Dharma and Desire: Lacan and the Left Half of the Mahabharata

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY W A S H I N G T O N

D C

January 6,2005

I hereby certify that Andrea Custodi has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on October 22,2004 and that this is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Michael Moses Associate Dean for Graduate Studies

Dissertation Research Committee: Alfred John Hiltebeitel, Professor of Religion and Human Sciences, Director Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Professor of English, Reader Gail D. Weiss, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Reader

Dharma and Desire: Lacan and the Left Half of the Mahabhgrata

Andrea Custodi

B.A. August 1996,The George Washington University M.A. May 2002, The George Washington University M.Phi1. January 2003, The George Washington University

A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

January 30,2005

Dissertation directed by Alf Hiltebeitel Professor of Religion and Human Sciences

UMI Number: 3158504

INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI UMI Microform 3158504 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346

Abstract This dissertation is an interdisciplinary effort to bring Lacanian and feminist theory together in the reading and analysis of the Mahabharata. It explores specifically the relation between dharrna and desire as they are implicated in such themes as maternity and paternity, the gaze, and transsexuality in the epic. In so doing, this dissertation aims to contribute not only to Mahabharata studies and South Asian religious studies, but also to contemporary psychoanalytic and feminist theory, especially as they are applied to Indic materials.

A strong argument running throughout the dissertation will be that Lacan brings fresh theoretical insights to Freudian work that has been done on the subcontinent; indeed Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a set of analytic tools that enjoys great currency in other areas of the humanities, offers a level of sophistication in approaching the symbolic content of cultural and religious objects that South Asianists cannot afford to ignore. The masculinist bias, however, that continues to be an issue both in Lacanian theory and psychoanalysis more broadly, must be countered by a feminist sensibility that is attuned to such currents and offers a set of parallel analytic tools to address them. Hinduism in general and the Mahabharata specifically are animated by tremendously rich gender dynamics, and by combining two theoretical approaches that have similar interests-a focus on sexual difference, the power structures and symbolic valences issuing therefrom, the intersection of gender and subjectivity, and the social, cultural, and linguistic effects of gendering-yet differing assumptions, aims, and often conclusions, a lively engagement and provocative conversation with the epic should emerge. The concept of the "left half has traditionally Hindu roots, but it is applied somewhat unconventionally in this dissertation as a theoretical filter for discerning broader gendered dynamics beyond the more discrete categories of male and female. The notion of the left half, as it is developed here, intersects with Lacanian and feminist theoretical concepts, aspects of dharrna, and literary tropes within the epic. By making the left half of the Mahabharata the object of this dissertation, a broad yet symbolically specific field of inquiry is created that allows for theoretical explorations as well as specific insights on the epic's stories, characters, and underlying motivations. Dharrna and desire both encompass this field and are richly interwoven throughout it. This dissertation should demonstrate that not only can Lacanian and feminist theory shed light on the Mahabharata, but the Mahabharata can also provoke new insights within Lacanian and feminist theory. The epic offers us fertile possibilities for thinking about gender, subjectivity, and desire, and this dissertation seeks to refine and expand our methods for approaching it.

Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter I - Psychoanalysis and the Subcontinent Chapter I1 - A ladies'man? Lacan and Feminist Theory Chapter I11 - Maternity, Paternity, and the Name-of-the-Father Chapter IV - Shifting Skirts and the Power of the Gaze Chapter V - Having and Being: Gender-bending and Sexual Difference Conclusion Appendices Bibliography

...

Ill

Notes on Translation, Abbreviation, and Citation

All translations were made in collaboration with Alf Hiltebeitel, unless otherwise noted in the citation. Van Buitenen's translations are noted with the abbreviation W," Dutt's translations with "D," and Hiltebeitel's with "H." The Mahiibhgrata is abbreviated as Mbh. The Critical Edition is abbreviated as CE. In citations that appear both in the Critical Edition and in the Vulgate, but the placement varies, the Critical Edition reference is given first and the Vulgate reference second in parentheses.

Introduction

This dissertation seeks to contribute to the fields of South Asian religious studies and contemporary theory in the human sciences by bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminist theory together in the reading and analysis of the Mahabharata. Though many psychoanalytic studies have been made of South Asian materials, relatively little work has been done to explore how Jacques Lacan's sweeping rearticulation of Freudian psychoanalytic theory might enhance and expand them. Furthermore, though feminist studies have also been made of the Mahabharata and the cultural currents feeding into and out of it, there have been no specifically feminist Lacanian psychoanalytic studies of the Mahfibharata that self-consciously bring these two analytical approaches together around the central concerns of gender and subjectivity.

This dissertation is thus an

interdisciplinary effort not only to bring contemporary Western theoretical approaches to the study of a two thousand year-old epic, but also to bring the rich and provocative primary material of the Mahabharata to the dialogue within and surrounding Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminist theory.

In employing and

exploring these disciplinary and theoretical tools, I hope to offer fresh readings of this epic and original contributions to the scholarship surrounding it. The title of the dissertation attempts to condense many of these strands, but in so doing perhaps sacrifices some clarity.

I will introduce each of its

constituent elements here, laying the groundwork, I hope, for how each will be further elaborated and explored in the chapters that follow. The first term, dharma, is an extraordinarily rich and complex one, the breadth, depth, and importance of which has few if any parallels in the Hindu tradition. It is variously translated as law, religion, morality, and virtue, its opposite, adl~arma,taking on the contrary range of meanings. Etymologically, dharma originates from the root

dhy, which means "'to support', 'to undergird', 'to establish'," and might thus be described as that which "properly undergirds or establishes something from a certain point of view, prescriptively and/or descriptively" [Lipner 1994: 861. For example, if it is said that a woman's dharma is to be a wife, it may mean both that a woman should be a wife and that it is in woman's nature to occupy a wifely position and fulfill wifely roles, just as it is the dharma of fire to bum. Indeed, it is this sort of semantic ambiguity that makes the term so elusive yet compelling, and it could well be argued that one essential facet of Hinduism throughout its multiple millennia and often widely divergent forms is some concerted effort to understand, work through, make sense of, interpret, articulate, and implement dharma-dharma is a constant thread in the almost dizzying variety of social, historical, cultural, and religious forms that is Hinduism. Perhaps most succinctly, dharma can be said to be about order-especially

order as opposed to chaos. In a

world that is recognized to be full of flux, contingency, and paradox, dharma is the order that keeps individual lives, social structures, mischievous divinities, and natural or cosmic forces from reeling out of control. It keeps things in balance, in bounds-it

structures, contains, and grounds.

On the one hand, dharma is understood as universal and eternal, with an essential, stable, and enduring structure that sets it apart from the flux and diversity of natural and human worlds. Yet on the other hand, as a choice against chaos, as the one thing that keeps the world from reeling out of control, dharma can also often take on a seemingly striking relativity. It can become a framework for choosing the better of two bad options, deciding between two apparently equal choices, going against what would seem intuitive, or distinguishing between what may be good for one person and bad for another-and

in so doing it becomes

radically contingent upon the particulars of any given situation and the actors involved.

These distinctions between relative and universal dharmas are

recognized within the Hindu tradition and given names: sanatana dharma, eternal dharma, and svadharma, individual dharma. As we will also see later, there are other dharmas, too, that inform moral reasoning and frame meanings, roles, and duties in social life. What may be right for a woman may be wrong for a man, a brahmin's dharma differs from that of a lqatriya,* a child's from that of a parent. However one is positioned in life at any given moment-and

in relation to an

entire constellation of other individuals and social functions-will

determine the

* The warrior, princely, or aristocratic caste, translated by Van Buitenen as "baronage."

dharma that is appropriate for that person, and even then it may not be clear and must be arrived at dialogically. Dharma in all its complexities and perplexities may be said to be the central preoccupation of the Mahabharata.

The epic is a vast exercise in

conceptualizing impossibly difficult situations in which humans may find themselves-social,

political and spiritual conundrums, moral dilemmas, and

seemingly irresolvable paradoxes-and

then attempting to find its way out

through extensive dialogue, debate, reasoning, narrative, divine intervention, precedent, intuition, or sometimes just plain expediency. Here we arrive at a metaphor that serves us well in thinking about the epic: that of weaving. I will be using it in many different ways throughout this project, but here, as it relates to dharma, I see the epic authors weaving strands of characters and history into a big dharmic knot, and then, almost as if to amuse themselves, trying to see if they can unravel it again. This also brings in the notion of Hid, or divine play, inasmuch as the authors occupy the position of gods to the text, and arguably self-consciously so. Much as human lives and events-indeed the cosmos-are

the whole drama of existence and

the self-conscious sport of the gods, so the rich lives and legends

of the epic characters are the poignant, provocative play of the authors. But beyond the intellectual, moral, and religious sport that the weaving, knotting, and unraveling of dharma may be in the Mbh, it is also a self-consciously pedagogical text. The Mbh presents itself as the fifth Veda-the

last of the

foundational pillars of Hindu ritual, myth, and religion-and

claims that

"whatever is here ...is found elsewhere. But what is not here is nowhere else"

[1.56.33 VB]. It is considered both itihma* and srngzv, and, like fables or Biblical parables in popular Western moral dialogue, its passages are regularly referred to in the moral discourses of Hindus both educated and illiterate. Indeed, it is said that if one can take in the whole Mbh, s/he will experience every emotion, every aesthetic sensation that is possible, and finally reach an equanimity that is akin to enlightenment. The dharma that is the central focus of the Mbh, however, is far from illuminated-indeed,

it is intriguingly obscure and runs the gamut from the

most universal, eternal, and absolutist of notions to the most arbitrary, contingent, and relative.

It continually appears to turn on itself, inverting and even

contradicting its own reasoning-it

can come out at two ends of an argument in

completely different forms. Furthermore, as Ghosh notes, "in pursuing its central moral enquiry into the nature of dharrna or righteousness, the Mahdbhdrata holds up alternatives to social norms to the point of subverting convention" [2000: 331. Among the most fundamental and far-reaching of these sometimes subversive reappraisals-and

surprising, given the "apparently male orientation of the

narrative" [Ibid.]-are

those surrounding women, femininity, gender, subjectivity

and sexuality, or what I prefer to pull together under the Lacanian concept of desire. Desire, especially in the Lacanian sense, is another can of worms. Indeed, it could be said to be as essential a concept to Lacan as dharma is to Hinduism, and equally complex and elusive. Desire as Lacan understands it has little to do

* Literally "history,"but more in the sense of "onceupon a timen;a sort of sacred narrative.

^

A broad term that encompasses everything from treatises to plays, the distinguishing factor of which is that it is written-not heard or revealed-and at some level engages, explores, and articulates dharma.

with how it is used colloquially-it

has less to do with erotic attraction between (or

among) the sexes and more to do with the formation of subjectivity, the construction of sexual difference, and the existential dynamics that propel and compel human lives. So even though my explorations of desire in the epic will take turns through sexual scenarios and seemingly standard vignettes of heterosexual attraction, it will be doing so with the broader intention of exploring the formation of sexed subjectivity, of which desire is a constituent element. I will say less rather than more on desire here in the introduction, leaving it to unfold in the course of the chapters that follow and returning to address it more explicitly in the conclusion. Lacan, too, will merely be introduced by name here, as the following chapter will pick up his theories and place in the psychoanalytic tradition more explicitly. His ideas occupy a central focus in this dissertation, and this project is very much dedicated to carving out a space in South Asian studies for Lacanian contributions, but this is not a project that seeks to tackle Lacanian theory head-on as another project might.

In other words, I know I could problematize and

critique and engage his ideas more, working through their theoretical implications, contemplating their nuances, comparing how they play out in the work of contemporary Lacanian theorists-and open to that-but

I try to leave doors and windows

my primary focus is not to engage the Lacanian theoretical

community as much as the South Asian religious studies community. As much as I feel Lacanians can be enriched by exposure to South Asian materials, and as much as I try to demonstrate that, the thrust of this work is towards a primary audience

composed of psychoanalytically-inclined South Asianists who have hitherto only seen Freud at work on the subcontinent. This project, though seeking to create a reflective relationship in which insights are mirrored both ways, is principally an application of Lacanian theory to the primary material of the Mbh, and an attempt to build upon and expand predominantly Freudian analyses of it.

Lacanian

theorists will, I hope, find my use of his ideas competent, but should not expect a level of attention beyond the articulated scope and intent of the project. Lastly, as far as introducing the key terms of the title, we come to "the left half of the Mahiibharata. This is not a phrase that is commonly used as I have done here, but it beautifully evokes, I think, what about the Mbh interests me and constitutes the object of this project. It is not enough to say I am interested in the women of the Mbh, or gender and sexuality, or reproduction or femininity, though I am, and will refer to them throughout this work as among the aims of my study. The concept of the left half incorporates all of these, but also goes beyond them into a broader quality of "othernessn that exists as a sort of shadow side to the epic. In Hindu traditions the left half is considered the feminine side of the body, but is also-especially in juxtaposition to the male right-viewed

as

polluted, sometimes inauspicious, subversive, and even adharmic. So the notion of the left half of the epic brings us, through the frame of femininity, into notions of abjection and alterity that offer fertile possibilities for research and reflection in both Lacanian and feminist theory. The left half is the Other to the male right, the Other that is only ever regarded and treated obliquely-a self-but

shadow to the male

is nonetheless that which enables masculine subjectivity to be, and thus

absolutely essential to the male subject's constitution as such. For the right side to be unequivocally male, pure, auspicious, and dharrnic, it must be contrasted and juxtaposed to the left that is both feminine and all else that cannot be masculine. The notion of the left half of the epic, therefore, brings together various elements of femininity, sexual difference, otherness and subversion into a conceptual field that associates them but nonetheless allows them to roam freely. They may cluster, they may diverge, but they are linked by what they are not, like all that falls under a shadow. Before moving on to the body of the text, any good introduction will lay out the chapters that are to follow, giving the reader a foretaste of the feast to come. I now will follow suit, and offer some idea of the structure and content of this dissertation. The opening two chapters are largely theoretical introductions that position this project within the scholarly contexts preceding and surrounding it. The first chapter, "Psychoanalysis and the Subcontinent" offers an overview of the historical

and

intellectual

encounter

between

predominantly

Freudian

psychoanalytic scholars and both the primary materials and primary processes of Hindus and Hinduism. The first part of the chapter broadly sketches the outlines of the discipline of psychoanalytic anthropology and introduces the foundational thinkers who have shaped psychoanalysis on the subcontinent.

The focus then

turns to Lacan, examining how he rearticulates Freudian theory in ways that offer fresh possibilities for psychoanalytic thinking about Indic materials, bringing in examples from outside the epic tradition to demonstrate these possibilities, and

pointing the way to concepts and ideas I will continue to explore throughout the body of the dissertation. The second chapter, "A ladies' man? Lacan and Feminist Theory" takes up the second pillar of my theoretical orientation to this project: feminist theory. I begin by placing myself within the vast and often contested field of feminist discourse and outlining what constitute my feminist objectives for this project. The focus then turns to feminist work that has been done in South Asian religious studies, by no means attempting a comprehensive overview but rather outlining the various approaches that have been taken and what each might bring to a study of the left half of the Mbh. The latter part of the chapter explicitly addresses the encounter between psychoanalysis and feminism, examining how Lacan changes the content and parameters of this encounter and suggesting how these innovations might be brought to bear on the study at hand. I then turn my sights to doing what these two chapters lay the groundwork for: offering a feminist Lacanian reading of the Mahgbharata. But before moving on to introduce those chapters, I should pause here and note what is not included in my introductory chapters.

I do overviews of

psychoanalysis in India, feminism and South Asian religious studies, and feminism and psychoanalysis; I present what I see as the most relevant feminist work on the Mbh, but I do not do a literature review of Mahgbharata studies per se. This has been omitted for several reasons. First of all, this is an interdisciplinary project, and in such a project one must necessarily limit the fields to which one dedicates a full introductory chapter. Positioning myself theoretically within the fields of

psychoanalysis and feminist theory seemed more important than doing so in relation to Mbh studies, as I am coming to this project from a primarily theoretical training and with primarily theoretical interests.

If I intend my primary

contribution to be to feminist and psychoanalytically-inclined South Asianistsand my secondary audience to be a broader one composed of non-South Asianist feminists and Lacanian theorists-it

makes more sense to position myself in those

discourses rather than within the more specialized field of Mahgbhgrata studies. Second of all, there exist fine literature reviews of scholarship on the Mbh that any review of mine would mostly just replicate. Arti Dhand does an excellent overview of scholarly approaches to the Mbh in her dissertation [2000:13-27], and van Buitenen makes thorough historical and intellectual contextualizations of the epic in the introductions to his translation of the epic's first five books. Biardeau, Hiltebeitel, and other Mbh scholars have in their work consistently engaged differing theoretical and methodological approaches and text-historical debates in the field. My interest in this project lies in building bridges between the Mbh and the theoretical discourses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism, and I prefer to let others build the bridges between the other theoretical and methodological questions that surround the study of the epic. But I would like to make just one point-though

a strong o n e - o n my position in relation to what might be a

critique leveled against my approach by others in the field. The dominant attitude in scholarship on the Mbh has traditionally been a diachronic one. Scholars have viewed the vast epic as an unwieldy accretion of various religious, historical, and social layers that accumulated around a central

mythic core from about 400 B.C. to 400 A.D., and the aim of their work involves identifying these various layers and peeling them away to reveal the Ur-text underneath.

Many interesting archaeological, linguistic, and historical

observations have come out of these approaches, but for my relation to and interest in the text, they are of little use. Here I align myself with the more structuralist approaches of Dumezil, Biardeau, and Hiltebeitel-I

take the epic as

a synchronic whole and am ultimately more interested in its internal referents than what it might be referring to outside of itself. However the vast opus that is the Mbh might have evolved into what it is, the fact is that it has been what it is for more or less two thousand years, existing in various versions and languages but nonetheless hanging together as an epic far more than it diverges. Most of the stories and quotations that I use appear in all versions of the epic and are thus drawn from the Critical Edition, compiled by a vast team of scholars in Pune and the first five books of which were translated into English by van Buitenen. In some cases, there is some gem of a phrase or story in the Nilakantha vulgate translated by Dutt that I cannot resist including, and that really need not be excluded on textual or historical grounds. The Critical Edition, as useful and valuable as it is, is itself an artificial text, the product of a massive scholarly undertaking, and the various vulgates have animated the hearts and minds of real people for millennia. What interests me in the Mbh (and what makes the diachronic approach unappealing for me) is precisely how and why the Mbh, in the various clusters of its embodiments but as a narrative whole, has animated the hearts and minds of millions of people over scores of centuries, and

why it continues to captivate contemporary India-and

Western scholars-even

today. My sense is that it does so because of its tremendous psychic charisma that stirs its readers and listeners in ways of which they may often even be unaware. As with other great art, literature, and music, the epic touches us on subtle, unconscious, symbolic, intuitive levels, levels that psychoanalysis as a discipline was created precisely to explore. So I take the text as a whole but explore the fissures within it, the gaps and lacunae, but also the cohesions, the knots where things cluster and come together, the repetitions that circle around and around, sometimes changing, sometimes staying the same. However the various elements may have come together historically, they exist together symbolically, and that is the Mbh that is the object of this dissertation. On, then, to the body of this work. The remaining three chapters attempt to do that for which the first two chapters lay the groundwork. Chapter Three, "Maternity, Paternity, and the Name-of-the-Father," examines the dynamics of reproduction in the epic and suggests that dharma can be understood as an epic equivalent to Lacan's "Name-of-the-Father". Both exist within what Lacan terms the Symbolic order and are largely coterminous with a patriarchal order that pretends inviolability but in fact has holes, particularly around the problematic issue of paternity.

One could almost go so far as to say that though the central

focus of the epic might be dharma in all its subtleties and subversions, the primary component of dharma that excites epic attention and anxiety is that involving the paternal function. The Mbh is about lineage, dynasties, and heredity-it

is of

utmost important who is begotten by whom, but more often than not (at least in

the case of the major characters) this is not exactly clear, or somehow complicated, or somewhat obfuscated.

Though van Buitenen says that "the

Mahfibhsrata, with all its interest in paternity, is largely indifferent to motherhood" [1975: 2061, I would suggest to the contrary that the epic is concerned dually with maternal and paternal roles in procreation, both in terms of the (re)production of dynasties and in terms of broader symbolic and psychic dynamics that the pivotal process of procreation involves. He continues: "After having made herself useful as a wife by becoming a mother, the woman seems to recede from view" [Ibid.]. On the one hand, I would suggest that she does so far less than van Buitenen intimates. But on the other, I would say that when she does, she moves into a shadow role that, though perhaps only obliquely perceived, is absolutely indispensable not only to the characters and events of the epic, but also to the very male subjectivity around and by which dharma as the Name-of-theFather is created and sustained. As we will see with the successive generations of women who bear sons by men other than their dharmic husbands, women become the primary perpetuators of the Name-of-the-Father when the paternal function itself is empty.

Meanwhile, almost as a corrective measure, the epic offers

numerous instances of offspring who are achieved "without the agency of womanw-testaments to the unilateral procreative power of the transcendent male subject. So the Name-of-the-Father in its embodiment as dharma occupies a primary place in the symbolic dynamics of the epic, and if paternity and dynastic succession is its explicit focus, maternity, Woman, and feminine desire exist in the near offing, obliquely yet intrinsically sustaining the male subjective position that

ostensibly frames and structures the epic. dynamics-all

I find that the left half of these

that which goes on just underneath the dharmic and patriarchal

surface~constitutessome of the most provocative and compelling material in the epic. The fourth chapter, "Shifting Skirts and the Power of the Gaze," explores desire as it plays out visually in the Mbh. Lacan's treatment of the concept of the gaze, as with desire, is somewhat different from its colloquial usage-it

involves dynamics not just of seeing but also of being seen, and we will

find that these reciprocal dynamics figure powerfully in the epic's depictions of desire. As I noted above, desire too has as much to with the formation and sustaining of subjectivity as erotic dalliance, and this chapter will focus on charting pathways between the gaze, desire, and feminine subjectivity. I will explore how these dynamics play out within the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real through close analyses of celestial courtesans and the epic goddesses and heroines Ganga, Draupadi, and Damayanti. Clothing, too, constitutes a sort of subtext to the subtext of the gaze in the epic, and I will trace its folds as a sort of Lacanian objet a in these stories. The crux of this chapter revolves around exploring notions of feminine subjectivity through the interplay of the gaze and desire. It is sometimes all too easy to read with the grain of the ostensibly masculine narrative and view the epic females in a circumscribed subjectivity, as shadows to their male counterparts-I

will suggest that Lacan provides us with useful analytic tools for

reading against the grain and discerning a rich texture of female agency, desire, and subjectivity woven into the masculine symbolic fabric.

Lastly, in the fifth and final chapter, "Having and Being: Gender-Bending and Sexual Difference," I move into a sustained examination of transsexuality in the Mbh, focusing primarily on the characters of @una/Brhannadii

and

~mbii/~ikhandin(i) but pulling widely from the rest of the epic material as well. The endlessly fascinating instances of transsexuality in the epic provide inexhaustible fodder for rumination on questions of gender and sexual difference. Because in Lacanian theory sexual difference revolves around either being or having the phallus-and

because in the epic having a phallus is indispensable to

one's selfdescribed or imputed masculinity-I

explore the liminal states of

transsexuality, transvestism, and androgyny as a way of examining what happens when the status of the phallus is ambiguous. So these chapters circle around the interlocking components of desire, subjectivity, gender and sexual difference, the gaze, the phallus, the name-of-thefather, and dharma in the Mbh. They attempt to both build upon feminist and Freudian analyses that have been made of the epic, yet also offer fresh readings through the use of a specifically feminist Lacanian framework. I do not seek to offer conclusions as much as open a new space for dialogue and research and reflection, in fact I would on principle resist any analysis of the epic material that boils it all down too easily. It is vast, it is rich, it is itself not aiming at coherence though it considers itself complete, and I would suggest that the Mahabharata's richness, intrigue, and two thousand-year appeal lie precisely in its endless complexity, its resistance to pat formulations, its variety and contradiction. Lacan as a theorist is well-suited to the reading of such an epic, for his pedagogy seeks to

continuously destabilize pretensions to knowledge, expose contradictions, and explore the slippages in signification, while at the same time not giving up on trying to discern patterns, repetitions, and recurring symbolic structures in the human mind.

With both the Mbh and Lacanian theory, to claim full

understanding reveals precisely how little one understands-both

require

humility, both require that the thinking/writing/reading subject relinquish the phallic position of mastery and be open to the rich plurivocality of meanings and possibilities. This is where a feminist approach also proves itself well-suited to the epic, for it counters the seemingly monolithic masculine narrative not with another master narrative, but instead with a rejection of the need or desire for a master narrative and an approach that is not founded on mastery but openness and receptivity to the connections and insights, the subtle subversions and subtexts that present themselves.

I hope that this dissertation will make a

contribution not only in terms of content, but also on the level of approaching and engaging the text-but

without further ado, let us begin working toward Lacan

and left half of the Mahgbharata from the greater context of psychoanalysis and South Asia.

Chapter 1- Psychoanalysis and the Subcontinent

Psychoanalysis is no stranger to the Indian subcontinent. From the legendary Visnu on Freud's desk through the terrifying mothers and erotic ascetics of contemporary scholarship, the thinly-veiled or outright eroticism, incest, and gender-bending in Hindu myth, mysticism, epic and ritual has captured the imagination of psychoanalytically-inclined scholars, South Asian and Western alike. Indeed, for the psychoanalytically-informed scholar, trained to tease out the deep symbolism of the unconscious, the hidden patterns, the inverted recurrent motifs, what might be most problematic is that much of the psychoanalytic material in Hinduism is at times so obvious!* If one of the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis is that themes of incest, castration, and polyrnorphous perversion exist and motivate us on the unconscious level, what to make of a culture that not only abounds in such consciously articulated images, but also presents them as matter-of-fact or even playful narratives?

Though much of the history of

psychoanalysis in South Asia could be said to carry the familiar tones of an all-tooeasy quasi-colonialist transfer of Western values, family structures, and symbolic * See Wendy Doniger's 'When a Lingam is Just a Good Cigar" [1999b].

equations to a society characterized by a high degree of prior cultural development spanning millennia, much has also been a sustained attempt to work through these radical differences in the form, quality, and content of the cultural products that come under psychoanalytic scrutiny. This chapter, addressing the life and history of psychoanalysis on the subcontinent, will be divided into two sections: the first making an overview of the project of psychoanalysis as it relates to the study of religion in South Asia, the second examining more specifically the contributions that Lacanian theory can offer to this project.

The Contexts: Psychoanalytic Anthropology and Freud on the Subcontinent

Questions and currents in the discipline of psychoanalytic anthropology So we will begin from the outside working in-contextualizing this work within, or in relation to, the discipline of psychoanalytic anthropology. Though this is a primarily literary study, it is preoccupied with the question of culturespecifically, the question of applying a theoretical orientation and accompanying set of analytic tools that were forged and developed in one culture-this implying both time and place-to

term here

another. And though I obviously would not be

moving ahead with this project if I did not ultimately feel that it is a valid enterprise, I do think that it requires some reflection at the outset, in order not to fall too easily into a blithe and uncritical analysis of one culture with the conceptual tools of another. Post-colonial discourse has taught us too much to undertake such a project without pausing to examine the assumptions and implications inherent to it. And so, without going into extensive literature reviews

and painstaking delineations of major theories, I hope here to take a brief look at the field within which I situate this project and provide at least a working justification of it. Psychoanalytic anthropology contains within its very name a seeming contradiction that represents the crux of the tensions both within and outside it. The first of the terms, psychoanalysis, has a long history of unabashedly universalist (and subtler colonialist) aspirations: Freud proposed to be able to explain "primitive" cultures-indeed

all of culture-on the basis of incest taboos

and the Oedipus complex, mapping out a basic human psychodynamic structure that he felt could be proven across temporal and geographical boundaries. On a personal level, even, Freud consummated the role of traditional civilized European intellectual, looking to non-Western cultures from an attitude of superiority and even indifference. As Christiane Hartnack notes, "confronted with the challenge to explore the 'dark' continents of their time-the women, and the non-Western world-Freud

unconscious,

focused on the first, admitted his

difficulty in theorizing on women, and remained uninterested in an intercultural exchange of his findings that went beyond a confirmation of his own expansionist strivings" [2001: 1491. And even beyond Freud himself, his time, and cultural milieu, psychoanalysis as a mature discipline has at its heart certain core assumptions about human nature-psychic

structure, symbol formation, family

relationships, psychosexual development, gender differentiation, and sexual difference-that

are understood as constants that anytime or anywhere will feed

into individual and cultural motivations, behaviors, and characteristics. In other

words, psychoanalysis as a discipline is based upon the claim there are certain core experiences of being human that are universal-and

if these core experiences are

universal, then so can be the science that purports to explain them. The discipline of anthropology, on the other hand, has had stronger political and intellectual tendencies towards cultural relativism: emphasizing the uniqueness of each culture and the individuals who inhabit and sustain it, and seeking to understand that culture in its own terms without reference to outside schemas.

Anthropology has stressed how different our symbolic, material,

linguistic, and psychic worlds can be, and painted pictures of human society that depict the infinite variations of human expression, belief, and behavior. Psychoanalysis, to many anthropologists, is simply a product of a turn-of-thecentury Jewish intellectual in Catholic Vienna, and should be studied in its relevance to that culture. To attempt to extend frameworks and ideas forged in the crucible of that particular culture to others with radically different histories, beliefs, social structures, and material realities-and that-is

to make truth-claims from

at best preposterous, at worst, darkly hegemonic. But it is not as neat as that, and the seeming oppositions between these

disciplines also contain similarities that bring them together. Psychoanalysis, for all its universalist assumptions and pretensions, is very much a science of the idiosyncratic.* No two case histories are alike, and no two cultures have the same way of dealing with basic human conditions.

If anything, psychoanalysis, by

applying a common set of structures and dynamics across cultures, can better * A favorite phrase of Peter Caws, personal communication

tease out the particularities and idiosyncrasies of each culture and the individuals within it, and in this sense might counter what Gananath Obeyesekere describes as a "naive anthropologism which refuses to recognize that symbolic forms might at some level deal with basic human problems of the sort that Freud highlighted"

[1990: xviii]. Indeed, the value of psychoanalysis as a metatheory that is capable of working across time and space may lie in precisely this ability to handle the manifold variety of human behaviors and symbolic expressions while at the same time providing a framework that juxtaposes the patterns and commonalities they present: This is what any theory (metatheory) should do: it should exhibit enough nomological rigor to show the rules or principles that govern our common humanity while at the same time possessing enough flexibility to illuminate the different forms of life that spring from this common base. The problem of universality versus relativity then becomes a largely empty one. [Obeyesekere 1990: 218-191 Anthropology, likewise, with its venerable tradition of standing for the unique and particular in each culture, has universalist kernels with which it too struggles. How can an ethnographer ever truly present a culture in its own terms when that very presentation must be framed in a foreign language? How can ethnographers ever truly filter out their own assumptions, worldviews, psychological conditioning, and academic training from the indigenous ideas, beliefs, and behaviors they are trying to understand and translate?

Though ethnographers may want to

understand cultures in their own unique contexts, and though they may want to present them to their audiences in as "pristine" a form as they can, the very project of anthropology must in many ways necessarily partake of that which it most wishes to disavow.

Anthropologists are aware of these tensions and

contradictions, and in their scholarly discourse discuss how to handle them with sensitivity and integrity, but the point is that the disciplines of anthropology and psychoanalysis are not so opposed or exclusive as they might seem at first glance. Each is fundamentally interested in human beings as endlessly fascinating idiosyncratic subjects, each seeks to discern patterns in cultures that both distinguish them and link them into broader trends within the human experience, each is profoundly concerned with the questions of language and symbolic transformation. What happens when psychoanalysis and anthropology come together as psychoanalytic anthropology is that a commitment to exploring the infinite variety of human expression is brought together with a commitment to discerning the commonalities that animate and form us as subjects-and,

as I see

it, a tremendous potential for understanding and explanation within the human sciences is born. So valid reservations exist, and the process of applying psychoanalysis outside its native contexts is by no means a simple one. The study of any culture with the tools of another is by its nature a problematic and difficult task, and this particular work will be undertaken without trying to minimize the difficulties that are inherent to it. But that said, rather than spinning wheels to try to resolve them, I think there is enough promise to nonetheless move forward with an eye to what can be gained. In the next section addressing foundational themes and thinkers in psychoanalysis and South Asian studies, and throughout the body of this work, I will continue to address the cultural specifics that must shape the application of psychoanalysis to Hinduism, and highlight what insights the epic

Mahiibhiirata in turn offers to psychoanalytic theory, seeking to create a dialogue rather than a monologue. This commitment to mutual reflexivity will, hopefully, create a sense of reciprocity with a culture that has heretofore largely occupied the object rather than the subject position in psychoanalytic dialogue. And on that note, let us now turn to the long and rich dialogue that psychoanalysis has provoked and enjoyed on the Indian subcontinent. Freud on the Subcontinent

At the outset of this section I should make clear that this will not be an exhaustive survey of all the work that has been done on this subject. Psychoanalysis has had a life of almost a century on the subcontinent, and to attempt to cover everything would be more than a book in itself. What this section

will do is trace a basic trajectory from psychoanalysis' strongly colonialist beginnings into a valid scholarly sub-discipline that has taken on a rich and vibrant life of its own; it will seek to highlight the major ideas around which the dialogue turns, introduce the thinkers who develop them, and be the bridge that takes us from the discipline of psychoanalytic anthropology writ large into Lacan and the left half of the Mahiibhiirata. At least for its formative years, psychoanalysis in India was inextricably embedded in the colonial situation on the subcontinent. Freud's Indian followers used psychoanalysis to argue their case for independence, while British colonial authorities used Freud's theories to justify their hegemony. Freud himself saw India as a conquest, a jewel in the crown of his budding discipline, but beyond accepting intellectual tribute from his Indian disciples rarely showed any real

interest in the culture to which his ideas were being applied.

The members of

the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, in turn, apart from the respect and acknowledgement willingly offered to the eminent professor, by no means played the role of loyal subjects: they pointed out aspects of Freud's theories that were not valid for the Indian cultural context or simply developed their own psychoanalytic tools that they felt worked better. Christiane Hartnack provides a thorough study of the development of psychoanalysis in colonial India which I will not attempt to reproduce here, but I will use her work to lay out the foundation upon which psychoanalysis in India grew in order to bring us to the more contemporary scholarship that informs this study. We will begin with two English psychoanalytic writers who, though ultimately having far less impact on the development of psychoanalysis in India than Girindrasekhar Bose,* were heard more widely in the international psychoanalytic discourse of the time: Owen Berkeley-Hill and Claude Daly. Both of these writers give us a flavor of the kind of colonialist psychoanalyzing that, in the early twentieth century, still had great currency in psychoanalytic dialogue-and

the contrast with Bose should give us a

good reminder that psychoanalysis is ultimately a set of tools, the final product of which is dependent on the wielder. Berkeley-Hill was a member of the elite Indian Medical Service and superintendent of the European Mental Asylum in Bihar for almost twenty years. Though he married an Indian woman, helped found the Indian Psychoanalytic Society with Girindrasekhar Bose, and was considered somewhat of an intellectual * Considered the father of Indian psychoanalysis-we will return to him shortly.

and social renegade, Berkeley-Hill was nonetheless a devoted colonialist. His first major essay, published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1921 and titled "The Anal-Erotic Factor in the Religion, Philosophy, and Character of the Hindus," attempted to demonstrate the wide range of anal-erotic impulses in Hindu culture. For example, the deities Agni, Indra, and Siirya are all "associated with passing enormous amounts of wind" and thus linked to anal-erotic fixations; the notion of atman is the "flatus complex masquerading as metaphysical spirit"; and the yogic techniques of control over the sphincter muscles are really an effort "to direct flatus into a most elaborate quasi-philosophical system" [Hartnack 2001: 511.

Brahminical ritualism is likewise an indication of "classical pedantic-

compulsive, anal-erotic" tendencies, and the creation and juggling of large arithmetical quantities in Hindu myths an "expression of the moulding capacities characteristic of early anal activities" [Ibid.]. This explains for Berkeley-Hill "why people all over the world have developed antipathies to Hindusn-"the Hindu has all the disadvantageous traits of an anal-erotic personality structure, such as irritability, bad temper, unhappiness, hypochondria, miserliness, meanness, pettiness, slow-mindedness, a tendency to bore, a bent for tyrannizing and dictating, and obstinacy" [Ibid., 521. The British character, of course, has the characteristics of "determination and persistence, power of organization, competence, reliability and thoroughness, generosity, individualism, and the general ability to deal with concrete objects of the material worldv-these contrasting characteristics, in addition to the overall Hindu lack of "a

psychological disposition to leadership," [Hartnack 2001: 521 provide for BerkeleyHill, and presumably his readers, an obvious justification for British colonial rule. Claude Daly built on Berkeley-Hill's anal-erotic insights, and linked them to castration traumas. A military officer who learned of psychoanalysis after a mental breakdown in World War I, Daly published a long essay on " E l i and the Hindus' Castration Complex" in 1927 in Imago. In the image of E l i dancing wildly on the supine body of her husband ~ i v aher , body dripping in blood and decorated with hacked-off limbs and phallic symbols, he finds "a symbolization of the gruesome appropriation of the desired object, thus representing the penis envy of all women," interpreting this as an "expression of repressed infantile complexes" and concluding that "the Hindu race succumbed to a regression on the basis of their abnormal reaction to the castration complex, which appears later than the menstruation complex. This made of it a race that is dominated by possessions and compulsive ideas similar in nature to those we have found among neurotics" [Ibid., 681.

Since Daly, following Freud, saw cultural dynamics as mirroring

individual psychodynamics, this to him confirms that Hindus are "psychologically stuck in a dark age" whereas Europeans have advanced to a psychologically mature stage IIbid., 691, an argument that once more clearly justifies the colonial regime. Three years later, Daly would move more explicitly into this theme, publishing "A 8

Psychoanalytic Study of Indian Revolutionary Activities," in the International Journal

of Psychoanalysis in 1930.

In it, Daly develops a theory of the Indian

revolutionaries' psyche in reference to Hindu myths, linking the use of renunciation and suffering as weapons to similar tactics employed by Irish

dissidents and English suffragettes and calling this approach "in its essence, an infantile trait" [Hartnack 2001: 711. Not only is the movement infantile, it is for Daly outright Oedipal: the fervor for Mother India expressed by the Bande

Mataram reveals incestuous desires in a "common pattern of Oedipal fantasiesthe little boy fights the brutal father in order to liberate the wounded mother" [Ibid., 721. Incorporating his earlier work on Kali, Daly suggests that with Indian revolutionaries "we have an even more subtle and complex problem than that of Western revolutionaries.. .the Indian revolutionary identifies himself with Kali, the mother who successfully rebels against and humiliates the father, and condones her criminal tendencies" [Ibid., 731. Thus, returning to the argument for British colonial rule, Daly concludes: [Indians] are a race who fail in their rebellion against the father, and as a result of this failure adopt a feminine role with feminine character traits. There results, so to speak, a spilt in the male personality, the aggressive component undergoing repression, which accounts for the childlike and feminine character traits of the Hindu as whole, and the fact that they thrive only under very firm administration, but if allowed latitude in their rebellious tendencies are quick to take advantage of it. [Ibid.] Though each had a genuine interest in psychoanalysis, Berkeley-Hill's and Daly's political agenda is obvious. It was the beginning of the end for British rule in India, but the idea of such a populace governing itself seemed unthinkable. Psychoanalysis was not simply intellectually colonialist in its expansion to claim new territory for the Oedipus complex, as Sudhir Kakar would later say, it was clearly utilized by real powers for real ends. But it was also used by the resistance, as we will see with Bose. Two things come out of these British thinkers that I want to bracket for continued consideration: first, and thinkers like Sudhir Kakar and

Stanley Kurtz will also pick this up, both Berkeley-Hill and Daly link Hindus (especially nationalists) with other dependent or inferior groups~children, women, Irish, and neurotics-at

the bottom of the mental health spectrum. This

has been a common critique of the application of psychoanalysis to non-Western cultures-measured

by a Western yardstick, non-Western cultures not surprisingly

always seem to come out looking neurotic! Second, Daly especially hits upon the influence of the goddess in Hindu psychodynamics involving sexuality, castration, and menstruation. The fact that Hinduism has strong female deities is clearly an important and challenging task for psychoanalysis in India to address, as there is no equivalent in contemporary Western culture to the wide-spread and powerful tradition of goddess worship that has shaped and driven Hinduism continuously from its earliest origins.* Certain striking implications stemming from this fact also emerge from Bose's work, to which we will turn now. Girindrasekhar Bose, head of Calcutta University's Psychology Department for most of his career, founded the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in 1922-it

was

the first recognized psychoanalytic association outside of Europe, making its debut even before that of France. Unarguably the father of Indian psychoanalysis, Bose was a member of the highly educated Westernized Bengali elite, and though an

* The Western tradition is certainly not without female divinities and goddess worship-from classical antiquity to Celtic religion to Catholic veneration and cults of the Virgin Mary, the feminine divine has both surfaced and remained powerfully latent in the historical trajectories of Western religious beliefs and practices. But there has been no continuous goddess tradition of the breadth and depth that has characterized Hinduism-one that can be traced from the earliest written and archaeological sources to contemporary devotion, one that touches all segments of society and reaches through all branches of a diverse and pluriform religion. As we will see later, it is this defining element of goddess worship in Hinduism that attracts and intrigues many Western feminist scholars of religion, and as I will continue to elaborate in this chapter, also complexities psychoanalytic work on the subcontinent.

avid admirer and stalwart proponent of Freud's psychoanalysis, also had anticolonial, nationalistic sensibilities that made his reception of it careful and critical. Indeed, he took the question of cultural hybridity by the horns and often actively molded Freud's theories and practices to better fit the Indian cultural milieu. The famous psychoanalytic couch was replaced with a deck chair (a fitting reminder of its transfer from foreign lands), and Bose scrapped the analyst's impassive neutrality by facing his patients and establishing an active interpersonal exchange with them. He believed in many of the insights and benefits that psychoanalysis could offer independent of a patient's cultural background, but also realized that differences in family structure, child-rearing practices, religious notions, and gender roles could be obstacles to any easy application of psychoanalytic method in an Indian context [Hartnack 2001: 1201. Even beyond societal structures, Bose realized that psychoanalysis was profoundly shaped by Western notions of selfhood, subject-object relations, and biological theories, and that some of these things would have to change if psychoanalysis was to be viable in India. For example, in contrast to Freud's positing of a basic alienation and antagonism between subject and object, culture and individual, Bose employed a traditionally Hindu emphasis on interrelatedness and interdependence.

Whereas Freud

emphasized the structural separation of the id, ego, and superego, Bose emphasized the unity of the Self. Whereas Freud saw himself as an archaeologist reaching back through psychic layers to reconstruct a buried past, Bose saw his work more synchronically as an engineer fixing circuits that weren't functioning properly [Ibid., 1281. Bose looked to traditional Indian psychology-especially the

introspective insights of the Upanisads and the meditative techniques of yoga-in his work on sense perception and states of consciousness, and incorporated folk beliefs and practices into his work on auto-suggestion and healing, attempting throughout the course of his career to "revive Indian knowledge while functioning in a professional world that was basically structured according to Western systems of knowledge" [Hartnack 2001: 1051. What is perhaps most striking about Bose's work, besides the uniquely Indian methods and elements he imbued it with, is what he found. In contrast to Freud, whose clientele was largely female, Bose had few female patients given the still traditional separation of genders in Indian society.

But whereas Freud

identified the (in)famous phenomenon of "penis envyn in the women he treated, Bose found a correspondingly striking "wish to be femalen among the men he treated. Moreover, in contrast to the misogynist currents in Freud's work, Bose found strong positive associations and identifications with women that he linked to "the motivation of maternal deity" [Ibid., 1451. In addition to fears of castration, then, there seemed to also exist in Bose's patients a wish to be castrated! Though Freud himself never made much of Bose's discoveries of the male wish to be female or the desire to be castrated, I think this is a striking example of the kind of insights that a cross-cultural psychoanalysis can offer.

In combining the

psychoanalytic techniques of listening and interpretation with a cultural sensitivity that was open to reversals and transformations of what Freud found, Bose further refined and complexified psychoanalytic theory in ways that probably would not have occurred had the discipline stayed in Vienna. Kakar, to whose work we will

now turn, picks up and develops many of the insights and theoretical developments that Bose's work initiates. Kakar

did

not

directly succeed

Bose-G.

Morris

Carstairs was

chronologically the next major contributor to psychoanalysis on the subcontinent. His study of a Rajput community, TIMTwice Born [1961], is perhaps the best-known and most widely-referenced of all psychoanalytic anthropological works on India, a sustained psychoanalytic ethnography researched in the local tongue with a genuine sensitivity towards both his subjects and the delicacies of such an enterprise.

Kakar is in many ways responding to and building on Carstairs'

foundation: both attempt to systematically address Hindu family structure, caste and social structure, child-rearing practices, religious beliefs, and attitudes towards sexuality, the body, illness, and healing. Furthermore, both attempt to outline psychoanalytic material that is specifically Indian, for example, the idea of

a distinctly Indian Oedipal situation arising out of the Hindu joint family and the existence of pollution anxieties related to distinctly Hindu attitudes and practices involving consumption, excretion, and sexual intercourse.

Kakar's first major

work, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India [1978], thus follows Carstairs in providing a well-rounded attempt to lay out basic structures of family life, child-rearing, and sexuality in India, and his later works span a wide range of topics-including

mysticism [1991], clinical practice [1999],

healing [1982], and sexuality [ 1987; 19901-that psychoanalytic and ethnographic interests.

continue to revolve around core

In uPsychoanalysis and Non-Western Cultures" Kakar notes Freud's own basic indifference to cultures outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, and contends that the earliest attempts by Western scholars to apply psychoanalysis to nonWestern cultures were weakened by two foundational flaws: first of all, an assumption of the classic "psychic unity of mankind" position that seemed to become simply a pretext for extending the intellectual reign of the Oedipus complex into uncharted psychic territories, and second, a measuring of nonWestern cultures' mental health by a Western yardstick [1985: 4411, which, as we saw with Berkeley-Hill and Daly, tends to lump everything non-Western at the neurotic end. These unfortunate early psychoanalytic forays were not only a function of a lack of sophistication or sensitivity on the part of their proponentssays Kakar, they reflect the intrinsic difficulties of such an enterprise. First of all, for a discipline that has its origin in notions of health and healing it is very difficult to extract normative judgments from the interpretive process. That is to say, it is difficult for a discipline that began as a curative process to be "neutralnin studying discourse, examining dreams and symbolic formations, and observing child-rearing practices, the interpretive process attempts to discern what is pathogenic, what constitutes the genesis of neurosis or psychosis.

It must,

therefore, have built-in notions of what is healthy and what is not, and will approach, for example, a culture's breast-feeding practices with those notions informing its analysis. Furthermore, as Bose recognized, there can be powerful differences in modalities of relating or fundamental notions of the self that profoundly affect the

nature and quality of analytic work in a given culture. Kakar, like Bose, uses the example of Freud's "blank screen" or "reflecting mirror9'-the concept of analytic neutrality-as

something that may simply not work in the context of the

communicative patterns of a given culture. Indian communication patterns, for example, might require more vigorous non-verbal feedback from the analyst than Western patients might expect or require. The idea of introspection, whereby one scrutinizes the events and adventures of one's own life as a sort of historical narrative, is likewise a foundational element of Western psychoanalysis that becomes problematic when applied to non-Western cultures. Says Kakar, "this kind of introspection is simply not a feature of Indian culture and its literary traditions.. .an Indian analyst must confront the fact that for most patients, emotional problems do not have a life historical dimension or, even more generally, a genesis in the 'psyche'" [1985: 4431. Problems are more intuitively attributed to malevolent spirits who lie outside the individual, or seen as the product of the karma of a previous life. Even the Indian injunction "Know Thyself" refers to a self other than to which Socrates was referring-for

Hindus, it invokes

the atman, "a self uncontaminated by time and space and thus without the life historical dimension which is a focus of psychoanalysis and Western romantic literature" [Ibid.].

Both traditions may exhort reflective individuals to know

themselves, but the self that is to be known may be shaped according to very different cultural parameters. Indian notions of the body, of the family, of nature and the cosmos all further contribute to what becomes a distinct cultural context

that psychoanalysis cannot be easily mapped onto. But, says Kakar, that doesn't mean the project of cross-cultural psychoanalysis should be abandoned: In arguing for a relativising of psychoanalysis through an inquiry into nonWestern experience, I do not question the great developmental constants psychoanalysis has uncovered. These are, of course, based on a shared, universal experience of infancy and childhood within the family. My notions of relativity have more to do with establishing the boundary conditions for various analytic concepts, determining their relative importance within the edifice of psychoanalytic thought and separating what is Western-cultural in psychoanalytic formulations from what is truly universal. [1985: 4441 In "The Maternal-Feminine in Indian Psychoanalysis" Kakar continues to echo and develop many of the psychoanalytic insights that Bose first introduced. Beginning with a quote from Bose suggesting that in the Indian Oedipal situation "the real struggle lies between the desire to be a male and its opposite, the desire to be a female," Kakar goes on to examine what about the Indian situation requires a reappraisal of certain tenets of psychoanalytic theory. For example, children in India have traditionally grown up naked until about the ages of seven to ten years (though this is becoming less so in modem, urban India), so the differences between the sexes are never the traumatic surprise they might be in the West, and there is in both Bose's and his own cases a "fluidity of the patients' cross-sexual and generational identificationsn that do not appear to the same extent in European and North American subjects [Kakar 1989: 3551. Kakar's main argument returns to what in many ways I see as the crux of psychoanalysis in India versus Europe and America: "that the 'hegemonic narrative' of Hindu culture as far as male development is concerned is neither that of Freud's Oedipus nor that of Christianity's Adam. One of the more dominant narratives of

this culture is that of Devi, the great goddess, especially in her manifold expressions as mother in the inner world of the Hindu son" [Kakar 1989: 3561. There simply is no equivalent to the Great Goddess in Western traditions, and if Western notions of God-the-Father have been shown by psychoanalysis to resonate powerfully with other chords in Western culture, then God-the-Mother requires at least the same amount of psychoanalytic scrutiny in India. Furthermore, also in contrast to contemporary European-American culture, Kakar notes that myths in India are not, as Freud described them, "the wishes, dreams and fantasies of a youthful humanity," an obsolete product of a bygone era; on the contrary, "vibrantly alive, their symbolic power intact, Indian myths constitute a cultural idiom which aids the individual in the construction and integration of his inner world" [1989: 3.581. This brings together the two strands of psychoanalytic work on India that at times may seem to diverge: a more clinically-oriented approach that

is primarily concerned with individual

psychodynamics, family structure, and developmental issues, and a psychoanalysisof-culture approach that is primarily interested in the symbolic dimensions of religious experience, ritual, and myth. In both East and West, it often takes one to inform the other, but particularly in India individuals regularly look to myths and passages from the epics to model their behavior, justify their choices, and understand their roles in society. And psychoanalytic work on the Indian epics and myths must thus consciously engage itself as work on living, breathing cultural entities that remain a powerful force in the lives of those who inhabit its cultural tradition.

Stanley Kurtz [1992; 1999; 20001 enters the dialogue of psychoanalysis in South Asia making precisely this link between early childhood experience and mythic-religious expression, especially regarding the psychology of goddess mythology and worship. Both building on and critiquing the work of Carstairs and Kakar, Kurtz argues that psychoanalysis can have no real grasp of culture, family life, and individual psychodynamics in India unless it fundamentally revisits and rethinks core elements of Freudian theory.

If one of the most profound

differences between Indian and European-American family structure is the prevalence ofjoint, extended families in India versus nuclear families in the West, Kurtz argues that the presence of multiple mother (and father) figures must thus necessarily impact the upbringing of the Indian child, the psychological challenges with which she or he is confronted, and hence the symbolic cultural motifs that evolve to express and resolve them. For example, rather than aiming at the goal of individuation, consonant with Western family structure and cultural values, the Hindu child must aim instead at successful integration into the group. Likewise, rather than working through early childhood issues with one mother, Hindu children must learn to negotiate and successfully resolve their relationship with multiple mothers. For goddesses-is

Kurtz,

the

multiplicity-yet-unity of

Hindu

deities-especially

thus a cultural-religious mirroring of this development, and on both

cultural and individual levels requires a different psychoanalytic understanding of the necessary phases and constituents thereof.

To this end, Kurtz suggests

replacing Freud's pre-Oedipal phase with an "ek-hi" phase-derived from a Hindi phrase meaning "all the mother (goddesses) are one": As in the Western pre-oedipal phases, questions of trust, identity, and

goodness are at stake in the Hindu ek-hi phase. In the Hindu case, however, the movement is not away from the mother and toward individuation and trust. Rather, the movement is away from the natural mother and toward a more mature immersion in a larger and fundamentally benevolent group of mothers, a group in which all the mothers are, ultimately,just one. [Kurtz 1992: 92-93] The Oedipal phase, then, Kurtz renames the "Durga phase," referring to a body of goddess myths that he sees as reflecting much more accurately than Oedipus the essential tasks and challenges for the Hindu child at this stage of development. Whereas Kakar and Carstairs present the Oedipal situation in India as resulting in a man who is passive, castrated, and feminized, identified with the mother and longing homosexually for the father, Kurtz suggests that a rethinking of Oedipal dynamics through the "Durga complex" brings us the possibility of emotional maturity and successful integration in the group ego. Furthermore, whereas Kakar and Carstairs stop with the self-castration of the Hindu male, a recurrent motif in goddess worship and imagery, Kurtz suggests that the dynamic involves both castration and phallic restoration, the restoration being the reward for having successfully deferred to the father-group and renounced active erotic relations with the mother-group. Kurtz not only rethinks the suitability of the phases associated with childhood development, he also examines the concepts constituent to those phases, such as love. Even these core concepts, so seemingly obvious, have profoundly culture-specific assumptions and ideals inherent to them, and a psychoanalytic theory serious about developing the

best possible analytic tools for understanding other cultures must be prepared to give serious attention to them. Kurtz's work thus furthers psychoanalytic dialogue on South Asia both on the levels of theory and content, though within a paradigm that remains largely Freudian. From here we will begin to transition towards what

I will argue is a much-needed infusion of Lacan into psychoanalytic work on the subcontinent. Besides the few that I have highlighted here, there are, of course, many other rich and prolific thinkers on the subject of psychoanalysis and Hinduism, the treatment of whom I must necessarily abridge if I am ever to get to the heart of this project.

Some I will only mention by name-Devereux

[1951], Spratt

[1977], Roland [1978; 1988; 19911, Masson [1980; 19991, Kripal [1995, 2001, 20011 and Caldwell [1999]. Others-Gananath Obeyesekere [1981; 1984; 19901, Wendy Doniger [1980; 1985; 1991; 1997; 1999a and b; 20001, and Robert Goldman [1978; 1980; 1993; 19991-have

been so intrinsic to the development of this

project that their work will be woven throughout the body of this dissertation. What all of these thinkers bring together-though questions in a different way-is

each of course works with these

an attention to Oedipal dynamics, early childhood

sexuality, symbol formation, and the unconscious, informed by a largely Freudian theoretical structure. And though much good work continues to be done within a traditionally Freudian paradigm, I would argue that for the sub-discipline of psychoanalysis in South Asia to keep step with theoretical dialogue in the rest of the human sciences, it must take account of Lacan's sweeping rearticulation of Freud and address the possibilities that this discourse offers.

If Lacan's

rearticulation of Freudian theory has re-energized and animated contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and if its significance has been recognized not only within the psychoanalytic community but also by scholars working within a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, then it is high time, I think, for it to be introduced to psychoanalytic thinking on myth, epic, and religion in South Asia. Lacan is not totally absent from psychoanalytic dialogue on Hinduism-a few of the more interdisciplinary and theoretically-inclined South Asianists have engaged him. Kakar mentions Lacan in The Analyst and Mystic as a "mystic of psychoanalysis" [1991: 51, and uses his categories of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary to discuss mystic motivation and experience [Ibid., 27-28]. Kripal picks this up and makes some brief reflections on Lacan's notions of jouissance and the psychology of mysticism [1995: 41, 326; 1999: 436, 4521. Cynthia Humes refers to women's place in relation to Lacan's symbolic order in a piece on the Dew Mahatmya, a seventh-century goddess text [2000: 132-331. Doniger makes some oblique references to him in a few works [1999a and b; 20001, and spends some time on his mirror stage in The Bedtrick [2000: 101-1041. Margaret Trawick offers perhaps the most sustained treatment of Lacan that I have discovered thus farabout six pages-in

which she introduces his theories to her primarily

ethnographic and South Asianist audience and makes some links to Tamil notions of the self and Vedic sources [1990: 142-1481. But beyond these, there is nothing else that I have found in my sweeps of the literature. And the paucity of work in this area heretofore is really not

surprising. As Trawick notes, Lacan can be maddening. His prose is intentionally elliptical and obscure, inaccessible to readers who have not sought out instruction. Freud at least aspired to a universal application of psychoanalysis and wrote transparently enough to make his ideas amenable to, even invite, applications within other cultures. Lacan himself, though interested in the psychology of mysticism and informed by French structuralist ethnography, manifests little interest in India specifically or in making sustained attempts to apply his ideas ethnographically. But that doesn't mean such an effort is not promising, and this dissertation is largely driven by the desire to open up fresh theoretical possibilities to a South Asianist audience that might not have thought him worth the trouble. In the next section we will go on to look more explicitly at what Lacan does with Freudian theory, and how his work might apply to studies in Hinduism. Much as Lacan himself approached Freud-but

quite unlike the manner in which

Lacan engaged his psychoanalytic colleagues and contemporaries-this

study does

not seek to overturn or discredit the work that has been done within a more traditional psychoanalytic paradigm; it rather seeks to amplify and extend the psychoanalytic dialogue-teasing

out the radical nuances, exploring beyond the

confines of the nuclear family, emphasizing the role of language, and reflecting on the questions of subjectivity, symbolism, and sexual difference that Lacan gives us a powerful vocabulary to address.

Enter Lacan

Lacan 3 Relation to Freud Lacan conceived his life's work as advocating a "return to Freud," both in redirecting psychoanalytic attention back to Freud's original writings and calling attention to their radical insights, as well as in criticizing the work of most of his psychoanalytic contemporaries whom he saw as fundamentally misunderstanding and misappropriating Freud's intellectual legacy.

His attacks against the

psychoanalytic establishment were often highly derisive and dismissive, and his clinical methods were perceived as renegade and unorthodox. This earned him "excommunication" from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1963, after which he went on to form his own school: the ~ c o l eFreudienne de Paris. Though Lacan considered his as the only authentically Freudian school in the psychoanalytic community, in fairness his approach should be contextualized in relation to the other major psychoanalytic schools of the time: Kleinian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory, and ego-psychology-they not consider Lacan the most authentic!

certainly would

But it is true that, in contrast to these

schools, Lacan did most consistently advocate, and practice, a close re-reading of Freud's original works and give sustained attention to a fresh elucidation and reworking through of Freud's theories. For thinkers outside the community of clinical psychoanalysts, Lacan offers a level of theorizing on human subjectivity, language, and culture that is as profound as it is far-reaching, re-energizing the Freudian legacy and reasserting its continuing relevance and interpretive acumen.

Lacan's attention to Freud's original works was by no means that of a dogged disciple, however. He built new concepts upon Freud's foundations, wove new themes through apparent contradictions, and, on some points, departed from Freud altogether. Much of Lacan's relation to Freud develops chronologically, his license evolving with his intellectual development. For example, his earliest work on the Oedipus complex does not substantially differ from Freud's, "his only originality being to emphasize its historical and cultural relativity, taking his cue from the anthropological studies by Malinowski and others (Lacan, 1938: 66)" [Evans 1996: 1271. Here already we see the cross-cultural potential of Lacan in relation to Freud, a point we will continue to develop. By the 1950s Lacan begins to take a much more dynamic approach to Freud's theories, and the Oedipus complex becomes the introduction of a triangular symbolic order into a dualistic imaginary, a structural function of lack that revolves less around an actual penis than an imagined phallus, a castration that has the same effects for the female child as for the male. It is not about the "mother" and "father" per se as much as the maternal and paternal functions, and the assumption of sexual difference that emerges from the Oedipus complex is more a function of how the subject navigates this complex than any biologically-given genitalia. Whereas for Freud it is the boy who desires the mother and identifies with the father, for Lacan both boys and girls desire the mother and identify with the father-woman

(we will

address this in more depth later) thus becomes "Other" for herself as she does for man.

Furthermore, Lacan differs from Freud in his exposure to and affinity for structuralist theory.

Lacan was profoundly influenced both by Ferdinand de

Saussure's linguistics and Levi-Strauss' application of Saussure beyond linguistics to culture, myth, and kinship structures. Indeed, the fundamentally Saussurean idea of language as consisting in the elements of signifier and signified (though Lacan, as opposed to Saussure, privileges the signifier) is perhaps one of the most important foundations underlying Lacan's work, as well as a characteristically structuralist emphasis on relations between elements that in themselves are fundamentally empty. Thus Lacan goes beyond Freud in emphasizing an antiessentialist view of the subject, which instead exists as a function of symbolic, social, and linguistic relations, in itself signifying nothing. Any biologistic strains in Freud's thought are also read on a symbolic, linguistic register: for example, whereas for Freud penis and phallus are used interchangeably, Lacan virtually ignores the penis as a material, biological entity and focuses almost exclusively on the phallus in its imaginary and symbolic valence. Freud's two models of psychic structure-the

first, "topographic" system of conscious, unconscious, and

preconscious, and the second "structural" system of id, ego, and super-ego~also undergo critique and revision in Lacan's hands. The terms continue to retain something of their Freudian meaning and usage, but both models are subsumed under Lacan's primary tripartite system of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, which we will examine in more depth below. Lastly, Lacan brings an entirely new psychoanalytic spin to thinking about Woman and femininity. Though he follows Freud in identifying the masculine as

the dominant cultural paradigm and focusing on the phallus as the primary signifier of sexual difference for which no feminine equivalent exists, Lacan departs from Freud in refusing to impart any biological essence to woman or femininity. For Lacan, Woman is a position in the Symbolic order, and if there indeed exists no symbol for woman that is equivalent to the phallus, "the" Woman as such can be said not to exist [Lacan 1982: 144]!

This is obviously a highly

provocative statement that we will examine more at length in subsequent sections; suffice it now to illustrate that, in contrast to Freud who returned again and again-futilely-to

the mystery of woman and feminine desire, Lacan places

woman in a symbolic position that makes her, as a category, as immaterial and inaccessible as truth, or God, or the inscrutable Other. Overall, Lacanian theory differs from traditional Freudian theory in that the fundamental relationship is that between the subject and the Symbolic order, between the over-arching structure of language and the contingent nature of the subject within it. If Freudian theory's core element is the Oedipus complex, Lacan's is the relationship between language/law/the Symbolic order and the subject-and

this, I would suggest, makes Lacan potentially even better suited to

cross-culturalwork than Freud. All cultures are governed by symbolic orders-the primary constituent of which is language-whereas

family structures, as we have

seen in the psychoanalytic work heretofore on India, can present quite radically different possibilities for Oedipal dynamics. Lacan's abstracting of "mother" and "father" to maternal and paternal functions, for example, might overcome Kurtz's critique

that

group

parenting

fundamentally

alters

an

Indian

child's

psychodynamics: whether as an individual or a group, the symbolic function must intervene to interrupt the narcissistic imaginary dyad, and it is how the child negotiates that process that is crucial to her or his subsequent development. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before going on to examine how Freud and Lacan play out differentially in certain examples of Hindu myth and religion, let us first give a basic overview of the constituent elements of Lacanian theory.

Overview of elements of Lacanian theory and some examples Perhaps the best place to start in the vast and complex vocabulary of Lacanian discourse is with the distinction between the registers of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real that are as fundamental to Lacan's thinking as Freud's ego, super-ego, and id were to his. The Real is usually presented in opposition to the Symbolic, with the Imaginary between them. If the Real is monist (direct, unmediated experience), the Imaginary is dyadic (narcissistic mirroring relations), and the Symbolic triadic (the intervention of language and the law into the imaginary dyad).

Represented in terms of developmental

chronology, the Real would be the plenitude of infantile experience, the Imaginary would be the narcissistic relationship with the mother, the Symbolic the Oedipal intervention of the father by which the subject is formed in relation to law and language.

But Lacan also insists that all three registers continue to

synchronically animate

subjective experience,

(like Bose)

resisting

an

archaeological approach to psychic life and instead emphasizing the continual retroactive restructuring of symbolic meaning and subjective experience.

The Real is the realm of immediate, un-mediated experience. It is the realm of trauma, which is defined by the impossibility of translation and representation. It is full presence, before lack or absence are introduced; it is the ineffable alinguistic realm of jouissance, enjoyment of a sexual nature that one can experience but never know; it is all that exists beyond the limits of language and representation. The Imaginary is-as

I like to describe it-everything we think is

real. It is the realm in which we live and understand our lives, our loves, our gender and sexual roles; it is the realm in which we make sense of our experience through conventional wisdom, common sense, and interpersonal interaction. It is in the Imaginary that we understand our selves as unified subjects-the stage having given us this illusion-and

mirror

in which we define ourselves and our

world according to ideal representations. The Imaginary is the realm of the ego, consciousness, and meaning; it hides the rift, the chasm between the Real and the Symbolic, reconciling the primal experience of the Real and the Symbolic superstructure that forms us as subjects.

The Symbolic is the all-pervasive

structure of law and language that governs our entry into culture, our position as sexed subjects, and our relations with the Other. It is that which structures our reality, our Imaginary-it

gives us, through language and symbolic representation,

the ideals and concepts by which we order our lives, meanings, and notions of ourselves as individuals, partners, and groups. The Symbolic is a sort of cultural operating system that is internalized by the subject through education, socialization, and acculturation, often taken on unconsciously as the subject's own. Notions of self, nation, race, and gender that are subtly embedded in language

and the visual media around us, for example, would be examples of the Symbolic that structures the Imaginary we call our reality. On the one hand, Lacan's Symbolic corresponds to Freud's preconscious, as structures that we may become sometimes aware of but generally are not. But it is also, more importantly, the register of the unconscious-hence

Lacan's famous

dictum that "the unconscious is structured like a language" [1973: 1491. Like language, the unconscious operates through a system of signs, arbitrarily but inextricably linked in a chain of differential relations; the unconscious is located in the Symbolic as something that is transindividual and intersubjective for it only exists "inside" us to the extent and in the manner that language does-as

an

innate predisposition to law and structure, and the capacity to internalize and individualize these laws and structures.

Thus, just as the unconscious is

structured like a language, it is also "the discourse of the Othern [Lacan 1977: 161-the

"Other" understood as radical alterity, both as another subject who is

ultimately unknowable and unassimilable and as the symbolic order that exists beyond the reach and control of the subject.

I will be giving more attention below to the specific concepts I will be working with in this project, and feel that with Lacan it is ultimately best to let the ideas emerge in the context of the work rather than attempt to lay them out comprehensively before beginning. So let us run a few test cases now-examples drawn from outside the Mahabharata but within the Hindu tradition-to

get a

working sense of how Lacan's ideas might be applied within a South Asian context.

Obeyesekere and Ganeia

As a segue from our earlier discussion of Lacan's elaborations on Freud, and as a prelude to our more sustained application of Lacan to the body of the epic, I want in this section to use a few vignettes from outside the epic tradition, though relevant to it, to illustrate how Lacanian theory can be superimposed upon Freudian readings, and in so doing, extend, amplify, and enrich them. Ganesa, one of Hinduism's most beloved and widely worshipped deities, does not explicitly appear in the Mahiibhiirata, but folk legend holds that he wrote the entire epic, dictated by its author Vpsa, with his broken tusk (a "potent" psychoanalytic motif we will revisit further below). Furthermore, he is the Hindu god of auspicious beginnings, and so, for both these reasons, it seems fitting that we begin with his story. Ganesa, for many psychoanalytically inclined scholars of the Hindu tradition, is the paradigmatic Indian Oedipus. The myth of Ganeia's creation, of course, has almost as many forms as it has tellers, but a simple rendition of a wellknown version should suffice here: G ~ e h is a created by P3rvati from the dirt off her body to stand guard while she bathes. ~iva,her husband, comes home, and, not recognizing this youth as his son, cuts off Ganesa's head in an act of jealous rage. Pfirvati protests. ~ i v arepents, and replaces his head with that of an elephant. Ganeia is an obese, effeminate male with a flaccid trunk and one broken tusk, who rides upon a rat. Obeyesekere, in presenting Ganesa as the Indian equivalent to Oedipus, grounds his analysis in Hindu family and social structure as it differs from the West. He argues that the erotic-nurturant bond between mother and son is especially strong in Hindu culture, as the mother, starved for affection within the joint family

structure,*engages her son in emotional and erotic dependency: this "eroticism is compounded by a key feature of Hindu family relationship-the

domination of

the mothern [Obeyesekere 1990: 121, while the absolute patripotestal authority of the Indian father requires unquestioning loyalty and submission from the son. However, for Obeyesekere, rather than challenging and overcoming the father as in the Western Oedipal model, the Indian boy is locked into a position of domination and passivity, and the Indian Oedipal model is thus an identification through submission IIbid., 841 in a culture for which individuation is neither a goal nor a concept. The son does not slay, but rather is slain by the father. The standard Freudian formulation would read Ganesa's phallic trunk as symbolizing his incestuous desires, and his eventual re-admittance into the divine family as a reward for undergoing the symbolic castration of decapitation [Ibid., 1161. His broken tusk likewise represents symbolic castration for his incestuous wishes and his privileged access to his mother's nakedness [Ibid., 1201, and Ganesa is thus passive and effeminate, fixated on the mother and fearful of the father. So how might Lacan interpret this myth? We will begin with Ganesa being created from the dirt off Parvati's body. In Lacanian terms, this would suggest the subject and the other tied together at the level of the Real: the initial amorphous fusion between mother and child, direct unmediated presence, oneness. Ganesa, then, is to stand guard while his mother is bathing. This brings us to the level of J o i n t families are traditionally ruled over by the husband's father and mother, with the latter commanding unquestioning obedience from her daughters-in-law. Any show of affection between husband and wife within the household (at least in the presence of others) is traditionally frowned upon, and the daughter-in-lawis also not expected to show excessive affection for her child over others in the household. Stanley Kurtz, as I briefly touched upon earlier, closely examines the psychoanalytic implications of the Hindujoint family structure in All tlie M o t l m are One.

the Imaginary-the

dyadic narcissistic mirroring relation between mother and

child. Ganesa becomes an imaginary object to counter his mother's shame, which appears as a function of the ego; the fact that the child is posted to guard the mother, a reversal of the mother-child relationship, suggests the reciprocal mirror relation between the subject and other in the realm of the Imaginary. ~ i v acomes back, jealous, and cuts off Ganesa's head. The husband/father is the third term, the Symbolic order. Language and the Law-of-the-Father break open the dyadic relationship-the

Symbolic order forces itself upon the subject, which is

experienced as an early trauma. For the subject, a break in imaginary conceptions is experienced as a sense of castration-the

castrating function of the Symbolic

order separates the child from the mother. Parvati protests: the mother (perhaps, as Obeyesekere suggests, starved for affection in a joint family that denies demonstrative feelings) desires to retain the Imaginary mirroring love relationship with the child. Lastly, the head of the elephant represents the return of the repressed-the

trauma of castration/decapitation-now

as-symbol. It is a compromise-the

in the form of syrnptom-

mother keeps the son, but the father imposes

the law of the symbolic order. The Imaginary is maintained, but the Symbolic assumes a place within the subject-it

is the super-ego that prescribes the terms in

which the subject is constituted. This dynamic of symbolic castration and phallic restoration may be a distinctly Hindu Oedipal dynamic that Stanley Kurtz refers to in his Durga phase: "nearly every image of self-castration is followed by a restoration of the phallus" [2000:

1531.

The son/devotee,

renouncing incestuous desire for the

mother/goddess in favor of the group, symbolically castrates himself but is rewarded for this manly sacrifice by "re-empowerment of the child-man at a more mature level by the group. The phallus is thus restoredn [Ibid., 153-541. In Lacan's terms, Ganesa is the symptom-as-symbol that simultaneously hides and reveals the trauma, and the fact that he is an effeminate male might also indicate a symbolic reconciliation of the genders, symptomatic of the lack and instability inherent in the binary cultural construction of sexuality. Ganesa's obesity, too, points in the direction of lack-the fulfilled-and

desire for the mother which can never be

is thus compensated, in this myth directly by the mother, through

over-consumption.

Though I have but skimmed the surface of possible

interpretations of this myth (not to mention its countless variants) this should, I hope, give some idea of how Lacan allows us to build upon the insights of traditional Freudian psychoanalytic anthropology-focusing

on the emotional and

symbolic implications of socialization patterns, the import of the phallus and castration, and the desire of (and for) the mother-while

also offering us a

framework that is less prone to essentializing gender and reifying family schemas, and more flexible and amenable to the import of language, law, and symbolic processes in the genesis of the subject. I will continue to move back and forth between Freudian and Lacanian theory throughout this work, exploring how they may be combined in the context of South Asian materials, and how Lacan might provide some useful departures.

Kinsley and the Ma1uividyi.s As I noted above, the already challenging enterprise of applying psychoanalytic theory to Hindu materials seems compounded even further when we come to a facet of Hinduism that distinguishes it strikingly from the androcentric monotheistic religions in the context of which the discipline of psychoanalysis developed: Hinduism's thriving and deeply-rooted goddess tradition, in which goddesses are worshipped both alongside and independently of male gods, and in which the goddess is often, especially in ~ a k t aand Tantric Hinduism, posited as the greatest of divine principles, the ultimate reality, the creating, sustaining, and destroying force that animates all of creation. God in Hinduism is just as easily a woman, and just as powerfully a woman. So how might traditional psychoanalyses of religion based on God-the-Father apply? The fairly standard Freudian route, taken by Kurtz in All the Mothers are One, simply equates the goddess to the mother: good mother, bad mother, bountiful yet terrifying, nurturing yet devouring, one yet many. Yet it seems to me that there is much more to Hindu goddesses than that-especially in the case of the ten Mahavidps-and

Lacan's rearticulation of Freud might have a lot to offer to our

psychoanalytic understanding of them. What exactly Lacan offers, however, is not immediately clear. Lacan only ever conceives of God as occupying a masculine position in language and culture, and beyond that, he asserts that woman as a symbolic category cannot even be said to exist! How then are we to reinterpret the Hindu goddess from a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework? The Mahavidygs provide us with an intriguing point of

departure. Unlike other goddesses who are worshipped as intermediaries of male gods or whose stories place them in subservient roles, the Mahfividps, though associated with ~ i v a ,are emphatically superior to him, and are consistently depicted in dominant sexual positions or seated upon male deities. They act independently of their male consorts, often dominating and devouring them, or acting in stark contrast to their wishes. They are fierce, strong, and aggressive, and flout the conventions of civilized Hindu womanhood.

For Freud, the

Mahavidyis might be described as embodiments of the angry mother, who, if placated correctly, has the power to grant boons and sustain the world of the male subject. They might be described as embodying rampant female sexuality, linking this sexuality explicitly with death-eros

and thanatos~and manifesting the

feminine anger that in society is metamorphosed into frigidity, hysteria, and masochism. And all these elements might well be there. But a Lacanian analysis would cast them somewhat differently.

If, for Lacan, Woman as a category cannot be said to exist, if Woman is only ever an imaginary construct to support the fiction of male subjectivity, if Woman is thus only a space of absence and lack that projects beyond the fragile borders of the phallic symbolic order, and if this space can be understood as one in which elements of the Real erupt, then the ten Mahiividyfis might be best understood as disjointed images of female otherness that exert a powerful, disturbing, yet transfixing hold on the male imagination.

Furthermore, the disjointed yet

cohesive nature of the Mahfividyis as a group is a good clue to resist easy formulations as to their relationship and function, and a caution to developing too

facile and comprehensive a theory about them. Though they share many similar characteristics, there is no easy division of symbolic labor among the group. Some overlap each other very closely (for example, E l i , Tafi, Chinnamasta, and Bhairavi are all depicted as fierce and bloody; Sodasi, Matangi, and Kamala are beautiful and sexually desirable [Kinsley 1997: 9-14]) others seem completely anomalous (Dhfimavati is a quarrelsome widow [Ibid., I l l , a trope rarely if ever seen in the pantheon of Hindu goddesses). They cannot be interpreted simply as life stages or functions of women (motherhood, for example, is a conspicuously absent element in the iconography of the Mahfwidyiis [Ibid., 4041]), or easily reduced to other symbolic elements of the Hindu pantheon or cosmology (some informants and scholars, for example, have wanted to interpret the Mahavidyiis as representing stages of creation and destruction [Ibid., 411, the three gunas* [Ibid., 421, the three aesthetic moods [Ibid., 431, lunar phases [Ibid., 451, or stages of consciousness [Ibid., 46-48], but Kinsley carefully points out the holes in each of these associations). They are distinctly individual, yet they are one, and the balance between their unity and difference is not always clear. Indeed, if Woman in the Lacanian framework is best understood as a symptom of man, as something onto which lack is projected and simultaneously disavowed, something that both reveals and conceals original trauma, then the elusive nature of the Mahividyiis' association might also be framed in the same light. There is a convergence around certain symbolic structures-dominant sexuality, death, fierceness and

* Philosophical categories meaning "qualities,"each corresponding to one of the three constituents of the universe.

boon-bestowing-yet

also disjunctures of iconography, function, and symbolic

association that prevent too-easy convergence.

As a group, the Mahiividps

simultaneously coalesce and unravel key features of feminine otherness. Indeed, though on the one hand the Lacanian framework places God in the position of absolute Other, the transcendent signifier, the gaze that bounds the field of human subjectivity, it also places Woman in that position, as corollary and necessary to it. Jacqueline Mitchell writes in the editorial introduction to Feminine Sexuality: As negative to the man, woman becomes a total object of fantasy (or an object of total fantasy), elevated into the place of the Other and made to stand for its truth. Since the place of the Other is also the place of God, this is the ultimate form of mystification... In so far as God has not 'made his exit' [E., p.1541, so the woman becomes the support of his symbolic place [1982: 501.

So though God as Other continues to be male, a projection of the authority and certainty that the male subject cannot claim for himself, Woman occupies much the same position as cause of desire, site of lack, and guarantor of male subjectivity, or as Mitchell puts it, this "absolute 'Otherness' of the woman, therefore, serves to secure for the man his own-self knowledge and truth" [1982: 501. In the Hindu context, of course, God and Woman can be conflated, and as we see in the case of the ten Mahiividyas, the function of granting knowledge that both God and Woman assume in the Lacanian framework assumes a central place. The term vidyd itself means knowledge, and Kinsley notes that "viewing the

goddesses as those who grant great knowledge or wisdom is in keeping with a general association between goddesses and knowledge throughout Sdkta literature" [1997: 601.

Indeed, a dynamic that runs throughout the ten

Mahavidps both as individuals and as a group is that of granting or concealing knowledge-one goddess may assume the role of granting liberating knowledge while another might veil reality and delude beings, and in some cases one goddess assumes both roles. This, I think, is a beautiful example of the Lacanian insight that the Other, as God and/or Woman, is held to be the locus of truth yet simultaneously denies it, a symptom that both reveals and hides the fiction and fragility of male subjectivity. These two examples hopefully give some idea of what Lacan offers to more traditionally Freudian analyses of Hindu myth and religion: an abstraction from nuclear family dynamics to symbolic functions, a greater attention to the role of law and language in the formation of subjectivity, and a theoretical elasticity and flexibility that open possibilities rather than reducing or essentializing them. We will return now to an overview of key Lacanian concepts that I will be weaving throughout my analysis of the Mahabharata.

Key Concepts Much as a psychoanalyst uses the tool of attentionflottante to sift through the vast verbiage of the analysand, I employed a technique of lectureflottante in working through the vast text of the Mahabharata. Reading through the text, often skimming the more lengthy didactic passages or painstakingly detailed descriptions of battle, I kept my attention cocked for phrases or motifs that repeated themselves, tuning into key words and patterns and cross-referencing them with others of their kind. In this sense, I felt as if I was in some way allowing the epic to offer its own linkages, and I, as literary analyst, was able to work as

Freud himself did, citing Michelangelo, per via di hare~allowingthe forms to emerge themselves rather than superimposing a premeditated structure on them.

My analysis of the "left half of the Mahgbhiirata will thus focus less on the story line itself and look for patterns of repetition within the text, patterns that to the Lacanian sensibility indicate a symptom that reveals itself in those intervals.

A. K. Ramanujan makes a brief though compelling study of repetition in the Mahabhsrata that, from a South Asianist perspective, lays a strong foundation for a Lacanian analysis based on structures of repetition. In contrast to many South Asian scholars who approach the Mahabharata as a chaotic accretion of various interpolated passages, Ramanujan argues that the epic-though undoubtedly vast (over eight times the size of the Odyssey and the Iliad combined!)-is

a structured work, and that "the central structuring principle of

the epic is a certain kind of repetition" [1991: 4211.

Ramanujan likens the epic

structure to language: there is an intuitive sense among native readers/speakers of the underlying logic or grammar of the whole that enables the various parts to make sense in relation to one another; structures of repetition are not simply replications, but also involve transformations, elaborations, variations, and ultimately, imperfections. Much as I will do in the body of this work, Ramanujan focuses on actions and traits that repeat themselves throughout the length of the epic-either across generations or throughout the lives of one character-quite provocatively suggesting that these structures recur "like a neurotic's compulsion to repeat" [1991: 4391. This statement manifests a striking consonance with

Lacanian notions of the symptom and structures of repetition, and speaks strongly to the appropriateness of such an approach. If, according to Ramanujan, the epic's structure is like that of language, whereby vast amounts of information are assimilated, memorized, and reproduced according to an underlying grammar, and if, according to Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, then Lacanian analytic tools, developed to navigate this linguistically-structured unconscious, must be aptly suited to also exploring what we might call the epic unconscious. Freud himself "posited the existence of a basic compulsion to repeat in order to explain.. .the tendency of the subject to expose himself again and again to distressing situations," and Lacan reiterates this in a distinctly linguistic format, defining repetition as the insistence of the signifier, "returning in the life of the subject, despite resistances which block them.

...Repetition

is the general characteristic of the signifying chain, the

manifestation of the unconscious in every subject" [Evans 1996: 1641.

As

Ramanujan observed, neurotic symptoms repeat themselves, and Lacan likewise understands symptoms as signs that both hide and reveal, that repeat according to an unconscious signifying logic that only becomes apparent through linguistic, symbolic representation. Indeed, a central argument that I intend to make is that the feminine is a symptom of the text, a source and manifestation of anxiety that the epic recurrently attempts to resolve but never succeeds in doing so. I will even go further to argue that the feminine as symptom in the epic involves a sort of jouissance~thatpleasure is produced along with anxiety, and that the two propel these structures of repetition along throughout the epic. Jouissance itself is

defined by repetition, or vice versa:

"repetition is redefined as the return of

jouissance, an excess of enjoyment which returns again and again to transgress the limits of the pleasure principle and seek death (S17, 51)" [Evans 1996: 1641. For Lacan, in his rereading of Freud, too much pleasure actually becomes pain-albeit an exquisite sort of pain-and

though jouissance appears to follow the trajectory of

the pleasure principle, as excess also becomes its opposite. This pushing of the boundaries of the pleasure principle-of transgressing the fine line between pleasure and pain-is

a dynamic that repeats, a path along which desire moves, a

point around which desire cycles and comes back to again and again, and I believe we can see such patterns operating in the epic.

These clustered Lacanian

concepts of jouissance, symptom, and repetition will be woven throughout my analysis of the Mbh, and I hope to show that they help explain much of what structures the epic and drives its plot and characters. Along with being attuned to patterns of repetition in the epic, I will work from a Lacanian understanding of the structural binaries inherent to the cultural construction of gender, sexuality, and desire, as well as the subtle slippage between them. Rather than understanding femininity in the epic as something essential, I will focus on it as a structural position in the symbolic order, and examine how the epic plays with these binaries of gender, sexuality and desireordering and disordering, reifying and subverting, raveling and unraveling. The next section will address "the question of woman" in the epic more specifically, so

I will leave this discussion for later. Suffice it here to say that, much as woman is a symptom of the text, desire-or rather the dharma of desire-constitutes a major

recurrent motif throughout the epic, and, I would argue, is one of its primary driving forces. Indeed, another specific focus of mine will be parallels in the epic between the Hindu notion of dharma and Lacan's Law-of-the-Father, as both constitute a sort of regulating symbolic order that on the one hand affirms the structure that holds together the moral and symbolic fiber of the Mahabharata, but on the other hand is continually questioned and subverted throughout the epic. Yet though I would identify a "dharma of desire" at work throughout the epic, and even perhaps suggest that the entire epic could be understood as a grand treatise on this theme, what exactly is this dharma remains inconclusive. As Ramanujan notes, "it is not dharma or right conduct that the Mahabhgrata seems to teach, but the s+ma or subtle nature of dharma~itsinfinite subtlety, its incalculable calculus of consequences, its endless delicacy" [1991: 4351. This notion of dharma works well with a Lacanian approach. Inasmuch as Lacan is a structuralist thinker, he is also post-structuralist in that rather than emphasizing the stability of the structures he defines, he emphasizes instead their slippage, subtlety, and instability. Lacan may seek out and identify the binary structures inherent to gender, language, and culture, but he is ultimately more interested in exploding them, opening them up to the dynamics of a third term, and exploring the gaps and fissures. If dharma is to be understood in Lacanian terms as a Hindu version of the Law-of-the-Father,a static dharma it will not be, and appropriately so. Likewise, desire, as I noted in the introduction, is not understood in colloquial terms. Lacan's concept of desire occupies the center of his theories,

and is always understood very specifically. Desire arises out of a fundamental lack in the subject that can never be fulfilled, and is characterized by precisely this fact that it "can never be satisfied; it is constant in pressure, and eternal.

The

realisation of desire does not consist in being 'fulfilled', but in the reproduction of desire as such" [Evans 1996: 371.

Furthermore, desire for Lacan cannot be

understood as something individual or private. "Man's desire is the desire of the Other" [Lacan 1973: 381-transindividual,

constructed outside the subject,

though experienced as arising within the subject. It is always a function of the symbolic order, "a social product. Desire is not the private affair it appears to be but is always constituted in a dialectical relationship with the perceived desires of other subjects" [Evans 1996: 391. Desire is produced and regulated within the symbolic order, hence, I would suggest, makes perfect sense as an integral component in the maintaining and functioning of dharma. The Mahabharata is obsessed with the rules governing desire, intercourse, and procreation, and throughout the body of this dissertation we will be charting the dynamics of desire as they operate in the field of dharma and the Mahabharata's symbolic order. Intricately interwoven with lack, the feminine, dharma and the law-of-the-father, desire is the knot through which all the strands of the epic come together. These concepts will of course continue to be developed throughout the course of this work, and many others should also emerge. This section will have simply offered an overview of the major themes that will be informing my approach. Though I attempt to locate and examine the symbolic categories at work in the Mbh, I don't suggest a stability to them, for in the epic they are

destabilized as much as they are affirmed; indeed, what appeals to me theoretically in the Mahabharata is its rich imagination in conceptualizing the myriad possible permutations of the symbolic binaries that underlie it, as well as its playfulness and at times daring in exploring them. This is what I think the Mahabhgrata has to offer contemporary theory, and what I hope to bring back from this project: a radical imagination that playfully, tragically, or piously explores the symbolic categories of gender and desire, a rich storehouse of possibilities that we simply don't see elsewhere, and a sophisticated system that, in regulating the dynamics between unruliness and order, gives us tremendous insight into the literary functioning of Lacan's symbolic order. Let us now, then, turn to the left half of this dissertation, and see how we might further complicate things by bringing a feminist sensibility to inform this project.

Chapter 2

- A ladies9man? Lacan and Feminist Theory

This project promises to be a feministLacanian analysis of the Mahabharata, and if the preceding chapter has given any sense of how rich, varied, and contentious the discipline of psychoanalysis (and Lacanian theory within it) can be, then I can only do the same for a discourse that has revolutionized both academic dialogue and society at large to much the same extent, and has had a profound impact on the course and content of culture in the twentieth century.

Indeed, feminism,

psychoanalysis, and Marxism are widely hailed as the three grand meta-narratives of the twentieth century, and even the postmodern critiques that claim to go beyond them, far from obliterating their presence, continue to engage the discourses they have produced. Of course if I am to be working with two of these three meta-narratives, it is clear that I can only do so in a limited fashion, and the aim of this chapter will be to carve out my little nook within the vast bodies of these discourses. "Feminism" or "feminist" are by no means agreed-upon terms, both within and beyond the community of people who label themselves as such-indeed,

it is

probably wisest to recognize the existence of multiple "feminismsn that at times

overlap and intersect, and at other times dissent and diverge. This section will begin by outlining an understanding of feminist scholarship that I feel is best suited to this project, and review other feminist approaches to Hinduism and the Mahabharata.

The final focus of this chapter will be an examination of the

relationship between feminist theory and psychoanalysis, especially what it means to take a "feminist Lacanian" approach to South Asian religious studies. With this theoretical framework established, we can then move on to the heart of this work: bringing Lacan to the left half of the Mahabharata.

Feminist Theory and Religious Studies in South Asia

If feminism in general can be said to be concerned about the representation of women-be linguistic-the

it political, social, and economic or cultural, symbolic, and question of who or what exactly is to be represented is not self-

evident. As Judith Butler asserts at the outset of Gender Trouble, "there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the category of women" [1990: 11. Indeed, the assumed or implicit "we" in much of feminist theory and activism is highly problematic, for not all women define their primary identity as such: If one "isn a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered "personn transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out "gendern from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained. [Butler 1990: 31

The claim could of course be made that racial, class, and other differences aside, there is a coherence to women as a category and the feminist cause because of the universality of patriarchy and masculine domination that has throughout history and across cultures identified and oppressed women as such. Under universal patriarchy, differences among women become subsumed under the primary marker of gender, and to resist this women should unite as such, putting aside their differences until parity between the sexes can be established. But Butler doesn't buy this either, suggesting that "the urgency of feminism to establish a universal basis for patriarchy in order to strengthen ...[its] own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a. ..fictive universality of domination, held to produce women's common subjugated experience* [1990: 41. In this sense, feminism may even become the unwitting perpetrator of women's universal oppression, at least in theory, creating a universal masculine hegemony where otherwise it might be understood as heterogeneous and arbitrary. Jane Gallop, too, examines the basic assumptions under which much feminist work has been done in a way that is helpful to conceptualizing this project.

Departing from Bell and Rosenhan's critique of the term "women's

studies," Gallop concurs that the label is ungrammatical and ambiguous but, rather than attempting to choose another label with "accuracy and purpose" as Bell and Rosenhan propose, suggests that ambiguity may be one of women's studies greatest assets [1985: 14-16]. The term "women's studies" may indeed mean alternatively "studies performed by women" or more colloquially "studies about women," but even beyond that, Gallop suggests, could encompass a broader

re-evaluation of the structure, content, and practice of knowledge from the perspective of "women as knower." This last phrase, borrowed from Dorothy E. Smith, is also, Gallop acknowledges, ungrammatical [1985: 17]! "Womenn is plural, "knower" is singular. But a discipline focused around "woman as knower" could not be more than a "heteroclite collection"-that aggregate of epistemological positions-and

is to say, an irregular

the agrammatical "women as knower"

at least creates an approach that emphasizes women's psychological place as a sexual class in a cultural and economic division of labor [Ibid.]. This creation of such an epistemological position offers unique and valuable possibilities for rethinking language, knowledge, power, and the gendering that creates and sustains them as such. If structures of knowledge and language have tended to be predominantly masculine, then "women as knower" creates an epistemological position that is perfectly suited to question, critique, and read against the grain of masculine cultural hegemony. Gender may be arbitrary and problematic, but it has a palpable realness in social and cultural realities, and "women as knower" provide an epistemological balance that has hitherto been lacking in social and cultural modes of production. Butler's reservations about "woman" as a category thus constitute an important bracket in work that we nonetheless call "feminist" or "women's studies9'*and her points are incisive, astute, and well-taken. But there is also the

* These two terms, too, do not always exist in synonymous relation with each other. Whereas "women's studiesn can be by or about women without any specific political or social agenda, feminist work usually involves some recognition of women's historical oppression or gender inequality and some commitment to redressing it-whether politically, socially, economically, culturally, or intellectually.

argument that "there has always been a women's movement": as Mary Evans writes, "women in many societies have protested against women's social and sexual subordination and powerlessness...[and] to locate feminism as the product of a particular historical period or culture is therefore a hazardous exercise, since too precise a location can exclude the other various forms of feminism that existed in diverse contexts" [Wright 1992: 981. Indeed, the pitfalls of overgeneralization or essentialism may be overcompensated by too much specificity and particularism, and perhaps the often (and unapologetically) ambiguous path that feminist work-at

least this feminist work-must

negotiate is a middle ground between the

two: recognizing both that the category of women, though problematic, cannot be done away with, and also that it offers us, both epistemologically and practically, better possibilities in identifying and challenging often subtle or invisible structures of masculine hegemony than those we would have without it. The path that I see this project taking, and I hope it will develop throughout this chapter and the body of this work, is one that is primarily focused around writing from and continuing to refine a feminist epistemology.

To be

sure, this work is "women's studies" both in the sense that it is being done by a woman and that its object is the "left half of the epic; but it also construes itself as feminist in the broader sense of "women as knower" that Gallop reintroduces. Not only is this work being produced by a feminine and feminist subjectivity that is aware of itself as such, it is also interested in more than simply focusing on questions of feminine power, voice, and representation in the Mbh-it

seeks to

rethink the epic from a position of feminist subjectivity within the text, reading

against the grain of male rationalization, explanation, and justification, and rereading the women characters not simply as projections of male subjectivity, which in many ways they surely are, but also as subjects in their own right. This is not just for a feminist sense of justice or equality, though certainly that is there; this is to push and explore and reinvent the bounds of knowledge, to think about the characters and events and motivations of the text differently, and thus to think about gender and sexuality differently. And what is not only feminist about this approach-specifically

in relation to the production of knowledge-but

what is

also in many ways Lacanian, is the subject position that I assume in relation to the text and the claims I make from it.

Gallop anticipates my position on this

precisely: I was and am trying to write in a different relation to the material, from a more unsettling confrontation with its contradictory plurivocity, a sort of encounter I believe is possible only if one relinquishes the usual position of command, and thus writes from a more subjective, vulnerable position. Though I have worked long and hard at Lacan's text [and, for me, the Mbh] and with the various commentaries upon it, rather than present my mastery I am interested in getting at those places where someone who generally knows the text well still finds herself in a position of difficulty. [1985: 19-20]

This sort of feminist approach thus involves relinquishing the position of the "subject supposed to know" that Lacan speaks of as the position of mastery in the production of knowledge-it

releases us from an intellectual uphallocentrism"that

prompts one to "constantly cover one's inevitable inadequacy in order to have the right to speak" [Gallop 1985: 201. This adoption of an unabashedly "castrated" position in relation to the text and to truth-claims-whatever designation may be-represents

one's sexual

not an epistemological loss but a gain.

One

relinquishes the need to occupy a position of mastery that disallows alternative interpretations, the need to dominate a discourse or compete within it. One is released from the need to fix subtle, complex relationships into truth-claims, and intellectual fluidity rather than rigidity is the desideratum. My adoption of this position, I hope, will enrich not only the process but the content of a project such as this one. Without getting ahead of myself here in bringing together the Lacanian and feminist positions, however, and before moving any further with epistemological reflections, we should pause to take account, as we did in the preceding chapter, of the cross-cultural issues involved in feminist approaches to South Asian materials. As we saw in the case of psychoanalytic discourse, already complex theoretical and methodological questions within North American and European subject areas become even more so when the focus shifts to South Asia. For feminist work on the subcontinent, race and class become further complicated by caste as well as a number of ethnic, linguistic, race, and religious specifics that are particular to South Asian culture and history. The impact of the colonial experience, for example, cannot be underestimated in its influence on Indian discourses surrounding gender, sexuality, and femininity. Furthermore, Indian feminists often explicitly distinguish themselves from Western feminists, on the grounds that the specifically Western discourses on rights and equality that gave rise to feminism in Europe and North America are simply inapplicable in the Indian context, where hierarchy has always been both a foundation and an ideal, and where all individuals, both male and female, are positioned in complex

hierarchical and lateral relations according not just to gender but to caste, age, kinship, and occupation: The concept of feminism, therefore, as a movement that was founded in the context of specific cultural and political milieux carries a special Western flavor about it, and generally refers to a movement that seeks absolute and complete equality...in any given situation, at any given time. The seeking of the notion of equality within the explicitly hierarchical Hindu tradition is problematic... [and] the language of "rights" is also alien to the Hindu discourse. ...Gender, thus, becomes only one of the many issues within hierarchical studies in India. [Narayanan 1999: 26-27] Furthermore, Indian feminists-if

they are willing to call themselves such (see

Madhu Kishwar's "Why I do not Call Myself a Feministv)-may claim not to be interested in reconceptualizing women's roles in a new, future, or possible social order as much as reclaiming and revalorizing women's roles within a traditional paradigm, and thus see their mission as qualitatively different from that of most Western feminists. On

the

other

hand,

however, as we found with

cross-cultural

psychoanalysis, much also stays the same in feminisms both Western and Indian! Even though the contents of the issues may change, there still remain questions about representation, unity, and who has the right to speak for whom; there still remain powerful divisions among women as well as strong reasons for solidarity. "Western feminism" itself is a heterogeneous discourse-not

only is there the well-

known distinction between American and French feminisms, there are major independent strands of feminism focusing around women of color and lesbians, as well as powerful alliances with queer theory and disability studies.

Indian

feminism, too, has its own distinct place and role within the broader discourse of "Third-World" feminism as well as its own internal divisions among feminists with

differing identities and agendas-tribals,

Dalits, and Muslims to name but a few.

Leaving the more socially and politically charged issues for now, and without drawing boundaries that are too rigid or making distinctions too hard and fast, let me make some broad groupings identifying the various scholarly feminist approaches that have informed this project. One of the largest and most prominent bodies of feminist work on the subcontinent is the field of goddess studies.

Hinduism's thriving goddess

tradition has attracted the attention of feminist scholars of religion for obvious reasons, but what exactly the Hindu Goddess(es) have to offer feminists is not entirely clear. To what extent can the Hindu goddess really be considered a resource or example for feminist scholars of religion? Or more succinctly put in the title of a recent volume addressing this question, Is the Goddess a Feminist?

[2000].As Kathleen Erndl and Alf Hiltebeitel note in their editorial introduction to the volume, "writing about goddesses in India had taken a number of distinct forms and had generated a corresponding number of interpretive positions, but little had been done to spur thinking about the issues that drive these formations"

[2000:12-13]. Do we discuss the Hindu goddess-the

great goddess, of which all

the various goddesses are understood to be manifestations? Or do we look at the particulars of individual goddesses-some specific-within

weight-a

geographically, caste, or family-

their varying contexts? To whose interpretations do we give more

learned Brahmin commentator or an illiterate village woman? How do

we reconcile diametrically opposed interpretations of the same goddess? And where do we (as Western feminist scholars) fit in, with the interpretations that we

would propose, often at odds with traditional Hindus or Indian feminists? Is the Goddess a Feminist?, rather than attempting to provide any conclusive answers to these questions, provides a range of approaches to answering them, and the responses are often ambivalent. In her article, "'Sa H a m 4 Am She': Woman As Goddess," Rita DasGupta Sherma argues that there is in fact a positive relation between philosophical movements emphasizing the divine feminine and the historical emergence of female spiritual adepts [2000: 25-26]. Though differing models of divine feminine power may exist in Hindu cosmology and mythology, Sherma argues, women can and do choose those models that offer the most uplifting or empowering possibilities for them. Alfred Collins takes a more equivocal stance, alternating between viewing the Samkhyan Prabti* as "profoundly patriarchal in nay-saying herself and living for the male's sake, yet ...militantly feminist in afflicting her ahamkaric 'husbands' with the triple suffering and cutting through their presumptions" [2000: 661. Rita Gross answers the volume's title question with the answer "it depends" [2000: 1 0 4 l - o n how one defines feminism and which devotees one is talking about.

The Goddess can either be subversive and

liberating or a staunch defender of the patriarchal status quo. Cynthia Humes notes that the Indian women she interviewed see it as a non-issue: they find little substantive connection between the Great Goddess' femininity and their own-the Goddess is qualitatively different from ordinary women, an exception not

* Samkhya is a dualistic philosophical system that works off the opposition between the masculine Purusa (spirit, contemplative awareness, self) and the feminine Prakti (matter, worldly activity).

partaking of human womanhood-and

recognize that the Goddess can thus be

used for either feminist or antifeminist ends according to the inclinations of her human proponents [2000: 1491. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, positioning herself as an Indian feminist, identifies the broader contexts that foster such debates: The 'feminist' Hindu goddess, or more accurately the claim for the progressive potential of the goddess for women's liberation, is to be found chiefly in the following sites of discourse: South Asian studies scholarship in the Western academy, which is largely reflected in this volume; Hindu 'nationalism'; radical Indian feminism of a certain kind, and, allied with it, Gandhian secularism. [2000:2731 Aside from these camps, says Sunder Rajan, there are few other segments in Indian society that are concerned with the Hindu Goddess as feminist, and as regards "South Asian studies scholarship in the Western academy,

...the

temptation to idealize non-Western societies as a 'resource' to meet the inadequacies of Western philosophies and lifestyles," is a possibility of which feminist scholars seeking answers in the Hindu goddess should be acutely aware [2000: 2741. Indeed, if responses to the question "Is the Goddess a Feminist?" are

ambivalent and inconclusive, it is probably well that they should be. What in many ways is much more interesting-and

what constitute the most substantive and

compelling contributions of this volume-are

the various attempts to chart

relations between certain feminisms, certain goddesses, and certain devotees. The

"Is," the "the," the charged singulars of "goddess" and "feminist" are provocative heuristic devices that propel and animate a multifaceted and dynamic discussion-but

the answers will only ever be plural. Similarly, and in reference

again to the feminist Lacanian epistemology I espouse above, my approach will be

less concerned with providing answers and more about exploring the questions. Another major area of feminist work within South Asian religious studies is the sub-field of Tantric studies, which I will but touch on briefly before moving on to work specifically focused on the Mbh. Like the Hindu goddess tradition, the Tantric tradition holds obvious appeal to feminist scholars as a philosophical and historical movement that self-consciously reversed much of the obvious male bias in both Hindu and Buddhist religious beliefs and practices: goddesses rose to a position of dominance over gods, the feminine principle took place as the center and essence of the divine, women entered Tantric circles as gurus and adepts, and rituals and regulations governing purity and pollution were reversed, making traditionally prohibited substances such as menstrual blood the focus of worship and ritual practice. Miranda Shaw's work is perhaps the best representative of feminist historiographical work in the field of Tantric studies, and though her focus is on Tantric Buddhism much of her methodology and arguments work for the Hindu context as well. Indeed, her statements about her work in many ways mirror and inform my own: One of the principles upon which feminist historians have come to agree is the need to reclaim the historical agency of women, that is, to concentrate upon how women acted rather than how they were acted upon and to consider how women viewed events rather than how women were viewed. Women's presence and points of view can sometimes be reconstructed by going beyond the statements made in a text to imagine the world of discourse in which the text occurs, controversies to which it is responding, practices or social arrangements it seeks to legitimize, and assumptions it leaves unstated. [Shaw 1994: 12-13]

...

Though, unlike Shaw, I will not be going so far as to suggest female authorship of the Mbh, and though I will not be employing a specifically historical mode of

inquiry, I will be employing similar reading strategies. I will be looking for the lacunae in the discourses, the unanswered questions, the contradictions and dissonances.

And, by exploring and often adopting a position of feminine

subjectivity in rethinking many of the characters and episodes in the Mbh, I hope not just to uncover subtle left-handed nuances that might otherwise be missed, but also to unveil phallic structures of signification that otherwise "play [their] role only when veiled" [Lacan 1977: 2881. Turning now to work specifically on the Mbh, Iravati Karve takes a reflective, almost meditative approach to the characters of the epic that I would present as implicitly feminist, though not explicitly so. In fact, I would almost term her work a "narrative" feminist approach, in that she narratively engages the characters, producing almost a daydream or creative conjecture of what their thoughts, feelings, and motivations must have been. Though she never identifies her work as feminist, I would argue that she perhaps unselfconsciously represents a sort of ecriture feminine on the Mbh that, rather than making solid "academic" contributions to Mbh studies per se, prompts reflections that nonetheless deepen and refine others' more traditionally scholarly engagements with the text and its characters. For example, she creates a poignant extension of the final scene in which Draupadi falls climbing Mount Mem with her husbands, the cause of which her eldest husband, the all-wise Yudhisthira, identifies as her secret preference for Aqiuna, his younger brother and one of her five husbands. In Draupadi's final moments, she meditates on this observation and how her special love for Aquna was never returned:

No woman could win Arjuna's heart. Is love always like that? Is it always one-sided? I pine for someone who doesn't return my love, someone else yearns for me. Suddenly, as if shocked, she stopped. The realization pierced like lightning; there was one who had given his whole life for her. She sighed with her new understanding. Again pictures came before her eyes; ...Bhima comforting her when she was tired, Bhima bringing her fragrant lotuses.. .Bhima plaiting her hair with gory hands. ...How many things she remembered-greedy Bhima, rough and tempestuous Bhima, always railing at Dhrtarastra and Gandhgri. In the same sense that Draupadi was earthy, so was he. She was a daughter of the earth, he was a son. [Karve 1974: 92 -931

As Draupadi lies there, a sound stirs her reverie. It is Bhima, who has also fallen after his two younger brothers and Aquna. Dragging himself past their bodies, he reaches Draupadi: 'What can I do for you?' The words came out with difficulty. It was the same question he had asked all his life, but in this situation it was utterly meaningless and incongruous. Draupadi smiled. Bringing Bhima's face close to hers, she said with her last breath, 'In our next birth be the eldest, Bhima; under your shelter we can all live in safety and joy.' [Karve 1974: 9-31 Especially in comparison to the often pithy Mbh, Karve's reflections bring a soft amplitude to the implicit love stories running throughout it and provoke insights into latent themes and dynamics of the epic that might otherwise pass unnoticed. She posits a hidden love affair between Kunti, wife of Pgndu, and Vidura, a mixedcaste half-brother to her husband and King Dhrtafistra. Yudhisthira, Kunti's son, thus becomes not (just) son of the god Dharrna, but Vidura's son as well! Whether or not the epic itself bears this out upon closer scrutiny, it nonetheless provides fascinating material for reflection upon what are definite linkages between the two characters. Not all of Yuganta is about the secret lives of the Mbh's female characters, but it is in these chapters that Karve does some of her richest work, and certainly that which is most relevant to this project in particular.

Though I will not permit myself to speculate as much as she does, she breathes life, dreams, memories and desires into the female characters, doing more than discussing the infusion of female agency into the reading of the Mbh. Shalini Shah's The Making of Womanhood: Gender Relations in the Mahabhirata

[I9951 is perhaps the first full-length explicitly feminist work of this kind. Though providing a thorough exposition of the epic's women and their stories, and valuable for this attentive combing-through of the vast material, it is relatively unsophisticated on a theoretical level and actually contributes very little to this project.

Shah relies on a sort of feminist materialism-interpreting

stories,

symbols and characters solely in terms of material conditions of patriarchy and production-that in the Mbh.

simply cannot be the "whole story" in terms of gender relations Furthermore, her approach partakes of a linear narrative that

hearkens back to some imagined golden age of matriarchy-from

which history

represents a single-minded march to masculine domination-that

seems frankly

outdated in relation to contemporary feminist scholarship. But what is most perplexing and ultimately off-putting is that she almost seems to exert effort in proving that some of the most obvious examples of female power, intelligence, and agency within the text are actually not so. For example: Some scholars have tried to glorify the advisory role of queens like Satyavati, Draupadi, Vidulii and Giindhgri. It is said that wives and mothers wielded considerable power in the management of kingdom. For instance, Kunti's departure from Hastiniipura [sic] is described as leaving her own [kingdom] and ignoring fruits of rule.. .Actually, such mothers or wives are never more than stand-in. [Shaw 1995: 1511 And even though Draupadi is described throughout the text as a "wise womann or "lady sage," learned in religious teachings and the science of morality, the fact that

this knowledge was gained sitting on her father's lap as priests taught her brother for Shah wholly discounts Draupadi's wisdom and education as simply 'eavesdropping" or "feeding on leftovers" [1995: 1431. What Shah seems to be doing-as

ostensibly an Indian feminist-is

taking Western feminism at its

extreme in its demands for equal everything and applying this wholesale to an Indian epic over two thousand years old. There seems to be no recognition that the standards she is applying-universal freedom-are,

education, political parity, sexual

though perhaps desirable, not simplistically transferable.

Indeed, that is the overall impact of Shah's work on a theoretical level: simplistic and single-minded. Were her work done in the context of an earlier wave of feminism-at

a time when feminist scholarship was necessarily occupied

in systematically combing through and identifying structures of masculine domination in perhaps seemingly innocuous texts, and when the systematic intellectual, cultural, and historical oppression of women had yet to be proven to a still skeptical masculinist intellectual establishment-I

could bracket it as such

and understand. But evaluated in context with its contemporaries in feminist South Asian scholarship, it seems anachronistic at best.

Feminist scholarship

overall, and within South Asian religious studies in particular, has moved from a wholesale emphasis on how oppressed, benighted, exploited, and powerless women were/are to a more nuanced exploration of the subtleties of these structures of masculine domination as well as an appreciation of how women have consistently, resourcefully, and impressively subverted, teased, and outright defied those structures. Feminists are moving away from a monolithic narrative of some

hypothetical golden age that is a glimmering memory across the wasteland of women's long arduous historical march under the oppressive yoke of patriarchy and towards an appreciation of the circularity of history and the gaps and pockets of diversity and resistance that invariably spring up within even the most hegemonic social orders. Though Shah's work remains valuable as "women's studies" in its attention to the stories and characters of women in a predominately male-oriented text, as "feminist" it is unsatisfying at best, at times maddening in its lack of any theoretical sophistication or recognition of the complexity of the material. My project, I hope, can provide a counter-example of what I think is a much more responsible and appropriate feminist approach to the epic material. Arti Dhand's recent dissertation "Poison, Snake, the Sharp Edge of a Razor: Yet the Highest of Gurus: Defining Female Sexuality in the Mahftbhftrata" [2000] follows Shah's as the next and only other full-length work that I know of specifically examining gender and sexuality in the Mbh, and in many ways-not least her focus on dharrna-approximates

my project quite closely.

Dhand,

however, seems to steer clear of explicitly identifying herself or her work as "feminist" and prefers to focus on tracing out internal relations in the text rather than using any contemporary theoretical orientations in her analysis of them. Though obviously aware of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and feminism as possible tools with which to conduct such a study, Dhand chooses the indigenous categories of nivtti, pravtti, and apaddharma to direct her sweep of sexuality in the epic. Dhand's identification of these categories and her analysis of the epic's numerous and varied sexual intrigues in light of them are quite useful and

interesting, and I would like to dwell on them at least for a moment before moving on. For Dhand, the many seemingly contradictory statements on female sexuality in the Mbh, as well as the rich and colorful nature of stories eliciting them, actually make sense when understood in relation to the different sorts of dharma driving the epic. As I continue to suggest, dharma in the Mbh is not a monolithic fixed structure or rigid governing body of teachings-it

is subtle and

diverse and may often appear to generate contradictory moral and ethical values. Dhand identifies two predominant parallel currents of dharma in the epic-niytti and praytti dharma, as well as a third-apaddharma-that

emerges specifically in

times of distress. Niytti dharma is the dharma of final liberation from the cycle of rebirth; it is the dharma of self-renunciation, asceticism, and release from the mundane world. This is the dharma espoused by seekers of moksa, enlightened sages who have severed all ties with society and whose foremost concern is generating enough ascetic "heat" to acquire supernatural powers, achieve parity with the gods, achieve some boon, or catapult themselves outside the cycle of samsdra. For these predominantly (though not exclusively) male ascetics, sexuality

is dangerous and threatening as the one thing that can make all their efforts for naught. One chance encounter with a heavenly nymph and all their accumulated merit is dissipated. Women, of course, being the embodiment and agents of this threat, are seen as poison, snakes, or the sharp edge of a razor. And even beyond female sexuality in particular, sexuality and the body in general are disparaged and repressed within the context of niytti dharma: children are denounced as

chains to the earthly realm, pleasures of food and drink are illusions that lead astray, and the body is a bag of filth, blood and pus that is best cast aside. Pray-tti dharma, on the other hand, is world, body, and sexuality-affirming. It is the dharma of the social realm of family, reproduction, and the sustenance of the world. A healthy body is a blessing to be honored, as are wives, husbands, and children, and sexuality is accepted and respected for its life-giving, and more tangentially, pleasure-producing capacities.

Indeed, pleasure is what pray-tti

dharma must keep in check, because too much of it can disrupt and destabilize the fragile bonds on which family and society are based, as well as the essential boundaries of gender and caste that are inherent to the maintenance of social and cosmic harmony. Pray-tti dharma is thus directed towards ensuring that women stay monogamous and are kept from perpetrating the horrors of caste miscegenation, and men, though allowed a greater latitude of pleasure and sexual freedom, must not dissipate their virility in profligacy or abuse the little bit of latitude in cross-caste intercourse that is allowed to them. Apaddharma, the last category that Dhand juxtaposes with the other two, is the dharma that comes into play in times of distress when the strictures of the other two dharmas must be relaxed or suspended for purposes of survival or production of offspring. This is perhaps the most interesting of the dharmas, because it is how many of the otherwise scandalous sexual events in the epic are justified-it

is the catch-all

dharma that enables one to transgress but save face, to trespass but devoutly justify.

We will be looking much more closely at dharmic transgressions and rationalizations throughout the rest of this work, and Dhand's work provides a useful analysis of the categories inherent to the epic from which we can proceed. Though the content of our work is very similar, however, there are also some important differences in our approaches that I should point out before moving on to the second section of this chapter. I have already noted that Dhand does not describe her work as feminist, and we may well characterize it as more solidly "women's studies" according to our provisional definition in the notes above. Unlike Shah, Dhand takes a balanced approach that explores positive as well as negative associations of female sexuality, identifies examples of power and agency as well as marginalization or victimization, and gives female ascetics, sages, and other strong or unusual characters the credit for their unique place and role in an otherwise patriarchal system. Unlike me, she does not attempt to read against the

grain of the epic's categories themselves, or to explicitly interrogate them. Indeed, and this is perhaps what most distinguishes our respective theoretical and methodological approaches, Dhand's work partakes of no hermeneutics of suspicion.

This latter phrase obviously betrays the psychoanalytic influence

informing my interpretive strategies, but I mean it more broadly in noting that Dhand's is a sort of "straight" engagement with the text that takes the epic to mean what it says, that accepts its own explanations and justifications rather than cocking one's proverbial ears and listening for the slips and subtexts. I am not intending this as criticism of a work that I think is a solid, valuable contribution to Mbh studies, but I do want to highlight its contribution as primarily content-based

in straightforwardly taking the epic at its word. In contrast, my project involves an almost instinctive hermeneutics of suspicion that seeks to explore what the epic does not self-consciously avow, that doesn't buy the straight explanations, that seeks to chart the discourse underlying the dialogue. For those who are looking for answers and order out of the epic's sexual chaos, Dhand's work will be the more satisfying, for those who would like to see things get even messier, I hope to oblige.

Psychoanalysis and Feminism And now we come to the last of the theoretical introductory sections before delving into the body of this project: psychoanalysis and feminism, where the two strands I have been tracing in the preceding pages meet in a knot that leads out again to the threads weaving through the left half of the Mbh. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, psychoanalysis and feminism have long exerted a "mutual fascination" upon each other [1990: 61 that, I would add, at times better approximates a lovehate relationship. From Freud's muchdetested theory of penis envy to Lacan's declaration that there is no such thing as woman, psychoanalysis has provoked some of feminism's angriest dismissals but also inspired some of its most profound reflections on sexual difference, social and symbolic representation, and the gendered formation of the human subject. In this section I will take a brief look at some of the major issues that have characterized the rocky history of psychoanalysis and feminism, sketching out the possibilities I see for a feminist Lacanian contribution to thinking about gender and sexuality in the Mbh. Much

scholarly attention has been devoted to the history of and ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism (Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism [I9741 as perhaps the landmark work) which I will not pretend to reproduce here. But I d o hope to emerge from this chapter with a clear footing a t least on where I a m beginning with these discourses before moving out to see where they will take us. Mary Jo Buhle opens Feminism and Its Discontents with an historical snapshot that seems apt also for the beginning of this section. It is 1909, and Freud is in Worcester, Massachusetts to deliver a series of lectures on the emerging discipline of psychoanalysis: Seated conspicuously in the front row, "chastely garbed in whiten and with a rose pinned to her waist.. .was Emma Goldman. The notorious anarchist and free lover had heard Freud speak in Vienna fifteen years earlier, and she continued to count herself among his most ardent admirers. Gladly, she interrupted her own lecture tour to be present at this historic event, Freud's only appearance in the United States. Goldman undoubtedly hoped Freud would speak on some aspect of sexuality. His colleague Ernest Jones remembered a "ladyn-perhaps Goldman herself-passing him a note asking the founder of psychoanalysis to address explicitly the question of sex. Upon hearing this request, Freud allegedly replied that he could no more "be driven to the subject than away from it." Soon, however, he fulfilled Goldman's expectations.. . W e ought not to exalt ourselves so high as completely to neglect," he warned, "what was originally animal in our nature. Nor should we forget that the satisfaction of the individual's happiness cannot be erased from the aims of our civilization." Freud concluded by proclaiming the potential of psychoanalysis to free "a certain portion of the repressed libidinal impulses." For an anarchist who refused to assist any revolution forbidding her to dance, the counsel could not have been more pleasing. ...Not long after the Worcester meeting Goldman published a short essay specifying the affinity between psychoanalysis and feminism: the recognition of sexuality as preeminent in the makeup of women as well as men. Moreover, she added, Freud attributed the intellectual inferiority of so many women "to the inhibition of thought imposed upon them for the purpose of sexual repression." In short, according to Goldman, Freud had perceived the link between the private and public dimensions of man's subjugation of woman. Although successive generations of feminists would

alternately laud and revile Freud's special insight into this relationship, Goldman never wavered in her faith in psychoanalysis or in the man she considered "a giant among pygmies." [Buhle 1998: 1-21 It was not just Freud's ideas about sexual liberation that attracted Goldman-she saw "feminism and psychoanalysis as historically paired and standing together on the brink of modernity" [Ibid., 21. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, feminism and psychoanalysis constitute two of the three great modernist emancipatory meta-narratives of the 2 0 century: both promise liberation from centuries, indeed millennia, of cultural repression, both promise the awakening of longdormant sexual and existential possibilities, both hail reason and enlightenment as their allies against ignorance, tradition, and superstition. Even beyond their emancipatory narratives both psychoanalysis and feminism are profoundly concerned about questions of identity, sexuality, and the socio-cultural underpinnings of the unconscious. But though Goldman and other first-wave feminists may have seen nothing but promise in the alliance of these two forces, as the relationship has evolved it has become clear that there are basic antagonisms between them that are not to be easily resolved.

If the dialogue between

psychoanalysis and feminism is more often than not a stormy one, at least the century-old tug-of-war can be said to have driven each discourse to develop in ways it would not have had the other not been at its shoulder While feminists have welcomed psychoanalytic attention to sexual difference, gender roles, and the etiology of neuroses in deep-seated repressive cultural patterns, it is often hard to digest Freud's conclusions on these points. Why is it that women must be seen as lacking? Why must culture be based on a

renunciation of the mother? Why does it seem like psychoanalytic dialogue is really only ever about male subjects? Why do women inevitably emerge in psychoanalytic theory as frigid, hysteric, passive, and intellectually inferior? What's wrong with clitoral orgasms? And why does everyone seem to think that what women really want are penises? Ironically, as much as the birth and early evolution of psychoanalysis is owed to the "loquacious brilliance" [Grosz 1990: 61 of Freud's female patients, it seems that Freud spent much of his time avoiding any real engagement with feminine subjectivity and desire per se. For all he writes on femininity, it is only ever conceived of in its functional relationship to male subjectivity, and Freud seems uncharacteristically content to say little more. The general consensus seems to be among feminist scholars of psychoanalysis that Freud gives us the tools for understanding the structures and mechanisms of patriarchy-and

the cultural construction of femininity within it-but

no

strategies for effecting its transformation. And perhaps this would be too much to ask of a turn-of-the-century bourgeois patriarch.

Freud himself, the only psychoanalyst who ever went

unanalyzed (by another analyst, that is), undoubtedly had his own "mother issues," which Madelon Sprengnether brilliantly unpacks in The Spectral Mother. Traces of these concerns surface in odd moments, producing gaps and inconsistencies in Freud's argument, to which he himself often calls attention, as if to acknowledge his own bad faith. The result is a form of textual instability that Freud in his discussion of Dora associates with hysteria. The analyst himself, unable to create a coherent narrative, produces instead a symptomatic text, in which the elements he strives to banish from consciousness disrupt the smooth flow of the story he wishes to tell, ultimately calling it into question. [1990: 31

If woman is a symptom of man, as Lacan would say decades later, then she is most definitely a symptom of a psychoanalysis that, while offering tools for a better understanding of patriarchy, nonetheless remains mired in it. For some feminists this calls for a piecemeal reworking of psychoanalytic theory-keeping acceptable, throwing out what is not-for

what is

others, it requires a wholesale revolution

in the structures of knowledge that can produce and sustain such a discourse. For me, it requires a bit of both-keeping

enough of the theory intact to have a

functioning interpretive system while at the same time maintaining a fundamental commitment to radically rethinking and reworking the basis upon which psychoanalytic and other intellectual work is performed. Lacan's appeal for me and other feminists, I think, is very much his ability to do both.

As I discuss in the previous chapter, much of Lacan is a rereading and rearticulation of Freud, sewing Freud (back) into the fabric of an intellectual culture that has been profoundly influenced by currents such as structuralism and phenomenology while moving towards post-structural horizons. But on the other hand, much of Lacan is a non-sequitur to Freud-his

methods so unorthodox, his

persona so controversial, his conclusions so radical as to continually effect a subversion of the very structures of knowledge to which he appears as heir. Elizabeth Grosz perhaps puts it best: Lacan shifts the grounds of Freud's hypotheses: instead of Freud's lucidity and concern to make psychoanalysis accessible and scientifically acceptable, Lacan cultivates a deliberate obscurity; where Freud attributes the powers of discourse to the unconscious, Lacan explains what its 'language' consists in, and what its effects on the discourses of consciousness are. Where Freud sought the respect and status of professional recognition, Lacan seemed to actively court controversy. ...Where Freud gains credibility from a systematic, rational, well-argued

analysis, Lacan works largely by indirection, circularity, ellipsis, humour, ridicule, and word-play. Where Freud sought to ensure the status of psychoanalysis as science, a therapeutic and an explanatory theory, Lacan sees it, not as a system of cure, explaining or guaranteeing knowledge, but as a series of techniques for listening to, and questioning desire-even those desires at work in the production of knowledge. Where Freud maintains a 'dignity' beyond reproach in his formal yet cordial reports of sexual matters, Lacan seems to go out of his way to flirt, mock, seduce, and insult ... To Freud's role as Talmudic patriarch, Lacan plays the gigolo. [1990: 151 Gallop, too, sees something of an intellectual gigolo in Lacan, especially as h e relates to feminists and "the question of woman." Lacan, says Gallop, "wants to be with the women, but as the ladies' man.. .The ladies man is an expert at flirtation. Unlike the man's man, philosopher o r hunter, who spends his time with serious, frank confrontations, the ladies' man is always embroiled in coquetry: his words necessarily and erotically ambiguous" beyond phallocentric-"He

[1982:34-35]. Indeed, Lacan is something

is also phallo-eccentric. Or, in more pointed language,

h e is a prick" [Ibid., 361. Unlike (although related to) phallocentrism, which women resent on principle, the prick is both resented by and attractive to women. [...I Unlike phallocentrism which locates itself in a clear-cut polemic field where opposition conditions a certain good and evil, the prick is 'beyond good and evil', 'beyond the phallus'. Phallocentrism and the polemic are masculine, upright matters. The prick, in some crazy way, is feminine. The prick does not play by the rules; he (she) is a narcissistic tease who persuades by means of attraction and resistance, not by orderly systematic discourse. The prick, which as male organ might be expected to epitomize masculinity, lays bare its desire. Since the phallic order demands that the law rather than desire issue from the paternal position, an exposure of the father as desiring, a view of the father as prick, feminizes him. Lacan, inasmuch as he acts gratuitously nasty, betrays his sexualized relation to his listeners. The phallic role demands impassivity: the prick obviously gets pleasure from his cruelty. The evidence of pleasure undermines the rigid authority of the paternal position. [Ibid., 36-38] However one may choose to take these statements, I d o think they give an evocative suggestion of the relationship between Lacan and feminists: there is a

definite attraction inasmuch as Lacan undermines phallocentric structures of knowledge while at the same time enacting or mimicking them; he performs a sort of intellectual striptease on the subject of woman that exposes promising possibilities while refusing to give "the full monty"; he angers as much as he pleases, he fulfills as much as he teases, but without a doubt he engages. Let me give a brief sketch of how two of the most prominent Lacanian feminists (or feminist Lacanians)-Julia

Kristeva and Luce Irigaray-negotiate

his

provocative ideas in moving towards what I see as most promising and problematic in a feminist and Lacanian joint venture.

Both Irigaray and Kristeva broadly

adhere to a Lacanian framework while retaining a certain critical distance from it. They both share Lacan's basic anti-humanism, his attention to the importance of language in psychical life, and his understanding of the sexualized position that subjects occupy in the symbolic order [Grosz 1990: 1491, but at the same timethough in differing ways and for different aims-each challenges and modifies certain tenets of Lacan's theories in articulating her own. Kristeva, perhaps a bit more conservative than Irigaray, approaches Lacan from the disciplines of semiology and literary theory, relying strongly on Lacan's notion of the Symbolic in the construction of her theory of the semiotic. For Kristeva, "the text that is analyzed is actually the effect of the dialectical interplay between semiotic and symbolic dispositions" [1984: 51, with the semiotic understood "in its Greek sense.. . [as a] distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof, engraved or written sign, imprint, trace, figuration" [Ibid., 2.51. In a more psychoanalytic sense, Kristeva's semiotic is connected to "a precise modality

in the signifying process ...[that involves] not only the facilitation and the structuring disposition of drives, but also the so-called primary processes which displace and condense both energies and their inscription" [Kristeva 1984: 251. So whereas the Symbolic is a stable order of meaning that creates and sustains a unified, cohesive speaking subject and a structured, coherent text, the semiotic is a "rhythmic, energetic, dispersed bodily series of forces which strive to proliferate pleasures, sounds, colours, or movements.. ..It is the repressed condition of symbolically regulated, grammatical, and syntactically governed language" [Grosz 1990: 1521. Much like the repressed in Lacanian discourse, Kristeva's notion of the semiotic functions as an interruption or disruption of the Symbolic order, a dissonance within the text's ostensibly stable logic.

"Indifferent to language,

enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax" [Kristeva 1984: 291. Indeed, an essential element of the Symbolic is its necessary repression or channeling of semiotic fluxes into stable orders of rational meaning; the semiotic is essential to the functioning of the Symbolic while at the same time representing an excess that challenges symbolic control, for this control is only ever tenuous at best. Moreover, "in 'artistic' practices the semiotic-the

precondition of the symbolic-

is revealed as that which also destroys the symbolic" [Ibid., 501. So, for Kristeva, the semiotic is a sort of unruly feminine corollary to the masculine symbolic, a fluid subtext that alternately challenges and supports the symbolic structure, or as

Grosz puts it, "the syrnbolic/oedipal/social mode owes a debt of existence to an unspeakable and unrepresentable semiotic/maternal feminine" [1990: 1531. Though Kristeva's interest is in the literature and poetry of the avantgarde as examples of the semiotic's resurgence against the Symbolic, I think her ideas also offer provocative cues for thinking about the text of the Mbh. In much the same way, I see the left half of the Mbh-its

feminine subtext-as

precisely

this sort of semiotic undercurrent that challenges, disrupts, breaks down, and threatens to overflow the masculine dharrnic and symbolic order. Inasmuch as the feminine is anxiety-producing for the coherence and rationale of the text, it is essential to it, and I would suggest that the masculine-couched dharma of the Mbh is predicated precisely upon a sort of unruly Kristevan feminine semiotic, the harnessing of which provides its sense of purpose, meaning, and raison d'ktre.

A second major interest of Kristeva, and this is very much implicated in her work on the semiotic, is motherhood and the maternal body. This is powerfully articulated in Kristeva's notion of the abject-that

which is denied, disavowed,

rejected, cast out of the "body" (understood literally or figuratively) in order to establish and maintain its fragile boundaries. In Kristeva's words, "I expel myself,I spit myself out, I abject myselfwithin the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself [1982: 31. Or even more pithily, "abjection is above all ambiguity" [Ibid., 91, in the sense that the abject has its roots in liminal substances such as blood, mucus, pus, or feces-substances

that occupy the middle realms of the

porous body, the grey region between self and other.

As Kristeva puts it, "the

body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order

to be fully symbolic... Any secretion or discharge, anything that leaks out of the feminine or masculine body defiles" [1982: 1021. Though the abject is particularly associated with the maternal body or the feminine in general, it is also woven throughout other symbolic and cultural categories: Might it be that dietary prohibitions are a screen in a still more radical separating process? ...In that case, it would be a matter of separating oneself from the phantasmatic power of the mother, that archaic Mother Goddess... A phantasmatic mother who also constitutes, in the specific history of each person, the abyss that must be established as an autonomous (and not encroaching) place and distinct object, meaning a signijiable one, so that such a person might learn to speak. That evocation of defiled matemality...inscribes the logic of dietary abominations within that of a limit, a boundary, a border between the sexes, a separation between feminine and masculine as foundation for the organization that is 'clean and proper," individual, and, one thing leading to another, signifiable, legislatable, subject to law and morality. [Ibid,, 1001 The maternal body is thus abject not only for its association with blood and other liminal bodily substances, but also as that which must (in the psychoanalytic model) be disavowed and distanced for the subject to emerge as such-and

from

there the abject takes on a symbolic life of its own. Eventually, 'the impure will not longer be merely the admixture, the flow, the noncompliant, converging on that 'improper and unclean' place, which is the maternal living being. Defilement will now be that which impinges on symbolic oneness, that is, sham, substitutions, doubles, idols" [Kristeva 1982: 1041. So for Kristeva, the subject and the sacred are intimately linked in dynamics of abjection involving the maternal body. In contrast to Freud's 'spectral" mother and Lacan's abstracting of the "maternal function," Kristeva's close examination of these dynamics brings renewed psychoanalytic attention to the flesh-and-blood maternal body and the myriad subtle ways it is implicated in personal and cultural

development. Additionally, though I will do no more here than simply note it, Kristeva also moves from Lacan's privileging of the visual realm to engaging the senses more broadly, emphasizing the integrated sensory nature of all experience and especially that of early childhood. Though I think that the gaze and the visual register are privileged in the Mbh and will thus be taking a more "straightforward" (if such can be said of anything Lacanian!) approach to it, I do think that this attention to the other senses is an important feminist contribution to Lacanian theory, and is one that Irigaray will also develop. For the Mbh, however, the notion of the abject has perhaps the most direct relevance. The text abounds in statements of horror and disgust in regard to bodily fluids, especially female and sexual fluids-at

the same time ascribing them

tremendous power. The maternal body is likewise a site of ambivalence, and the author of the epic himself, Vpsa, wastes no time in disinvesting himself from it: he grows to full maturity on the day he is born and promptly bids his mother adieu.

Furthermore, the obvious abhorrence towards the possibility of caste

miscegenation-which

Arti Dhand I think correctly intuits as a major driving force

in many of dharrna's sexual strictures-to

me very much suggests dynamics of

abjection at work. The outcaste is that which much be cast out in order for the higher castes to maintain their fragile boundaries; the higher castes are only pure to the extent that the sudras are polluted, in much the same way that men can only be pure to the extent that they purify themselves of the feminine taints of womb or intercourse. Indeed, as Doniger notes,

The fluidity of the human body is seen by Hindus as a source of danger.. .For them, the dangers inherent in the flow of vital fluids might be offset by the construction of elaborate social barriers-the caste system, the most complex system in the world for the selection of the one safe, sanctioned, perfectly balanced and appropriate marriage partner. [1980: 58-59] Kristeva brings this issue of fragile boundaries challenged by life's fluidity into the language of abjection and Lacanian discourse, and opens it, quite aptly for this project, to the realm of religious studies: "[abjection] takes on the form of the

exclusion of a substance (nutritive or linked to sexuality), the execution of which coincides with the sacred since it sets it up" [1982: 171.

Furthermore, her

treatment of the abject seems at times to feed directly into questions of dharma: An unspeakable adherence to Prohibition and Law is necessary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside. Religion, Morality, Law. Obviously always arbitrary, more or less; unfailingly oppressive, rather more than less; laboriously prevailing, more and more so.. . [Contemporary literature] acknowledges the impossibility of Religion, Morality, and Law-their power play, their necessary and absurd scheming.. . With such a literature there takes place a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and Immorality. [1982: 161

I would suggest that the Mbh, though by no means affirming the impossibility of "Religion, Morality, and Laww-an almost exact translation of the word dharmadoes, along the lines of the contemporary literature Kristeva references, interrogate, problematize, and subvert the categories, strictures, and seeming omnipotence of dharma, while at the same time working within and through it. Though I will not be making an extended application of Kristeva's abject to the epic, I would like to establish it here, along with her idea of the semiotic, as theoretical notions that very much undergird and complement the analyses I will be making. Much as I aim to do here, Kristeva works within a primarily Lacanian

framework while at the same time critiquing and interrogating its masculine assumptions, adding dimensions to it that give greater attention to the unruly feminine disrupting the phallic symbolic, and offering fertile theoretical innovations to pursue and explore. Luce Irigaray, like Kristeva, approaches Lacanian theory both as an object of investigation and a method by which she makes her investigations [Grosz 1990: 1671 but is more radical in her goals and methods. Even more deliberately than Kristeva, Irigaray uses the interpretive strategies of psychoanalysis to read against the grain of psychoanalysis itself, to deconstruct its assumptions and lay bare its veiled phallocentrism. Psychoanalysis, in consistently depicting the feminine in terms of deficiency or lack, not only propagates a model of desire and sexuality premised on the phallus, but in not acknowledging this also propagates a structure of knowledge by which "the masculine is able to speak of and for women because it has emptied itself of any relation to the male body" [Ibid., 1771. That is to say, for Irigaray, psychoanalysis is one more example of a knowledge discourse in which the phallus, masquerading as a universal not specifically male signifier, inevitably construes women as Other and the feminine as deficient-the

only

difference is that psychoanalysis, especially as it is articulated by Lacan, gives us the theoretical tools and vocabulary by which to identify this. Irigaray thus creates

a sort of feminist metadiscourse on philosophical and psychoanalytic metadiscourses, for "it is precisely philosophical discourse that we have to challenge, and disrupt, inasmuch as this discourse sets forth the law for all others, inasmuch as it constitutes the discourse on discourse" [1991: 1221.

Indeed, her project is nothing less than revolutionary: "the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which women would be the subject or object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal" [Irigaray

1991: 1261. As opposed to phallic structures of knowledge whereby the premises of discourse are unity, cohesion, and separation from the object, the visual is privileged as sensory mode, progressions are linear, and structures are fixed, Irigaray calls for a production of knowledge that is distinctly and radically feminine: This 'style', or 'writing', of women tends to put the torch to fetish words, proper terms, well-constructed forms. This 'style' does not privilege sight; instead, it takes each figure back to its source, which is among other things tactile. It comes back in touch with itself in that origin without ever constituting in it, constituting itself in it, as some sort of unity. Simultaneity is its 'proper' aspect-a proper(ty) that is never fixed in the possible identity-to-self of some form or other. It is always fluid, without neglecting the characteristics of fluids that are difficult to idealize: those rubbings between two infinitely near neighbours that create a dynamics. Its 'style' resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea or concept....But its 'style' cannot be upheld as a thesis, cannot be the object of a position. IIbid., 126-271

As opposed to structures of knowledge based on male sexual anatomy, then, Irigaray's proposed paradigm is conceptualized on the basis of female anatomy, as "two lips in continuous contact" [1985: 241. For Irigaray, this breaks down the subject-object distinction that dogs Western philosophy, posits an "otherness of sameness," and creates a symbolic aesthetics of continuous tactile contact instead of visually-inscribed distance. [In contrast to the] Lacanian mirror of male self-representation which confirms woman in the position of man's specular double or alterego.. .Irigaray substitutes the speculum, the curved, distorted medium of

women's self-observation and self-representation. Her 'mirror', the speculum, surrounds, and is surrounded by, the contours and specificity of the female body. It is not a device of selfdistance, but of self-touching, and implicated rather than disinterested self-knowledge. It represents the 'other woman', not woman as man's other, but another woman, altogether different from man's other. [Grosz 1990: 173-741 What Irigaray brings to my project are not concrete terms and concepts as much as an interpretive framework that is both feminist and Lacanian, one that uses the former as a mirror to reflect on the latter, inasmuch as the latter has reflected upon the former. discourse-and

In other words, to the extent that psychoanalysis as a

Lacan as a "master" of that discourse-has

theorized on woman

and feminine sexuality, Irigaray produces a masterful reversal of the interpretive and theoretical tools of psychoanalysis to, in turn, analyze its discourse from the perspective of woman and feminine sexuality.

In many ways I will want to

maintain a similar license in my application of Lacanian theory to the text, interrogating and flexing the theoretical tools I am using as I am using them. Like Irigaray, though I have a strong sense of the interpretive potential of Lacanian theory, I remain suspicious of its masculinist assumptions, and keep an eye out (or perhaps, to de-privilege the visual, an ear attuned) for those biases even as I am applying Lacan's ideas.

This project thus, as much as it is an essay in the

interpretive potential of Lacanian theory applied to a South Asian epic, is not a simple or straightforward application of it-the

feminist twist makes the theory

itself an object, and invites the epic to problematize it further. There are, of course, feminists who are not so skeptical, and ways of reading Lacan that make him-as

Gallop intimates he would like to b e - o n e of

the girls. As Grosz writes, "it is never entirely clear whether he is simply a more

subtle misogynist than Freud, or whether his reading of Freud constitutes a 'feminist' breakthrough" [1990: 1471. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose in their respective introductions to Lacan's collected works on feminine sexuality present Lacan as a thinker who offers rich possibilities for feminist thinking on subjectivity and sexual difference, and neither seems to think that his ideas require any fundamental alteration to be applicable to a specifically feminist psychoanalysis. The phallus as signifier simply is the paternal function as the crucial element in the formation of the subject simply

iy.

culture and the symbolic order are

patriarchal by definition, and humanity would not be what it is if things were different. From this perspective, feminists can imagine another reality all they like, but if they want to understand how things are, Lacan provides a means that avoids the other pitfalls of essentialism, rigid authority, and veiled as opposed to self-consciously phallic structures of discourse. At least in identifying the phallus for what it is, Lacan removes the veil that is so crucial to its functioning and in so doing provides perhaps the first step to modes of symbolic, linguistic, and intellectual production that do not rely on it as prime mover.

I remain torn on the question, or as Gallop says in the passage I quote above, I still find myself in a position of difficulty on these questions. And I don't pretend to be able to resolve them here. I still have problems with the phallus as the prime mover of language and culture-as

pervasive and subtle as I know

patriarchy can be, I still cannot accept that it is the whole story of humanity. As compelling as I find Lacan's statement that "the woman does not exist" I still sense that it might need to be further qualified. As much as I see "woman as

Other" all over mass media and pop culture, I still can't shake the feeling that there are other possibilities just under the surface that have just to be enunciated.

I am comfortable with these reservations-I

am comfortable with the possibility

that Lacan can be both subtly misogynist and radically feminist, and I am comfortable with the fact that my adoption of his theories in this project is not that of a convinced acolyte as much as an intrigued skeptic. I do think that, if the interpretive discipline of psychoanalysis has merit (which I think it does), and if Lacan represents the most sophisticated and exciting current within that discipline (which I think he does), and if Freudian psychoanalytic work in South Asian religious studies leaves many symbolic stones unturned (which I think is the case), then, reservations aside, there is much good work to be done. I hope that this project will help to carve out a field of new questions and issues that the Lacanian twist brings, and invite other scholars-feminist, psychoanalytic-in body of this work.

South Asianist, and

to help elaborate what I will necessarily omit. On, now, to the

-

Chapter 3 Maternity, Paternity, and the Name-of-theFather

Disruptions or anomalies in the standard procreative process characterize the conception and birth of many of the main characters in the Mahibhirata and are also scattered throughout the epic as minor but persistent disruptions to the husband-wife procreative ideal. As diverse as the situations surrounding these births might seem, they nonetheless could be said to fall into two broad categories defined by the absence or failure of one partner in the process-each of which subverts both biological and social "laws" by disrupting the standard conjugal reproductive binary and bringing in a third term, another possibility that must somehow be accounted for dharmically if it is not to unravel the moral fiber of the epic. Parthenogenesis, defined as "conception without a conjunction of sexual gametes" and usually marked by accompanying signs or wonders [Smith 1991: 841, may not be the best term to encompass all the procreative possibilities I am examining here, but it is probably the closest and most succinct. In terms of female parthenogenesis, for example, Kunti's conception of the Pgndavas by various gods is probably the only case in the Mbh that fits the strict description,

though examples of male parthenogenesis are much more abundant. The much broader sense I would like the term. to connote here is that of conception and procreation without one's dharmic partner, or with one partner bearing a disproportionate share of procreative agency. Mary Carroll Smith employs the terms "absent" or "shadow" male [1991: 841 in describing female parthenogenesis, terms that I think could apply more broadly to the procreative dynamics explored in this chapter: rather than the structural space of both parents being occupied, one space consists of either an absence or a "shadow" parent. Thus in the case of human niyoga* or the levirate which I will examine in some detail below, though the conception may have occurred between two mortals it nonetheless constitutes a disruption in the cultural ideal of procreation, or in Lacanian terms, a disruption of the Symbolic Law and the Name-of-the-Father which dharmic language must rationalize and justify. Smith makes a close analysis of parthenogenesis in the Mbh, focusing mostly on male parthenogenesis as that which has the richest recurrence in the epic. Her conclusions point towards the martial values that motivate and underlie such stories in a ksatriya epic. Reproduction of males without females allows a pure transmission of virile energy, and both the extraordinary martial prowess and the knowledge of the secret lore of weaponry that result are directly related to the harnessing of energies created and communicated by these male parthenogenic births [Smith 1991: 85, 921. I will be using Smith's insights further below when I

* The practice of a woman conceiving a child in her husband's name by someone other than her husband, usually because her husband is either dead or unable to procreate.

specifically address the cases she uses as her examples, and do not doubt that there are indeed strong currents of martial lore running through these stories. But I also think that the abundance of extraordinary births, both male and female, as well as the fascinating structural and symbolic transformations that are involved in them, also suggest broader dynamics at work. My suspicion in working through these themes is that the persistent procreative permutations that recur throughout the epic suggest a masculine Symbolic struggling with-and processing in its own way-the

perhaps

difficult awareness of female desire, the

fundamental uncertainty surrounding paternity ("the origin of both heroes and rivers is hard to know" [1.127.11]), and the need for a sense of order and control in managing these realities. Procreative Precepts Let me give a brief overview of the epic's own notions of conception and birth before looking more closely at the procreative anomalies that recur throughout it. The sage Narada describes the procreative process thus:* The seminal fluid, originating in one's nature ...goes to another person. When given to the womb, it sometimes produces an embryo and sometimes fails ...In an act of sexual intercourse, when two persons of the opposite sexes come into contact with each other, the embryo takes birth in the womb, like a calamity attacking the mother ...By sexual intercourse, a drop of the seminal fluid that is inanimate is cast into the womb.. .That part of the body into which the food that is eaten is digested is the place where the embryo lives, but is not digested there. In the womb, amid urine and feces, one's sojourn is governed by Nature. The born creature is not free in the matter or residence therein or escape therefrom. In fact, in these respects, he is perfectly helpless. Some embryos fall from the womb. Some come out alive. While as regards some, they are destroyed in the womb, after being quickened with life, on account of some other bodies being ready for them. [12.318.14-26 (12.331.2436) D; italics mine]

* See also Yaysti's description [1.85.6-161

Note the first italicized portion, "amid urine and feces". It will be my contention below that it is precisely this revolting concept that male parthenogenesis seeks to avoid, and Smith too points to avoidance of the birth canal as a motif that reappears in multiple parthenogenic myths [1991: 841. For the most part, men and women are understood to have equal parts in the procreative process: "Without a male, a female can never conceive. Without a female, a male also can never create a form" [12.293.13 (12.305.2) Dl, though each contributes distinct elements: "bones, sinews, and marrow.. .originate from the father.

Skin, flesh, and blood originate from the mother" [12.293.16-17

(12.305.5-6) Dl. Yet throughout the epic-and

especially in dharmic discussions

surrounding niyoga~womenare also referred to as primarily the fields in which male seeds are sown. As Vyiisa puts it, Vidura was procreated by my own power upon a field (ksetra) owned by Vicitravirya" [15.35.15 (D 15.28.25)l. The being that grows in the field is a function of the seed, and the soil simply nourishes it. Alternatively put, "the mother is the father's water sack" [1.69.29]-a

convenient

receptacle for semen in which to beget a son. Indeed, the idea of women as mere fields in which seed is sown-not

active and equal partners in the process-can be

understood as an extension of the broader notion that "semen is regarded as more powerful than uterine blood ...and that the child resembles the father in all socially significant qualities" [Doniger 1980: 291. On the other hand, however, great importance is placed on the rank and status of the mother in determining that of the child. The offspring of a wife of higher caste outranks that of a wife of

lower caste because the soil of a low-caste field "pollutes" the materials it provides, or provides materials of an inferior nature. Thus Vidura can never be kingthough he is the wisest and most just of the three half-brothers-since

he was

born of a serving woman. Lastly, it is interesting that the epic places sexual reproduction as originating in the second-to-last yuga.* Great cosmic cycles of yugas repeat themselves in a progressively declining pattern likened to legs on the sacred bull of dharma. In the first age-the

satya (or k$a) yuga-the

sacred bull of dharrna is

firmly established on four legs; it is a sort of golden era where senses are heightened, caste and gender distinctions are inviolate, and the divine is manifest in the world. In the second age, or treta yuga, the bull has only three legs and things begin to move towards disorder, with dharma threatened by its opposite, adharma. In the dvdpara yuga the bull wobbles on two legs: through the decline of dharrna, the veil of illusion clouds human sensibilities and the divine must be worshipped through the means of images, not directly. Lastly, in the kali yuga, dharma teeters on one leg and the veil of illusion obscures divinity in the world: women are corrupted, caste miscegenation runs rampant, and inauspicious omens abound. The Mbh occurs at the turning point between the dvqara and kali yuga, and its great tragedies (as well as its reproductive intrigues) are thus a function of time, destiny, and the inexorable decline of dharma in the great cosmic progression of the yugas.

* "Agenor "Epochn-these are mythical ages without exact historical equivalents, though we are said to currently be in the kali yuga.

[In the satya yufra] there was no dharma of sexual intercourse [maithuna]. In those days, people produced offspring by their will.* In the treta yuga, progeny were produced by will [or by touch].+There was no dharma of sexual intercourse for them. In the dudpara yuga there was the dharma of sexual intercourse for (producing) progeny. So in the kali yuga people come together and live in pairs. [12.200.35-37 (12.207.3840)l Thus sexual reproduction is a function of decline. Deities "beget offspring by will alone. By word, by sight, by touch, and by sexual intercourse [maithuna], also, they beget children. These are the five methods" [15.38.21 (15.30.22)l. It would make sense, then, that in the birth of great heroes or through the ascetic powers of great sages, conception would more closely approximate that of deities, and the less than desirable method of sexual reproduction would be circumvented.

The Dharma of Paternity Dharmic dynamics surrounding paternity issues in the Mbh are among the most charged and highly-invested topics of the epic.

Indeed, in a society that is

obviously obsessed with male lineage and descendants, it is ironic that ~amtanu's direct line should stop with his son Bhisma, and only be continued by the sons that three generations of wives bear from other men.

Births by women

impregnated by men other than their husbands are remarkable for their suspension of the very rule that is arguably one of the most important motives for male control over women, not just in ancient India: controlling a woman's reproductive functioning to ensure that her child is the husband's own.

Of

* Samkalpa is an interesting word that can mean idea, notion, conception, will, desire, or determination. But the prevailing sense here is one of intent, which seems to make "willn the most appropriate translation. t "By will" is the prevalent reading shown in the Critical Edition, but "by touch" is found in the Nilakantha Vulgate that Dutt uses [12.207.39].

course, the males in question were irretrievably incapacitated in regard to begetting their own children-in

the case of Pandu and Dhrtarastra, their father

was dead, in the case of the Pandavas, impotent (cursed to die in the act of sexual intercourse)*-and

in name at least the children are understood to be the

husband's. Furthermore, the "outside males" are either not really outsiders (a "brother" relation in the case of Vyasa) or so far outside the realm of normal human possibility (in the case of the gods who father the Piindavas) that they do not constitute any real threat to normal human males. Yet in all cases, the reasoning leading up to the steps that bring other males into the procreative picture is heavily laden with dharrnic justifications that, I would argue, are excessive, defensive rationalizations that bespeak the anxiety associated with taking such a step.

Dhamnic Reasoning Most of the dharmic discussions surrounding paternity would fall within the pravtti dharma that Arti Dhand outlines, dharma for which childrenespecially sons-are

an essential component in fulfilling social and religious

obligations. In this dharmic context, "for a childless man.. .there is no door to heaven" [1.111.11VB] , and in the political context of the dynasty whose story the Mbh recounts, for a childless king there is no heir to the throne. These two pressing needs account for many of the lengths to which both men and women in the epic will go to procure offspring, preferably male.

* In the case of Vidura, perhaps because his mother was a servant, the husband, absent or not, is simply irrelevant.

Yet though it is said that "sons ...are born the common property of the father and the mother" [1.99.28 VB], it is not always clear who exactly i s - o r is to be-the

father. At one point it is stated that "in the decisions of Law [dharma]

they quote three kinds of fathers respectively: the one who begets the child's body, the one who saves its life, and the one who gives it food" [1.66.13 VB]. At another point it is stated that "the son is his who took the hand" (the husband), referring to the kjatriya women who bore a new generation of children by brahmins after their husbands were decimated. By "keep[ing] their minds on the Law [dharma] as they lay with the brahmins" [1.98.6 VB] these women procured children who partook of the caste and the name of their dead husbands, and continued their male lineage. There is an extensive discussion between Bhisma and Yudhisthira on the dharma of paternity, ironically, as the former lay dying from wounds inflicted by his "grandson" Aquna.

+na

and Yudhisthira are the "sons of

Piindu" who were begotten upon their mother Kunti by different gods,* and Yudhisthira asks: "some say that the son is born of the field (lqetra). Some, on the other hand, say that the son is born from his seed. Are both sons equal?" [13.49.12 (13.49.12) Dl.

Bhisma responds: "The son would be born of the seed, or

abandoned, he would be born of the field. [In the case of] a son born from oneself? who is abandoned for some reason or another, the seed is not the cause [of paternity]; the son would belong to the owner of the field" [13.49.13-15

(13.49.13-15)]. In other words, Bhisma does a sort of ranking of paternity: the

* Pandu was cursed to die in the act of sexual intercourse. Atman

first answer is that the son is "of the seed," but if the owner of that seed abandons his son or is otherwise absented, the son then would belong either to "the field" or "the owner of the field." Pgndu himself, in compelling Kunti to invoke gods to father children in his stead makes (what is at least to him) a dharmically persuasive argument: In the eyes of the Law there are these six sons who are of the blood and heirs, and these six who are neither heirs nor of the blood. [They are]: the son fathered by oneself, the son presented, the son purchased, the son born by one's widow, the son born by one's wife before her marriage, and the son born by a loose woman; the others [who are not] are the son gifted, the son bartered, the son by artifice, the son who comes by himself, the son come with marriage, the son of unknown seed, and the son fathered on a lowly womb ...Therefore, lacking myself the power of progeny, I shall now send you. Find yourself a child by my equal or better, glorious wife! [1.111.27-32 VB] He then proceeds to recount the story of a hero's wife whose elders instructed her to bear a child for her dead husband: "ritually pure and bathed, she stood in the night at a crossroads and with a flower chose an accomplished brahmin"

[1.111.33-35 VB] . Kunti, however is not convinced, and responds to this with the story of Bhadra, a woman who conceived children from her husband's corpse

[ l .112.15-34]! Though many of the dharmic justifications surrounding uncertain paternity corroborate, there are enough disjunctures to raise suspicions that it is not as simple as each instance suggests. Let us look now into specific examples of

niyoga to get a better sense of the circumstances and reasoning surrounding them. Human Niy oga

I already referred above to the story of an entire generation of ksatriya women bearing children in their husbands' names by Brahmins-a

story to which

the epic refers no less than 20 times [Goldman 1978: 3411. In this case and in the

story just recounted, Brahmins, sages, and ascetics are ideal choices to father children on others' wives, though it is not always clear why their husbands are unable to d o so themselves. The sage Vasistha begets a child on the queen of King Kalmasapada at his request,* and the seer Dirghatamas is asked by King Balin to father sons on his wife,+ though neither specifies the exact reason why. "Since so many of the Mbh legends regularly equate Brahmans with fathers and batriyas with sons," [1978: 3411 Goldman traces these kings' impotence to Oedipal origins, a theme to which we will return later in this chapter. But whatever the reason for these queens being offered to these Brahmins, in both cases we often see a striking lack of female desire or outright repulsion at the men who are sent to them. Finding [Dirghatamas] both blind and old, the queen did not go, but sent the old man her nurse. On her, he fathered eleven sons...When mighty King Balin saw [them] at their studies, he said, "Those are mine!" "No," said the great seer, "they are mine ...I have fathered [them] on a serf woman. Your queen Sudesng found me both blind and old, and disdainfully and foolishly gave me her nurse." Balin then pacified that strictest of seers and once more sent him his wife Sudesng. Dirghatamas felt her limbs, then said to the queen, 'You shall have a son of great power and true to his word." And so the royal seer Anga was born from Sudesns. [1.98.25-31VB] It is interesting here that the seer fathered eleven sons on the nurse, when h e knew all along that she was not the queen. If this was a favor to the king, why

* "I wish to obtain from you a boon by which I can acquit myself of the debt to Ikvaku.. .pray go for me to my beloved queen, who has virtue, beauty, and accomplishments, to beget children for the furtherance of Iksviiku's lineage.. .The queen at the king's command strode up to Vasistha. At her season the great seer Vasistha, who partook of the best, lay with the queen by divine precept. When a child was conceived in her, the good hermit was bidden farewell by the king and returned to his hermitage." [1.168.11-23VB] t "'0blessed one,' he said, 'please father on my wives sons who know Law and Profit, to continue my line.' The virile seer [tejasvi} agreed, whereupon the king sent him his wife Sudesns. ..In this way many other barons adept at the bow were born by Brahmins, barons most proficient in the Law, manly and strong [viryavanto]." [1.98.21-331

would he have fathered eleven sons whom he knew would not be the king's own? Furthermore, it is also interesting that he would consider the sons of the nurse his, but not the son fathered in exactly the same way on Sudesnii. Is this because the presence of the dharmic father with whom he had contracted trumps his claim? Because there was no husband for the nurse? Why would the great seer claim those offspring "born of a lowly womb" for his own? We see the same pattern of repulsion and replacement in the conception of two of the most pivotal characters of the epic: Piindu and Dhrtarastra. Vyiisa, the author of the epic, is a great seer as well as the premarital son of Queen Satyavati, and thus the elder half-brother of Vicitravirya, her dead son by ~ a m t a n uwhose wives need to bear offspring to continue the lineage. He occupies, then, both the role of brother and seer, two of the most common means by which widows can conceive heirs to their husbands' names. In agreeing to his mother's request, Vyasa anticipates the young princesses' reaction: "Her highest vow shall be that she bear my ugliness. If she bears with my smell, my looks, my garb, and my body, [she] shall straightaway conceive a superior child" [1.99.4243VB]. But that was asking too much. When the first young princess was told to lie on her bed and await a brother-in-law who would come to her in the night, she imagined it would be "Bhisma or any other of the bulls of the Kurus" [1.100.3 VB]-but

when the

seer entered her bed with the lamps still burning, and she saw "dark Qsna's* matted orange hair, his fiery eyes, his reddish beard," she could not look at him out of fright and closed her eyes [1.100.5 VB]. When Queen Satyavati asked him * e s n a Dvaipiiyana, another name for Vy%a.

afterwards if a fine son would be born, Vyasa replied that "because of his mother's defect of virtue, he will be blind" [1.100.10 VB]. When his turn came with the second princess, "she too saw the seer and, desperate, turned a sickly pale. Seeing that she had paled from distress, Satyavati's son Vyisa said to her, 'Since you paled when you saw my ugliness, you shall have a son of a sickly pallor, and so his name shall be Pandu the Pale, woman of the lovely face'" [1.100.15-19 VB]. The time came for the first princess to take a second turn: But as she thought back on the appearance, and the smell, of the great seer, the woman, lovely as a Goddess, was from sheer fright incapable of doing as the queen told her. The princess of the Kasis decked a slave woman, as beautiful as an apsani, with her own jewelry and sent her to Qsna. When the seer came, the woman rose to meet him and greeted him: and with his consent she lay with him and served him with all honor. The seer waxed content with the pleasure of love he found with her, and he spent all night with her as she pleasured him. [1.100.22-25 VB]

When Vyasa rose, he told her that she would cease to be a slave and have a son mindful of dharma, "sure in the principles of polity, innocent of lust and wrath," the most sagacious man in the world [1.100.28 VB]-this

was to be Vidura, the

God of Dharma incarnate, who, however, could never be king because of the lowly womb from which he was born. So, as in the story of Dirghatamas, the princesses-mothers protagonists and perpetuators of the royal line-repulsed

of the epic's by the seers'

appearance, would rather send maids to fulfill their duty than suffer an unpleasant coupling for the sake of progeny. Though the events of the epic a r e in

many ways overdetermined, one could argue that the great family tragedy could have been averted but for these women's desire, or lack thereof.

Had the

princesses fulfilled their duties as well as their servants, the eldest son would not

have been born blind and thus unable to ascend the throne. The normal course of succession would have been maintained and not complicated by competing claims. And while we are with the "what ifs," had Bhisma fulfilled his duty, the princesses would not have had to deal with the repulsive seer in the first place! Bhisma, as King ~amtanu'seldest son, should have been king. But when he renounced his right to the throne and to progeny in deference to his father's desire for Satyavati,* it meant he vowed a lifetime of celibacy that he was not willing to rescind even in face of the distress the kingdom faced, and even with Satyavati's specific appeal. With Bhisma turning down his right and duty to the levirate, the line passed from that of his father to that of Satyavati-herself origin a "lowly wombv-by

means of her premarital son Vyasa.

in

Though the

dynasty would continue to bear the Name-of-[Bhisma'sl-Father, in reality it would become matrilineal for three consecutive generations. As pragmatic as the practice of niyoga may seem-ensuring protecting inheritances, continuing the name of the father-the

heirs,

question of

desire is thus never fully separate from it, and the practice retains enough of its subversive potential to require excessivejustification when it occurs. Bhisma notes in his deathbed lecture that, though according to some the younger brother may unite with his older brother's widow, "others hold that the practice, though it is frequent, originates from desire instead of being a scriptural ordinance" [13.44.51 * As we will examine more closely in sections to follow, Bhisma not only renounces his own right to the throne so that his father ~ a m t a n ucan marry Satyavati (her father's condition is that her sons be king), he also renounces all sexual contact with women so that he will have no sons who might have competing claims against Satyavati's progeny. The great irony of the Mbh is, of course, that it was precisely competing claims to the throne between Satyavati's descendants-and following from Bhisma's vow of celibacy-that decimated the family and destroyed the kingdom.

(13.44.53) Dl .* A case in point, Aquna sees the buxom Citrangada strolling in a city through which he passes and desires her; her father the king, in acceding to Aquna's desire, names as his price that W n a provide him an heir through her.? Aguna here is neither seer nor relative, but simply conveniently desires a woman who must provide an heir to her father, not her husband. As we have seen, the fact that the queens sent servants in their stead suggests that, for them, the importance of acquiring heirs for their husbands does not outweigh their repulsion at having to sleep with a man they find physically unattractive. Furthermore, even though the child is ostensibly in the absent father's name, it is never unequivocally so. In all the cases of niyoga in the epic, the "biological" father-human

or divine-is

called "father" as much as the "dharrnic" father, and

if these biological fathers never thoroughly discard their role as such, to use Bhisma's reasoning above, the offspring thus never unequivocally belong exclusively to "the master of the soil".

True, such questions of paternal

appellation must be contextualized in a kinship system that recognizes multiple fathers and mothers in an extended family and social network, but these references to fatherhood in the epic are not of a simple generic or formal nature. It is clear that Vyasa has a relationship with Pandu, Dhrtarastra, Vidura and their children that goes beyond his role simply of elder brother-seer-author of the epic, * This exact phrase doesn't appear in the Sanskrit, but Ganguli agrees with this reading of the passage. f 'When he saw the buxom daughter of Citravahana, he desired her; and he went to the king and made known his purpose. Conciliatingly the king replied, "All my forbears had sons, but to me this girl was born, who surely shall continue the line. My fancy is that she is my son, and I have styled her my puppet according to the provisions ...So let her bring forth a son, who shall be the dynast: this son I demand as my price for her. By this covenant you must take her, Pandava." [1.207.15-25 VBI

and the gods a paternal relationship with each of the sons that Kunti bears by them in her husband's name.

Divine Niyoga Indeed, Kama, the pre-marital son of Kunti, has three competing claims on his paternity, each ostensibly justified by the dhannic precepts outlined above: Siirya, the Sun God, "from whose seed he sprung"; Adhiratha, the lower-caste siita who "gave him food" and whose caste Karna maintains throughout the epic; and PZndu, who married Kunti after the fact but as "master of the soil" would in theory have accepted Karna as his eldest, according to his own dharmic argument above. Karna is the only case in the epic of triplicate paternity, each with dharrnic support, and one claim never really takes clear preeminence over the others (though Kama sentimentally casts his lot with the life that the siita had given him

[5.139.5-101). The five Pandavas, half-brothers to Kama as they are to each other, are treated both as sons of Pfindu and as sons of their respective divine fathers throughout the epic. Yudhisthira, the eldest, is the son of Dharma himself, for as PZndu reasoned in choosing this god as the first to be called by Kunti, "Dharma would not join yoke with us if it were not lawful, and people will now think that this is the Law" [l.ll3.40]. Bhima, the second, is son of the wind god VZyu, Aquna son of the king of gods Indra, and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva were conceived by Kunti's co-wife M2dI-i by the twin Asvins. It is not clear, however, exactly how this divine niyoga functions. In the first instance, the text says that Kunti "lay with Dharma, who had assumed a yogic body

[yoga nwrti]" [1.114.2V B ] ;in the second, it is said that "she called up the Wind,

and by him she bore the strong-armed Bhima" [1.114.9 VB]; in the third, she "called Indra; and the lord of the Gods came and begot Arpna" [1.114.28 VB]. Miidri "went out to the Asvins with her heart; and they came and begot two sons on her" [1.115.16 VB] . And in the case of Karna's conception, Kunti describes it thus: "The deity of the thousand rays then entered me with his energy and stupefied me completely. He then said to me, 'You will have a son' and returned to the firmament" [15.38.13 (15.30.24) Dl. Earlier, Vaisampiiyana describes it thus: Surya "entered Kunti in his yogic person, and he touched her to the navel. And the power of the Sun well-nigh unnerved the royal maiden, and she fell on her bed stupefied" [3.291.23 VB] . The Pandavas obviously take after their divine fathers in key traits,* yet remain Pandu's in name and lineage; throughout the epic in references too numerous to cite, the gods and the Pandavas (and Kama) are referred to as fathers and sons, and there are multiple interactions between these divine fathers and their heroic sons that sometimes even border on tenderness. Indra welcomes his son Aquna into the court of heaven to learn the art of celestial weaponry and dance, Surya pleads with Kama to abandon his fatal animosity against the Pandavas, and Dharma punctuates Yudhisthira's life with dharmic tests to ensure and cultivate his good judgment.

* In Mary Carroll Smith's words, there is a sense of the "inner connection between [Arjuna's] consummate heroic achievements and the spiritual principle embodied in his father" [1991: 851.

Illegitimate/PremaritalOffsjn-hzg As much dharmic maneuvering as we see with procreation ostensibly operating within the context of marriage and family interest, we also see surprising flexibility in cases of illegitimate or premarital offspring. I mentioned above that Vyasa, the author of the epic and a recurrent character in it, is the premarital son of Queen Satyavati.

Before her marriage to King ~ a m t a n u ,

Satyavati was a lowly fishergirl-with

an extraordinary birth, however*-who

exuded a fishlike smell. She plied a ferry for her father, and one day a great sage, Parasara, steps on board and becomes overwhelmed with desire for her. Her concerns in resisting are mostly of a pragmatic nature: first, she worries that the holy men standing on the banks would see them. Parasara creates a fog. Then she worries about losing her virginity. Pariisara promises to restore it. Thenquite strategically, as this is what would attract King ~amtanu-she asks as a boon that her body henceforth emit a delicious smell. Parasara grants it. "And much pleased, her wish granted, the girl bejeweled with all a woman's charms lay with the wonder-working seer.. .the happy Satyavati, having obtained her matchless boon, gave birth the same day she lay with Parasara" [1.57.66-691. Jayatri Ghosh

* A mountain procreated a son and daughter with a river whom he was holding within him; a sageking frees the river, and she offers her children as thanks. The king makes the boy his general and the girl his wife. One day while hunting, the king thinks of his exquisite wife and ejaculates, collecting the sperm on a leaf. He gives the leaf to a hawk to carry to his wife, but another hawk intercepts it, mistaking it for meat. The sperm falls into another river where a nymph sporting as a fish swallows it and becomes pregnant. In her tenth month, she is caught by a fisherman who, in opening her belly, finds a boy and a girl. The king is informed of this and offered the babies. He adopts the son (later to become King Matsya) but rejects the girl-Satyavati-who is then adopted by the fishermen [1.57.33-551.

makes a thoughtful and compelling analysis of Satyavati as the Siidranf who became the matriarch of the Mbh: The story of her compliance [both with Parasara's and ~amtanu'sdesire] is a transformation of social and sexual subordination into far-reaching personal and political advantage. Still more remarkable is that the matriarchal ascendancy she gained is recognized in the Mbh as a moral supremacy that lent to her political decisions unquestioned validity. Her story thus inverts the conventional power relationship: rejected by her father at birth and forced into the underclass, she became the arbiter of the fate of the [Kuru dynasty]. Nor is her success fortuitous because the narrative is careful to mark the shaping intelligence that underwrote her progress. [2000: 351 Indeed, Satyavati's "total lack of embarrassment in acknowledging an illegitimate child and the enduring relationship between mother and son" is striking, as well as the validation of her dharmic reasoning that "enshrines a mother's rights.. .in an age of supposedly unquestioned patriarchal determinism" [Ghosh 2000: 43-

441. In Ghosh's analysis, Satyavati increasingly emerges as the embodiment of principles that seem to run counter to the general social conventions of the epic. First, she, rather than any male figure in her circle, is the decision maker; second, the customary ignominy of bearing a child out of wedlock is reversed in her case to lend power to her decisions; third, she anchors the dharrna of her decisions in a biological observation that lays claims to gender parity.. .There seems to be little room for doubt that the Mbh is using the Satyavati story to support an alternative view not only of dharma, but also of the hierarchy of power. That it does so by electing for the central figure of the discourse an embodiment of powerlessness as an abandoned child, a woman-and a woman from the underclass, at that-and an unwed mother underlines the departure from the norm. IIbid., 44-45; italics mine]

A comparison with Kunti demonstrates the strikingly different consequences of each woman's premarital adventures, and the decision each makes in revealing o r concealing hers. Whereas Satyavati was able to keep the love and loyalty of her

* Woman of the lowly sudra caste.

premarital son, Kunti, in casting Karna off to be adopted by lower-caste parents and raised in ignorance of his royal and divine origins, irretrievably loses his love and devotion. Indeed, Kama goes on to develop an implacable hatred for the five Pfindavas and swears allegiance to their arch-enemy Duryodhana-in

the final

scenes leading up to the great war, Kunti is forced to accept that a duel will occur between her sons that will leave one dead. As Ghosh puts it, ' W e r e Satyavati's truthfulness had led to love, mutuality, and the preservation of the family, Kunti's deceit led to alienation, rejection, and fratricide" [2000:4.51.

Though it was

certainly easier for Satyavati to bear a child who would mature instantly and set out on his own (not to mention become the author of the epic), and Kunti's choice to bear Karqa in secret is treated with sympathy, as Ghosh observes, "the contrast between the two stories seems to turn dharrna into an ambivalent if not inconsistent category" [Ibid.] . Indeed, another twist in the case of these premarital births, referred to already above, is that a woman's husband, retroactively becoming "master of the soil," becomes a premarital child's dharmic father. Bhisma himself says: "When a man, desiring to have a son, marries a girl quick with child, the child born of his wife must belong to him, for it is the fruit of his own soil. The person from whose vital seed the son has sprung can have no right to such son" [13.49.16 (13.49.16)l. This argument makes Karna Psndu's. Though in the next breath, Bhisma also makes the case for Adhiratha, Karna's adoptive father: "Not having anyone to own him, he becomes his who rears him. Such son, again, comes to be considered as belonging to that caste to which his owner or rearer belongs" [13.49.21 (13.49.21)

Dl. Kama's paternity thus becomes a political and strategic matter, and appeals are made to dharrna by each party aiming to influence him. Siirya appears as the concerned father, attempting to persuade his son to listen to his mother's entreaties [5.144.1]. Qsna, ever wily, attempts to convince Karna to come to the side of the Pandavas by making an appeal not just to the Law, but also to sex and power. "Those who know the scriptures teach that the son born to a woman before her marriage is as much counted the son of her wedded husband as the son she bears in marriage" [5.138.8 VB]-if

Kama accepts, intimates Qsna, not

only will he be king and all the Pandavas must bow down to him as their eldest, but, he adds, "And at the sixth turn you shall lie with Draupadi! "* [5.138.15VB] . There are thus three ways in the Mbh to have a child with men other than your husband: human niyoga, divine niyoga, and, of course, pre- or extra-maritally. Obviously in many of these cases the recourse to niyoga and the co-opting of extramarital children are attempts to make the best out of a bad situation-were the husband and wife able to procreate themselves, such means would never be considered. Indeed, as we saw earlier, Arti Dhand highlights apaddharma~the dharma of distress-as

a third type of dharmic category in the epic that governs

sexuality and reproduction. This dharma comes into play in difficult times "when the limits of ordinary life are stretched to the point where individuals are forced into unorthodox actions to help themselves" [Dhand 2000: 2.531, and

addh ha ma

* Draupadi is the common wife of the five Pandavas, who take turns in their marital privileges with her.

is thus particularly salient and necessary in the kali yuga, the onset of which the tragic Mbh forebodes. But not all of the procreative machinations we see in this epic are results of people acting in times of distress-much

seems to occur for different reasons

entirely, and as we will continue to see in the following section, desire as a motive force is never far removed. We see the desire of husbands for progeny who will bear their name, desire of women for men who would otherwise be out-of-bounds, or an unequivocal lack of desire for those who are sent to them. I would suggest that the examples of niyoga and extra-marital offspring that we see in the epic are at least partly a narrative attempt on the part of male authors to account for the difficult reality of female desire, as well the reality of women who "submit to" men other than their husbands (in the final tally, Kunti, like her daughter-in-law Draupadi, has sexual relations with five!). This may be out of necessity (Kunti and Pandu, Ambika and Ambiilika) , curiosity (Kunti and Surya), or desire-cum-fear-of-

displeasing-a-great-brahmin (Satyavati), but the anxiety and dharmic coping with paternity that follows from it is similar in all of the cases. There is in each story an excessive, almost defensive rationalization of the choices made-be

it deference to

(or fear of) a great god or ascetic, or the dharmic imperative to create progeny that outweighs the dharmic imperative that women have sexual relations only with their husbands-that

appears as a dharmic overcompensation for the unruliness

and uncertainty of desire and procreation. Indeed, what I think is most compelling about the procreative machinations in the examples we have seen thus far is precisely this destabilizing

of paternity and grappling with it-the

various ways that women in the epic

procreate with men other than their husbands and their accompanying dharmic justifications-and

I think Lacan can offer insights into these dynamics that

traditional Freudian analyses cannot. In particular, Lacan outlines three types of "fathern-the Symbolic father, the Imaginary father, and the Real father-that,

I

would argue, offer a multifaceted approach to paternity similar to that of the epic itself. The Symbolic father is not necessarily an actual being but rather, as Dylan Evans puts it, "a position, a function ...synonymous with the term 'paternal function'.

This function is none other than that of imposing the Law and

regulating desire in the Oedipus complex, of intervening in the imaginary dual relationship between mother and child to introduce a necessary 'symbolic distance' between them (S4, 161)" [1996: 621. The Symbolic father is thus a position in the linguistic and cultural order and a corresponding function that is crucial to the development of the subject-it

need not necessarily be filled by the

"actual" father, or even by a male figure, but the function is fulfilled in the Nameof-the-Father, a concept that holds more psychological sway than anything fleshand-blood.

In the Mbh, it is the Name-of-the-Father that persists when the

biological father is absent or different from the husband who claims the progeny, and, more than any "real" father, is the crucial element in the characters' identities. Furthermore, what is particularly interesting about Lacan's notion of the Symbolic father in the context of this dissertation is that, according to Evans, "what distinguishes the symbolic order of culture from the imaginary order of

nature is the inscription of a line of male descendence.

By structuring

descendence into a series of generations, patrilineality introduces an order 'whose structure is different from the natural order' (S3, 320)" [Ibid.]. The Symbolic father is not about biological heredity per se as much as the line of male descendence-it

is precisely not natural but rather a function of culture,

language, and Law.

Indeed, as we see in the epic, what motivates the male

characters is not as much their seed continuing as their name being carried onthis is what justifies the otherwise unthinkable act of offering their wives to other men. Lastly, Evans notes, "the symbolic father is also the dead father, the father of the primal horde who has been killed by his own sons" [Ibid.]. The father and patriarch must be absent in order to assume and maintain symbolic power-in Freud's myth, he must be dead to be deified. We will explore the tropes of sons killing fathers further below, but it does seem that what we see at work in the dynamics of paternity in the Mbh is very much Lacan's function of the Symbolic father. In the Kuru dynasty, we see three consecutive generations of fathers who die unable to ensure the continuity of their lineage, skipping only the Piindavas themselves to be further destabilized with a fourth generation decimated (Abhimanyu and all of Draupadi's sons) and the only possible heir killed in the womb.* This is the central narrative of an epic that is continuously punctuated with references to the entire generation of ksatriya

women who had to bear sons by Brahmins. The paternal function, the place-of-

* It is only through divine intervention-not niyoga~thatthe sole possible heir to the kingdom over which this terrible war was fought can be revived.

122

the-father, is in a certain sense an empty category in the epic, surrounded, however by enough father-figures (Brahmins, preceptors, uncles) and resourceful women to continue the symbolic order of patrilineality. Indeed, the crucial role of the women here is not to be underestimated-as

Evans observes, "the symbolic

father does not usually intervene by virtue of someone incarnating this function, but in a veiled fashion, for example by being mediated by the discourse of the mother" [1996: 621. The mother is thus the agent of the symbolic father, who enforces the Law-giving and lineage-maintaining power of what might otherwise be an empty paternal function. Lacan's notion of the Imaginary father also has interesting resonances with the epic imaging of paternity. Evans, here too, offers a compelling summary of the Lacanian position: the Imaginary father is "an imago, the composite of all the imaginary constructs that the subject builds up in fantasy around the figure of the father.. .[which] often bears little relationship to the father as he is in reality (S4, 220)" [1996: 621. The imaginary father can be pictured as an ideal father, "the prototype of God-figures in religions, an all powerful protector," or as the "terrifying father of the primal horde" [Ibid.]. We see both in the male figures that step in for the dharmic fathers in niyoga: either actual gods in the case of the Pandavas-who

maintain a beneficent yet distant relationship with t h e m - o r

Vygsa and the other ascetics, who either frighten and repulse the poor women they are sent to impregnate,* or whose potential for wrath had incited the

* To be fair to Vyasa, though he may have been initially terrifying, throughout the epic he punctuates the protagonists' lives with advice, illumination, and assistance, assuming overall a benevolent authorial role.

invitation in the first place.* Finally, the real father is the closest Lacan gets to a notion of the biological father, but, as Evans puts it, "since a degree of uncertainty always surrounds the question of who the biological father really is.. .it would be more precise to say that the real father is the man who is said to be the subject's biological fatherv-in

true Lacanian form, real refers to "the real of language,

rather than the real of biology (S17, 147-8)" [Ibid., 631. So though Lacan offers no neat pigeonholing of the paternal possibilities we see explored in the epic, he offers us a vocabulary to think through the multiple functions they fulfill. Rather than attempt to understand the epic's various permutations of paternity through the unqualified rubric of "father," a Lacanian approach allows us to complexity this function in a way that better approximates the Mbh's own implicit distinctions that are articulated within the language and cultural schema of dharma. Indeed, as I have suggested, dharma can in this sense be understood as a sort of epic equivalent to Lacan's Name-ofthe-Father.

Both are concerned with the Law and the name over biology or

emotional identification, and both structure the moral reasoning that copes with the difficult realities of procreation and desire. The Name-of-the-Father in the Mbh is thus a sort of symbolic paternal imperative-for

history to make itself

distinct from nature, for the name to continue where the seed fails, and for Law to be able to assert itself above and beyond the individuals who are to embody it. The Imaginary gives us an imago where the Symbolic is veiled-a otherwise empty or obscured paternal function-and

the Real, as the one strand

* This will be elucidated with Goldman's Oedipal explanations below.

124

face to fill the

of biological continuity (or at least linguistic certainty), gives us at least a reassurance of materiality where all else may seem arbitrary.

Born without agency of woman The role of women as the biological perpetuators of the dynasty that continues under the name of men whose "seed" has never entered into it is interesting and provocative, but plausible. Women are associated with matter, the body, earth, fertility and reproduction; men with spirit, the law, and dynastic succession. As important as a man's seed is to him, where that fails the name is just as important, and as long as dharma can somehow justify the rupture of the conjugal reproductive ideal, the potentially subversive third term and its issue can be legitimized. But in cases where there is no mother-parthenogenesis sense-there

in its truest

is a qualitative shift. Births in which either a mother or father are

lacking might seem to be in structural opposition to one another, but it is not just a simple inversion. In the case of women who are impregnated by other men, or even gods, the issue tends to stay within the realm of the historical (dynasties, lineages, etc.); in the case of offspring being born without mothers, the story takes a leap into the supernatural, and the progeny tends not to perpetuate its lineage. In the case of niyoga, men either fall into the category of sperm donors or titular fathers-there

is a split between biological and dharmic paternity, and both may continue to exercise formative influences throughout their children's lives. But in the case of

male parthenogenesis, there is no mother at all.* Though feminine, womblike symbols may often frequent the procreative process,+ there is neither a biological nor titular mother in any of these cases. In Hindu mythology the instances of unilateral female creation are far outnumbered by unilateral male creation. The male seed is fertile in itself, particularly the seed of a great ascetic who has kept it within him for a long time and is therefore 'one whose seed is never shed in vain' (amogharetas); that is, he engenders a child every time he sheds his seed, n o matter where he sheds it ...The seed shed by a powerful male may fall into any of a number of womb substitutes (a pot, the earth, a river, or someone's mouth) and produce an embryo. In addition, other fluids from the body of the male may serve as seed substitutes, particularly sweat and tears. [Doniger 1980: 391

One explanation for the more numerous mythical examples of unilateral male creation is obvious: because of women's role in childbearing, it is more difficult to achieve the kind of symbolic if not physical distance that could make a mother absent without taking a leap into the magical, ritual, or divine. There are, of course, cases of adoption in the Mahabharata in which the biological and titular mother diverge-both

Kunti and Kama, for example-but

a birth that occurs

without the involvement of any female womb, human or divine, is extraordinary. Female parthenogenesis is thus structurally linked to male parthenogenesis in that, by one partner not contributing as would be expected, there is a disruption of the normal conjugal relations that produce offspring; but they are also

structurally

distinct

in

that

they

are

qualitatively

different-the

transformation does n o t involve a simple switching of terms. We certainly do n o t

* The term ayonija, used to refer to the male parthenogenic births, may be translated as "born without the need of a female source," or more simply, "non-womb births". There is no equivalent term (or concept) for births that occur without male seed or agency. t The sacrificial altar, rivers, jars, or mountain basins, as we will see further below-also the name of the apsard who incites many of the spontaneous ejaculations: Ghrtaci, or "Sacrificial Ladle full of Clarified Butter" [Hiltebeitel2001a: 287; Smith 1991: 901.

see women giving birth for whom there is n o account whatsoever of paternity!* As Smith notes, "the real o r shadow presence of a father figure is almost always given concrete mention in the female parthenogenesis myths while the mother is often dispensable in the 'non-womb' births" [1991: 981. Indeed, even Draupadi and h e r brother, who rise from a sacrificial altar, are by name and lineage associated with Drupada while his wife has n o real presence in their story. Paternity thus persists even where the seed is absent; motherhood, except in cases of adoption, requires the participation of the female's womb. Whereas the practice of niyoga falls within the context of p a w t i dharma, male parthenogenesis appears to partake of a predominately n i w t i ethic, not to mention a fairly profound misogyny and horror at the defiling properties of uterine conception and birth: On account of the obligation of birth, one is compelled to live within the womb, for the union of vital seed and blood. Living there one is defiled with excreta, urine, and phlegm, and always fouled with blood that is created there ...By their nature, women are Qetra [field] and men are betrajna [master of the field]. ..Therefore, wise persons should not pursue women especially. Indeed, women are like dreadful Mantra powers. They stupefy persons shorn of wisdom. They are sunk in the quality of Darkness. They are the eternal embodiment of the senses. On the account of the strong desire that men cherish for women, offspring proceed from them, due to the action of the seminal fluid. As one throws off from his person such vermin as are born there but as are not on that account any part of oneself, so should one cast off those vermin of one's body that are called children, who, though regarded as one's own, are not his own in sooth. [12.206.6-10 (12.213.6-10) Dl

* Well, actually, never say never in this epic! There is one striking exception in a side story, though the statement above holds true for the central narrative. The wife of Atri "forsook her husband in anger and said 'I shall no longer live under that ascetic.'" She went and lived under the protection of Mahadeva, who appeared before her and said 'You will have a son. And you will have that son without the help of a husband, simply through the favor of Rudra.. .that son, born in the family of his father, shall become known for his merit, and assume a name after you" [13.14.65-67 (13.14.9599) D; lines 98-99 in Dutt are not found in the Critical Edition; italics mine].

The lQi* Charushirsha gets as a reward for his penances one hundred sons "born without the agency of woman" [13.18.5-6 (13.18.5-6) Dl, and Bhisma, Drona, and &pa are exalted as "godlike warriors," "not born from a human womb" [5.54.49-50 Dl. Drona and &pa, indeed, "have absolutely no trace of contact with the feminine either in their birth or nurture" [Smith 1991: 971, and we should remember that Bhisma, with the other seven Vasus, was cursed to be born in a human womb,+ from which the Goddess Ganga fortunately saves them. Drona's son Asvatthaman has as his claim to fame not only that his father avoided the womb, but that his mother, too, was "not born of woman" [9.5.15 (9.6.15) Dl. This male fantasy of avoiding the womb and birth canal can certainly be read on multiple levels: as a paean to the powers of austerities, an expression of male horror at the "abject" feminine and its defiling qualities, and a wish-fulfillment or will-to-power of the most basic nature. As Doniger notes, "In the medical texts it is clear that women can procreate unilaterally but men cannot; in the myths, the situation is reversed, and men, but not women, are capable of unilateral procreation (albeit men do it into a 'female' receptacle of some sort-any container at all)" [1980: 501. Indeed, these male parthenogenic births may be symbolic attempts to overcome the one aspect of sexual reproduction that must be maddening to the male psyche: '"pater semper incertus est' while the mother is ' certissima"' [Evans 1996: 631 .

* Sage, ascetic, seer

t 'We foolishly passed by the great seer Vasistha when he was sitting at his twilight rites hidden from our eyes. He cursed us angrily, 'Be born in a womb!'" [1.91.13]

Male Pregnancy Perhaps the most obvious example of this sort of wish-fulfillment is the motif of male pregnancy that we see in various forms throughout the epic and other ancient Indian material. These "men can have babies as women do.. . [but] on the other hand, it does not happen that some woman or goddess suddenly finds herself endowed with a phallus or, to her surprise and ours, becomes able to produce children all by herself [Doniger 1980: 281. Indeed, Doniger suggests, "male pregnancy may be viewed as the positive aspect of a syndrome whose negative facet is manifest in self-castration," [Ibid., 3001 a possibility we will explore in more depth below. King Yuvanasva, perhaps the most striking example of male pregnancy in the Mbh, accidentally drinks water that was consecrated by a Brahmin in order for his wife to conceive-here, trumps biology [1975: 1971-and

as van Buitenen notes, rite

a hundred years later the king's left side* splits

open and a splendid son emerges [3.126.4-431. Indra appears and offers the child his forefinger to suck, "Indra being the storm cloud and hence androgynously able to produce semen or milk/rain.. .Thus the male is able is able to do anything the female can do, even to produce milk" [Doniger 1980: 501. In a different twist, the student Kaca is killed by Asurast, burnt to ashes, and fed to his guru Sukra in his wine. When Sukra calls out to him, Kaca responds from inside his belly, and the two are then faced with the dilemma of whose life , befits a guru, resolves the problem: "'I shall bear thee should be saved. ~ u k r aas

* Again, note that the left side is considered the feminine half of the body. t Demons

as a son, and thou shalt bring me to life, from my body departed'. ..Receiving the magic his guru bestowed and splitting his belly the Brahmin came out ...and seeing him felled, a pile of learning, did Kaca restore the dead man to life"

[1.71.4849 VB]. The problem then becomes that ~ u k r a ' sdaughter, who was in love with Kaca, is now technically his sister! "The loins ...in which you have dwelled, radiant woman of the long eyes and moonlike face, I too have dwelled there. By law you are my sister" [1.72.13-14VB]. In yet another case, Indra casts his thunderbolt at Skanda's* right side; it splits open and "another person was born, a youth accoutred in gold, wielding a spear, and wearing divine earrings; and because he was born from the entering of the thunderbolt he became Visiikha"

[3.216.12 VB]. Other beings are also born from the thunderbolt's impact on Skanda: "powerful maidens" who "cruelly rob babies, both newborn and still in the womb" [3.217.1-2VB]-these

"Mothers" reappear throughout Skanda's mythology

and have a long independent history that intersects with Tantric origins.? Finally, perhaps not surprisingly, Brahma-great god and creator of the cosmos-produces

Death out of his body, an "offspring of the wrath [he]

harboured for the destruction of the universe": T h e r e came o u t from the various outlets of his sense-organs a female figure. She was dark a n d red a n d tawny a n d h e r tongue, countenance, a n d eyes were red a n d she was adorned with two shining ear-rings a n d various

* An entire chapter could be written about the incredible procreative dynamics that surround Skanda's birth, as well as the complicated web of paternity and maternity that encompasses him. I have resisted going into this partly because of space considerations, and partly because of the decidedly human focus of this project. Though divine interactions propel many of the rich procreative dynamics that interest me, I am able to bracket Skanda as a god himself, son of God(s) and Goddess(es), whose story does not really interlace with the humans that give this epic its texture and animus. This is somewhat arbitrary, and I of course cannot resist bringing him in at certain points, but I must save fuller treatment of his extraordinary case for future work. t C.f. David Gordon White's forthcoming "Kiss of the Yogini," University of Chicago Press.

other brilliant ornaments. Coming out of his body, she betook to the southern quarter and she smilingly cast glances at those two lords of the universe. Then Brahma, that controller of the creation and destruction of the worlds, called her by the name of "Deathn. And. ..he said to her-"Slay these beings of creationn. [Dronaparvan, Appendix I, No. 8, lines 118-19* (7.53.17-20)Dl These women who emerge from male bodies are thus not life-giving or nurturing figures. As with the Mothers who emerge from Skanda's body, they bring death and destruction.

The males who emerge from men, on the other hand, are

shining paragons of glory and valor, carrying on their fathers' line without dilution from female "soil" or its defiling properties. Far from the helpless male protosubjects in the wombs described above, these creator-males shape and sanction the existence of the women they bring forth.

An interlocking motif to that of male pregnancy-though and more abstract-is

less corporeal

that of birth by male will, desire, or thought. Beings may

not emerge materially out of the abdominal area of a male body, but are nonetheless solely a function of male agency. These cases generally involve gods, who, as we noted above, have the ability to conceive by thought alone. Indeed, in several cases offspring are created directly out of the mind: Sanatsujata, who comes to teach dharrna to King Dhrtarastra, is one of four divine youths "not born of woman but directly from Brahma's mind" [van Buitenen 1978: 1821. Brahma also "once conceived in his brain and held the foetus there for many long years. After a thousand years, the great god sneezed.? In that act, the foetus dropped from his head" [12.122.16 (12.122.16) Dl. The god Prajipati had a son born from * See Hiltebeitel 1990: 346-47 on this passage and the argument for its inclusion in the main text of the Mbh. t &uvatas, a nice onomatopoeia.

his mind who in turn begot a son on a cow; this son deserted his father, who then "created a new self by himself, and, having been thus born twice, he angrily begot.. .Visravas with half of himself" [3.258.12-14 VB] ! Mahesvara "created from his mouth a dreadful Being whose very sight could make one's hair stand erect" [not in CE (12.284.29) Dl. We see perhaps at least a hint of female symbolism here, as mouths and vaginas have a long-standing association in the Hindu (and psychoanalytic) tradition, and Mahesvara himself is at once a phallic and androgynous god. Lastly, the sage Kuni-Garga-the

one human example in this

category-creates a daughter simply "by his desire [or mind] "* [9.51.31-35 (9.52.34)], with no other explanation apparently required by the text!

Birth by Sacri'fice In the example of King Yuvanasva who became pregnant by drinking consecrated water, we see the power of ritual trump biological limitations, and yet another category of male parthenogenic births is that of offspring created by rite or sacrifice. As Doniger observes, "one must note the primacy of the Vedic ritual as model for sexual creation ...the Vedic worldview is implicit in the frequent examples of unilateral competitive procreation that occur in the texts" [1980: 31321.

In the following example, once again involving Brahmfi, we see a

combination of ejaculation and ritual: Seeing the celestial ladies of great beauty, the seed of Brahman came out and dropped upon the Earth. On account of the seed having fallen on the dust, the Sun took up that dust mixed with the particles of seed from the Earth with his hands and cast it into the sacrificial fire. Meanwhile, the sacrifice with the sacred fire of burning flames was commenced and as it went on Brahman was pouring libations on the fire. While Brahman was

* Manasa could be translated as either.

pouring, (his semen) became visible. As soon as the seed came out, he took it u p with the sacrificial ladle and poured it as a libation of clarified butter ...on the burning fire. From that seed, Brahman of great power caused the four orders of creation to come into being. [13.85.8-12 (13.85.98-102) ]

All of living creation here is thus a product of this confluence between sight, desire, ejaculation, and ritual process: seers are created, as well other deities, from this conjunction between Brahmii and Agni, the god of the sacrificial fire. In fact, as the passage continues, Agni and Brahma begin to argue about whose children they are! As Doniger notes, "fire is also a kind of ritual fluid in the Indian view," a "female substance into which the male substance, liquid seed, is sacrificed" or a 'male substance, liquid seed, which is sacrificed into a female substance or surrounded by a female substance, the watery womb" [1980: 551. In another case, a king already has one son, but is concerned about the risks of having only one and desires a hundred to ensure the continuation of the lineage. His priest suggests a rite by which he will receive these hundred sons, but he must sacrifice his only son to do so. The king agrees-over the loud protests of his wives-and the son is sacrificed into the fire. The anguished mothers inhale the smoke of the fire and all become pregnant [3.127.5-128.7].* Indeed, these conceptions by sacrifice often have a distinctly dark side to them. The ascetic Tvastr Prajapati, by touching water and pouring an oblation into the fire, creates the grisly Vrtra to kill his enemy Indra [5.9.4045].

A Brahmin whose daughter-in-law is raped by

another powerful ascetic, "overcome by fury. ..plucked out a matted lock [jasp] from his head and offered it into the well-prepared fire. Thereupon a woman * Unlike the other examples, we have wombs participating here, but the act of conception is nonetheless solely a function of male ritual agency.

arose who matched the other in beauty. Once more he tore out a matted lock and offered it into the fire, and from it arose a demon of evil eyes and fearful aspect" [3.137.11], whom he commanded to kill the sage who had violated his daughterin-law. Draupadi's brother Dhrspdyumna is created by their "father" Drupada for the destruction of Drona, and when Draupadi then arises unanticipated from the altar after her brother, a "disembodied voice spoke: 'Superb among women, the Dark Woman* shall lead the baronage to its doom" r1.155.441.

Birth by Spontaneous Ejaculation Perhaps the most common form of male parthenogenesis that we see in the Mbh, however, is that of spontaneous ejaculation-usually

on the part of ascetics

or sages, usually involving some sort of feminine receptacle, and usually inspired by the sight of some scantily-clad or exposed celestial damsel. In some cases, this situation is contrived by Indra, king of the gods, in order to stop the ascetic from acquiring too much power by his austerities-acquired

ascetic "heat" is lost

through ejaculation, and mortals who are becoming threats to the gods with their spiritual power are thereby returned to their places. The great ascetic Dadhicha is one such example: "on account of his excessive ascetic austerities, ~ a k r a twas possessed by fear. The sage could not be dissuaded from the practices of his penances by the offer of even various kinds of rewards. At last, for tempting the sage, [ ~ a k r a ]sent to him the highly beautiful and celestial ApsarS by name

* Krsna, meaning "dark in complexion," another name for Draupadi. t Another name for Indra An upsanis is a heavenly courtesan or nymph: "'They are fond of bathing, can change their shapes and are endowed with superhuman power.' They 'are usually described as the servants of Indra, who when alarmed by the rigorous austerities of some mighty sage, sends down one of them to

Alambush2" [9.50.6-7 (9.51.6-7) Dl. The sage was on the banks of the Sarasvati river worshipping the gods when the nymph arrived, and upon "seeing the beautiful damsel, the seminal fluid of that ascetic trickled out," falling into the river, who preserved the seed with care and later presented the ascetic his son [9.50.8-20 (9.51.8-20)]. In another case of aqueous encounters, an ascetic was performing his ablutions in a river when he saw "a damsel of beautiful features and fair brows, bathing naked in the river. At this sight.. .the seminal fluid of the &i dropped into the Sarasvati. The great ascetic took it up and kept it within his earthen pot" from which were born great seers [9.37.29-32 (9.38.33-37)]. The seer Agastya, whose name means "he whose womb was a jar," was born when the gods Mitra and Varuna were sacrificing, saw the nymph Urvasi, and ejaculated, their seed falling into a jar [van Buitenen 1975: 1871. This is an unusual case of dual paternity-two

contributions of semen to create one child. The nymph Urvasi is

implicated again in the birth of the interesting character eyasrnga: the seer Kasyapa is performing austerities in a lake, sees her, and ejaculates into the water. A doe drinks the water, and eyasrnga is born from her. Though he would have, unlike the others, been carried in a mammalian womb, the fact that he has never seen woman enables his mind to be "ever set on a life of chastity" [3.110.1419

VB].

This would imply, of course, that having a mother is what fosters

(hetero)sexual desire in men! The very author of the epic, Vyiisa, also singlehandedly (well, in his case it took two) procreates a son by means of visually-inspired spontaneous ejaculation. disturb his penance, and her mission is generally successful.'" [Smith 1991: 89; citing V.S. Apte, The Practical Sanskrit Dictionary (Poona: Prasad Prakashan, 1957), pp. 164651

As he is rubbing sticks together to make a fire, he sees the apsard Ghrtaci and becomes suddenly possessed by desire. Seeing this, Ghrtaci changes herself into a parrot and comes closer. Although he sees her disguised in another form, the "desire that had arisen in the e i ' s heart spread itself over every part of his body" [12.311.5 Dl. 'With great firmness the Muni then suppressed what lay in his heart. But Vyasa did not control his agitated mind having been attracted by the body of the fair Ghrtiici. When the Muni made greater efforts out of desire for fire, his semen suddenly fell down on the firestick" [12.311.6-7 (12.324.1-7) HI. Vyasa, however, "without mental scruples, churned the firestick (some more). From it ...~ u k awas born" [12.311.8 (12.324.8) HI. &pa, the preceptor of the Kauravas and Pandavas, is also born as a result of Indra's scheming: This &i Gautama caused the king of the Gods great anxiety, both because of his expertness in weaponry and because of his many austerities. Thus Indra sent out a divine maid named Jalapadi ...: "Stop his austerities!" She went to Saradvat's pleasant hermitage, the young girl, and tempted Gautama, who was carrying his bow and arrows. When Gautama saw the Apsara in the wilderness, wearing one single cloth, with a figure unparalleled in the world, he stared with wide-open eyes. Bow and arrows slipped from his hands and dropped to the ground; and the sight of her started a shudder in his body. Yet, so profound was his wisdom and so opulent his austerity, that the sage held his ground with superb poise. Still, a sudden spasm overcame him. ..that made him spill his seed, though he did not notice it. The hermit left the hermitage and the Apsarg, while his seed split in two, and from the two halves a pair of twins were born. [1.120.5-14 VB]

The other preceptor, Drona, was born in a similar fashion, and would eventually marry Qpi, &pa's twin: "once the great seer Bharadviija.. .saw an Apsarii alighting, Ghrtaci herself, who had just bathed. A sudden breeze blew her skirt away, whereupon his seed burst forth, which the seer placed in a trough. Right in that trough a son was born to the sage, Drona by name" [1.121.3-5 VB] . The story is

recounted somewhat differently a bit later: "the seer saw her nude and desired her. His heart cleaving to her, the seer who had been virgin since childhood, spilled forth his seed excitedly, and he placed it in a trough" [1.154.3-4 VB]. Indeed, it appears Drona has a sister through an almost identical encounter, though she is never mentioned as such anywhere in the epic: the same seer Bharadvaja beheld the same apsara Ghrtaci passing by, and his "vital seed" fell into his handÑb'i was then kept in a cup made of the leaves of a tree [and] in that cup was born the girl Shrucavati" [9.47.57-58 (9.48.63-65) Dl. Smith sees in the births of Drona and R p a a pattern of "archaic warrior spirituality imaged in the process of male birthingv-an

"archetypal male

supremacy myth" that links "(I) ascetic austerity which creates and intensifies energy (tejas) or heat (tapas); (2) the sexual and creative potency of that hot energy in itself; and (3) the extraordinary prowess in military exploits that the harnessing of that energy can produce" [1991: 86, 941. She concludes: "Male birthing can be seen as the ultimate statement of total power in the universe.. .The absence of the mother in the male parthenogenesis myths is an exaggerated statement of a view of women as hindrances to spiritual attainment and as totally dispensable even in the area of mothering" [Ibid., 961. I agree with the view of these stories as a male will-to-power that marginalizes women in the only sphere to which they may be said to be truly indispensable, but I also see much that goes beyond Smith's view of these stories as manifestations of an "archaic warrior spirituality" subtext to the Mbh, and would rather explore in the direction of

fantasy, desire, and lack, in understanding the impulse that prompts such rich and insistent repetition of male pregnancy and parthenogenesis in the epic. Freud, as is commonly known, understands women's desire for children in terms of penis envy-when

a girl realizes that she does not have a penis, she feels

deprived of something important and eventually seeks to obtain a child (in the meantime, making due with a doll) as a replacement or symbolic substitute for that which she lacks. Lacan follows Freud, but recasts the penis in terms of the phallus, a symbolic structure that he attempts to divest of its biological significance. Children are thus a product of female desire that, however, they can never really fulfill. This particular argument as it relates to women has been (and no doubt will continue to be) taken up by feminist theorists elsewhere-what

I

would like to do is turn it back on men in light of the examples we have just seen. Are

these

male

fantasies of

pregnancy and

parthenogenesis

symbolic

compensation for some lack, even when they involve sages who are ostensibly hyper-virile? Do they reflect the Lacanian insight that all subjects-both female-are

male and

castrated, though they might inhabit different distinct positions in

relation to the phallus? If the child represents the phallus for the mother, might not it also be coveted as such by the "father"? Or-to interrogation of Lacanian theory-why

move into a feminist

must the child, as the product of a

uniquely feminine capacity, be conceived of as a phallus at all? Why could not

these myths of male pregnancy and parthenogenesis be conceived simply as masculine desire for a power that is uniquely feminine? The abundance of the pregnant belly, the seemingly autonomous gestation, the undeniably magnificent

emergence of one living being out of the body of another? Would not it make sense that men would covet this attribute of women as much, if not more, than women covet the penis? We can take another tack entirely in exploring the feminist and psychoanalytic valences of these myths and return to the notion of the abject, which I have already touched upon at several points thus far. These myths could alternatively be read as male envy of pregnant plenitude and an avoidance of what is repulsive in female birthing. To avoid the womb and birth canal is considered a precious boon, and we saw in preceding excerpts the horror of the helpless male proto-subject at being mixed in with uterine blood, urine, and feces. The desire for the feminine, which we see literally burst upon these ascetics, is for an idealized feminine-a

safe, beautiful, inviting celestial (not human) damsel,

freshly bathed and thus free from defiling elements. They are able to experience the scopic pleasure of an idealized female figure; they are able to experience the physical pleasure of ejaculating without actually having to approach the dreaded

yon$ and they are able to procure offspring without their seed having to gestate in female soil (read dirt) and without the attachment of a wife. In short, they are have-your-cake-and-eat-it-toofantasies! We will be looking at fear of the mother in the next section, but suffice it now to intimate that fear-psychoanalytically speaking-is

almost always wound up in desire, and the fact that these male

parthenogenic myths seem to partake of both would thus come as no great psychoanalytic surprise.

Oedipal Dynamics Beyond the rich dynamics involved in male and female parthenogenic births, there are also fascinating instances of seemingly outright oedipal dynamics involving maternity and paternity that no self-respecting psychoanalytic study could ignore. There are in fact specific regions of hell in the epic reserved for "those who kill their mothers ...who slay their father, (and) who sleep with their guru's wives9'*[7.51.25(7.73.25)]! Though there are few examples in which a father or mother is actually killed by the son, substitutions and transformations on these themes can be found in abundance. Robert Goldman makes a thorough and compelling study of Oedipal dynamics in the Mbh, aiming precisely to disprove those who, failing to see these substitutions and transformations at work, argue that no such dynamics exist in the South Asian mythic context. Without attempting to reproduce his work here, let me at least graze the Oedipal highlights of the epic and briefly consider how they might be contextualized within the greater procreative and paternal dynamics explored in this chapter, as well as attempt to give them some rethinking in Lacanian terms.

Son-kills-father The closest "textbook" Oedipal situation in the epic is that of Arjuna's son killing him, though there is little intimation of any desire for the mother that prompts or proceeds from it. Rather, it seems to be the mother's desire that it should occur, as well as Aquna himself! As W n a is making the rounds of various kingdoms to complete his brother's royal horse sacrifice, he comes across his son * Since gurus are equated to fathers this of course puts the guru's wife in position of mother. 140

by Citriingada, whom he left shortly after impregnating.

This son, King

Babhruviihana, first greets him peacefully, but in doing so is severely castigated by his father who accuses him of acting like a woman [14.78.6 (14.79.6)l. His stepmother Ulupi, a Snake woman who is another of Aquna's itinerant conquests, rises up out of the earth and incites him to fight: "thus was king Babhruvahana incited against his father by his (step)mother7'[14.78.13 (14.79.13) Dl. When the king succeeds in killing Arpna, he immediately repents, grieves, and vows to starve himself to death, as does his mother Citrangada. But Ulupi comes to the rescue, explaining that Arjuna had to be killed by his son in order for him to be able to expiate his own sin of killing his (grand)father Bhisma [14.82.8-9 (14.81.8-9) D; italics mine]! She then gives Babhruvahana a magical gem to place on Arjuna's chest, and he is revived. As Goldman notes, this story of Babhruviihana and Aquna is "carefully hedged about with rationalizations and a denial of any aggression on the part of the son so that in it the murder of the father becomes an act of both filial devotion and self-sacrifice, concepts with which the tradition is far more comfortable" [1978: 3291. Indeed, the ethical problem of sons being constrained to kill their extended (though not biological or dharrnic) fathers is a powerful dilemma that resonates throughout the great war, and it is precisely the "dread of this oedipal crime that unmans Arjuna in the well-known opening passage of the Bhagavad-

Gita" [Goldman 1978: 333; first italics mine]. Once accomplished, Arjuna's crime can only be expiated by being killed (and revived) by his own son. Even the Grandfather himself, Bhisma, is forced into battle with his guru/father-figure

Rama Jamadagnya over a woman whose name means "mother" but whom Bhisma should have taken as a wife (more on that later). As Goldman notes, "the oedipal nature of the struggle, though disguised by the celibacy of both participants, is made clear not only by the fact that a woman is the cause of their antagonism but by the fact that. ..Bhisma's actual mother, the goddess Gangs, appears to him and begs him not to fight the terrible Brahmin" [1978: 3361. Like b n a , then, it is Bhisma's own Oedipal aggression against his father-figure that in turn necessitates his own death at the hands of his "son."

Father-kills-son Fathers killing sons, though less pervasive a theme in the epic, does occur. We saw an example earlier in the story of the king who chooses to kill his only son in order to acquire more. This is something the father is willing to do that the mothers are not, and the notion that mothers love their children more than fathers is echoed in the story of Bhangasvana, who, having been both man and woman, can speak from experience [13.12.3741 (l3.12.4246)]. The only other instance of a father killing a son occurs in the context of a sparring match between a king and a Brahmin in which the latter compels the king to kill his son with his own arrows [3.190.73]. Here again the wife and mother intervenes, though it is unclear whether she succeeds in reviving her son or only in absolving the guilt of her husband. Though these are the only examples of fathers actually killing their sons, there are numerous examples of fathers being willing to fight and even inciting battle with their sons. Aquna and Babhruvahana are one such example that we

have already seen, as well as that of Bhisma and Rama Jamadagnya.

The

unwillingness to kill his fathers that "unmans" Arjuna at the outset of the great war is echoed on his preceptors' side as well, but both parties ultimately conclude that the battle must be fought. This echo of paternal aggression, secondary to filial aggression in the epic, is better illuminated when contextualized within the notion of Oedipal reversal that several psychoanalytic scholars have identified in the broader South Asian context. Goldman cites Spratt's argument that "the prevailing type of Oedipal myth in traditional India is the negative one. Indeed, it is true that the most striking and culturally reinforced attitude of a son to his actual father in the Indian epic and puranic legends is that of total passivity and perfect, unhesitating obedience" [1978: 3371. Furthermore, Goldman argues that "more forceful examples of filial subservience in the Indian epics frequently involve either the formal abdication of sexuality on the part of the son, often explicitly in the favor of the father, and/or an illustration of the wrath of the angry father unleashed upon elder brothers who are insufficiently subservient" IIbid.,

3381. The former example we will see below in the case of Bhisma's celibacy, and numerous examples of the latter can be found throughout the epic ( e g . Yayiti, Rama Jamadagnya, Visvimitra). Finally, if Brahmins are to ksatriyas as fathers are to sons, the frequent conflict between the two-and reprisals by Brahmins that follow-serve

the often brutal and bloody

as compelling examples of paternal rage

fit to chasten even the most intransigent son.

Son-kills-mother Mothers, too, are not exempt from violence.

The most famous, and

perhaps only, instance of a son killing his mother is that of Rama Jamadagnya cutting off his mother's head on the orders of his father, for the crime of having had a momentary flash of desire for a king she saw bathing [3.116.5-151. A similar situation in another case remains unconsummated: Chirakarin is ordered to kill his mother by his father, but being somewhat slow-thinking and moving, contemplates the dilemma so long that the father eventually returns having regretted his order and spares his son the completion of such a deed [12.258.464 (12.266.467) Dl. Though there are no explicit examples of a son desiring to

possess the mother, there are examples of a son explicitly avoiding maternal seduction. Aquna, as we will see later, is cursed to become a eunuch by a celestial lady whose advances he spurns on account of her distant maternal relation to him. But on a larger scale, the frequent language used in the batriya epic of "possessing the entire earth," and the fratricidal war fought for it-in ubiquitous notion of earth-as-mother-could frame the epic more broadly.

combination with the

suggest broad Oedipal themes that

In contrast to the motif of the desiring or

consuming mother, however, it seems that earth would rather be free of these troublesome children altogether.*

* In an epic where the major events are often overdetermined, the greater cosmic rationale for the cataclysmic battle is that Mother Earth has complained to the Gods that she is groaning under the weight of the ksatriyos.

Mother-devours-son Lastly, completing the quadrille, we do also see in the epic the widelyrecognized psychoanalytic motif of devouring or destroying mothers. When the gods see that Skanda's powers are a threat to them, they decide to send "'the Mothers of the world [to] attack Skanda.. .for they have the power and the will to slay him" [3.215.16 VB]. The Mothers agree and go, but when they see that he cannot be defeated, they relent and seek refuge in him, saying "You are our son. We hold the world. Welcome us all, we are yielding milk, overcome with love [sneha]" [3.215.18 VB].

Breasts flowing with milk are a common emblem of

beneficent motherhood in the epic: Kunti's breasts, for example, become damp with milk and mingle with tears of pride at Arpna's prowess in competition

[1.125.14]. But they also suggest their own opposite: "the inverse of the woman whose breasts flow with milk is the demoness who drinks blood" IDoniger 1980:

411. Indeed, later these Mothers request that Skanda allow them to devour others' offspring [3.219.19], becoming the "Graspers" or "Seizers" that take on their own thriving mythology in later Tantric and folk traditions. In another example, as Arjuna and lQ-sna are burning the Khandava forest, a Snake Woman tries to save her son by swallowing him. This is first portrayed altruistically, but is then rendered psychoanalytically suspicious with the phrase "greedy for her son" [1.218.7 VB] to describe her stretching upwards, only to have her head immediately lopped off by one of Aquna's arrows. As Doniger notes, "the female in her genital site is passionate (greedy, taking), while in her maternal site (the breast) she is merely giving" [1980: 361. The safe, giving, maternal

feminine is symbolically invoked by the breasts, then, and the dangerous, voracious feminine is represented by genital imagery-in

this case, the snake

woman's open, devouring mouth. Furthermore, snakes themselves often represent dangerous or ambivalent femininity in Hindu mythology: "snakes (often symbolizing women) perform an alchemy in which milk is transmuted into poison, the inverse of that alchemy that women perform by turning blood into milk": The secret fantasy of poisoned milk, of nourishment that kills, originates early in life when the decisive separation between mother and child takes place. The elevation of this fantasy, which is occasionally encountered clinically, to the status of myth for a whole culture indicates the intensity of inner conflict associated with this separation in the India setting. IDoniger 1980: 54; citing Kakar 1978: 1471 Doniger sees a continuation of these "fear of the mother" dynamics in the obvious linkage between sex and death in Piindu and Kunti's story: though Kunti is an instance of the "relatively 'safe' combination" [1980: 571 of the union between a mortal woman and an immortal man (or rather, five immortal men!), the symbolic union of sex and death in the surrounding circumstances make the situation a bit less comfortable.

Doniger links this situation with "a general psychological

pattern based on fear of the mother" described by Carstairs, in which the male (child) withdraws from the wife (mother) in response to perceived sexual aggression towards him [1980: 571. Goldman too, sees the curse of Piindu as "absolutely crucial to the epic" [1978: 3581 but, as with the case of King Kalmiisapiida, links it to Oedipal aggression against the father. Kalmiisapiida disrespected a Brahmin and is cursed to demonic possession and cannibalism, in which period he eats a Brahmin while and he and his wife are in the act of intercourse. The Brahmin's wife curses him

to die if he approaches his wife sexually, and to only be able to have offspring by yielding his wife to a Brahmin [Ibid., 355-3571. Goldman locates Oedipal origins in King Balin's story as well. Though Balin's offering his wife to the Brahmin Dirghatamas is not given a specific explanation, he as a ksatriya would be in the position of son to Dirghatamas, who was blinded by a curse from his uncle who was trying to have sex with Dirghatamas' mother while he was in the womb. In Goldman's analysis, Balin is "the 'son' suffering the deferred and transferred fruit of Dirghatamas' Oedipal aggression against Brhaspati while the blind sage plays both roles in turn" [1978: 3601. Thus in both Pandu's and Kalmasapada's case there is a witnessing of the primal scene-a intercourse-and

Brahmin and his wife in the act of

both kill the Brahmin in the middle of this act and are cursed to

impotence for it. In Dirghatamas's case, there is a witnessing of a primal scene that also has incestuous overtones, and Dirghatamas is symbolically castrated for it. Though all three of these batriyas must now conceive children by offering their wives to Brahmins (in Kunti's case, she is able to invoke gods), in Pandu's and Kalmasapada's case they are also cursed to die should they ever engage in sexual intercourse again. Thus, in Goldman's words, "the punishment for Oedipal murder is functional castration and the ceding of one's wife, seen here as mother surrogate, to a new father figure" IIbid., 3591. Castration and Celibacy

Castration is a

central

theme in

both

Freudian

and

Lacanian

psychoanalysis, and in both is contextualized in relation to the paternal function. Though numerous examples of castration might be identified in the epic, I find

the most compelling example that of Bhisma, its very patriarch. His castration takes the form of voluntary celibacy, a vow of "awesome" or "terrible9'*proportions incurred out of deference to his father's desire for Satyavati, that would give him the name he would carry throughout the epic. Already in this we see hints of Lacanian parallels-it

is through castration that the subject emerges; castration is

the subject's point of entry into language and law, the Symbolic world of names and restrictions. Bhisma's father ~ a m t a n udesires Satyavati, and her father-a

lowly but

ambitious fisher king-demands as his condition for bestowing Satyavati that her sons be king, not Bhisma, the rightful heir.

~ a m t a n urefuses, but returns

mourning not only his frustrated desire but also the uncertainty of only having one son to succeed him [1.94.53-601. Bhisma then returns to the fisher king on his father's behalf and accepts his condition, but even that is not enough-though Bhisma may honor it, his future sons may not, and in order to ensure the reign of Satyavati's progeny Bhisma makes a vow of celibacy, at which the assembled throngs of gods and Apsaras rain flowers and pronounce him "the Terrible One" [1.94.90] for his unthinkable vow. One of the many great ironies of the epic, of

course, is that though Satyavati's (and not ~amtanu's) offspring do indeed succeed the throne, Bhisma's very vow to supposedly ensure it becomes a crucial link in a chain of events that concatenates the great fratricidal war between precisely this progeny.

* These words translate as "Bhisma"

Furthermore, though Bhisma's vow is throughout the epic recognized as giving him godlike dimensions (recall the link between "holding in one's seed" and spiritual prowess), there are also intimations of impotency attached to it. !%sup21a,for example, mocks Bhisma for having had another father sons upon his brother's widows, when the responsibilities (and pleasures) of the levirate had clearly fallen to him [2.38.23]. Despite the general tone of approbation and admiration for Bhisma's vow, the repeated references to his "living a life of celibacy for his father9'*[6.15.20 (6.14.2); 6.115.1 (6.121.I ) ] , "drawing up his seed (for his father) [6.115.13 (6.121.24)], or more explicitly "drawing up his seed to "

obey his father's commands"+ [11.23.20 (11.23.20)] inevitably attract the psychoanalytic lecture flottante. As Goldman notes, "the oedipal nature of the situation is made even clearer by the fact that immediately after uttering his terrible vow the son of the king addresses the young and sexually desirable girl on whose account he has been both disinherited and functionally emasculated as 'mother"' [1978: 3391. Though he only ever demonstrates the greatest respect for and deference to Satyavati, Bhisma carries strong misogynist undertones to his character throughout the epic that we will revisit later with the story of ~ r n b a / ~ i k h a n d(i) i n. The story of myasrnga also offers an interesting look at the intersections of castration, desire, and sexual difference. As we saw above, this young man is raised * Interestingly, the word here is actually guru, though the reference is clearly to ~ a m t a n u his , father. Though, as we have noted, there is a strong association between fathers and gurus-and a strong tradition of students maintaining brahmacarya, or celibacy, during their time in their guru's house, the only two occurrences of this phrase in the epic have to do with Bhisma and ~ a m t a n u , not other more traditional student-teacher relationships. t Which, as we saw, was not actually the case.

as an ascetic in the forest, never laying eyes on a woman. His great asceticism attracts the attention of Indra, who decides to withhold rain until a woman could break his virtue. A young courtesan renowned for her wit is sent to attempt the difficult task. She approaches Wyasrnga to seduce him, and he, not having seen woman, thinks her an enticing, intoxicating male ascetic and begins to feel strange and disturbing feelings towards "him". In the Jataka version cited by Doniger, when Wyasrnga notices the difference between their naked bodies, she explains that a bear wounded her between the legs, and asks him to help assuage the pain there, which he gladly does.

In her analysis, this "tale of the bear's wound is an

evocation of castration fear, reinforced by the later identification of this woman as a Yaksini.* She does in fact take from [Rsyasrnga] not his sexuality but his power to keep back both his own sexual fluids (semen) and those of the cosmos (rain)"

[1980: 3011. Many other instances of symbolic castration could be identified throughout the epic that would be impossible to enumerate here. Let me attempt, in moving towards the close of this chapter, to provide some reflections on what insights Lacan might offer to the workings of desire within the Oedipal triangles that we have observed in the preceding pages. First of all, Lacan brings a new spin to thinking about sexual difference in relation to the Oedipus complex: though he follows Freud in positing the Oedipus complex as the central nexus of the unconscious, he differs from Freud in that "the subject always desires the mother, and the father is always the rival, irrespective of whether the subject is male or * Female demon.

female" [Evans 1996: 12'71. Male and female subjects will therefore experience the Oedipus complex in radically asymmetrical ways, with sexual difference fundamentally shaping the subject's Oedipal experience and therefore the subject's entry into the symbolic order.

As Evans notes (though his gendered

language downplays the sexual difference he is supposedly emphasizing), "it is the particular way the subject navigates his passage through the Oedipus complex that determines both his assumption of a sexual position and his choice of a sexual object" [Ibid., 1291. Both males and females begin from the same Imaginary starting point-narcissistic

mirroring with the mother-but

the advent of the

third term, the paternal function (and the accompanying sexual distinctions of Law and language) shapes their entry into the Symbolic order, and thus their constitution as subjects, in sexually specific ways. The Oedipus complex for Lacan is thus the triangular dynamic by which the subject moves from the dual structure of imaginary relations into the Symbolic order, and the father is the decisive third term that effects this transformation. The paternal function here, though traumatic, is positive, for the failure to successfully navigate the passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic would result in social maladjustment and possibly psychosis: as Evans notes, "since the symbolic is the realm of Law, and since the Oedipus complex is the conquest of the symbolic order, it has a normative and normalizing function" [1996: 129-301. This has interesting implications for psychoanalytic thinking on the Mbh. For example, whereas Goldman tends to focus on the subversive and dangerous elements of Oedipal situations in the epic, a Lacanian approach might emphasize their

normalizing functions that serve to reinforce the Law rather than undermine it. Likewise, rather than seeing castration simply as trauma, Lacan emphasizes its normalizing effects when it is accepted rather than denied. In giving up the imaginary phallus, the child is giving up the Imaginary mother and the unity and completeness that it/she promises.

The father as agent of the Symbolic, in

breaking up the narcissistic dyadic relationship between mother and child, forces the child to give up the sense of unity and completeness that this mirroring relationship gives. And by thus instilling and enforcing this sense of lack that will continue to define and motivate the subject, the Symbolic father introduces the subject into the Symbolic order, into a system of law and language that will both mask and reveal this lack that is intrinsic and foundational to human subjectivity. This paternal function also sets in motion the dynamics of desire, a continual circling around the site of lack that is never fulfilled, never put to rest. If Bhisma voluntarily accepts his castration in deference to his father, and if Bhisma in thus ascending to the role of patriarch embodies law and arbitrates the symbolic functioning of dharma, he also illustrates its ultimate failure and incompleteness. With all the pretense of phallic unity and power that his position gives, and in his role as patriarch and guardian of the dharrna, Bhisma, along with the rest of the male audience, is left stumped at Draupadi's question* in the assembly hall. He is symbolically killed by ~ikhandin(i),a reincarnation of the woman whom he should have taken as a wife, and his grandson Arjuna. And even * Yudhisfiira bets and loses Draupadi in a dicing match with his cousins, after having bet and lost himself. Not accepting defeat and servitude, she poses a dharmic conundrum to the male assembly-how could he have bet her if he had already lost himself?-to which they are unable to reply.

when his death is certain-death

as the one point at which desire ceases-he

continues to cycle around it in an interminable voluminous discourse on dharma, an almost pathetic picture of language and Law circling in a pretense of completeness around the lack, the absence, the failure, that is life, death, and subjectivity. In the rich landscape of procreative dynamics we have explored in this chapter, we have seen the traditional reproductive relationship between the sexes-and

the symbolic categories that would usually define them-interweave

into patterns that are as complex and convoluted as they are intriguing and provocative. The lines become blurry, the realms interpenetrate, and all that seems to keep things from unraveling into chaos is the dharmic, ritual, and authorial glue that regulates and justifies what is otherwise seemingly arbitrary and capricious. But what is this glue that holds it all together, that regulates, justifies, and authorizes? In this chapter, at least, I find the adhesive in the symbolic and functional equivalence between the epic's dharma and Lacan's Name-of-the-Father.

Both, I would suggest, are the same thread that pulls

through the dizzying procreative permutations that shape and drive the Mbh. Both regulate the dynamics of desire and the formation of the subject within the Symbolic order: for example, what in the epic may be seen as dharmic justifications of whose name a son is to bear, how a woman may procreate a child with a man other than her husband, or even how offspring may be produced by magical or miraculous means, can equally, from a Lacanian perspective, be seen as the Name-of-the-Fatherjustifying and ordering the process of naming, the rules of

succession, and the balances of power that are necessary to the maintenance of the Symbolic order. In the rich and complex procreative dynamics explored in this chapter, we can see both dharma and the Name-of-the-Father coalescing around essential elements of the paternal function: regulating desire, intervening in maternal attachments, inscribing lines of descendence and succession, and maintaining a position of power and control in a world that tends toward unruliness and chaos. Furthermore, both are law-establishing functions that operate essentially through language. Just as dharma is essentially spoken, debated, articulated in discourse, and narrated, so the Name-of-the-Father exists and operates primarily through language. It is through language that sexual difference is inscribed and subjects produced; it is through language that one accedes to the Symbolic order, that, in conferring the subject status as such, is one's reward for having successfully navigated oneself away from socially disruptive desires and attachments.

It is, therefore, my contention that dharma is an indigenous

equivalent to Lacan's Name-of-the-Father, and that by shifting back and forth between the epic and psychoanalytic frames we can use each to reciprocally illuminate the other. Throughout the remainder of this dissertation, we will continue to trace Lacanian and epic symbolics as they propel each other along the sinuous currents of these stories and characters. We will for now, however, leave the possibility of broader conclusions for the end and move into other currents of the Mbh-the

gaze, the body, and feminine desire, agency, and vengeance.

Chapter 4 - Shifting - Skirts and the Power of the Gaze

The gaze is an important element in Lacanian psychoanalysis and, as I hope to show throughout this chapter, also plays a significant role in the dynamics of desire and subjectivity in the Mbh. Indeed, I would go further to suggest that the gaze prompts and drives some of the most central events in the epic; it is the point around which some of the most important scenes coalesce, and the impetus behind many of the characters' most consequential actions. For example, the cool gaze of Mahabhisa when Ganga's skirt is lifted by the wind is a moment that could be said to set in motion the events around which the epic twines, and Draupadi's disrobing scene is one of the most disturbing and dharmically contentious scenes of the entire epic, driving the bloody revenge of her five husbands in the great battle that empties the earth of k;atnyas. Clustered around the gaze are other themes of signification and interpretation-in

particular, as we see in the story of

Nala and Damayanti, marks or signs that are "readv-that

give the visual register

in the epic a pre-eminence that merits psychoanalytic scrutiny.

I hope to

demonstrate here that the gaze cuts across the realms of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic in the Mbh: it prompts desire in creating or reflecting idealized

imaginings of the sexualized self or other; it functions in the Real as a traumatic event that both shakes and substantiates subjectivity; it operates in the Symbolic as a visual system of signs that carry meanings. The aim of this chapter will be to elucidate and explore the gaze as it functions in these capacities through the characters of Ganga, Draupadi, and Damayanti. It is important to note at the outset that the gaze in the strict Lacanian sense is not the function of two eyes seeing-it

is "the object of the act of looking,

or, to be more precise, the object of the scopic drive. The gaze is therefore, in Lacan's account, no longer on the side of the subject; it is the gaze of the Other" [Evans 1996: 72; italics mine]. Indeed, it is precisely through this location in the Other that the gaze takes on its relevance in terms of subjectivity: the "subject looks at an object, [but] the object is always already gazing back at the subject ...from a point at which the subject cannot see it" [Ibid.].

The

disembodied gaze of the Other fixes, frames, and constitutes the subject as such, and articulates in the visual register the fundamental division inherent to Lacan's understanding of subjectivity. The subject is always already constituted in the field of the Other, in the sense that the subject comes into being through the symbolic, and the "I" can thus only ever exist in the field of language and symbolic representation, constructed according to terms that lie outside of it. As Mitchell puts it, "The human animal is born into language and it is within the terms of language that the human subject is constructed" [Mitchell 1982: 51. The subject is thus fundamentally divided because what is most personal and individual, the "I," is also that which one must share with every other speaking being, and the

gaze fixes the subject in the visual register much as the "you" does in the linguistic. In this chapter we will explore how the gaze intertwines with desire and subjectivity in the epic, bringing Lacanian and feminist insights to bear on the Mbh, and likewise bringing the Mbh's brilliant portrayal of these themes to bear on Lacanian and feminist theory. Though the specifically Lacanian notion of the gaze will frame and inform my overall treatment of it in this chapter, however, I will also allow myself some latitude beyond this "strict" construction in discussing the gaze as the act of seeing, returning a bit towards the Sartrean origins of Lacan's thinking about the gaze. What interests me most are the reciprocal dynamics of the gaze-the

seeing-and-being-seen-that

the characters of the Mbh

enact in rich and provocative ways, and I feel that the work is better served through theoretical flexibility and creativity than rigidity and dogma.

Dharma of the gaze Of course, the Indian tradition certainly does not need Lacan to elaborate the

significance of the gaze.

Sight, gaze, eyes, and the visual register have long

occupied an important, indeed central place in Hindu religion, iconography, ritual and myth, as well as Indian culture more broadly. Jan Gonda, in his seminal study of Eye and Gaze in the Veda [1969], argues that though the "evil eye" has been a favorite subject of scholarly attention, the "power of the eye" more broadly has a strong presence in early Hindu culture and religion. To begin with, he notes, in Vedic culture the qualities of the eye are understood as representative of the

whole person-blood-red

eyes signify evil, wide eyes vitality and wakefulness,

elephant eyes kingly qualities, and so on [Gonda 1969: 71. Use of the eyes also has ritual significance. What one looks at, what one should not look at, and how one employs one's eyes in performing a ritual are often subjects of explicit instruction in Vedic texts-indeed,

in certain contexts the gaze can "serve to transfer the

powerful purport of the text to the person who is aimed at by the officiant reading it" [Ibid., 111. The female partner in rituals in particular is often given specific instructions as to what she can and cannot look at [Ibid., 151, for the female gaze can have particularly dangerous or polluting qualities. For example, in the Mbh it is specified that gifts that have been seen by a woman who is menstrually impure do not produce any merit [13.24.5 (13.23.4)], and Gonda describes a moment in the marriage ritual called parasparasamiba?ta ("the looking at each other") during which the priest has bride and groom gaze at each other after a protective barrier has been removed and recite mantras that neutralize the bride's potential evil eye [1969: 131.

The gaze may also have ritual agency, in the sense that a "wilfully

directed look brings about a definite result in the ritual sphere"; for example, while reciting mantras, an officiant would fix his eye "upon the womb of the woman he wants to give birth to a son ...convinced that that gesture transmitted his intentions and the force inherent in the potent words to the sexual organs of that particular woman" IIbid., 181. Furthermore, Gonda notes that in the Vedic texts "a look was consciously regarded as a form of contact ...Casting one's eyes upon a person and touching him were related activities" [Ibid., 191-a

notion that, among other possible

applications, has interesting resonances for feminist theory.

What might this

conflation of gaze and touch that we see in the Vedas offer to such theorists as Kristeva and Irigaray, who seek to deprivilege the visual-understood masculine, distancing, objectivizing-and

as

put in its place a n intellectual aesthetic

of tactile contact? Is it possible to rethink the gaze in a way that is tactile, that implies contact, not distance? Could not the mutual interpenetration of gazes, beautifully articulated in the Hindu notion of darsan, also approximate Irigaray's continuous contact in the "sex which is not one"?

We will pick u p these

possibilities again as we move along, but let us return to Gonda briefly before moving into the notion of d a r h . According to Gonda, the gaze in Vedic ritual can take on explicit sexual functions beyond what we have already seen, as illustrated in a striking passage from two Vedic texts: The wife (of the sacrificer) looks (down) on [the sacrificial fire]. ..Next she executes a copulation at the beginning of the sacrificial worship with a view to procreation. Verily, what the wife does with regard to sacrificial worship ...is a copulation. In that she casts a look (at it), she executes a copulation. Now that at which she looks becomes impure and unfit for sacrifice. [1969: 221 Likewise, being seen in sexual intercourse is inauspicious, "because failed (defective and hence sinful: vyrddham) is the intercourse which another sees" [Ibid. 321 : In ancient India a married couple seen in coitu committed, or produced ...an offensive act representing a manifestation of impurity or a result of a transgression in the ritual and religious sphere and as such a cause or source of 'contagion' or ritual pollution. The man who witnesses [such] an act.. .runs the serious risk of becoming impure and infected with 'evil'. [Ibid.]

The Mbh echoes this: "One should never cast his eyes on a naked woman, nor a naked man. One should never indulge in sexual congress except in privacy. One should eat also without being seen by others" [not in CE (13.162.46) Dl. The Pandavas themselves, in order to handle the unique problem of one wife shared among five brothers, make a covenant that "if one of us sets eye on the other when he is sitting with* Draupadi, he must live in the forest like a hermit for twelve years" [1.204.28]. Sure enough, Aguna violates the covenant by entering the room in which Yudhisthira is with Draupadi-or

as he says explicitly, "I have

violated the covenant by looking at you" [ 1.205.24; italics mine] -and

must

therefore embark on an ascetic tour of sacred fords.+ Darkzn is a pivotal notion in Hindu worship. Though it can simply mean "seeing," its use in reference to temple images, sacred places or important personages takes on the sense of "auspicious sight" [Eck 1985: 31. The notion I would want to take from the concept of darsan and keep present throughout the visual perambulations of this chapter is that of the inextricable intertwining between seeing and being-seen, also expressed in the context of @ja^ and pilgrimage as "giving darian" and "taking darian." Diana Eck, in her classic work on darian, reminds us that when Hindus visit temples "it is not only the worshiper who sees the deity, but the deity sees the worshiper as well. The contact between devotee and deity is exchanged through the eyes" [Ibid., 6-71.

Thus, she

continues, "when Hindus stand on tiptoe and crane their necks to see, through * A sexual euphemism. t That does not, however, end up being very ascetic! Aguna has various amorous adventures during this time and returns with a second wife, &sna's sister Subhadra. Hindu worship, usually in front of images of deities.

the crowd, the image of [a deity], they wish not only to 'see,' but to be seen. The gaze of the huge eyes of the image meets that of the worshiper, and that exchange of vision lies at the heart of Hindu worship" [Ibid., 71. As we will see with the story of Nala and Damayanti, one telltale characteristic of deities is that their gaze is uninterrupted-they

move among humans with unblinking eyes. Likewise, in a

description of an ideal land, the bard Samjaya recounts that the "men born there have the fragrance of lotus. With motionless eyes.. .they move about without taking food" [6.8.12-13 (6.8.13)1.

Furthermore, Eck also picks up on Gonda's

observation of the link between seeing and touching: "Not only is seeing a form of 'touching,' it is a form of knowing" [1985: 91. This connection between seeing, touching, and subjectivity holds fertile possibilities for both Lacanian and feminist theory that I hope to explore throughout the rest of this chapter.

Gaze and desire The dynamics of desire in the Mbh seem to operate within a predominantly visual register, a fact that is not surprising if one looks at Lacan's description of subjective formation in the Imaginary, particulary in the experience of the mirror phase. As the name of the mirror phase suggests, this pivotal moment in the formation of subjectivity is visual: when the proto-subject first recognizes itself in the mirror, it experiences the disjuncture between this specular vision of wholeness and the disjointed uncoordinated parts of its body. Or as Grosz puts it, 'the child's recognition of its own image [in the mirror] means that it has adopted the perspective of exteriority on itself [1990: 381.

