DIAMONDS AND LUST
Wendy Doniger’s new book elaborates on “the eternal triangle of jewelry, sex, and money.”
What do you do when you suspect that your mother’s brother Uncle Harry was a fence and that the ‘dicey side of jewelry’ is in your blood? When contrarily, to complicate family history, ‘an uncle by marriage once removed’ is also the Leo Robin who wrote ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ and indeed all the lyrics to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? When you possess a ‘seven-piece harem ring’, allegedly gifted to your greatgrandmother who ran the Hotel New York in Marienbad by a Russian prince who couldn’t pay his bill in cash? When these are only some of the innumerable family anecdotes involving jewelry – personal stories that over time have assumed near myth proportions? If you are Wendy Doniger you record them with inspirational irreverence, and use them as a starting point for a detailed analysis of the role of jewelry, particularly rings, in history.
The formidable variety of Doniger’s scholarship is evident in her work which includes: translations of the Rig Veda, the Manusmriti, and the Kama Sutra; and of course the controversial The Hindus: An Alternative History. At the risk of sounding facetious one could add that one reason why Doniger has courted controversy is because the ring of truth characterizes much of her writing. Drawing on the associational images of beauty, romance, adornment, and pledges of loyalty (including feudal fealty) which rings and indeed all forms of jewelry connote, this latest book examines how these attributes could mask deeper linkages to power and the ways in which they are manifest in different relationships ranging from patriarchal dominance to sexual manipulation to betrayal. Both men and women become central to this many-splendoured narrative in which Doniger pulls up history, literature, psychology and culture with careless fluency, frequently substituting verbatim accounts with crisp paraphrases and using humour and wit to drive home her argument. Joyless academics who sneer at anything that doesn’t subscribe to their notion of “serious” scholarship (read pedantic verbosity) would do well to take a cue from Doniger who places contemporary pop culture alongside what are now considered “classics”, astutely acknowledging that context generally moulds judgement. She quotes from the Elvis Presley song (“She wears my ring to show the world that she belongs to me”) in a section dealing with how rings have been equated with ownership of women’s bodies. Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe, who ostensibly represent two different paradigms of womanhood, are viewed as grounded in the same “slut assumption: when a woman has a piece of jewelry, she must have gotten it by sleeping with some man.” Other popular references include Sex and the City and the way De Beers shifted advertising strategy to manipulate feminist sentiment (reference Sushmita Sen: “I don’t need a man in my life to have diamonds. I can own them myself.”).
The word “ring” in medieval times was associated with male and female genitalia, and Doniger lists several raunchy innuendoes in literature and art which confirm this. The “lost” ring came to mean different things, its discovery in places ranging from the belly of a fish to a bottle in the ocean perpetuating myths about loss and discovery. Doniger explores the multiple ways in which the ring was introduced into narratives (eg “Shakuntala and the Ring of Memory”) to change the fundamental storyline, deftly spotting parallels across continents and cultures. As the study moves into modern Europe and America it includes other kinds of jewelry, particularly necklaces.
Doniger’s concluding chapter brings in a crucial conceptual thread hinted at through the book: “the eternal triangle of jewelry, sex, and money.” She reminds us that most of the stories share this nexus “between jewelry and, on the one hand, sex and gender and, on the other hand, money and power”; that men who control the production and sale of jewelry have also created much of the mythology surrounding it; that throughout history, jewelry was the only form of property a woman could own; that jewelry became both a means of control over women and a tool of sexual manoeuvreing by them. Doniger presents her case with refreshing irony while acknowledging its abiding significance: “it is what our deepest intuitions grab hold of instead of reason, and it is what the mythology feeds on.” The unfortunate truth is that consumerist buzz and the media boom have created a mystique which exalts jewelry in shameful ways in today’s world, especially in less privileged societies. In the final analysis, jewelry and greed are often inseparable however much one may camouflage it. Doniger does not say this forcefully enough, leaving one with the uncomfortable feeling that the mythology of jewelry has somehow submerged this reality.