. And there are many versions of this and how Ahlia is punished for this. She's turned to stone, she's made invisible. Various things happen, but in one of the stories in this text, in these 12 and 13 to the Mahabharata, she's not mentioned. But the story opens with her son and the son's father, the wife. And the father says, she's been carried off. We know it's the story of Ahayah. And he says to the son, you'd better kill her. I'm going off of meditate. You kill her. So the son is called the procrastinator. He thinks to himself, well, you have to do what your father says, but you really oughtn't to kill your mother. Your father is really in charge of you, but your mother loves you. He goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And finally, when he's about to kill her, he decides he really has to do it. The father rushes back in and says, I was wrong. She was really innocent. Thank God you never killed her. So this is a very weird variant on the story of the wife who really is in fact guilty and is killed in all of these stories. And I don't know where it comes from. It's like rethinking the story of Ahalya, saying the sage was wrong, she wasn't unfaithful. In the stories we have, she was indeed, she was satisfied. So it's saying, think again, think again. Maybe these women that you suspect our innocence, the famous adulteress. Ahalya was innocent, so who knows? So it's like a challenge to a. It's like Helen of Troy going off with Paris. Everybody knows the story of the great adulteress. So this little weird, strange little story I've never seen. He's called the procrastinator. Kira Karen, someone who thinks for a long time before acting. Kira means for a long time. Karan means acting. So he says, should I? Should I not? And so forth. So it's a. I don't know this story from other sources. I'm not much of a folklorist. There may be other folk tales about this, but for a Sanskrit story, this is very strange and interesting, and it challenges a whole corpus of stories about the defining adulteress in Sanskrit literature, Ahalya. So that's an interesting twist, the idea of rock. So Protecting, protecting and controlling. And protecting and controlling. So these are interesting stories, Right?
- [16:59]
Shruti Jain
So perhaps the bad woman, Ahalya is not so bad after all.
- [17:04]
Wendy Doniger
She may have been wrong. Indeed, she may be misjudged.
- [17:08]
Shruti Jain
Right. And so this also leads us to a dichotomy between good women versus bad women, which is also present in these stories. So if you can tell us more about what is this dichotomy of. On one hand, we have so called bad women. On one hand we have good women.
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Wendy Doniger
Yeah, there are a lot of good women. So the bad women are these that we've been talking about who are unfaithful to their husbands. And in some stories, not very many, but in some stories they're cruel to their sons. Mainly they're unfaithful to their husbands. But there are a lot of good women in other stories. Good women, by definition, a good woman is a woman who always does what her husband tells her to do. And also she is a loving mother to her sons. And there's a great deal of literature in the Mahabharata and throughout India about the importance of a good mother revering the mother, loving the mother. A mother is like a shade tree. A mother is your refuse, and so forth. So there's a. In the Mahabharata and elsewhere, the woman who is extolled as the personification of virtue is not merely, or not even mainly the virtuous wife, although that's good too. The woman who is faithful to her husband, but the virtuous mother who does all sorts of things for her sons. And there are a number of good wives, women in these texts. Another way to be a good woman, and there are some of these in the text too, is to be an ascetic, a tapaswini, a woman who generates, we call it asceticism is really the wrong word. It's really a yogini. It's a woman who meditates, who fasts for 10,000 years, stands on one toe for 20,000 years. But in particular is of course chaste. She's unmarried, so she's not a mother, she's not a wife, and she's not a mother. This is another model of a good woman who's totally asexual. And she generates the kind of powers of tapas that male ascetics have too. We meet a number of these ascetic women. They're virtuous, they're good. They use their magic powers of tapas to help people. So they are the contrast to the defining bad woman, who is the unfaithful wife. The defining good woman is, in a sense, the faithful mother rather than the faithful wife.
- [19:43]
Shruti Jain
Faithful wife. And I think this contrast is also present in the story of Ahalya, which you just mentioned, that the son does not kill her because she has been a faithful wife, but because she has been a good mother to him.
- [19:54]
Wendy Doniger
Exactly, exactly. And he trots out that whole. He says, on the one hand, you should do what your father says. On the other hand, a mother is like a shade tree. A mother is this. He quotes all the famous sayings in Sanskrit about how mothers are so wonderful. And it's because she's the mother that he refuses to kill her, rather than whether he doubts that she is, in fact, an adulteress. It turns out in this version of the story, in this one version of the story, that she is not actually an adulteress. But that's not why he doesn't kill her. He doesn't care kill her because she's his mother. And there are lots of stories.
- [20:34]
Shruti Jain
So these stories do not show or portray a love for women. They portray a love for motherhood.
- [20:41]
Wendy Doniger
Yes. As in some ways, the essence of womanness, femininity. The woman's goal in life is not really to be a wife. The woman's goal in life is to be a mother. And the good women are the mothers. There are also stories about faithful wives, interesting, complicated stories where they really do what their husbands tell them to do, even though it gets them into terrible hot water of various kinds. So you can also be a virtuous woman by being a virtuous wife. But the real defining good woman is the good mother. And there are lots of good mothers in these stories.
- [21:19]
Shruti Jain
Right. One of the stories of a good mother is the story of Bhangaswana, if I'm pronouncing it right. And it is in particular fascinating to me because on one hand, it clearly shows the female to be an inferior sex, because the moment the king is turned into a female, he cannot rule. But also, do you think it somehow praises the maternal affection that the king chooses to be a woman? He does not turn back into a male. And also, can we read the story as a tale of fluid sexual identity?
- [21:52]
Wendy Doniger
After all, it's a great story. Bhang Aswana is wandering. A male king is wandering in the forest, and something happens, and he turns into a woman and his stallion turns into a mare, which is a nice detail that I like. Everything in this part of the forest has to become female. And he lives for a long time as a woman and as a Woman. He has many children, and in the end, the gods give him a choice. Do you want to go back to being a man or do you want to stay as a woman? And she says, I would rather stay as a woman because I love the sons that I had as a woman more than I loved the sons that I had as a man. And then there's a dynastic struggle between the sons that she had when she was a man and the sons that she had as a woman. So this is a very old story. It is pre Indian in the sense that it is Indo European, because we have a Greek, a famous Greek variant of it in the story of Tiresias, who also, for a while, was changed into a woman. And then they gave him a choice. Do you want to go back to being a man or do you want to go back stay as a woman? And his answer was, I want to stay as a woman. Not because, like the Indian woman, man, woman, she loved her children more when she was a woman, but because she had more fun in sexual activity, she had more fun in bed as a woman. So that's the famous story that women have more fun in sex than men and so forth. And it goes on and on. So it's interesting that in the Greek text, sexuality is what makes the woman choose, and in the Indian text, it's maternity that makes the woman choose to be a woman. So I think that's the point in a way, that woman's identity as a mother is the most precious thing and that it's, even by this story, more precious than the man's identity as the father. It's better to be a mother than a father in a way, the text is saying. The question of fluid sexual identity is an interesting one. There are stories in which people change sexes. This is one of the most famous and as I say, one of the oldest, since we have the Greek variant as well. But I don't think it really is about fluid sexual identity. I think it's about maternity rather than in Greek, about sexual pleasure. I'd like to think that it encourages the idea of sexual identity, and it does at least imagine that you might change from a man to a woman. But sexual identity in ancient India was certainly not fluid. And the Mahabharata is not giving you license. You did have three genders. Theoretically, you had the Kleba, who was either an impotent man or a castrated man, but he was not sexually, socially equal to a man or a woman. There are a lot of problems with Klebas. They were magical. They're scary. I don't think the fact that there was in some ways a trota procrati, a third nature which is listed in the texts, but it was not a socially viable third nature. It was something very strange. To this day, you have the cross dressing men appearing at weddings and people give them money to make them go away, they're weird, so forth. So I think you'd have to look elsewhere to find a fluid sexual identity in the classical Sanskrit texts of this period. And I don't think that's what Bandharswana is about. It's about the difference between the feeling for children that men and women have and that the woman's feeling for her children is greater. And that in that sense it's better to be a woman if you have children.
- [26:08]
Shruti Jain
Right.
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Wendy Doniger
But only. Only for that. Only for that.
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Shruti Jain
Only for that. Only for that reason. But do you think Bhanga Swana is a good woman? Bhangwaswana in her female version. Is she a good woman?
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Wendy Doniger
She certainly is. First of all, she used to be a king and she'd rather not be a king. That certainly speaks well for women. And she makes the right choice. She chooses for her children. What she cares about is her children more than the power she would have as a king. That's a lot to give that up just for the sake of having children. And that she loves them more when she had them as a woman than when she had them as a man. So I think she is a defining. She has the qualities that a woman ought to have.
- [26:54]
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Wendy Doniger
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- [28:21]
Shruti Jain
That's very interesting. And to further take this discussion on good women, there is also a story of Satyavati and Jamdagini and where a mixing happens and you can tell more about it to the audience. But do you think in the context of this story, the authors, or the authors want to portray that protection of women and maintaining the purity of class is also a male's dharma?
- [28:48]
Wendy Doniger
I think certainly so. The story is strange. It's told several times in the Mahabharata. It's time. Later on, Satyavati and her mother both become pregnant and they're each given a Charu, which is a kind of milk and rice pudding, which is given a blessing by a Brahmin to a pregnant woman so that she will have the right kind of a child. And Satyatvi's mother is actually of a Kshatriya descent. Satyavati is a Brahman descent. The mother, the wicked mother, the evil mother of the queen, switches the charas around because she wants the Brahman child. And so the one who's supposed to get the Brahman child gets the Kshatriya child. It's a very complicated story. In fact, it's told several times in the Mahabharata and differently each time.
- [29:41]
Shruti Jain
Great.
- [29:42]
Wendy Doniger
But in the end, what finally happens is that the child is born and becomes a famous cruel person who destroys the entire race of Kshatriya several times over. He's a murderous child because he's a mixture of varnas. He's neither a Kshatriya nor a Brahman, and so forth. So the story is told twice, slightly differently. And the idea is that the classes, the varanas, the four varners, and particularly the top two varnishes, which is all the Mahabhara really cares about. The kings and the Brahmins have got to be kept separate. And there's a wicked woman who mixes them, that is the mother, the wicked mother of Satchavati. And she produces enormous destruction. I mean, Jammaragni Parashurama is the result. The resulting child is Rama with an axe, who kills his mother and kills all sorts of people. So it's an interesting story about Charu. So about the importance of the blessed Charu. There's Another story in the Mahabharata about a king who dies and two of his wives are left without a husband and impregnated. And they get a Brahmin to bless a Charu so that the two women have sex together. It's the only instance I know in Sanskrit literature of women having sex, lesbian sex. And one of them thereby impregnates the other by the power of this weird Charu. But the child is born without any bones because the mother. The mother gives the flesh and blood to the child and the father gives the bones. Right. This was a child born of two women. He's a very crooked guy. This is a long story about him. But anyway, it's another story about Charu's getting mixed up. And where in this story of Satyavati, it was the varnas that got mixed up, the Kshatriya and the Brahmin got mixed. Wrong. In this other story, it's actually the sexes that get mixed up. And it's interesting, an interesting parallel, that the difference between varnas is thought of as being just as important as we think of the difference between the two sexes. Until quite recently, we thought it was a very bad idea for two people of the same sex to be together. And so this is an ancient story about both things, about Varna on the one hand and. And about male and female sexuality on the other. And in both cases, the classes have got to be kept separate and pure. And when you mix them, you make real trouble. There's an interesting parallel that the class could be as basic as actually male and female, that we think of the difference between a female body and a male body as more significant as the difference between a Brahman body and a Kshatriya body. But in ancient India, they were both very, very important and very similar. Basic. They were basic, sure.
- [33:03]
Shruti Jain
And can we also read these stories, this story and athletes, other stories like this, as a way of Brahmins mocking the kingship or the Brahmins mocking the kings. And there is a clash between Brahminhur and kingship and who is more powerful and who is more authoritative. Can we read these stories in that lens?
- [33:23]
Wendy Doniger
Very much so. Very much so. We know that the Brahmins are the ones who control the text of the Mahabharata.
- [33:31]
Shruti Jain
Great.
- [33:32]
Wendy Doniger
And that theoretically the king was more powerful. The king could have the Brahmin's head cut off, but the Brahmin could curse the king to vanish in a flame of dust or something like that. So the Brahmins who wrote these stories go to great lengths to show that really they were more powerful than the kings, even though the king could in fact throw them in prison and have them be headed and so forth. So there is this class between clash between clash between the classes in that way, which is, I think, in some ways more at the heart of these stories than the clash between men and women. It's really about Brahmans and kings and the way they support one another. Brahman authored texts, Brahman is always more important. But in real life, I wonder. I wonder whether they're just, as we say in America, whistling Dixie, just making it up. Whether the stories would read differently if they had been recorded by Kshatriya sages instead of Brahmin sages. And even here you can see, of course, the king holds all the aces in the hand. And the Brahmins are trying to work out ways in which ultimately they control the kings, but they really don't.
- [34:51]
Shruti Jain
The social reality might be different than what the Brahmin authors might have wanted to project it.
- [34:57]
Wendy Doniger
I think so. I think if the kings knew the Sanskrit and wrote the Sanskrit, we'd have different stories.
- [35:06]
Shruti Jain
If they didn't.
- [35:07]
Wendy Doniger
And this is what we have.
- [35:08]
Shruti Jain
Exactly. Sure. Also, in these stories about good women, we see the women as more passive.
- [35:17]
Wendy Doniger
Right.
- [35:18]
Shruti Jain
And do you think the real goodness of the women, the real goodness is in the male protagonist of the story. And the piousness of the women of the female character is defined just by her obedience to her husband?
- [35:34]
Wendy Doniger
That's a good question. And many of the stories are about that. Her main dharma is to follow him. But there are several stories which I translated in the book, in which the husband is wrong and he tells her to do something which is actually a violation of Dharma in some way, and she does the right thing, even in disobedience to her husband. Those are unusual stories. Basically the understanding is that you do what he, a woman does, what he tells her to do. But there are also great female yoginis in these stories who have no husbands and children. And they're very powerful women. And they do what they want to do. They comboss the gods, they get Brahma to make them do what they want. So there are this special class of non married women, the yoginis, who are more powerful than any Brahmin, any powerful than any king, whether they represent any part of a reality of ancient India. I'm not enough of a social historian to know. I just don't know how often it occurred that a woman of good caste had the courage to go off and not get married and meditate in the forest. I think these are fantasies, but I'm ready to be corrected by someone who actually knows more about ancient Indian social life than I do. I think these are fantasies of the way that a woman could actually have power without whether her goodness could be defined not just by obeying her husband, but by generating a kind of goodness and power all by herself. And these joganese occur in a lot of stories. Most of the women. The goodness of most of the women is defined by the degree to which they obey their husbands. That verb raksh, the husband controls her, guards her, protects her, and a good woman lets him do those things. But these female yoginists, who are not quite common, you meet a lot of them in these stories. So whether they were really common in ancient India, I cannot say. But they appear often in the stories as a kind of alternative to the blanket statement that the only thing a woman should ever do is get married and obey her husband. These women do present a very attractive alternative, and there are many of them, and they come in and out of a lot of the stories. And whether it's just a fantasy that people had, I suspect that it could not have been a very important social reality. But as I say, I wish I knew more about the actual social conditions at the time. From what I know, this is a fantasy, but it's a powerful fantasy. It comes in and out of a lot of these stories, these great yoginis, very interesting.
- [38:45]
Shruti Jain
That's fascinating.
- [38:46]
Wendy Doniger
There's a story about death and about she's a yogini and she doesn't want to kill people and so forth. There are a lot of female protagonists who aren't married women, but they're supernatural.
- [38:58]
Shruti Jain
Well, to take this discussion forward, which I think is very interesting, and the aspects which we are discussing are quite fascinating, and I'm sure the audience will like it as well. One thing I could notice while reading these stories about supposedly good women is that they describe them as passive recipients without any positive qualities.
- [39:20]
Blinds.com Announcer
Right.
- [39:20]
Shruti Jain
They don't have any positive qualities of their own. And sometimes they even commit Adharma, for example, in the story of Gautama and the Procrastinator, we can assume that something wrong happened or something not so right happened, but so I find it difficult to understand. So are there any good women at all? According to Mahabharata, is a good woman possible?
- [39:44]
Wendy Doniger
According to Mahabharata, of course there are good women. There are wives who obey their husbands. That's the first definition of good woman. No matter how painful and debasing the Tasks are that the husband set them. And there are good women, mothers, and there are ascetic women. So there are several ways in which women are good. In fact, there are quite a lot of them in these stories. They're all fairly passive. Ascetic women are not all that passive. In a way, they give up marriage, but they also generate tapas, which is apparently very difficult to do. And in the story of the procrastinator, the mother resists the temptations of the God, right? The God says, come away with me. And she says, I won't. I love my husband. The father is wrong and is saved at the last minute from murdering an innocent woman. So most of the good women in the Mahabharata are passively good. They don't do anything bad. They obey their husbands. But the ascetic women are actively good. And those yoginis, I think, and there are a lot of them, they show that women can in fact take an active role. They threaten the gods. Brahma says, stop doing this tapas, you're burning up the world. What would you do? And she says, well, I'll only stop if you do this and this and this. And she forces Brahma to change things. So these non married women are indeed very positive. Married women are positive by not being negative. They're positive by not doing all the bad things that the Mahabharata worries that women are going to do. So there are different ways of being a good woman in the Mahabharata, but in some of the animal stories too, the mother is again, smarter than the sun and so forth and so forth. There are, there are good women, right?
- [41:40]
Shruti Jain
And yes, you gave a very good clue to us to move the discussion from wives to jackals. So I would begin with this story of the mother of tiger, right? Which you, you just mentioned that she counseled his, her son in a right way. So can you tell us more about it and does it show that women can also have positive qualities?
- [42:01]
Wendy Doniger
Yes, indeed. What's interesting about the story is that the, the tiger is misled and there's a virtuous jackal. So right away we are in a strange fantasy. The jackal is by definition a dishonest, cowardly, slimy, nasty animal.
- [42:22]
Shruti Jain
Right?
- [42:22]
Wendy Doniger
You ever see a jackal? Jackals? I just saw one this morning actually, in the park. Coyotes. They're very much like them. Jackals are not attractive animals. And in folklore they are very bad indeed. They are slimy and dishonest and vicious. Lions and tigers, actually, in Mahabharata, tigers are even bigger than lions. The tiger is the real royal animal, at least in this part of the Mahabharata, are supposed to be noble and that they're kings. So in this story, the jackal is virtuous. He doesn't want to live on corpses. He doesn't want to live in the cremation ground. He becomes a sage and so forth. And the tiger says, come on, you can be my chief advisor. But the other jackals in his company, who are real jackals, that is to say, nasty, mean, slimy, bad jackals, they work against him. A lot of court politics and this and that, and they get the king, the tiger king, to throw out the jackal. He's going to kill him until the tiger's mother comes to see him and says, are you out of your mind? Don't you realize that this jackal is the good jackal and that these guys are really bad and really bad? And the tiger says, you're right, Mama. Thank you for explaining it to me. And he kicks out the bad jackals and he reinstates the good jackal. So on the one hand, you have a jackal who totally violates the definition of his class in Sanskrit literature. And you have a mother who also, in some ways, but only some ways, violates her class by bossing her son around. And her son actually is not just her son, but he's the king. So it seems to be saying it's just as likely for a jackal to be virtuous as it is for a mother to be smarter than her son. But I don't think it's saying that. I think it's saying, don't judge jackals. You never know. See what a jackal is like. A jackal could be, in fact, what we used to call an untouchable, a dullet, an unclean animal that lives on. He is the Dalit of the animal world. He eats corpses. And at the same time, don't misjudge mothers. Sometimes your mother knows more than you do, even though she's a girl and you're a boy. So I think those two surprises, or you could say upturning revolution, reversement. I can't think of the English word turning something upside down. Turning upside down, of the expected categories that they're parallel, that just as a jackal can sometimes be good, don't judge all the jackals, or if you prefer, all the dalits, whatever you want to say. These are not stories about animals after all. These are stories about people represented by animals. So just as you wouldn't judge a dale at saying, well, He's a Dalit. He can't have any sense. So too, sometimes you have to listen to your mama, even though she's a girl. So I think it's a really interesting story that reverses two standard ethical categories simultaneously in a very useful way. I love this story. I think it's really nice.
- [45:49]
Shruti Jain
And, well, the mother is right most of the times, from what I can say.
- [45:52]
Wendy Doniger
That's right. Mother always knows. Mother knows best, as we say in English.
- [45:56]
Shruti Jain
That's true.
- [45:57]
Wendy Doniger
Even. Even of the king. Even the mother of the king, she knows the best. Yeah, the tiger is really stupid too. So it's not. It's not hard to know more than this particular tiger. He makes all the wrong decisions, and the jackal saves him time and time again.
- [46:13]
Shruti Jain
And do you think this also reflects an inversion of roles? And, for example, we find stories where, for example, the jackal is wise. He's very wise. The Brahman is cruel, and the heron is truthful. So what does this inversion of roles and inversion of characteristics, picks signify?
- [46:34]
Wendy Doniger
I think it's very important. I think it's what makes this a wonderful and complicated book. I wish it were more widely read. It's not the most popular part of the Mahabharata. I think it challenges what are actually the two broad general characters of caste. The idea which is built into the whole Jati system, that you know all about a person's dharma if you know what his jati is, what his social class is, what his varna is. If he's a Brahman, he's wise. If he's a Kshatra, he's brave. If he's a shudra, he's lowly and sneaky. And if he's an untouchable, of course, he's beneath contempt. So I think that you get the wise jackal, you get the stupid lion. There are also stories. For instance, there's a heron who is supposed to be very wise. Well, the herons are supposed to be hypocrites. But then you have one story about a truthful heron and so forth. So you get these animal categories which I think are caste categories. The lion is the Kshatriya, the Jakal is the Dalit, and so forth. And when they behave differently, it might make you think twice. And assuming that every Dalit you meet is like every other Dalit you ever met, or the way that the texts tell you, I think it challenges the idea that you know all, all about a person's Dharma. If you know what varna, what social class or animal character, if He's a jackal. He's like this. If he's a Kshatriya, he's like that. These stories show you jackals and Kshatriyas who don't behave the way they're supposed to. And I think, though so much of the Mahabharata is about Varna and behaving and behaving. And here are the rules and obey the rules, and here are the rules. These stories upturn those stories and turn them upside down and say, you don't always know everything about a person or an animal. By knowing what class they belong to. I think it really undercuts the power of the caste system to show these animals who don't behave the way animals are supposed to behave. There are many lot of animal stories. There's wonderful story about a mouse who totally outsmarts the cats and all these things like that. You think of mice as cowardly and stupid, but this mouse is like a king. He tricks people. He gets them to work together and against each other. It's a wonderful commentary on royal power in a way that the mouse wins out over the cats and other big animals too. So I think they are in some ways anti. Dharmic stories are dharmic stories, stories that challenge Dharma in some ways. And there they are. It's the great Dharma shastra. The whole books 12 and 13 are the Dharma books. And somebody, bless his heart, it must have been a male and almost certainly a Brahmin, snuck these stories in when no one was looking. And they say, wait a minute now, think about this. Not every single king is like this. Not every single Dalit is like that. Think about when you meet these people. What are they actually like? Are they smart? Are they stupid? Are they evil? Are they good? Don't assume that you know the person. If you know the Varna, if you know the class. So I think the wonderful stories, really.
- [50:17]
Shruti Jain
And also at some level, if I talk in Dharma Shastra terms, it represents a conflict between Shastra and Achara, between what is being prescribed and what is being practiced by people.
- [50:31]
Wendy Doniger
Yes, absolutely. And these are. I think many of them are folk stories, the animal stories. We know them as Aesop's Fables. But mind you, Aesop got it all from the Sanskrit.
- [50:43]
Shruti Jain
These are.
- [50:44]
Wendy Doniger
These are very old Indian stories about animals who represent human classes. And the stories that I've picked out from books 12 and 13 challenge those stereotypes and say, not all jackals are like this, not all lions are like that, not all women are like this, and so forth and so on and I think that they're very valuable stories for that reason. They're kind of like undercurrent of folk wisdom that gets into the higher castes of the Brahmans telling the stories to the Kshatriyas. I think you have a Vaishya mythology here, perhaps even a Shudra mythology in places. And certainly you have in many places a woman's mythology right next to the spectacularly anti woman bias of many of the stories. At the same time you have other stories in which the women are smarter than the men and in many cases more moral than the men. So there's a real revolutionary strain in these stories, which I love.
- [51:56]
Shruti Jain
Right. But at the same time, we also have stories like where a sage turns a dog into larger animals and ultimately when the larger animals become ferocious, he turns him back into a dog. So does this represent an idea of swadharma and class boundaries? That the idea of swadharma or the concept of class category, class boundary should never be transgressed?
- [52:21]
Wendy Doniger
Yeah, that story is indeed. I put it in. I wanted to. First of all, it's a good story, but also it is preaching the dharma of Varna. It's a dog who's a faithful dog, and he serves the sage well. And one day a larger animal, a leopard, comes in and he says, oh, the leopard's gonna eat me. And so the sage turns him into a leopard. But then a lion comes and he says, oh, the lion's gonna eat me. And he makes him into a bigger and bigger animal until he makes him into the biggest animal of all, which is a mythical beast called a saraba, which has eight legs, four of them on its back. It's a crazy animal, but it's the biggest and worst animal of all. And when he's like that, he comes at the sage to eat him and the sage says, no, you don't, and turns him back into a dog. So this is a story preaching against the idea that you could possibly escape from whatever varna or jati you are in, whatever caste you're in, to take on the attributes of a higher caste, or especially a higher Varna in particular. But the sixth, the animal changes many times. It's really about Jati rather than about Varna. And in this text, which I felt I ought to put in, it says, don't try it. Stay as you are. You are born to what you need to be. Don't try to change. So I would call that a reactionary story, a story that preaches the solidity and unvariability of dharma that dharma is there and don't mess with it. So it's a story of preaching what I would regard as a negative philosophy. In contrast with other stories where people do change and get away with it and so forth. This is a story about don't think you can change. It's an important story in that way. So you do have wise jackals and cruel Brahmins and truthful herons and so forth. But then on the other hand, you have the dog who really should never have tried to be anything but a dog.
- [54:34]
Shruti Jain
Right. And also, moving forward, some stories of your book deal with kingship.
- [54:41]
Wendy Doniger
Right.
- [54:42]
Shruti Jain
So in what ways do you think the origin of evil and the beginning of kingship are related in these stories of Mahabharata and who's an evil king after all?
- [54:52]
Wendy Doniger
Yeah, yeah, of course. The whole Mahabharata is about kingship, in a way. And The Dharma par ones 12 and 13 are about questions. The whole framework is Yudhishthir asking the sage, how can I be a good king? So in a sense, all the animal stories, which have origins in many cases that have nothing to do with kingship whatsoever, are brought into the discussion and put to the use of the preaching of the dharma, of how to be a gu. So you have many stories about the origin of kingship. The classical story, which is told here and retold everywhere, the is that at one point, there was no Dharma. Things had gone badly, marriage had turned into adultery, people were killing each other, and the gods had to create a king in order to preserve dharma. And in most of the stories, Vishnu becomes incarnate as the first king. So the first thing that basic foundational myth tells you is that you have to have a king, and the king's job is to provide dharma. But then you get ideas about evil kings. So on the Wena, it says, the king is a good thing. If there was no king, there would be no Dharma. And then these more subtle stories said, well, a good king is a good thing, but what about a bad king? And there are stories about evil kings, and evil kings undermine the whole of the moral system. And since this is an idealized text, they are inevitably overthrown by good kings who re establish good Dharma. So we do have stories about bad kings as well as the origin of the defining good king, who is basically an incarnation of Vishnu, who establishes. And the reason you need a king is because if we didn't have a king, there would be no Dharma. People would commit adultery and murder and all that kind of stuff. It's the king who establishes The Dharma that preserves the peace and the moral quality of marriage and so forth. So the origin of evil and the beginning of kingship are the same story in a way. There are several different versions of it told. There are stories about evil kings who have to be destroyed and replaced by good kings. But the establishment of Dharma is the establishment of kings. Without kings, there was no Dharma. There's a theory of the Golden Age. In the beginning, people were created by the gods to be moral and good. But people are people. Time is destructive. After a while, they started lying and cheating and committing adultery. And at that point, the gods say, we have to intervene and fix this. And they fix this by establishing the king. So this book, which is written for kings, tells you that the king is what holds the moral world together. Without the king, there would be chaos and evil, and without a good king, there would be chaos and evil. So you'd better rule, and you'd better rule by these rules that I've just told you in thousands and thousands of rather boring Sanskrit verses about how to be a good king.
- [58:16]
Shruti Jain
Also talking about kings, let us talk about Indra, who is the king of gods, who repeatedly occurs in these stories and who's often notorious. He's often doing something which is not dharma, certainly. So why do you think this happens? That Indra, on one hand, being the most important of Vedic gods, is always shown to engage in activities that violate Dharma, activities that are, in fact, Adharma. And what causes this internal paradox?
- [58:47]
Wendy Doniger
It's really interesting. It's really interesting. I think we have to explain it by history.
- [58:53]
Shruti Jain
Sure.
- [58:54]
Wendy Doniger
So Shiva and Vishnu are Hindu gods. They're mentioned briefly in the Rigveda, the oldest Sanskrit text. So the Rig Veda is an Indo European text. That is to say, it comes from an early culture which shares with Greek and Latin texts and indeed with Nordic texts, Norse texts, a very early period in human civilization, maybe 3,000, 2,500 BCE, when there was a unified religion in which the king of the gods was not moral, he was powerful. Zeus is famous for his adultery. Wotan is also violent. So the Indo European king God was not. There was no such thing as Dharma. It was about power. Indra is that from that part of the world. Indra is much earlier than Shiva or Vishnu. The mythology of Indra goes back to that ancient Indo European period in which the king was powerful and was indeed an adulterer and in many texts, a liar. So Indra comes into the system in the Rig Veda, where you have almost nothing about Shiva or Vishnu, just one or Two little verses that don't really count. Indra is there. Indra remains in the mythology as a king who lies and cheats and commits adultery and all those things. But he is the king of the gods. But he is no longer God with a capital G, right? He's just a king. And as we all know, Brahmans are much more important than kings. So in this Brahmin text, although Indra is the king of the gods, the real God is Vishnu, or in some parts of the Mahabharata, Shiva. And Vishnu is completely moral. Shiva is more complicated. I wrote a long book about Shiva about complicated. His morals are because he's a yogi. But Vishnu is the incarnation of righteous kingship, kingship, which is Dharma. And Vishnu is the king God who really prevails in these texts about the origin of Dharma, the origin of all of that. It's Vishnu who comes down to earth as the first king. Indra remains a kind of comic, second rate character who runs around seducing women and throwing his thunderbolt and lying and cheating and so forth. But he has no moral status. And it's Vishnu who is the God of kings and the God of the kings in books 12 and 13 of the Mahabharata. So Indra becomes relegated to a kind of a storybook aspect of mythology. Lots of tales of him. He did this, he did that. He. He got defeated by the king. He had to hide in a lotus stalk and the Brahmins had to get him out and so forth. He's a figure of fun and mockery. He is the mocked king, the inadequate king, the bad king. Whereas Vishnu is the supremely powerful king, the Dharmic king, the good king, the Yudhishthira is exhorted to be like Vishnu. He is never, never exhorted to be like Indra. It's a different period of mythology. It's a different moral system. India always thinks like, my mother never threw anything out. If she got a new dress, she kept the old dress that she never wore anymore, but she kept it in her closet. Hinduism is like that. It got a new mythology, it got a new ethical system, which was the system of Vishnu. But it couldn't throw out Indra. There were too many good stories about Indra. And so they stay here. But he is not the epitome of the king anymore. He is the king of the Devas. And the Devas are also minor characters compared with the power of Brahmins who wrote the texts and who tell you that they are more important than the gods, that they have Powers over all the gods. There are lots of stories of Brahmans overpowering gods. Gods are just people that can live longer than we could and fly and do some stuff. Vishnu, on the other hand, is God with a capital G. And he is a moral God. And he is the God of righteous kings, Dharmic kings.
- [63:25]
Shruti Jain
And henceforth we can also see, maybe we can see two different models of kingship that what inadequate or unrighteous kingship looks like versus what is the right way of practice of kingship, which Vishnu portrays.
- [63:41]
Wendy Doniger
Absolutely. And Shiva then, by contrast, becomes a yogic character who is outside of society. He walks around naked, he meditates. He's not the model for normal human beings, although he's a very important guy. Many people worship him and he helps them when they worship him. But he's not the model for human behavior. Vishnu is the model, the model king, the model husband, the model human being, really, in the Mahabharata, right?
- [64:12]
Shruti Jain
And yes, this brings us to Shiva, whose mythology is very interesting. It's unique, complex. And you mentioned some stories about Shiva in your book. So my question would be that, do we find the development of Shiva into a great God within these stories? Because as we know, the Rudra of Veda was succeeded by Shiva of Puranas. But Shiva then became the powerful God who he is today. So do you see a similar development happening in these stories that you collect?
