Pushed to the Margins
As the title of the book suggests, this is the story of a woman hidden from history, legend and religious discourse: a young woman that a prince left behind as he sought the truth that would transform him into the Buddha, the Awakened One. Yashodhara was the prince’s cousin and they were born on the same day, destined, according to the Jatakas, to live one more life together. The young couple grow up together, surrounded by their companions, Devadutt, Ananda and Nanda. They marry when they are 16 and soon, Yashodhara is faced with her beloved’s increasing emotional distance from her, a distance that culminates in his heart-wrenching decision to abandon his wife and child. In this novel, Siddhattha (Pali for Siddhartha) leaves the palace the night his son is born, unable, any longer, to delay answers to the questions that haunt him. Yashodhara will see him only once again. Blazing with his own splendour, he is no longer her husband, he has become the great teacher, the one who has understood the secret of how to transcend human suffering.
Sasson calls her account of the life of Gautama Buddha’s wife a ‘hagiographical fiction’ because she draws from traditional Buddhist sources, from stories as well as commentaries on religious texts that were compiled centuries after the Buddha died. Sasson reminds us that we know little about the fifth century BCE, the time in which the historical Buddha is supposed to have lived. But, Sasson is a scholar before she is a fiction writer and she brings the length and breadth of all the knowledge she has to bear on the story she wants to tell. This sets her book apart from the other mythological and historical fictions that abound these days—there is an authenticity to her characters, even if the physical environment in which she places her story comes, as she says, from her knowledge of a later historical time.
Sasson has an easy style and we are never burdened by her scholarship. Her narrative is well-paced and we feel an intimacy with the young Yashodhara as she grows into the destiny that breaks her heart. Sasson’s novel foregrounds something from the Buddha’s life that many of us do not know—that he came back to claim his seven-year-old son, Rahula. Yashodhara’s loss is doubled, her feeling of always having lived on the edges of her husband’s life, away from its primary purpose, is multiplied. We share her despair, not just as a wife and a mother, but as a woman who has been pushed to the margins of a patriarchal world, albeit by a man whose wisdom will change the world around him for centuries.
The author calls her account of Yashodhara a ‘hagiographical fiction’