The Hindus (39 page)

Valmiki’s Rama usually forgets that he is an incarnate god, an avatar (“crossing down” from heaven to earth) of Vishnu. He genuinely suffers and despairs when he’s separated from Sita, as if he had lost touch with the divine foreknowledge that he would win her back. Sometimes Valmiki too treats Rama as a god, sometimes not. For the
Ramayana
is situated on the cusp between the periods in which Rama was first a minor god and then a major god. Hindus in later periods often took the devotion to Rama expressed by Hanuman and Lakshmana as a paradigm for human devotion (bhakti) to a god. Yet in the
Ramayana
these relationships lack the passionate, often violent qualities that characterize the fully developed bhakti of the Tamil texts and the Puranas from the tenth century CE.

As the bhakti movement increasingly imagined a god who combined the awesome powers of a supreme deity with the compassion of an intimate friend, it reinforced the vision of Rama as someone who was both limited by human constraints and aware of his divinity.

Commentators argued that Rama had intentionally become ignorant
³⁰
or that he merely pretended to forget who he was,
³¹
and in some later retellings, Rama never does forget that he is Vishnu. But it is worth noting that though the
Ramayana
tells a long, detailed story to explain why the monkey Hanuman, the great general of the monkey army, forgets that he has magic powers (to fly, to become very big and very small, etc.), except when he needs them to get to Lanka (7.36), it never explains why it is that Rama (who does not have such magic powers) forgets that he is an incarnation of Vishnu. Both Rama and Krishna (who is an avatar of Vishnu in the
Mahabharata
) flicker between humanity and divinity in spatial as well as temporal terms; they are not only part-time gods but partial or fractional parts of Vishnu, who remains there, fully intact, always a god, while his avatars function on earth, always human. The two avatars are born of human wombs, and when they die, they merge back into Vishnu. Like Rama, Krishna sometimes does, and sometimes does not, act as if he (as well as the people with whom he interacts) knew that he was an avatar of Vishnu.

In a sense, the double nature of incarnation develops in a direct line from the Upanishadic belief that we are all incarnations of
brahman
but subject to the cycle of reincarnation. And some gods appear on earth in disguise already in the Veda, particularly Indra, the great shape shifter, while, later, Shiva often appears briefly in human disguise among mortals in the
Mahabharata
. If you put these ideas together, you end up with an all-powerful god who appears on earth in a complete life span as a human. Why do these two great human avatars appear at this moment in Indian history? Perhaps because an avatar was a way to attach already extant divinities to the growing sect of Vishnu, a way to synthesize previous strands and to appropriate other people’s stories. Not only did some of these strands and stories come from Buddhism and Jainism, but the avatar was an answer to one of the challenges that these religions now posed for Hinduism.

For by this time the Buddha and the Jina had successfully established the paradigm of a religious movement centered upon a human being.
^eg
But Rama and Krishna beat the Buddhists and Jainas at their own game of valorizing the human form as a locus of superhuman wisdom and power, for Rama and Krishna are humans with a direct line to divinity, drawing their power from a god (Vishnu) far greater than any Vedic god and at the same time, through the incarnations, grounded in humanity.

Being human, Rama is vulnerable. Despite his divine reserves, he is tripped up again and again by women—his stepmother Kaikeyi, Ravana’s sister the ogress Shurpanakha, and, ultimately, his wife, Sita.

Sita is not only the ultimate male fantasy of the perfect woman but has as her foil a group of women and ogresses who are as Bad as Sita is Good. No one, male or female, could fail to get the point, and no one did. When Rama, the eldest, the son of the oldest queen, Kausalya, is about to ascend the throne, the youngest queen, Kaikeyi, uses sexual blackmail (among other things) to force Dasharatha to put her son, Bharata, on the throne instead and send Rama into exile: She locks herself into her “anger room” (India’s answer to Lysistrata), puts on filthy clothes, lies down on the ground, and refuses to look at the king or speak to him, and the besotted Dasharatha is powerless to resist her beauty (2.9.16-19). Kaikeyi is the evil shadow of the good queen, Kausalya. But Kaikeyi herself is absolved of her evil by having it displaced onto the old hunchback woman who corrupts Kaikeyi and forces her, against her better judgment, to act as she does. For bringing about the sufferings that will overwhelm Kausalya, Sita curses not Kaikeyi but the hunchback, whose deformation is itself, in the Hindu view, evidence that she must already have committed some serious sin in a previous life. On the other hand, when Shatrughna (Lakshmana’s twin brother) abuses the hunchback, he yells curses on Kaikeyi. In this text, even the shadows have shadows.

Sita never dies, but she vanishes four times. First she vanishes when Ravana carries her off, and Rama gets her back. Then she parts from Rama three times, into three natural elements—a fire, the forest, and the earth—as a direct result of that first estrangement: Rama keeps throwing her out now because Ravana abducted her years ago.

