WHOSE IDEAL IS SAVITRI, REALLY?
This Sunday sees the anniversary of an ancient rite in north India (it’s a fortnight later in the west and south): the Vat Savitri Vrat or Fast of Savitri, in which married women fast and pray for their husband’s sake.
While it’s nice and normal to strive for the well-being of a spouse, shouldn’t we, as 21st century Indians, ask ourselves if this rite, if at all required, should be pegged to a person like Savitri? Is she indeed worth the honour? When I was a child, the established view was that firstly, it was wonderful that a princess married a woodcutter and secondly, given that so few women managed to get their way, Savitri had to be celebrated as someone who did.
As I became painfully aware of the gender fault lines in Indian society, I wondered if Satyavan was really worth the trouble. He seemed a nice boy, but feeble. Knowing the male ego, was Satyavan properly grateful or did he feel emasculated and resentful that he owed his life, liberty and happiness to an ‘ abala’? None of the great love stories of the East equipped a real-life person with an emotional road map for how to ‘live happily ever after’. Instead, they were all about dying tragically before they could live together. However, Savitri, although she got what she wanted, did not quite meet my youthful ideals because of her trickery. There was something fundamentally wrong there but I did not know how to express my discomfort, being awash in the distress of the eternally pleading heroines of classical dance.
It was interesting to find years later that other Indian women also questioned Savitri’s idealised doings. For instance, I found that Mathuram Bhoothalingam, the 20th century writer who wrote in Tamil and English, sometimes using the penname ‘Krittika’ (her birth star), turned old myths and legends upside down in her plays, short stories and novels. Her play ‘Savitri’ that I discovered as late as 2009, took up where the traditional happy ending left off.
As all know, the story goes that Princess Savitri wilfully chose Satyavan, a dispossessed prince, as her husband, having encountered him in the forest while out on a journey and having fallen instantly ‘in love’. But although of the right caste, Satyavan lives in a hut in the jungle. His father, the dispossessed king, has turned blind weeping about his misfortune. Satyavan now chops wood for a living. Not only that, he is fated to die very soon. Savitri insists on marrying him (he may be poor but he’s the same caste) and outwits Yama, Lord of Death, when he takes Satyavan’s soul away. The old tale blazes with triumph: Satyavan’s father regains his sight and kingdom, Satyavan comes back to life, Savitri is hailed as the ultimate heroine. That’s where the modern play begins. Satyavan is now king but deeply resentful of Savitri who is deferred to by all. He can’t stand that she saved him, he actually dislikes her. Savitri eventually realises that it was not death but ‘what was written’ that she subverted, with consequences: a truer tale than the old one?