The experience of

fragmentation and the adoption of a perspective of exteriority introduce both lack and division into the core of the subject, creating the absence that desire will become an endless attempt to fill. "The term 'lack' is always related, in Lacan's teaching, to desire. It is a lack which causes desire to arise" [Evans 1996: 951. Experiences of the gaze continue to emphasize lack and the divided self-it

is not

just the proto-subject seeing itself in the mirror, but seeing-itself-being-seen, and this visual triangulation fixes the subject in a symbolic world that offers promises of wholeness and completion while at the same time continually undermining them. Desire is thus an endless quest to fulfill this lack that is at the center of human subjectivity, never to be satisfied, and in this section I hope to explore more particularly how desire is visually articulated in the epic, especially as it creates or reflects idealized imaginings of the sexualized self or other. What I hope to suggest, though not conclusively, is that these idealized imaginings of "woman" operate within a schema of masculine desire that is primarily visual, yet, first of all, visual in a sense that has stronger resonances of contact than might otherwise be assumed, and second of all, involves not only phallic dominance but also vulnerability. Almost all episodes involving or describing desire in the Mbh are articulated visually-the

one notable exception, which will occupy a later section

of this chapter, is that of Nala and Damayanti, for whom the first blush of desire is aural: "as they ceaselessly heard of each other's excellence, there rose in them a desire for the other unseen person, and love waxed in their hearts for each other" [3.50.16 VB] . Every other episode-important

or insignificant-involves

images,

the eyes, and visual stimuli as the primary medium of desire. The progenitor (at least in name) of the epic's protagonists, ~ a m t a n usees , the goddess Ganga (who will become Bhisma's mother) in human form and is smitten: "Her body was flawless, her teeth impeccable, and celestial ornaments adorned her. She was alone, wearing a sheer skirt; and she shone like the calyx of a lotus. When he saw her, he shivered, astounded by the perfection of her shape.. .and could not cease drinking her with his eyes" [1.92.27-28; italics mine]. Ganga in turn, "as soon as she had spied the splendid king.. .could not cease watching him coyly*" [l.92.29]. Two generations later, the sight of his second wife Madri incites Pgndu to the copulation that he knew would mean his own death: "as he watched the nubile Madn in her sheer [tanu] skirt,+ his lust grew like a brush fire. Staring at the lotus-eyed woman, whose mood matched his, where they were alone, he could not control his lust, and lust overpowered him" [1.116.6-7 VB]. Draupadi, too, steals her husbands' hearts as they gaze upon her at her svayamvara:# "The wide-armed sons of Pandu by [Kunti] and the two heroic and powerful twins, they all kept looking at Draupadi-they

were all struck by the arrows of love" [ 1.178.121.

The epic's great ascetics in particular, as we have seen, seem to be prone to visually-provoked ejaculation. When Gautama sees an apsara "in the wilderness,

* Vildsint coyly, playfully, coquettishly, charmingly, sportively. 1 1 should probably note, before setting off on a chapter about sheer skirts, that there is really no word for "skirt" in Sanskrit-the various words that are used refer to a cloth, but since it would be worn as a skirt in these cases it makes sense to go ahead with Van Buitenen's use of the colloquial English term. t Bridegroom choice. There is only one case I found where the apsara do not succeed. Indra orders apsara to seduce Trisiras; they attempt to "stir his lust with all manner of allurements, exhibited their dances,

wearing one single cloth.. .he stared with wide-*

eyes...and the sight of her started a

shudder in his body.. . [and] a sudden spasm overcame him.. .that made him spill his seed" [1.120.8-11 VB; italics mine]. Bharadvaja sees Ghrtaci's skirt blown away by a sudden breeze, and his "seed bursts forth" [1.121.3-51, which happens again later in the epic simply as she is passing by [9.47.57 (9.48.63)]. Kasyapa sees the

apsard Urvasi and "spills his seed" [3.110.1415], Dadhicha sees Alambusa and his "seminal fluid comes out" [9.50.7-9 (9.50.7-9) Dl, and the &si Mankanaka sees a damsel bathing with her body uncovered, at the sight of which his "seminal fluid drops into the river" [9.37.29-30 (9.38.33-34) Dl. The apsard Menaka actually schemes with Indra to have the wind blow up her skirt when she is sent to seduce Visvamitra: "the wind had better blow open my skirt when I am playing before him" [l.65.41 VB] ! [Menaka] thereupon saw Visvamitra.. .She greeted him and began to play in front of him. Off with the wind went her moonlit skirt, the fair-skinned nymph dropped to the ground embracing it, bashfully smiling at the wind. And so that strictest of seers saw Menaka nude, nervously clutching at her skirt, indescribably young and beautiful. And remarking the virtue of her beauty [Visvamitra] fell victim to love and lusted to lie with her. He asked her, and she was blamelessly willing. [1.66.2-71 Our own dear author of the epic, Vyasa, as we saw earlier, succumbs to spontaneous ejaculation at the sight of the apsard Ghrtaci. Seeing her in the woods, he becomes possessed by desire, and seeing him "befuddled with desire" [12.311.3 HI, Ghrtaci changes herself into a she-parrot and comes closer! Though he sees her "disguised in another form, the desire that had arisen in the &i's heart spread itself over every part of his body.. . [and] despite all his efforts displayed their charms, pranced about; but the ascetic did not become excited and controlled his senses, imperturbable as the full ocean." [5.9.15-16VB]

his vital seed came out" [12.311.5-7 (12.40.5-7) Dl. The son that is born of this encounter, however, escapes a similar fate. As ~ u k ais traveling through the celestial regions he passes apsara who are playing in the waters, and though they see him, "those naked aerial beings felt no shame9'* [12.320.17 (12.333.17) Dl. Vyasa, however, following his son, comes to the same place: Seeing the Rsi seated there, the Apsargs ...became all moved with shame and dispirited. Some of them, to hide their nakedness, plunged into the river, and some entered the groves...and some quickly took up their clothes, at seeing the &i. Seeing these movements, the &i understood that his son had been liberated from all attachments, but that he himself was not freed therefrom. At this he became filled with both joy and shame. [12.320.28-30 (12.333.28-30) Dl

Notice that in most of these cases, there is some reference to a sheer skirt, a skirt being blown away by the wind, a single cloth as the woman's only covering, or even a disguise. Clothing in this sense might be understood as the Lacanian objet petit a, the object that causes desire by seeming to obstruct its path: as Evans defines it,

"Objet petit a is any object which sets desire in motion, especially the partial objects which define drives. The drives do not seek to attain the object petit a, but rather circle around it (Sll, 179). Objet petit a is both the object of anxiety, and the final irreversible reserve of the libido" [Evans 1996: 1251. It is thus the covering of the body that makes its exposure so meaningful, a dynamic to which we will return with Draupadi. Sight plays a primary role even in divine desire. In the following passagein which we see an example of the proximity between looking and touching that Gonda describes-Agni,

* Hiltebeitel's

the god of fire, sees the wives of great brahmins bathing,

translation is "naked, seeing ~ u k empty a of expression, they were unaffected."

165

"radiant like golden altars, spotless like a digit of the moon, glowing with the glow of fire, all marvelous like stars" [3.213.43VB]: Seeing the wives of these.. .priests, Fire became excited in his senses, and, his heart lost to them, fell under the power of lust. But he thought further: ...I cannot see and touch them without cause-therefore I shall enter the household fire and look at them perpetually." Touching all these golden women.. .with his flames, and seeing them too, Fire rejoiced in the household hearth, while he lived there and entrusted his heart to the beautiful women under whose spell he was. [3.213.4448;italics mine] "

In another case, Tilottam2 is created by the Gods to destroy two demons who are threatening them. As she circumambulates the Gods before setting off, so great is ~iva'sdesire to watch her that he sprouts faces in each of the cardinal directions as she passes [1.203.24]; and "with great Indra, too, big red eyes popped out of his sides, back and front, all over, until they counted a thousand" [1.203.25 VB] ! Indeed, the "glances of all the great-spirited gods, except the God Grandfather, fell plentifully on Tilottama's body" [1.203.28 VB]. Interestingly, as we will see below, Brahma* exacts punishment upon one of his courtiers for a gaze that is transgressive and inappropriate, suggesting perhaps an aspect of the gaze as a function that the law-of-the-father sanctions, legislates, regulates and prohibits.+ The demons see Tilottama "with their drink-bloodied eyes" [1.204.11 VB] and are smitten; "befuddled with love" [1.204.18] they clobber each other to death over her. In another interesting twist, Tilottama's reward for having performed this service is that henceforth "no one will be able to have a good look at you"

* The Grandfather.

t Though the Grandfather himself is not exempt from visually-prompted spontaneous ejaculation. Remember, as we saw in the last chapter, that upon seeing celestial ladies the seed of Brahman came out and dropped upon the earth. [13.85.8 (13.85.98)l

Returning to Indra, however, elsewhere in the Mbh there is a wholly different explanation for how he ended up with a thousand eyes all over his body: "The great Indra had at one time been marked all over with a thousand vaginas [bhaga]. It was through the power of the Brahmanas that those marks were metamorphosed into as many eyes" [13.34.26 (13.34.28)l. This is repeated when Vipula berates Indra after he tries to seduce the wife of Vipula's guru: "Have you forgotten.. .that Gautama had cursed you* on account of which your body became disfigured with a thousand vaginas, from which you were freed" [13.41.21]. The link between mouths and vaginas, as I noted in the last chapter, has considerable currency in both the Indian and psychoanalytic traditions, but the explicit link between eye and vagina is somewhat rarer.

Though the eye itself may

iconographically bear a resemblance to a vagina, the gaze, at least in Western feminist and psychoanalytic circles, has tended to be understood in terms of phallic extension and mastery. In Indra's case, the vaginas are placed upon him as a curse, and their transformation into eyes is obviously considered a mitigation of that curse. The similarity in shapes would facilitate this transformation, but its symbolic dynamics are far from obvious. And Indra's case is not the only one. In a hymn of praise to ~ i v ahe , is described as "possessed of a thousand or ten thousand eyes on all sides of his body.. . [whose] Phallic form [lingo] is eternal" [7.173.91-92 (7.203.132-133)l. ~ i v ais widely worshipped in the form of a phallus

or linga, and the linga in ~aivaitetemples may sometimes have two eyes on it, so this is not an uncommon sort of tribute to be made. But the thousand or ten

* For seducing his wife.

thousand eyes on all sides of his body do appear to have resonances with Indra as well. Without attempting a full-scale analysis of the symbolic dynamics at play here,* I would note that inasmuch as the gaze-as

Other, as Symbolic, as phallic-

is predominantly masculine, we see in Indra's case a movement upwards from impure degrading feminine markings to symbolic agents of the gaze that, as king of the gods, would be his prerogative to control and assert. This we already see on Siva's lings-the wide-open eyes as divine awakening, enlightened awareness, the all-knowing and all-seeing pervasiveness of the phallic Symbolic that jolts our awareness and constitutes us as subjects. ignominious vaginal markings-a

The transformation of Indra's

mythological version of the scarlet "Aw-might

be said to involve a movement away from the lack, castration, immanence, and pollution implicit in them toward wholeness, masculinity, divinity and purity. On the other hand, the eyes on ~iva'sbody or his aniconic linga might be understood both as expressions of phallic and divine mastery and as intimations of the darker and subversive feminine elements in this androgynous god. ~ i v ahas never been afraid of the yonit-indeed

the ~aivaitelinga that is worshiped is always firmly

rooted within one. Lastly, we might also see in this symbolic transformation hints of what I will explore further below: the female gaze.

The Mbh might offer feminist and

Lacanian theory possibilities for understanding the gaze in ways that go beyond

phallic extension and dominance, or at the very least interesting twists on those

* Doniger [1999a: 104-1091 makes an extended analysis of this curse of Indra, including passages and insights from other texts and offering psychoanalytic explanations. t Womb, vulva, vagina.

themes. As with most symbolic currents within the Mbh and Hinduism more broadly, it is often better to attempt to discern the contrasts, connections, and contradictions in their flux and play rather than to try to fix a stable essence or correlation-a

feature of both that, if I have not already amply argued so, also

make them well-suited to Lacan's similar methodology. On the one hand, my identifying desire in the domain of the visual here is obvious-of course desire operates primarily through and within the visual register! Sight is, for most of us, the primary means by which we identify others and relate to the world around us; it is the sense organ upon which we tend to depend most heavily for our perceptions, and thus the desires that arise from them. But if Lacan suggests that sight is implicated in the formation of our subjectivity in ways that are not quite as obvious, and if desiring is integral to that subjectivity, what dynamics of desire might be involved in the episodes above that might not be so evident to common sense? First of all, I would want to note that in the cases of the ascetics and apsara, the fact that the female involved is a heavenly courtesan may provide us with some good food for thought. The apsarci is a highly idealized type of female-perfect

in

every way, commanded by males to serve their ends, doing so charmingly, embodying every male fantasy, prancing and preening and "blamelessly willing". Susan Bordo, discussing pornography in "Reading the Male Body," makes several observations that are perhaps surprisingly relevant-what

may be at work here is

not necessarily an "objectification of women" but rather "an attempt.. .to depict a circumscribed female subjectivity that will validate the male body and male desire

in ways that 'real' women do not" [1994: 2'761. Indeed, "what is desired ...is a world in which.. .female desire is incapable of 'emasculating' the male by judging or rejecting him, by overwhelming him, or by expecting something from him. What is desired is a sexual encounter that does not put manhood at risk in any way" [Ibid., 276-2771.

These skirt episodes might offer the same sort of visual

appeal that has made Marilyn Monroe's famous skirt-lifting scene an icon in the American public imagination-revealing

yet concealing, unabashedly sexual yet

with enough disarming innocence and modesty not to be threatening. It is this visual image, this idea, of what woman should be-what threatening-that

is desirable and non-

makes the male lust uncontrollably, but note also that in the

preponderance of these cases the desire and ejaculation occur at a distance. The image provokes and satisfies, but the reality must be kept at arm's length. The fact that these apsanis are created or commanded by the gods makes similar sense in a Lacanian framework of desire: "woman" as such is only ever a fiction created by a masculine Symbolic order, construed in relation to the phallic signifier, and functioning according to the requirements of the phallic symbolic economy. Furthermore, these women who are objects of the male gaze, who incite male lust as idealized images of desirable femininity, can be further complexified as examples of the "not-all (pas-tout)" of woman described by Slavoj P i ~ e kin "Femininity Between Goodness and Act" [1999].

According to "standard"

Lacanian theory, The not-all (pas-tout) of woman means that not all of woman is caught up in the phallic jouissancc. She is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man,

attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male desire), a mysterious jouissance beyond the Phallus about which nothing can be said.. . [kizek 1999: 291 What &ek then adds to this "standard" formulation is that "the allusion to some unfathomable mysterious ingredient behind the mask is constitutive of the feminine seductive masquerade: the way woman seduces and transfixes the male gaze is precisely by adopting the role of Enigma embodied, as if her whole appearance is a lure, a veil concealing some unspeakable secret" [Ibid.]. Thus "the very notion of a 'feminine secret,' of some mysterious jouissance which eludes the male gaze, is constitutive of the phallic spectacle of seduction: inherent to the phallic economy is the reference to some mysterious X which remains forever out of its reach" [Ibid.]. This further explains how Woman, constructed as Other, is necessary for male subjectivity to perpetuate itself as such and how desire is created precisely never to be fulfilled-though,

as with many psychoanalytic

concepts, this idea is primarily articulated through the lens of male subjectivity. Almost anticipating this critique, %ek

asks "In what, then, does the

feminine jouissance 'beyond the phallus' consist?": Perhaps the radical attitude of [the heroine in the film he is analyzing]...provides an answer: she undermines the phallic economy and enters the domain of feminine jouissance by way of her very unconditional surrender to it, by way of renouncing every remnant of the inaccessible 'feminine mystique,' of some secret Beyond which allegedly eludes the male phallic grasp...thus invert[ing] the terms of phallic seduction in which a woman assumes the appearance of Mystery.. .there is nothing Beyond, and this very absolute immanence undermines the phallic economyÑdeprive of its "inherent transgression" (of the fantasizing about some mysterious Beyond avoiding its grasp), the phallic economy disintegrates. [1999: 29-30]

Of course, the heroine in question dies tragically and ignominiously-not

quite a

desirable or sustainable feminist future, though perhaps symbolically apt. Yet we begin to see here how the statement that "there is no such thing as The woman" [Lacan 1982: 1441 might make sense-and

the upsanis who animate the sexual

imagination of the epic might thus be appropriately celestial. This does not mean, however, that female desire and subjectivity are precluded, either in Lacanian theory or the epic. Let us move into a close reading of the story of Gang2 to explore these dynamics a bit further.

A close reading of Gangs's skirt-lifting scene offers a remarkable link to contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing on subjectivity, desire, and the gaze. In this passage the celestial Ganges' skirt is lifted by the wind in the middle of a gathering of the gods, and all but the royal &i Mah2bhisa turn their facesMahabhisa gazes steadfastly at her in that moment, and though he is cursed to human rebirth by Brahm2 for it, Gang2 goes away musing about him, eventually choosing to take human form as Mahabhisa's wife in his reincarnation as ~ a m t a n ua, scion of the Lunar dynasty. The passage goes as follows, the translation that of Hiltebeitel: Then at some time the gods did homage to Brahma. The royal Rsis were there and king Mahabhisa (among them). Then Gang%,best of rivers, approached the Grandfather. Her garment, radiant as the moon, was raised by the wind. The host of gods then lowered their faces. But the royal Rsi Mahabhisa looked at the river fearlessly. Mahabhisa was disdained by lord Brahma, who said, "Born among mortals, you shall again gain the worlds." ...The river, best of streams, having seen the king fallen from his firmness, went away musing about him in her heart. [1.91.3-6,81

This is a passage with which psychoanalysts could have a field day. The more Freudian among them would find this a stellar example of classic Oedipal conflict, a glimpsing of the primal scene of lack, and retribution by a jealous patriarch. And I don't deny that those themes could be at play. But what I find most intriguing about this passage is the function of the gaze in it-it

is Mahabhisa's

transgressive gaze, after all, that is the motive both for Brahma's curse and Gangfi's musing, and their eventual human coupling proceeding from it that sets the epic events of the Mahabharata in motion. The gaze, both in Hinduism and Lacanian theory, is a powerful, subtle, and dynamic force constitutive of subjectivity, desire, pleasure and anxiety, and this story of Ganga and Mahabhisa can, I think, shed some interesting light upon it. Here we have perhaps the only case in the Mahabharata in which a female progenitor of the Lunar dynasty chooses her sexual and marital partner out of her own free will, outside the pale of a staged svayamvara, with no external prompting, no intervention from others, no constraint or even karmic destiny to ordain it. Something happens there in that assembly that makes her want him, desire him, and our only clue is this event of the gaze. The one main difference between the context of Mahabhisa's gaze and that of Lacan is, as I noted above, that Lacan's gaze is generally understood as a disembodied gaze, a sort of objective gaze, a gaze that comes from a screen image, a photograph, a mask, or a tin can, but not a subject. Certainly not a knowing intending subject, as Mahabhisa would be. But, first of all, I would assert that for Ganga it doesn't really matter.

The same

dynamics follow whether the gaze is a camera, a mask, or a man-the

sense of

seeing-oneself-being-seen is what is salient here, and the accompanying pleasure and anxiety, which are in turn constitutive of desire. The difference is in this case that she can direct the resulting desire back to the source of the gaze-a would no doubt welcome it-and

man who

thus the love story that ensues. Second of all,

what would come into play for Mahabhisa is not so much the gaze-if

in Lacanian

theory the gaze is mostly what one feels directed or reflected back onto oneself, not what one self-consciously sends out-but

the scopic drive: the pleasure

derived from seeing, the impulse to sneak peeks or stare. In all, the gaze in the story of Gangfi and Mahfibhisa is a powerful catalyst both for erotic desire and subjective formation, and we can see here the possibility of an active female desire emerging from the castration of the phallic gaze, or the source of the gaze exposed for its lack and vulnerability. Rather than extrapolating some sort of voracious man-eating female sexuality from this, however, I would suggest that we instead understand it as an active, desiring agency that emerges when the female subject is freed from the reifjmg, rigidifjmg male gaze that stands in a position of unmitigated symbolic power and cultural authority, and delimits her purely in relation to it. So where exactly to begin in unraveling the multiple strands woven throughout this story? Well, first of all, inasmuch as the gaze in psychoanalysis is generally constructed as phallic and penetrating, and inasmuch as the traditional psychoanalytic division of neuroses ascribes hysteria (one aspect of which is the exaggerated desire to be an object for others) to the female-so

that the male

takes on the role of voyeur, the female that of exhibitionist-we

can see both

deriving pleasure from this transgressive sneak-peek of Mahabhisa. But though in this case (and perhaps symbolically so) Mahabhisa and Gang2 embody the gendered scopic division of labor, the gaze is not something that is solely directed to female objects-it

remains a phallic function, but applies to both male and

female in the Symbolic construction of subjectivity. It is by the gaze that one is constituted as a subject-in

its linguistic form the Lacanian gaze could be said to

be Althusserian interpellation-for

it turns one's own regard back on oneself and

makes one sees oneself as one is seen by the Other. It is a moment of profound, unsettling self-reflexivity and self-interrogation. Henry Krips links Lacan's notion of the gaze to what Roland Barthes calls the puncturnÑUdetail or spot that arrests the viewer's eye, or, as Barthes says, 'pricks' it" [1999: 101. The punctum is a "point of real violence" that "challenges the viewer, who feels himself under scrutiny.. .thus the gaze, like the fmnctum, is a distortion precipitating the viewer into looking back at himself or herself, into interrogating what is seen, 'doubling reality' and 'making it vacillate"' [Ibid., 10-111. The punctum, too, is an obviously phallic image, and effects a sort of violence upon the complacently viewing subject, a violence that in Ganga's case would also be a scopic violation. The violence of this constitutive moment of subjectivity also recalls another important constituent of the Lacanian gaze: the Real and its traumatic yet self-

constituting effects. Not only does the gaze of the Other bring the incipient subject into the realm of the Symbolic order, placing her under the "law of the signifier," it provokes an encounter with the Real-"in

its visual form, the Real

comprises anxiety-provoking breaks or anomalies in the visual field where the system of perceptual categories falters" [Ibid., 991-which

brings about the effects

of self-scrutiny. What I would say in the case of Gangi is that it is not so much a case of the system of perceptual categories failing, as the system of perceptual m k s ~ w h a can t and cannot be seen. What is under her skirt would obviously-as the reaction of the other Gods indicates-fall

into the latter category, and

Mahabhisa's unblinking transgression of those perceptual rules provokes, I would argue, a moment of anxiety and disorientation for Ganga, an anxiety which, however, is also pleasurable, in that it not only constitutes her as a subject but also as an object of desire for another. This after-effect of the encounter with the Real, this doubleness of pleasure and anxiety in becoming both subject and object, this formation of desire in the crucible of the gaze, only becomes apparent gradually, for she walks away musing, not instantly and overwhelmingly enamored. So we see desire as the final aftereffect of Mahabhisa's gaze, a dynamic that Krips describes in the context of Katchina masks-in

fact, I will substitute Mahabhisa for the

Katchina mask in the following quote to suggest their interchangeability as agents of the gaze: Such dovetailed activities of seeing and being seen, like the successive throwings-away and retrievals of the Fort-Da, set in place the scopic drive, and along with it the creation of pleasure as well as anxiety. As in the FortDa, desire emerged from such activities, enabling [Mahabhisa] to take on the role of object-cause of desire. [Krips 1999: 631 Furthermore, I would suggest that not only is desire the after-effect of this encounter, but also Ganga and ~ahabhisa-as-~amtanusettling into the comfortable Imaginary of human form and conjugal bliss-with

Gangii's

infanticide of their first seven sons* the only reminder of the traumatic Real. Or, if we choose to focus on the Symbolic dynamics, we might see that "hysteria [again, if we can loosely connote Gangs's desiring to be an object of the gaze as such] is the attempt to cure symbolic impotence by means of the imaginary" [Copjec 1995: 171. Indeed, there is one more point to be considered before moving on, a point that, since it has to do with firmness in reference to a male, no good student of psychoanalysis could overlook: "The river, best of streams, having seen the king fallen from his firmness, went away musing about him in her heart" [1.91.8; italics mine]. I would argue, drawing on Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins, that seeing the king "fallen from his firmness" is, as halfway point between the moment of the gaze and the constitution of her desire for its perpetrator, a crucial step in the evolution of her desire for him. Working in an entirely different context, Silverman analyzes four post-World War I1 films in which the themes of male castration and lack are only thinly veiled, and "the male subject's aspirations to mastery and sufficiency are undermined from many directions" [1992: 521. The films all display different attitudes towards male lack and castration, but an interesting possibility that emerges from them is afemale desire for which the phallus is not necessarily the sipzifier [Ibid.]. Indeed, especially in the case of one of the heroines of The Best Days of Our Lives, the male subject's castration becomes heavily eroticized: * This was a promise she had made to the divine Vasus who provided the reason (or excuse) for her entree into human form in the first place. Though the Vasus were cursed to be born from a human womb, if they were killed upon birth they could avoid life as humans and immediately regain their divine forms.

He ...has lost his hands-and with them the power to be sexually aggressive...Every night, his wife will have to put him to bed, and then it will be her hands that must be used in making love. Beneath the pathos of the scene...one feels a current of excitement, in which the sailor's misfortune becomes a kind of wish-fulfillment, as one might actually dream it: he must be passive; therefore he can be passive without guilt. [Silverman 1992: 72, citing Warshow 19471

My point is that it could thus be precisely Mahabhisa's "falling from firmness" that provokes Ganga's desire for him. His symbolic castration by the irate father, his loss of divine status and curse of having to re-enter the world through a human womb, the seeming loss of potency and virility that thus ensues-this

is what

Ganga goes away musing about, and this is what prompts her to finally take human form to become his wife and lover. Ganga, I would argue, like the heroine in The Best Days of Our Lives, is a woman for whom the phallus is not necessarily the signifier of desire-and,

I would go further to say, she is not the only one.

Damayanti, as we will see later, chooses Nala in the moment that he is revealed in contrast to the gods who were impersonating him: "[Nala] stood revealed by his shadow, his faded garland, his dustiness and sweatiness, and the blinking of his eyes, while he touched the ground" [3.54.24].

Draupadi, however, is not

impressed by her husbands' impotence at the moment when she becomes the object of a transgressive male gaze, and does not let them forget it! We will now move into her story to look more closely at the function of the gaze in the Real, the dynamics surrounding the female gaze in the Mbh, and consequences besides desire that result from exposure of the female body.

Draupadi As I mentioned above, Draupadi's disrobing is one of the most powerful, disturbing, and dharmically contentious scenes of the epic. Rather than setting in motion a love story, it drives a bloody revenge that will decimate her family and empty the earth of kings. Indeed, an argument could be made that it is this scene, or her question that is the segue into it, that constitutes the fulcrum of the epicthe point toward which all action preceding it drives, and from which all action following it derives. It is the painful symptom that recurs throughout later chapters when the thoughts or conversation of her husbands start turning towards reconciliation; it is the prompt that again and again renews their commitment to vengeance. And the fact that this scene is as powerful as it is without Draupadi ever technically being disrobed makes it all the more interesting. The epic-rarely

explanation-remains

shy of

ambiguous* on why and how her sari is prevented from

being ripped off by her licentious brother-in-law: new saris appear as soon as one unravels, until Duhsasana sits down exhausted, defeated, and utterly bewildered. She is humiliatingly exposed in other ways-verbally

abused and berated, and

dragged by her hair, menstruating, "clad in a single cloth," into an assembly hall full of kings and brahmins-but

the miraculous appearance of new saris as hers is

being torn away combines the Imaginary and the Real, the magical, dharmic, and divine, in a way that is so overdetermined that it requires nothing less than a fullscale unpacking.

* Though the common explanation is that the divine Krsna intervenes.

179

Draupadi and Gang2 have radically different reactions to their public exposure: Draupadi swears the destruction of her transgressor, Gang3 pursues hers erotically. Why such different reactions? Why this return again and again in the epic to the exposure of the female body to the male gaze?

Why this

fascination, coupled both with desire and punishment? As I intimated with Ganga's story above, a straightforward Freudian reading would suggest that this theme represents the dread and fascination associated with the primal scene-the mother's body exposed, swathed in an aura of danger. Or more subtly, the fear and pleasure associated with voyeurism of the mother's nudity or the primal scene,

the gaze as a kind of phallic extension that enables one to penetrate, possess her who is most forbidden. But these interpretations, though plausible, confine the dynamics either within the Oedipal sphere of the nuclear family or to the perspective of the male subject. What I would want to suggest here is that, among the many symbolic currents that cluster around these scenes, two visual themes in particular coalesce around the figure of Draupadi: that of the female gaze-the feminine either as active, seeing agency, or simply that which prompts the male to feel "seen," thus forming his subjectivity and motivating his actions-and

that of

the female being seen. Draupadi both sees and is seen; she is laid bare and in turn lays bare the male subjects surrounding her. In Draupadi's and other cases, however, exposure of the body is emphatically not constitutive of desire, but to the contrary carries with it resonances of dharmic disturbance or disaster.

Uncovered bodies as trauma

Goddesses and apsar& might be able to be viewed in male assemblies with relative impunity, but for a self-respecting k~atriyawoman-even an incarnation of a goddess risen from an altar such as Draupadi-avoidance

of and protection from

the male gaze is a not-negligible matter of status and self-respect. For the epic's human heroines uncovered bodies and exposure to the male gaze are often a sign of trauma or some disturbance of dharma rather than desire.

Draupadi, for

instance, poignantly bemoans her public exposure in the assembly hall: I on whom the assembled kings set eye in the arena at my Bridegroom Choice, but never before or after, I am now brought into the hall! I whom neither wind nor sun* have seen before in my house, I am now seen in the middle of the hall in the assembly of the Kurus. I whom the Pgndavas did not suffer to be touched by the wind in my house before, they now allow me to be touched by this miscreant. ..What greater humiliation than that I, a woman of virtue and beauty, now must invade the men's hall?" [2.62.4-8VB; italics mine]

Much later, the royal widows of the heroes decimated by the great battle provoked by that episode in the assembly hall are described in similar terms, their disregard for modesty and appearance an indication of the scale of the trauma that they are experiencing: Those ladies who had not before this been seen by the very celestials were now, helpless as they were in the absence of their lords, seen by the common people. With their beautiful disheveled hair, and their ornaments thrown off, those ladies, each clad in a single piece of cloth, proceeded most sorrowfully [11.9.910 (11.10.8-9) Dl.. .Those ladies who formerly felt abashed even in the presence of friends of their own sex, now felt no shame, though scantily clad, in coming out before their mothers-in-law. [ l 1.9.15 (11.lo. 14); italics mine]

* There may be a double entendre here, as wind and sun are not simply elements but also male deities-the former, as we have seen, infamously responsible for blowing up women's skirts, the latter responsible for impregnating Kunti out of wedlock.

In the story of Nala and Damayanti, the royal couple, cheated by a game of dice out of their kingdom and riches, leave the city with-as out-Nala

the text takes care to point

"in a single robe, unclad, feeding the grief of his friends" [3.58.6] and

Damayanti "clad in one skirt" [3.58.7]. To add insult to injury, the dice return in the form of birds to take his one remaining robe: "those birds cried out to Nala, seeing him standing naked on the ground, wretched, with his face bent down, 'We are the dice, fool, and we came to take your robe too; for it did not please us that you still went clothed!'" [3.58.15 VB]. Finding himself left naked, Nala gives full vent to his misery, and must share his wife's cloth until he cuts it in half, leaving her in desperation in the middle of the night. In perhaps the only case of a man willfully exposing himself, Duryodhana uses visual tactics in pushing the humiliation of Draupadi to a point that would make Bhima swear his death-interestingly,

in this case, exposure of the male

body is considered humiliating for the woman! Crazed by his ascendancy, [Duryodhana] took his cloth and looked invitingly at [Draupadi]. Then, smiling up at [Karna], and taunting Bhima, he exposed to Draupadi who was watching him his left thigh, soft like a banana tree and auspiciously marked.. .[Bhima] saw it and, widening his bloodshot eyes, spoke up in the midst of kings, willing the assembly to listen: "May [I] never share the world of [my] fathers, if I fail to break that thigh with my club in a great battle!" [2.63.10-14VB; italics mine] Draupadi's husbands, too, are forced to strip their upper garments as marks of their servitude after they lose the gambling match, but it is Draupadi's disrobing that constitutes the pivotal scene of the epic-described, however, with surprising brevity. Kama gives the order, reasoning that "the Gods have laid down that a woman shall have one husband ...She submits to many men and assuredly is a

whore! Thus there is, I think, nothing strange about taking her into the hall, or to have her in one piece of clothing, or for that matter naked!" [2.61.35-36VB]. Then Duhsgsana forcibly laid hold of Draupadi's robe.. .and in the midst of the assembly began to undress her. But when her skirt was being stripped off...another similar skirt appeared every time. A terrible roar went up from all the kings, a shout of approval, as they watched that greatest wonder on earth. And in the midst of the kings Bhima.. . pronounced a curse in a mighty voice: "Take to heart this word of mine ...such as never has been spoken before nor any one shall speak hereafter! May I forfeit my journey to all my ancestors.. .if I do not tear open in battle the chest of this misbegotten fiend.. .and drink his blood!" When they heard this curse, which exhilarated all the world, they offered him much homage and reviled [Duhsasana]. A pile of clothes was heaped up in the middle of the hall, when D u h k a n a , tired and ashamed, at last desisted and sat down. [2.61.4048 VB]

So though Draupadi is no doubt abused and disrespected, the most fascinating thing about "Draupadi's disrobing" is that she is never actually disrobed! But it carries tremendous psychic force nonetheless-in

folk performances, this is the

scene during which women and actors are most likely to get possessed, and it is one of the highlights of the Draupadi festivals.* In fact, I might venture to assert that it is so psychologically powerful precisely because it remains unfulfilled. Just the prospect, the attempt is unthinkable and disturbing enough-and

if as Lacan

suggests, symptoms both hide and reveal the trauma that is their source, and desire circles around its objects without ever being fulfilled, Draupadi's clothes can be understood both as symptom and objet petit a. This episode, I would suggest, is best contextualized within the Real, primarily because trauma is experienced in the Real and it is around this core trauma that much of the epic's Imaginary and Symbolic dynamics revolve.

* Fieldwork and personal communication with Alf Hiltebeitel, July 2000.

First of all, Draupadi's staking, disrobing, and her famous question to the assembly paralyze the male arbiters of dharma and expose both in them and their dharma "glaring" shortcomings and deficiencies. Yudhisthira, veritable King of Dharma, from the moment he stakes Draupadi sits silent as if mindless, stupefied. The collected elders sit silent after she asks pointedly who was lost first, herself or her husband. Indeed, in this poignant scene dharma and the patriarchs who are to embody and interpret it are rendered morally impotent by this question of Draupadi's that they cannot answer, and it is only the deus ex machina of inauspicious omens interrupting the assembly that provides an easy out for the paralyzed patriarchs. The fact that the chief female protagonist of the epic, its heroine, both goddess and woman, born from an altar and wife of semidivine heroes, is dragged by her hair, menstruating and clad in a single cloth, before an assembly of men-comprising not only her five husbands but also her relatives by marriage-who

fail to protect her and allow her molestation, creates a tear in the

Imaginary and Symbolic fabric of the epic that can only be purged and resolved by the great catastrophic Mahiibhfirata war. The scene is overdetermined in so many ways that it constitutes a veritable knot in the fiber of the epic, and the gaze is a powerful force in both directions. Draupadi is not just being-seen here-she

also

represents the agency of the female gaze that shapes and motivates male subjectivity. Indeed, if Gangs,

as

one side of the proverbial coin, enacts female

desire, Draupadi as the other enacts female agency, evidenced not only by the strategic brilliance of her question that rescues her husbands from a desperate situation, but also by her compelling use of the gaze. In the next section we will

look more closely at this notion of the female gaze and how it is enacted and utilized in the Mbh. Thefemale gaze Draupadi is not only a famous beauty but is recognized in the epic as a woman of impeccable dharma, a model wife, and a "lady sage". On the one hand she is cast as an incarnation of the auspicious ~ r igoddess , of prosperity: A part of ~ r was i born here on earth for the sake of love as a blameless virgin, from the middle of an altar in the house of Drupada. She was neither too small nor too tall, and fragrant like the blue lotus; her eyes were long and lotuslike, her hips well-shaped, her hair black and long. All the marks of beauty favored her who had the sheen of a beryl stone; and secretly she stirred the hearts of the five lordly men. [1.61.95-971

Yet she also has ominous undertones to her character. As we saw in the last chapter, when at Draupadi's birth she rises up out of the altar, a disembodied voice rumbles, "Superb among women, the Dark Woman shall lead the baronage [ksatra] to its doom" [1.155.44]. And this she does.

Draupadi drives the

vengeance of her five husbands, never letting them forget the injustice perpetrated upon h e r - o r them-whenever

their resolve flags. With a quick,

incisive, and sometimes brutal tongue, Draupadi throughout the long years of their exile never lets them forget the revenge that is their due, and on the brink of war, as her husbands sue for peace, makes an impassioned speech inciting them to fight [5.80]. Kunti, too, invokes her daughter-in-law in urging her sons to battle, exhorting them to "walk the path of Draupadi! [5.135.19]. Drona cautions "

Duryodhana as he boasts of his prowess: 'You cannot defeat the Piindavas for whose triumph a Draupadi hopes, she true-spoken and of awesome vows and austerities, a Goddess!" [5.137.18 V B ]. But her gazes are worth a thousand words.

King Janamejaya, two generations later, wonders 'Why did Qsn2 Draupadi, beset by evil-minded men, fail-capable as she was-to

burn the sons of Dhrtariistra

with her evil eye?" [1.56.7 VB]. And in the assembly hall, of course, her eyes are blazing: As she piteously spoke the slim-waisted queen Threw a scornful glance at her furious husbands And burned them with thefall of her sidelongglances, Filling their limbs with anger. Not the kingdom lost, nor the riches looted, Nor the precious jewels plundered did hurt As hurt that sidelong glance of &sn%,* That glance of Krsna sent in fury. r2.60.35-36; italics mine]

In yet another assembly hall molestation, a repetition of the first trauma, Draupadi is manhandled by the general Kicaka in front of her husbands Bhima and Yudhisthira, who must maintain their disguises and thus once more cannot come to her assistance. "Ignoring her dejected husbands," Draupadi protests to the king "while blazing with dreadful eyes" [4.15.13-141. Draupadi is an active seer, an example of strong female visual agency, just as much as she is an icon of female humiliation and exposure. If anything, it is precisely her resolute returning of the gaze-the

reflecting of the mirror back onto the male assembly-that

salvages not

only her pride but also her husbands and kingdom, albeit only temporarily. The question of the feminine gaze is, however, a problematic one for Lacanian theory.

As Joan Copjec notes, "some of the impasses we have

encountered in our attempts to posit a female spectator have depended on our not taking seriously the proposition about the nonexistence of the woman" [1989:

* Another name for Draupadi.