First, right after the defeat of Ravana, Rama summons Sita to the public assembly. Then:

“Dasharatha’s son is certainly lustful” is a key phrase. Rama knows all too well what people said about Dasharatha; when Lakshmana learns that Rama has been exiled, he says, “The king is perverse, old, and addicted to sex, driven by lust (2.18.3).” Rama says as much himself: “He’s an old man, and with me away he is so besotted by Kaikeyi that he is completely in her power, and capable of doing anything. The king has lost his mind. I think sex (
kama
) is much more potent than either
artha
or dharma. For what man, even an idiot like father, would give up a good son like me for the sake of a pretty woman? (2.47.8-10).” Thus Rama invokes the traditional ranking of dharma over sex and politics (
kama
and
artha
) and accuses his father of valuing them in the wrong way, of being addicted to sex. He then takes pains to show that where Dasharatha made a political and religious mistake because he desired his wife too much (
kama
over
artha
and dharma), he, Rama, cares for Sita only as a political pawn and an unassailably chaste wife (
artha
and dharma over
kama
). Rama thinks that sex is putting him in political danger (keeping his allegedly unchaste wife will make the people revolt), but in fact he has it backward: Politics is driving Rama to make a sexual and religious mistake; public concerns make him banish the wife he loves. Rama banishes Sita as Dasharatha has banished Rama. Significantly, the moment when Rama kicks Sita out for the second time comes directly after a long passage in which Rama makes love to Sita passionately, drinking wine with her, for many days on end; the banishment comes as a direct reaction against the sensual indulgence (7.41). Rama’s wife is above suspicion, but Rama suspects her. His ambivalence, as well as hers, is expressed in the conflicts between the assertions, made repeatedly by both of them, that Ravana never touched her, that he did but it was against her will, and that physical contact is irrelevant, since she remained true to him in her mind.

When Rama publicly doubts Sita and seems unconcerned about her suffering, the gods ask how he can do this, adding, “Can you not know that you are the best of all the gods? You are mistreating Sita as if you were a common man.” Rama, uncomprehending, says, “I think of myself as a man, as Rama the son of King Dasharatha. Tell me who I really am, and who my father is, and where I come from (6.105.8-10).” Rama is not thinking straight; the gods have to reveal his avatar to him and use it as an argument to catapult him out of his trivial and blind attitude to Sita. Later still, when Rama has renounced Sita, and Brahma has again reminded him that he is Vishnu, Shiva gives Rama and Sita a vision of the dead Dasharatha, who says to Sita, “My daughter, don’t be angry because Rama threw you out. He did this in your own interest, to demonstrate your purity.
^eh
The difficult test of your chastity that you underwent today will make you famous above all other women. My daughter, you need no instructions about your duty to your husband, but I must tell you that he is the supreme god (6.107.34-35).” And when Sita has vanished again into the earth, this time for good, and Rama is raging out of control, Brahma comes with all the gods and says to him, “Rama, Rama, you should not grieve. Remember your previous existence and your secret plan. Remember that you were born from Vishnu (7.88).”
³³

Sita walks into fire determined either to kill herself or to win back the right to go on living with the very much alive Rama. The ordeal is not, however, a suicide, though she says she “cannot go on living”; on the contrary, it is an antisuttee,
^ei
in which she enters the fire when her husband is very much alive, not to join him in heaven (as suttees usually do) but as a kind of threat either to leave him or to win back the right to go on living with him here on earth.
^ej
As a threat it works: Rama takes her back, and they plan to live happily ever after, a fairy-tale ending. But we may see a touch of irony in the closing statement that he “got the happiness that he deserved,” for it does not last; the rumors return, and Rama banishes Sita, though she is pregnant; she goes to Valmiki’s hermitage and gives birth to twin sons. That is the second time Sita leaves him after her return from Lanka.

Perhaps Valmiki
^ek
thought there was something unsatisfactory about this banishment that inspired him to add on another, more final and more noble departure for Sita. It begins years later, when the twins, now grown up, come to Rama’s horse sacrifice and recite the
Ramayana
, as Valmiki has taught it to them. The
Ramayana
lays great emphasis on the paternity of Rama’s twin sons, on their stunning resemblance to Rama; the crowds of sages and princes at Rama’s court “waxed ecstatic as they seemed to drink in with their eyes the king and the two singers. All of them said the same thing to one another: ‘The two of them look just like Rama, like two reflections of the same thing. If they did not have matted hair and wear bark garments, we would have no way of distinguishing between the two singers and Rama’ (7.85.6-8).” Yet Rama pointedly recognizes them
^el
as “Sita’s sons” but not necessarily his own (7.86.2). This is an essential episode, for male identity and female fidelity are the defining desiderata for each human gender in these texts; no one is interested in female identity or male fidelity.
³⁴
These concerns play an important role in the treatment of Sita.

This is the moment when Rama summons Sita again, for the last time, and she herself brings about the final separation: