Empowered Women of Indian Mythology: Sudha Murty’s THE DAUGHTER FROM A WISHING TREE
‘Urvashi and Puruvaras’. Source: Raja Ravi Verma / Wikimedia Commons
Sudha Murty’s book The Daughter From a Wishing Tree is a rich and empowered offering of many women, many goddesses, many warriors, and many queens, all coming together to tell you one thing: that they’re makers of their own destinies.
How exactly, does one describe Sudha Murty’s 2019 book The Daughter from a Wishing Tree? Perhaps it’s wishful thinking? Perhaps one hopes it will be the Indian equivalent of a Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, or an in-your-face, tongue-in-cheek rejoinder to the machismo of a desi epic?
Personally, I’m not sure. Murty’s paperback take on mythology is not exactly a resounding slam in the face. It contains stories of women, often hidden and oftener dismissed in the tales of yore, and yet, it isn’t a thunderous counter to the chauvinistic retellings of Hindu epics. Where Murty’s book shines is in its quiet defiance. It is a rich and empowered offering of many women, many goddesses, many warriors, and many queens, all coming together to tell you one thing: that they’re makers of their own destinies. Skewed histories be damned.
For that is what Murty determinedly tells you through the twenty-four stories in Wishing Tree: that characters like Damayanti, Satyabhama, Urvashi and Shurpanakha all collectively suffered the brute force of a patriarchal pen and were relegated to oblivion. In Murty’s book, however, the women—whether in hell, heaven or earth, vis-à-vis their positions in Indian mythology—are the centre of the story, and that is where they will stay.
Characters like Damayanti, Satyabhama, Urvashi and Shurpanakha all collectively suffered the brute force of a patriarchal pen and were relegated to oblivion. In Murty’s book, however, the women—whether in hell, heaven or earth—are the centre of the story, and that is where they will stay.
Murty isn’t alone in its pursuit of the female protagonist’s POV. Her work joins a determined and illustrious trajectory of novels and novellas in the last decade (and more) that have sought to turn traditional narratives on their head. You could trace this back from as recent an offering as Aditya Iyengar’s Bhumika (which came out last year and totally barrelled through the Ramayana’s linear and male-heavy storytelling, making Sita choose for the first time at the precipice of the agni) to Lanka’s Princess in 2017, Amish’s Sita (a fierce warrior) that same year and Kavita Kane’s book on the forgotten Urmila in Sita’s Sister in 2014 – among other books of that ilk.
At the outset, a reading of The Daughter From a Wishing Tree: Unusual Tales about Women in Mythology obviously requires some level of suspension of disbelief, for, dear reader, you are about to enter the Harry Potter-esque world of talking objects, kings transfiguring into frogs, and dwarves and goddesses descending on earth to flow as present rivers. Murty’s book is obviously a mythological offering, so whether you’re avowedly religious or staunchly atheistic, you can sit down to a reading guaranteeing yourself the pleasure of the stories.
Amidst the magic and the incantation, however, emerges the sage princess who created the first human clone in mythological history. Out of the mist of male disparagement, rises the goddess created by the Hindu Trinity (Brahma+Vishnu+Shiva) to slay asuras like a boss.
Shurpanakha’s tale is particularly delightful to read, when you think of the manner in which most of us have probably grown up reading her. Shurpanakha was seen as a mere narrative ploy to bring Ram into the battle, a mere catalyst to a larger scheme of things that she is not party to, a woman devious and jealous of another woman’s beauty apparently and a woman who “rightfully” suffers the cutting down of her nose. This, at least in my memory of abridged and picture-heavy children’s Ramayanas, was also always aggravated by depicting Shurpanakha as an ugly, often grey-complexioned rakshasa woman with a snout for a nose, and who deserved what was coming to her. Here, however, refusing to be tethered by patriarchal expectations of the brave-BUT-generous, fierce-BUT-forgiving prototype of the female warrior, Shurpanakha of Lanka plots and schemes at her lowest moments to exact revenge for a broken heart.
Here’s the deal: are all of the book’s stories unequivocally about a woman? Absolutely. But do they unequivocally convey the badassery you expect entirely women-dominated warrior/magic/power stories to convey? Not really. To be fair, Murty, perhaps, has the weight of a thousand years’ worth of mythological stories – not to mention the weight of applying the lens of accuracy and verisimilitude to said stories – to blame for that.
While she has fused each of her chosen tales with characteristic charm and delightful dialogue – both authorial liberties – she chose not to accord the same liberties to the stories themselves. Which means, you could be rooting for Satyabhama all along, and empathise when she says things like: ‘I can’t believe my husband (Krishna) offered xyz flower to Rukmini (another wife) instead of me (also offering an undercurrent of resentment at the fact that her husband even has other wives apart from herself)’, you resign yourself to the fact that ultimately, she’ll be the one who’s taught a lesson, because that, allegedly, is the crux of the tale that fits within other tales that fit within epics that people have read and believed in for years. Krishna has always had other wives in mythology, and his wives only have to get along – and so Satyabhama has to learn the art of “unconditional love, not possession,” as a wily Narada chastises her.
Unfair, no?
That undercurrent of mutinous dissatisfaction with some of the women’s arcs runs through a few of Wishing Tree’s chosen twenty-four stories. The origin story of Mandodari, for instance, is saddening; as a frog in a previous life, she asks for a boon from a group of sages, requesting that she be reborn a beautiful princess who marries an emperor. What’s disappointing is that she asks for no powers for herself, ending up, as mythological chronology deems fit, the wife of Lanka’s Ravana, eventually “suffering” for not having asked the sages for happiness. Why oh why, was she, who so easily could have been the architect of asura queendom, forced to play second fiddle to the battle of two men – one of whom was her own ill-fated, ten-headed husband?
Photo: Puffin
There are, of course, rare glimpses of how women shone even in the original epics from which Murty chose her tales. For instance, there is the story of how goddess Parvati yearned for a daughter because she wanted a companion who would truly understand her heart. Murty’s epilogue to that longing is sweet and simple: “...it shows Parvati’s...profound belief and knowledge that a daughter is indeed rare and precious – a discovery that people continue to make even today.”
There could be two ways of consuming Murty’s chosen stories: as a first-time adult reader; or as a first-time adult reader that already knows how the stories end (told to one by judicious desi grandparents or read in fable and folklore). But here’s the deal: if you encounter the stories in a third way, as if you were picking up these perspectives and point-of-views in your own childhood, then it all makes sense! If you were to read Wishing Tree to your child – or encouraging your child to read it – at an impressionable age, what they’re essentially picking up are the female-centric aspects of the larger epics, of chapters rich and replete with strong women characters, women characters with actual dialogue (reams and reams of dialogue – could you imagine that in the epics?), queens with minds and battle strategies of their own… then you would be doing the next generation—and feminism—a great service.
Think of the minds that were shaped before we had the Murty-prototype epic to turn to: the minds that were fed stories passed down through the ages, from one generation to the next, of servile women and all-knowing men, of devoted wives and defiant kings, of gods who favoured the latter and ordered the former to fall in. Think of the relish with which these have been churned out and woven for the next line of children and grandchildren to listen to. Think, also, of the inadvertent power dynamics this inevitably led to: the belief that men must always sit at the table, the idea that women can be relegated to the background, the fact that, in marriages, decision-making, bread-winning, and ultimate-power-wielding is usurped often by our fathers and not our mothers, the unfortunate circumstance that so many sons, still, are favoured over the birth of a girl – a far, far cry from Parvati’s own longing for Ashokasundari.
Perhaps Wishing Tree can help change things a bit. Perhaps literature, as food for the soul, will feed also a spirit of equity and equality. God knows it’s time.
The Daughter from a Wishing Tree: Unusual Tales about Women in Mythology (2019)
By Sudha Murty
Publisher: Puffin. Pages: 192.
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Urmi Bhattacheryya is an independent journalist, formerly at The Quint, a feminist and trashy-reality-TV-watcher (like you wouldn't believe) and a reader of reads. If you ask, she'll channel her inner Bipasha Basu and tell you to do bicep curls. So don't ask. You can find her on Twitter: @UBhattacheryya or Instagram: @urmi6.
