Behavioural patterns are linked to counter thought patterns within the mind. Deeply entrenched ways of behaviour, even in modern-day society, have their supportive myths and legends that pass on the collective thought forms. If we look back at our history, we could claim that Dravidians were the founders of the earliest Indian civilization that was matrilineal and shared an attachment with the great Mother Goddess. The traditional confrontation between the sexes in contemporary India has traces and mindsets that were established during the initial subjugation of the patrifocal (Aryan) system over the matrifocal (non-Aryan) one. Patriarchy was established via Brahmanization/Sanskritization, wherein most of the spiritual disciplines were ascetic and life-denying. This patriarchy relegated the female to the position of a devotee. It used mythological weaponry and religious licence to transform culture and induce a societal and sexual shift away from the strong matrilineal position that women had originally occupied. The epic struggle for moral supremacy can be observed through the centrality that the Ramayana has occupied and which lasts up to the present day. The Ramayana is the exponent of rigid Brahmanic standards of male–female relationships. Although it draws inspiration from a broad canvas, that is, the confrontation between non-Aryan and Aryan cultures, it can be interpreted as an encounter between the patrifocal social systems and the matrifocal ones, with the former subjugating the latter. The sexual initiatives of both Ravana, the Rakshasa (the darker-skinned Dravidian) king and his sister Surpanakha have to be curbed or better still, destroyed.
Looking at the matrilineal Dravidian social system in ancient India, and drawing from a layered fabric of our multi-cultural strands, one can identify traces of heavy resistance in the Aryan tribes towards the mother-right features that were strongly implanted in the existing society and religions. ‘The threat lay partly in the diametrically opposing sexual patterns of the natives, specifically their recognition of woman as central in familial and social orders,’ [Heimsath (1972), p. 27]. Classical Hindu tradition abounds in intriguing examples of the confrontation between patrifocal and matrifocal societies. ‘If one earnestly approached this study in India, one could probably discover an epic struggle of mother-right and father-right traditions based entirely on an intellectual reconstruction of the history of the Indian people in the form of their myths and legends,’ [Heimsath (1972), p. 28].
The Ramayana therefore symbolizes a cultural, historical as well as a socio-anthropological material which deals with the right kind of normative, prescriptive behaviour. On the other hand, while scanning the Mahabharata, one can see that many of the important characters are illegitimate, that is, they are born out of wedlock or outside conventional morality. The most prominent system is the polyandrous union of Draupadi with the five Pandava brothers, with all of them being married to one woman, each having a child with her, but never remaining faithful to her. Throughout the epic, one also finds Aryan noblemen marrying non-Aryan women because they are seduced by the latter’s beauty, boldness and a certain sense of security that these women embody.
With the spread of the Brahmanic norms, intellectual indoctrinations and interpolations sterilized even portions of the older compositions of the Mahabharata. A lot of the folk traditions and cultural diversity was lost in the North Indian version of Valmiki and Tulsidas’ Ramayana came to be published, which became the dominant versions influencing the collective consciousness of a majority of the people.
What we will be focusing on is the material dealing with the man-woman relationship within the myth. We will be examining the story that acts as an organizing agent, explaining the way natural instincts behave in a cultural context, and its resulting experience which brings out the depths of emotions and records experiences that are archetypal and, therefore, recognizable. Reality can only be understood experientially, and the best way to convey it to the masses in a culture is through a myth or a tale.
We see how the union of Rama and Sita becomes the ideal monogamous model for the Hindu marriage. The woman must henceforth regard her husband as a near god. The ideal of womanhood is projected onto Sita, who becomes the perfect role model as partner and mother. She, like her Western counterpart, the Virgin, is sanitized and made out to be or rather forced to become an asexual being as a higher and purer self, but one who is constantly separated from her husband. Sita’s alleged infidelity, when she is abducted, is a major theme that preoccupies women even today. It is not truth that matters to Rama, but a kind of collective cultural conditioning, because even today, ‘in most religions of the country’, says psychologist Sudhir Kakar, ‘male folk wisdom offers similar overt reasons for man’s perennial war with woman. It agrees in portraying the female sex as lacking both sexual morality and intelligence’. Kakar goes on to quote a number of ancient texts which are exponents of this belief, and which stem from various regions of India. Is it any wonder then ‘that with such a collective fantasy of wife, the fate of sexuality within marriage is likely to come under an evil constellation of stars? Physical love will tend to become a shame-ridden affair, a sharp stabbing of lust with little love and even less passion.’ [Kakar (1989), p.12]
What are the covert messages that such a traditional mythological epic conveys to a woman? Men have complete dominance in every domestic and public relationship. Sexual activity is restricted to marital relations within the marital bond only, and it is deemed correct for the purpose of procreation alone. It suppresses women from undertaking any independent activity and nurturing self-confidence. Women are denied participation in important religious rituals and are exiled from the political arena and important decision-making; they do not inherit the properties of their fathers and widows are not allowed to remarry.
Till date, many Indian women, like Sita, are subdued in their marital homes, and their spirits are broken and minds enslaved. They have learnt to subordinate themselves to the male ego; they must love and worship the man and must believe that they are dependent on him, and provide him psychological backing by seeming to support him even though he may deem it right to abandon the woman along with her children as the Ramayana myth portrays. Why? We may ask. Is it because both the fate of the woman and her children depend upon him?
When the energy of the Great Mother in a culture is suppressed in such a way, the shadow of the Great Mother appears in a different form—the feminine, when not venerated as an equal partner, is venerated instead as the mother. Swami Vivekananda, a social reformer of the last century, told an audience during his famous speech on 18 January 1900, at the World Conference of Religions: ‘In the West woman is wife. The idea of womanhood is concentrated there—as the wife. To the ordinary man in India the whole force of womanhood is concentrated on motherhood. In the Western home the wife rules. In an Indian home the mother rules.’ Modern anthropologists testify the exalted position that the human mother, especially the mothers of sons, and not the Mother Goddess, occupies among Hindus. She, in turn, strengthens the umbilical cord during childhood, knowing that it is her only means of gaining a status in her new family and society.
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