- [64:44]
Wendy Doniger
Certainly not. In these stories. There is one book of The Mahabharata, book 10, which is a terrifying book. It's the book about the night raid. It's about a slaughter in which in the night, the heroes. The heroes violate the basic code of kingship by attacking sleeping people in the night. The Drona Parwan, Saptika Paarwan, the Saptikapan, the Book of the Sleep, really. And Shiva appears there as the God. So it's a kind of a. It's a short book of the Mahabharata too. It's a 10th book. It's right there. And these, the heroes, our people violate dharma in order to avenge a massacre in a way. And they do that by attacking at night, which is illegal, with the power of a very, very terrifying God who is Shiva. So in that one place, you have the vision of Shiva as a God of some people and is available to the Pandavas, the heroes of the Mahabharata, who are normally Vishnu worshipers. But to do this dark task, they get another God. They basically use Rudra, the Vedic God who becomes Shiva. So he appears in this one place in the Mahabharata. He Appears at times in other places, but in that book he is. So we have a vision within the Mahabharata of another cult, of another God. Hinduism was never one thing. The cult of Vishnu became very important in the Ramayana. Of course, Vishnu is the reigning God. Rama is an incarnation of him, so forth. Although Vishnu doesn't appear very often at all in the Mahabhara, in the Ramayana, he just is there from time to time. But he's not nearly as central to the Ramayana as even Shiva is to the Mahabharata, let alone the Vishnu, who is Krishna and so forth. So you have a glimpse into the cult of Shiva as a great God, a dark God, a terrifying God in that one book of Mahabharata. Afterwards, of course, various cults of Shiva developed. And as many people worshiped Shiva, I think at one point has worshiped Vishnu, he still remains a very great God. But in the Mahabharata he has this dark, sinister character and comes into his own in one particularly sinister book. And otherwise he's there from time to time he appears. There are some stories told about him, but they're probably late stories in the Mahabharata. I'm not good at dating texts. My suspicion is that they come in at a late period of the Mahabharata when Shiva is beginning to be worshiped more than he was at the. You know, the Mahabharata takes place over hundreds and hundreds of years. It's this enormous book. So some of the stories are much. Are hundreds of years later than others. And my feeling is that the Shiva stories come from one of the later levels of the Mahabharata, and that he never, in the Mahabharata, attains the general status of Vishnu. But there are places when people worship Shiva and not Vishnu in the Mahabharata. So we know that the worship of Shiva was already quite important at that time. It went on to become far more important.
- [68:20]
Shruti Jain
So can we say that the dharma of Shiva, or the dharma portrayed by Shiva is different from the dharma portrayed by Vishnu?
- [68:26]
Wendy Doniger
Oh, yes. Shiva is the God of yogis. He's the God of magical power, he's the God of death, the God of night. Those are important things. So he's an important God, but in the Mahabharata, he doesn't have the general status of Vishnu, who's really the God of everything. And later on, Shiva became the God of everything for people who worshiped Shiva. But he now has a more particular, much darker character in the Mahabharata. Not as general. The end of book 13 has lots of stories about the birth of Kumar the son of Shiva and Parvati, lots of where he's a very benign God, but he's a yogi, so he's not violent in that story. But that's a peculiar story, and that's in one of the late books. So there are some pleasant Shiva stories, but there are also some very scary Shiva stories.
- [69:27]
Shruti Jain
Right. But. Well, to summarize the discussion, we can say that these stories certainly prove that Dharma is complex. Dharma is multiple and Dharma is sukshma. It is very minute and it is very difficult to assert it. It's subtle.
- [69:45]
Wendy Doniger
Subtle, yes.
- [69:46]
Shruti Jain
It's difficult to ascertain what is Dharma in a way.
- [69:49]
Wendy Doniger
Yeah. You never really know it. Whenever you think you know it, there's a story that shows you really didn't quite get it. So they say, okay, now I know it. And they say, well, let me tell you this story and say, well, now I know it. And it kind of makes you realize that you can never, ever entirely understand Dharma. You understand as much of it as you can, and you try to live your life by what you understand as Dharma, but at the same time, it's just a small piece of a much larger fabric by which other people live very different lives. Right. And you're just part of that bigger and much more complex scene.
- [70:30]
Shruti Jain
Well, this has been a fascinating discussion and a very enriching one. Thank you very much. Before we sign off, I would just request you to share something about her upcoming works for the audience.
- [70:44]
Wendy Doniger
Well, this was one of the last books I published. This book of the stories on Mahabharata. What I'm finishing now is a memoir of my life as a scholar, of all the pupils I taught and the books I wrote, and how I began at a time when women were treated very differently from the way they are treated now, and what it was like to be a young woman scholar in the world of Brahmins and Sanskritists and a very male dominated academic world, and what fun I had in it. I'm finishing the book up now. We'll see. My Indian publisher, Ravi Singh, is interested in it. He publishes the other book on the Mahabharata. So we'll see if he wants to publish it. I hope he will. It's the story of my life as a woman scholar. Really? That's what I'm doing now. That's the present book.
- [71:48]
Shruti Jain
Oh, that's wonderful. And I wish you all the best for that. And yeah. Once again, thank you very much for joining us today. It was a fantastic discussion.
- [71:56]
Wendy Doniger
You asked very good questions, and I had fun answering them.
- [71:59]
Shruti Jain
Thank you very much. It was fascinating.