1211. Indeed, if the Woman does not exist, how can her gaze or status as spectator be theorized? Our first possible response is that it is the woman who is the fulfillment of man's desire who does not exist, and that her absence as such does not preclude

other possibilities for her role in subjective formation, the gaze, and desire. We should not forget that it is in theory the mother-or

the maternal function-who

holds the child up to the figurative if not literal mirror, the mother who exists in the Imaginary as the first narcissistic recognition of the subject as such. Thus it is not simply the subject seeing itself in the mirror, but also the subject seeing itself being seen (by the mother) (in the mirror) that gives this mirror stage its formative

power. Second of all, even if the Woman does not exist, she might as well! Even if the Woman is a fiction of male desire and subjectivity, it does not lessen the impact of her gaze. Just as the Lacanian gaze is commonly understood as something abstract and disembodied-the

sound you think you hear behind you

as you're peeping through the keyhole, the sound that makes you feel as if you've been seen, that makes you straighten up and look around-the

origin of that gaze

is not as significant as its interpellative effect. Whether or not the Woman exists, Man lives, acts, and behaves as if she did. The female gaze is thus, I would suggest, what provenes from beyond the masculine Symbolic, the Lawof-theFather, the phallic signifier-at

times supporting it, at times subverting it-but

in

either case forcing its self-evaluation and continual self-justification. Indeed, I would posit the female gaze as such to be integral to dynamics of male subjectivity in the epic. Sometimes it is as simple and innocuous as women looking on while male actors strut their stuff, for example, when the young prince

of Viriiw boasts of his prowess "amidst the womenfolk," as the text notes twice explicitly [4.33.21; 4.34.101; or when "Brahmin ladies, princesses, and the commoners' daughters crowd together in play to gaze upon the [King Yudhisthira] who is girt for war" [5.49.8 VB]. Or it can have a tone ofjest, as when the goddess Pfirvati chides her husband h a : "Persons of even ordinary powers applaud themselves and brag before their wives" [not in CE (12.284.27) Dl. In a darker scene, however, Gandhari's gaze from underneath her blindfolded eyes scorches the toe of Yudhisthira, who was responsible for the death of her hundred sons. More often than not, the female gaze in the epic is implicated in scenes of impotence and castration that drive the male characters to their bloody finale, and Draupadi's is the most insistent and compelling. Duryodhana is infuriated by Draupadi and the women laughing at his clumsiness in their palace, and returns home more committed than ever to the Piindavas' downfall [2.46.30]. He has his revenge, at least in part: Draupadi fumes to l+-sna, in recounting the events of the assembly hall, "in the midst of the kings, inside the hall, overrun by my menses, [Duryodhana and his cronies] watched me ...and burst out laughing, the foulminded!" [3.13.55 VB]. She continues her complaint, reiterating the helplessness of her husbands: "And I was laid hold of by the hair, I who was the choicest, while all five who are like Indras* looked on" [3.13.108 VB]. In the assembly hall scene itself, Draupadi is described as "looking down on her wretched lords" [2.60.37],

* Though Indra himself is not always the model of phallic splendor. We saw earlier how he is marked all over his body with vaginas. In another episode, he is superceded by Nahusa and hides in the fiber of a lotus, where his wife finds him: 'When she saw her lord in a very tiny body, the Goddess.. .[herself] became tiny in form," [5.14.10 VB] and praised him until he responded to her pleas for help. Doniger, too, provides a psychoanalytic reading of this passage [1999a: 1061.

who, along with the other men in the hall, "were filled with misery beyond measure" [2.60.39]. The scene is described with poignancy again at the close of the book: Who but that crooked gambler would overpower and exhibit in the hall this effulgent and beautiful princess, not born of woman, issue of a great dynasty, glorious and conversant with all the Laws ...The full-hipped [Draupadi], ruled by the Law of women [ s t n dharrna], clothed in her single garment, stained with blood, looked at the Pa&avas, to find than robbed of their property, fading i n spirit, robbed of their wife, robbed of their fortune, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to slavery, as they were ensnared by the noose of the Law as if impotent of gallantry.. .Earth herself would b u m under her wretched eyes." [2.72.1419 VB; italics mine]

Later, as they are in exile in the forest, Bhima still smarts from the outrage, and in an encounter with a Riiksasa in the forest, "emboldened by the outrage of Duryodhana and the prowess of his arms, [Bhima] swelled under [Draupadi's] eye" [3.12.55 VB; italics mine]. And lastly, as the epic nears the end of its long and circuitous journey, Aquna, the greatest warrior of them all, is finally unmanned by his failure to protect the women of the Vrsni clan, his last duty to his dear departed friend msna.

First he is barely able to string his bow, then he is unable to call his

celestial weapons to mindÑ6'havin seen the great change in the strength of his arms in battle, and from the destruction of his divine great weapons, Aquna became greatly ashamed" [16.8.54 (16.7.54)l. Then comes the final straw: "while all his warriors were looking on, many foremost of ladies were dragged away, while others went forth [with the robbers] as they desired" [16.8.57 (16.7.59)]. The proud and once-invincible warrior wilts under the glances-beseeching

or

mocking-of the women he is duty-bound to protect as they are being led away by

are supposed to embody. Many rich possibilities exist. But one thing is sure: whatever happens in that assembly hall is experienced as a profound trauma that must be revisited again and again until it is purged in an unimaginably gory and devastating battle that lasts as many days as the epic has books. That scene, I would argue quite strongly, is the kernel of the symptom that the epic repeats again and again-its

foundational trauma, if you will-and

the gaze is one of the

most powerful motivating forces in the dynamics that shape and motivate it.

Nala and Damayanti Finally, we will close with a brief reflection on the story of Nala and Damayanti, and the visual themes of signification and interpretation that are interwoven throughout it. The story of Nala and Damayanti, though without a scene exactly like Ganga's or Draupadi's, nonetheless has some interesting parallels that merit attention. It can almost be said to be the Imaginary of the Mahabharata's Realor a sweet dream in the epic's nightmare waking-inasmuch

as it carries a similar

plot line but is more idyllic, less disruptive and disturbing, and ends happily. Biardeau uses the term "mirror effects" to describe the correspondences between the Nala and Damayanti story and the larger epic [Hiltebeitel 2001a: 2161, a provocative description within this Lacanian context. As with Gang%,there is a moment when the heroine Damayanti's love is aroused by the sight of her lover-tobe, Nala, relatively disempowered in contrast to more traditionally phallic alternatives. Nala, too, gazes upon Damayanti, not in an embarrassing moment of exposure, but presumably undone and relaxed in the privacy of her boudoir. The

mutual recognitions that punctuate their romance-both throughout-involve

at the beginning and

subtle scopic dynamics, with themes of symbolic recognition,

marks and signs playing throughout their story. From Damayanti's plea to the gods to let her recognize Nala at her bridegroom choice to the signs she must read when Nala returns to her in disguise, the intertwining of these two subjects is a work of sign-reading and symbolic savvy that provides a rich complement to the dynamics of the gaze and the visual register throughout the epic. And like Draupadi, Damayanti too loses everything (and half her garment to boot) in her husband's dicing match and must wander the forest and submit to demeaning occupations until the injustice can be righted and the kingdom won back from her greedy brother-in-law. This section will tie Gangi's and Draupadi's stories back together in reflecting on the refraction of their themes in Damayanti's, and use these three stories to move toward concluding reflections on the dynamics of exposure, recognition, and the gaze in the epic.

Marks, s i p s on body, clothes

As I note at the outset of this chapter, Nala and Damayanti's desire for each other is striking as the only exception to what seems to be an otherwise consistent pattern-it

is aural, not visual in origin. "People praised Nala with great wonder

in the presence of Damayanti, and they praised her in Nala's presence, again and again. And as they heard of each other's excellence, there rose in them a desire for the other unseen person, and love waxed in their hearts for each other"

[3.50.15-17 VB] . A goose becomes Nala's unlikely linguistic agent to further this unseen desire: in exchange for Nala's mercy, the goose offers to go to Damayanti

and "so speak of you, [Nala], that she will never think of any other man" [3.50.20 VB]. Sure enough, after Damayanti hears the words of the goose, "she was no longer herself on account of Nala" and becomes prone to brooding, crying, raising her eyes to heaven, not sleeping, and "looking like a woman crazed"; her friends "know from the signs" that she is not well, and her father decides that this means she has reached womanhood and should be married [3.51.1-71. Before the svayakara, Nala is sent by four gods who are also Damayanti's suitors to exhort her to choose them, despite Nala's protests that he has the same intent. They enable him to enter her quarters unseen by the guards, though his beauty appears strikingly visible to the female attendants and Damayanti herself, who ask themselves who this fine specimen of a man might be. Nala dutifully delivers his message on behalf of the gods, but Damayanti avows her love for him and her unwavering decision to choose him at the svayamvara. When the gods hear of this, they change their appearance to look exactly like him, and at the moment of the bridegroom choice, she surveys her suitors and sees five identical Nalas!

As Damayanti wonders anxiously how to choose the real Nala, she

remembers the "marks that betoken the Gods" that distinguish them from mortals, and pleads out loud that they be revealed: "If it be true that I chose [Nala] to be my husband, when I heard the words of the wild geese, then by this truth the Gods must point him out to me! ... [They] must display their own forms, so that I may recognize King [Nala]!" [3.54.18-20 VB] The Gods, then, touched by her devotion and passion, display their marks of divinity: "She saw all the Gods without sweat, with unblinking eyes, with spruce garlands, without dust, and

standing without touching the ground. And [Nala] stood revealed by his shadow, his faded garland, his dustiness and sweatiness, and the blinking of his eyes, while he touched the ground" [3.54.23-24 VB].

When she chooses Nala, in all his

mortality, the Gods bestow upon him boons that will become crucial signs later in her recognition of him. There is actually a similar situation recounted a bit later in the epic. Sukanya, young and beautiful, is married to Cyavana, an old and irascible brahmin. One day she is bathing, and the twin Asvins, the healers of the Gods, see her nude and try to convince her to leave her husband for them. When she protests her devotion to her husband, they decide that they will all assume an identical youthful and handsome form, and if she picks her husband correctly from among them, he will be able to keep this desirable form. Cyavana, "desirous of beauty," agrees, and they jump into the lake, climbing out "all young and divinely beautiful, with shining earrings, wearing the same outward appearance" [3.122.16-17 VB] . They say to her: "'beautiful young woman, choose one of us for your husband, whomever you desire.'

When she saw them all standing there

looking the same, the princess decided with heart and mind, and chose her very own husband," [3.123.18-20 VB; italics mine] who was of course thrilled to be able to keep both his wife and his newly acquired good looks. In this example, we see a sort of emotional/intellectual intuition that makes the correct choice, rather than the combination of devotion and sign-reading that we see in Damayanti's case. Actually, to allow myself some digression, Cyavana and Sukanya's marriage is the result of another quite interesting episode that has resonances with related

visual themes. Cyavana had so engrossed himself in his austerities that an anthill grows around his immobile form. Sukanyii is frolicking in the woods as part of her father's retinue, "comely, youthful, amorous, and drunk" [3.122.9]: [Cyavana] saw her when her friends had left her and she was by herself, wearing one piece of clothing ...As he watched her in her solitude, that most brilliant Brahmin seer endowed with the power of his austerities was enamoured. He spoke out to the beautiful girl from his dried up throat, and she did not hear him. Then Sukanyii saw the eyes of [Cyavana] in the anthill and, exclaiming, "Now, what is this?" she, confused in her judgment, curiously pricked the eyes with a thorn. When she pricked his eyes, the very irascible sage waxed angry and constipated the armed escort of [her father]. [3.122.10-13VB] "Observing that his escort suffered from constipation, with bladders and bowels impeded" [3.122.14 VB], the king begins inquiring as to what might have happened, and Sukanya ventures that she pricked "some living creature in an anthill, which gave out light," thinking it was a firefly [3.122.19 VB]. Her father immediately rushes to the anthill, begs Cyavana's forgiveness, and agrees to grant Sukanyii to him in marriage as recompense. This episode seems at first blush, given its dangerous combination of ascetic practicing austerities and nubile young maiden in the forest, to be leading towards another episode of spontaneous ejaculation, but Cyavana actually attempts to speak to her. The failure of the words then leads directly to a sort of symbolic blinding, which in psychoanalytic theory, of course, has almost instant associations with castration. How exactly this leads Cyavana to choose constipation-not guards-as

of Sukanya, but of her father's

a suitable punishment is not clear, unless this symbolic genital attack

prompts some regression to an earlier anal phase. In any case, he is pacified by * Doniger [1999a: 134-1401 makes an extended analysis of this story, cross-referencing its appearance in other texts as well.

receiving in marriage the object of his desire and perpetrator of the indignity, and she is appropriately subservient enough to win his affection. When he then regains his youth, they "amused [themselves] in the forest" [3.125.10] and "cavorted together like Gods" [3.123.23 VB] happily ever after! Returning to the story of Nala and Damayanti, however, things go downhill after some time of conjugal bliss. Nala's treacherous brother cheats him out of his kingdom and possessions in a gambling match eerily reminiscent of that in which the Pandavas lose everything.* Unlike Draupadi, however, Damayanti looks on as her husband gambles [3.56.8], and he stops short of actually betting her [3.58.5]. Nonetheless, they are left to wander in a single cloth in the forest, and after Nala deserts her in the middle of the night, Damayanti eventually takes up a position as servant in her aunt's household, unrecognized until a Brahmin sent by her father notices a birthmark that identifies her: "for her body may be caked with dirt and unadorned, still it shines like gold for all to see! By this body and by that mole I have recognized my queen, as fire that is covered by hot smoke" [3.66.7-8 VB]. Reunited with her kin, Damayanti devises a strategy for finding Nala. She sends out a coded message far and wide, and when a response returns that signals recognition of its meaning, she identifies who she thinks is Nala, though he is disguised as a hunchback. In order to confirm his identity, she devises a series of tests that he accomplishes unknowingly, the final confirmation coming from her

* In fact, this story is being told as the Pandavas are in the woods after the catastrophic dice match. Yudhistira wonders "Is there a king on earth more unlucky than I?" [3.49.34] and the story of Nala is the response he receives.

servant woman's shrewd observation of the boons attached to him that the Gods had granted at their wedding. Not only is the story widely noted as being one of the few in the epic (or ancient Indian literature, for that matter) that features a woman as protagonist [van Buitenen 1975: 1831, but Damayanti also clearly distinguishes herself as possessing tremendous symbolic savvy. As Doniger suggests in her discussion of the parallels between Damayanti and Penelope, "both of the women manipulate the signs themselves; truly they have agency," and she notes the contrast between Lkvi-Strauss' formulation that men exchange women like words or signs and a heroine like Penelope (and Damayanti) who "insists upon her status as a [speaking subject], a generator of signs" [1999: 168; italics mine]. The relationship between "Woman" and language or sign-production in the psychoanalytic tradition is of course a rich one-psychoanalysis

is, after all, a product of women's dialogue

describing and producing their unconscious symbolic structures, their bodies and symptoms, and the interpretive process that Freud brings to bear on the task of "reading" these sign-systems. Even though structures of signification may be framed within a Symbolic order for which the phallus is the ordering principle, this does not mean that there is not considerable room for creative and often subversive agency in manipulating, multiplying, and destabilizing these signs, and women as active linguistic agents may alternately challenge and perpetuate phallic structures of signification. Moreover, as Hiltebeitel notes in the story of Nala and Damayanti (as with Yudhisthira and Draupadi in the assembly hall), it is the man in these cases who

loses his self [dtman], and the woman who regains it for him: "in both cases, the heroines save the heroes and themselves" [2001a: 2261. Damayanti is described in the story as one who "knows time and place" [Ibid., 2251-she

knows how to read

signs, create and exchange them, and it is clear that had she any less symbolic sense her story would have been an unmitigated tragedy. We also return here to the significance of clothing in these stories. As we have seen in the preceding sections of this chapter, the presence or absence of clothing can alternately evoke desire or trauma. An interesting addition to this is Hiltebeitel's suggestion, in considering the parallels between Nala/Damayanti and Yudhisthira/Draupadi, that clothes can also signify the self. Yudhisthira is figuratively stripped-"of wealth, loved ones, and language. ..of all that has up to now identified him" [Ibid., 2201-as

his brothers are literally stripped in the assembly hall.

Draupadi, as we have seen, is both stripped and covered-humiliatingly

His wife exposed

yet miraculously spared, a function of her dharma and/or devotion. Furthermore, suggests Hiltebeitel, the terms describing Nala's self [dtman] as "naked, unclothed" resonate with the explicitly spiritual message of the Bhagavad Gita in which "the self puts on garments from life to life; unclothed, it is either between earthly identities or liberated" [Ibid., 2261. So in these three stories we see, with Gang%,a skirt blown up by the wind that echoes the erotic forest scenes between ascetics and upsarcis, with Draupadi a traumatic forcible disrobing in which dharma or divinity intervene, and with Damayanti a cloth torn in half that signifies the rupture of her union with her beloved. Each also involves male counterparts who are similarly exposed. Clothing here-in

relation to the gaze for which it

exists-can alternatively be the object a that provokes desire as it frustrates its fulfillment, the thin veil between the real of trauma and the imaginary of normality, and the symbolic signifier of social and sexual order and the ruptures thereof. Clothing is, in these three episodes as they intertwine, a sort of signifier for a signified that shifts; rather than representing some stable referent, it flows in and through various interlocking themes. Lastly, beyond these sartorial intrigues, the body in general is often read in the epic as a system of signs. Marks on the body are read as auspicious or inauspicious, and an aesthetic system of what do and do not constitute marks of beauty is clearly laid out in repeated physical descriptions of (usually, but not only female) characters. For example, the queen of Virap, to whom Draupadi is applying as lady's maid during her year in disguise, "reads" Draupadi's body and does not believe that she can be the lady's maid she says she is: Your heels are flat, your thighs are full, you are deep in the three places, high in the six, red in the five red spots, and your voice halts like a wild goose's. Your hair is fine, your nipples are pretty, you are shapely, with full breasts and buttocks, you are endowed with every grace like a filly from Kashmir! Your eyelashes curl nicely, your lips are like bimbo, berries, your waist is slender, your throat lined like a conch shell, your veins are hidden, and your face is like the full moon! Tell me who you are, my dear, since you are not a serving woman at all. [4.8.10-13VB]

Arjuna too is "read," as those closest to him look for signs on his body that might explicate the life he has been dealt: Yudhisthira asks: "[Arjuna's] body has every auspicious mark. What, however, 0 Krsna, is that sign in his excellent body for which he has always to suffer misery and discomfort? [Arjuna] has to bear a large share of misery. I do not see any censurable mark on his bodyn ...[Krsna], having thought for a long time, answered as follows: "I do not see any censurable mark in this prince, except that the cheek-bones of this foremost of men

are a little too high. For this [he] has always to be on the road."* [14.89.4 8 (14.87.5-9)Dl The notion of the body as a signifying surface is one that has considerable currency in contemporary philosophical thought. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, "this metaphor of the textualized body asserts that the body is a page or material surface.. .ready to receive, bear, and transmit meanings, messages, or signs, much like a system of writing" [1994: 1171. Furthermore, in a dharmically motivated text such as the Mbh, it could be said that "what marks [the body's] outside surface is more law, right, requirement, social imperative, [and] custom" [Ibid.]all words that, were they to be translated back into the epic's Sanskrit, could probably be collapsed into one term: dharma. Inasmuch as bodies in the Mbh are described with iconographic or symbolic connotations, they are inscribed with dharma (or lack thereof-adhama),

and when we are presented with a physical

description we are expected to be able to "read" into it much more. Interestingly, and to move us into our concluding reflections, the word for "sign" in Sanskrit (lingo)can also mean "penis" [Doniger 1999: 142, 2691. If Lacan were looking for any cross-cultural linguistic confirmation of his equation between the phallus and the signifier, he might go no further! The phallus in Lacanian theory is an ordering principle of language and culture, a unifying presence that makes structure possible, and the signifier of sexual difference. The linga as both phallus and sign is thus an intriguing traditionally Indian connection that, rearticulated independently by Lacan in the 20th century, has revolutionized

* Again, Draupadi's active gaze comes through here: "Draupadi, however, looked angrily and askance at Kgna ... [though Qsna] approved of that mark of love (for his friend) which [Draupadi],who was also his friend, showed." [ 14.89.9 (14.87.11) ]

feminist, psychoanalytic, and literary theory. I mention earlier that I retain some reservations as to how definitively we should accept Lacan's phallus-based understanding of language, culture, sexual difference and symbolic structure, but I do find it provocative.

Moreover, to the extent that males have held and

continue to hold the reins of representation and cultural (re)production, and to the extent that they project the symbolic values of the phallus into it, the hegemony of the phallic signifier is something that, for better or worse, feminist scholars must be equipped to deal with. Yet though the phallus can be understood as both the ordering principle of the Symbolic order and the signifier of sexual difference and desire, as we have seen in the cases of Ganga and Damayanti the absence as well as the presence of the phallus can be evocative of desire-or

rather, desire can be seen to function

through phallic plentitude as well as symbolic castration. The cases of these two women, I have suggested, are examples in which the glimpse of male vulnerability and mortality proves the deciding factor. Indeed, if we turned the lens of 2i5ek9s analysis onto Man as opposed to Woman, could we not say that in Gangs's and Damayanti's stories what women desire in men is what lies beyond the phallic masquerade? Perhaps the best way to negotiate these questions is to recognize the ambivalence inherent in desire: women may desire both the illusion of phallic mastery and a glimpse of the castrated male subject who exists behind it, just as

men desire the enigma of (the) Woman as well as the flesh-and-blood concreteness of women, though often incompatibly.

In the cases of female

exposure through sheer skirts or mischievous breezes, we see an obvious

fascination with what lies underneath; yet presumably there is ambivalence on the part of the male subjects whose gaze is riveted by these scenes, for uncontrollable desire is often paired with an ascetic lifestyle predicated precisely on the renunciation of female contact, if not outright horror of it. As Grosz notes, Lacan's ocularocentrism-his vision-centeredness-in complicity with Freud's, privileges the male body as a phallic, virile body and regards the female as castrated...[but] we should note here that the female can be construed as castrated, lacking a sexual organ, only on the information provided by vision. The other sensori-perceptual organs would have confirmed the presence of a female organ instead of the absence of a male organ. [1990: 391 Thus the seeming lack of the feminine in the visual register is just as much an illusion as the seeming phallic plenitude of the masculine. But though Grosz follows Sartre in recognizing the visual as "the domain of domination and mastery; it provides access to its object without necessarily being in contact with it," might we not return to the ancient Indian correlation between looking and touching as a prompt for rethinking this assumption? Might we ask whether, if the gaze can be understood as a form of contact rather than distance, the "presence of a female organ" could also somehow be affirmed visually? And if so, could not male desire circle around both positive presence and negative absence? Might not the sheer or shifting skirts and their allure stand for both? Indeed if the opposite of the phallus is lack, and lack the prime mover of desire, we could say that desire is more accurately a function of alternating presence and absence, wholeness and fragmentation, mastery and impotence. Though the scenes of desire in the epic may often seem to repeat in formulaic patterns, and though the descriptions of the objects of desire might seem idealized tropes, there are rich nuances in both

the major characters and sub-stories that open a world of possibility in understanding the dynamics of desire, subjectivity, and the gaze in the epic. In the stories of Gang%, Draupadi, and Damayanti in particular, we see a rich interweaving of these themes that are, perhaps in true Lacanian form, better explored than mapped. And to continue the charting of this intricate tapestry, we move now into the final thematic chapter on transsexuality, transvestism, and sexual difference.

Chapter 5 - Having- and Being: - Gender-bending and Sexual Difference

In the introduction to his translation of the fifth book of the Mbh, van Buitenen writes: "Epic myth [as opposed to Puriinic myth] has a different character: it is frankly more manly ...Duryodhana's final taunt to Yudhisthira, 'Show you are a man!' is the essence of the Mahdbhdrata as epic" [1978: 1681. On the one hand, one might respond that van Buitenen is simply seeing the epic through masculinist blinders, and that a feminist analysis of the epic might reveal many rich currents of femininity animating and propelling the epic. This is partly what I am doing. Yet on the other hand, one might, also from a feminist perspective, agree with him, as I also do. Masculinity and its symbolic correlates are highly charged and contested themes in the epic, permeating the dharma that exists like a water table under the Mbh-springing

up at points in dialogue and debate,

otherwise implicit under the bedrock, fluid, not solid-and

constituting some of

its most poignant preoccupations in a way that femininity does not. The lengths to which male characters will go in proving or defending their manhood simply have no equivalent for the female characters, whose femininity is rarely if ever contested. Indeed, even in contemporary culture femininity must

rarely be proven in the way that masculinity is continually challenged to b e - o n e is rarely exhorted to "be a woman" or "show your womanhood" in the way men are regularly exhorted to prove themselves as such. These apparent cross-cultural and cross-historical concurrences lend validity to the psychoanalytic project of discerning basic features in the genesis of sexual difference that can then be applied to a broader understanding of what it is to be human: masculinity is charged with a symbolic investment that is qualitatively different from that involved in femininity, and is constructed in such a way that makes it more vulnerable to challenge and subversion.

But why, and how?

In exploring

examples of transsexuality and related forms of gender-bending in the Mbh, I hope to shed some light on constructions of gender and sexual difference in the epic and bring Lacanian theory to bear as a reflecting surface that both illuminates these examples and is in turn illuminated by them. Doniger, in her comprehensive study of androgyny in Indian mythology, notes the vast range and variety of forms that can be grouped together under that heading: "liminal figures [that] include the eunuch, the transvestite (or sexual masquerader), the figure who undergoes a sex change or exchanges his sex with that of a person of the opposite sex, the pregnant male, the alternating androgyne (male for a period of time, female for a period of time), and twins" [1980: 2841. Beyond the "true" androgynes who are equally male and female, there are also numerous cases of androgynes who are either primarily male or female, though "male androgynes by far outnumber female androgynes and are generally regarded as positive, while female androgynes.. .are generally negative" [Doniger

1980: 2841. As with many of the themes and categories we have examined thus far, I may use the labels loosely to describe these various sexed states-I

am more

interested in exploring related symbolic clusters than in splitting hairs between definitions. But I will in beginning at least briefly lay out the standard usages of the terms I employ here, even if I intend to use them with some license and leeway in the theoretical meanderings of this chapter. Transsexuality is usually used in reference to individuals whose physical sexual characteristics and accompanying gender role have gone through some change, either mythically or by modern science. Transvestism, as the second half of the word suggests, usually involves clothing-dressing as the other sex without undergoing any sexual changes. Androgyny and the related terms intersexuality and hermaphroditism involve physical characteristics of both sexes being present simultaneously in one person, though androgyny may also take on more psychological or symbolic overtones that are absent from the other terms. Gender masquerade is a broad term that describes what might be ambiguous in terms of the above categories, but which involves some dubiousness of sexual identity, especially intentional deception regarding one's sex.

All of these distinctions,

however, never really exactly match up with the various permutations of sex and gender in the epics and broader Hindu mythology, so the terms I use will always be to some degree approximate. The Sanskrit word that is commonly used in

many of these cases is napwhsaka, which can "designate non-men of such different natures as eunuch, impotent man, and androgyne" [Doniger 1980: 3081. Kliba is another, with a wide, pejorative range of meanings:

A kliba is not merely an androgyne ... [it] is a defective male, a male suffering from failure, distortion, and lack. This word has traditionally been translated as 'eunuch,' but ...it includes a wide range of meanings under the general homophobic rubric of 'a man who does not act the way a man should act,' a man who fails to be a man. It is a catchall term that a traditional Hindu culture coined to indicate a man who is in their terms sexually dysfunctional...including someone who was sterile, impotent, castrated, a transvestite, a man who committed fellatio, who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sexual organs, a man who produces only female children, or finally a hermaphrodite. [Doniger 1999a: 279-2801

Indeed, the Mbh is not always explicit about the exact status of an ambiguous character's sexual organs, and deities especially might manifest a fluidity of gender that would be a stretch for even the most sexually malleable of epic hero(in)es. Agni, the Vedic fire god, though traditionally personified as male, can also take on female characteristics or roles [5.15.26], and Prajapati, the Vedic creator-god, has similarly androgynous overtones.

Krsna is known as

"V?tsudeva...because h e is the womb of the Gods. [And] inasmuch as h e is bullish, h e is called Vrsni" [5.68.3]. Siva is of course the quintessential androgynous god, widely worshipped in his a r d h a n ~ d v a r a(god-who-is-half-woman) form. O n e hymn praises him thus: "Gold is your seminal fluid. You are male, you are female, you are neuter" [not in CE (12.284.157) Dl, and another, "I bow to you ...who have a body half of which is male and half female, to you who are both male and female" ] [not in CE (13.14.297) Dl. Indra is instructed to "see ...in the image of [ ~ i v a the marks of both sexes. That god of gods.. .shows in his form the marks of both the sexes as the one cause of the creation of the universe" [not in CE (13.14.227) Dl-indeed,

the epic asks, "who else is there who has half his body occupied by

his beloved wife?" [not in CE (13.14.217)]. Siva himself in addressing his wife says

"half my body is made up of half your body" [not in CE* (13.146.11) Dl-their fusion evokes the fundamental unity at the heart of creation, their difference the cause of sexual differentiation: You have evidence, 0 king of the gods, of the fact that the universe has originated from the union of the sexes ...All female creatures have originated from Urn%,and hence it is they have the mark of femininity which characterizes Umg; while all masculine creatures who have originated from Siva bear the masculine mark (linga) that marks Siva...Every being having the mark of the masculine sex should be known to be of [~iva], while every being with the mark of the feminine sex should be known as belonging to Uma. This universe of mobile and immobile creatures is pervaded by two forms, male and female. [not in CE (13.14.229-235)Dl As fluid as sexual characteristics and gender may be among deities and in mythological escapades, however, dharma as it structures and orders this-worldly affairs revolves around a firm conception of the two genders, and is very much based upon their clear distinction and eternal stability. Though in Samjaya's dharmic tales an ideal land is described where men and women "grow up there equally.. .both possessing equal beauty [rupa], both possessing equal virtues [guna] , both wearing equal dresses [samavesam] [not in CE (6.7.8-9) Dl, in epic "

culture a lack of clear distinction between the sexes has inauspicious resonances. For example, "women seemed to look like men, and men like women, when.. .Duryodhana fell" [9.57.56 (9.58.60) Dl, and gender ambiguity and reversal is used broadly throughout the epic as a sign of dharmic decline. Not only is having no clear marker of gender inauspicious and ignominious, having (as one would say in Lacanian terms) no phallus is one of the

* This exact passage is not in the Critical Edition, but there is a very similar one not too far away: "(Youare) half my of my body" [13.134.9].

worst things a man can impute to himself or another, for it is the possession of the phallus upon which masculinity is predicated. In these instances we see manhood contested in a way for which there is no feminine equivalent, and disparaging references to oneself or another as impotent or a eunuch are among the most common forms of insult in the epic. sisupiila accuses Bhisma of living "like a eunuch9'*[2.38.2] and suggests that his "celibacy is a lie that you maintain either from stupidity or impotence [klibatvad}" [2.38.24 VB]. Duryodhana remarks that he "would be neither a woman nor not woman, neither a man nor not a man" if he tolerated the Pindavas' good fortune [2.43.29 VB], and Bhima attempts to incite his brother Yudhisthira to action by wondering out loud if "despair has prompted [him] to the life of a eunuch" [3.34.13 VB].

Though Damayanti, in fondly

recollecting her lost husband, muses "my [Nala] has no vices, he has been like a eunuch to me" [3.71.14 VB], Draupadi, less kindly, wonders how her powerful husbands can "like castrates suffer that their beloved and faithful wife is kicked by a siita's son" in Virip's hall [4.15.21 VB]. Viduri, in a parable recited by Kunti, incites her son to battle by calling him "a man with the tools of a eunuch" [5.131.5 VB] and a "castrate" [5.131.17]. She admonishes him that "the forgiving man, the meek man is neither woman nor man" [5.131.30 VB] and that "standing tall means manhood" [5.132.38 VB], instructing him to "harden yourself and rise to victory!" [5.134.7VB]. Even the strong and valorous Bhima, perhaps the most traditionally manly of the five brothers, receives his fair share of such insinuations as well. In battle * Literally, "livingin the third naturew-tciyd, meaning "third gender"in the feminine.

both Duryodhana and Kama refer to Bhima as a "eunuch [tubaraka: literally, "little beardless man] " [7.108.35 (7.133.37); 7.114.69 (7.139.95)], Qsna prods Bhima to action by admonishing him not to "act like a eunuch" [5.75.20 VB], and Duryodhana taunts him through his emissary: "repeat to that eunuch, that gluttonous cretin Bhimasenaka.. .'drink if you can the blood of Duhsasana, just as you impotently swore in the middle of the hall! '" [5.157.16-17 VB] . Duryodhana's emissary goes on to sneer at the Pandavas for their feminized disguises in exile'[Aguna] wore a braid, and Bhimasena slaved as a cook in Virap's kitchen" [5.158.31-32 VB]-and

for being emasculated by having been saved from slavery

by Draupadi, a woman. At the beginning of the great battle there is an interesting dialogic repetition as Yudhisthira goes to each of his father-figure preceptors and asks for his permission to fight them: Bhisma, Drona, and Krpa each responds likening himself to a eunuch for being bound by wealth to fight on the side of Duryodhana [6.41.32, 52, 67 (6.43.42, 57, 72)]. This notion of manliness being implicated in martial performance is echoed by Samjaya the bard who recounts to blind Dhrtarastra the fortunes of his son's army: "your warriors strive in battle to the best of their strength and ardor, displaying. ..their manliness as much as possible. [But] the manliness of the illustrious warriors of your army opposed by that of the heroic sons of Pandu becomes baffled in battle [6.79.46 (6.84.46) Dl. Yudhisthira, after being spoken to harshly by Arjuna who noted that the king kept his distance from battle, asks shamefully: "An impotent that I am, what [is] the use of my having the sovereignty?" [8.49.104 (8.70.46) Dl.

As Lacan suggests, being a man-and warrior, and husband-is

fulfilling the manly roles of king,

intimately wound up in possessing the phallus, which

paradoxically, however, is necessarily a function of the castration involved in becoming a subject. Both sexes initially want to be the phallus for the motherboth the boy and girl child want to be the object of her desire, to complete her fully, fill her lack-but

they must eventually realize that this desire is impossible

and must be renounced. Though this renunciation is equivalent to castration, for the child must thereby recognize his/her own lack and failure, in so doing the child successfully navigates the Oedipal complex and assumes a position as subject within the Symbolic order of law and language. As Grosz observes, "the child's sacrifice of its primary love-object in conformity with the law must be compensated (more for boys, less for girls!) by means of the acquisition of a position, a place as a subject in culture" [1990: 711. It is in this entry to the Symbolic that sexual difference emerges, for boys and girls are positioned differently in relation to "the crucial signifier in relation to which the child accedes to the '1'''-the

phallus

[Ibid., 1041. "Through the phallus, each sex is positioned as speaking being, 'giving reality to the subject'; through the phallus, the reality of anatomical sex becomes bound up with the meanings and values that a culture gives to anatomy" [Ibid., 1311. Thus, whereas Freud places the discovery of sexual difference at the moment when young children see and recognize the genitals of their parents or each other, Lacan speaks of sexual difference symbolically in terms of either being or having the phallus.

Evans emphasizes that "for Lacan, masculinity and

femininity are not biological essences but symbolic positions, and the assumption of one of these two positions is fundamental to the construction of subjectivity; the subject is essentially a sexed subject. 'Man' and 'woman' are signifiers that stand for these two subjective positions" [Evans 1996: 1781. To the extent that the boy accedes to the father's name and is heir to symbolic paternal authority, he is invested with full speaking authority, an "I" with the possession of the phallus to back it up. What occurs in the case of the girl is a bit more ambiguous: In one sense, in so far as she speaks and says 'I', she too must take up a place as a subject of the symbolic; yet, in another, in so far as she is positioned as castrated, passive, an object of desire for men rather than a subject who desires, her position within the symbolic must be marginal or tenuous; when she speaks as an 'I' it is never clear that she speaks (of or as) herself. She speaks in a mode of masquerade, in imitation of the masculine, phallic subject. Her 'I', then, ambiguously signifies her position as a (pale reflection of the) masculine subject; or it refers to a 'you', the (linguistic) counterpart of the masculine '1'. [Grosz 1990: 71-72] We touched briefly upon this notion of femininity as masquerade, as something that must be performed in or for the masculine symbolic, with %ek in the last chapter, and we will pick up again later what this means for our understanding of the role of transsexuality in the Mbh. For the male, too, however, it is not all roses. His possession of the phallus is always tenuous, premised as it is on the condition of castration, and encounters with women continually serve as reminders of this instability inherent in phallic subjectivity-not

only is his

possession of the phallus based upon renunciation of the mother (and recognition of his own inability to be the phallus for her), he also cannot ultimately fulfill any woman's desire (all desire is insatiable), and thus his ostensible phallic plenitude remains simultaneously a site of lack, failure, and frustration.

Desire emerges from the lack inherent to subjective formation for both sexed positions. All subjects, to come into being, must do so in the realm of language and society-the

Other-and

thus must renounce the lost object (the

mother) and identify with the Name-of-the-Father. Most importantly for the Lacanian perspective, all subjects are constituted by lack, all subjects thus desire (to fill this lack), and all desire can never be fulfilled, for "desire is in principle insatiable. It is always an effect of the Other, an 'other' with whom it cannot engage, insofar as the Other is not a person but a place, the locus of law, language, and the Symbolic" [Ibid., 671.

I will pick up this question of desire

later, and hope to weave it into the other strands that feed into the sometimes tangled knots of gender, phallic signification, subjectivity, and sexual difference that we will examine in this chapter. Gender is, with caste, one of the two major pillars upon which the elaborate edifice of dharma rests in the Mbh, and interesting possibilities emerge when we see these seemingly stable categories subverted, challenged, and transgressed. It is in liminal states such as transsexuality that the boundaries of the symbolic binaries of gender are thrown most starkly into relief, and it is here also where Law and the Symbolic order must weigh in on what is acceptable, what must be modified, and what must be denied. Though there are multiple examples of transsexuality and other forms of gender-bending in the Mahsbhsrata, I focus here on what I find to be two particularly striking cases: Arjuna/Brhannada and ~ r n b a / ~ i k h a n d i n ( i )It. is in these two examples that I find traditional categories of gender and sexuality most poignantly challenged and transgressed, and, I

would go further to argue, challenged and transgressed in such a way that provides suggestive insights into psychoanalytic constructions of selfhood and subjectivity. If we examine these cases closely, we can see themes of gender and subjectivity interwoven intricately together in ways that may give both feminists and Lacanians cause for reflection.

A.riuna/Brhannada The exact nature of Aquna's gender as Brhannadg during the Pgndavas' year of disguise is not exactly clear-that

is, the text never states explicitly whether Axjuna

is simply cross-dressing or has undergone some physiological transformation as well.

The one potential moment of truth-in

which Vir@a orders Arjuna

inspected to ensure that he is safe to put in the princess's quarters-is

dealt with

ambiguously and even playfully, for the answer comes back that Aquna's "nonmasculinity was firm" [4.10.11 HI.

Even his name Brhannada is playfully

ambiguous, meaning "great man" but in the feminine gender [Hiltebeitel 1980: 1.571, or as van Buitenen translates it, "large reed" or "having a large reed9'-likely "a joke that he who condemns himself to an effeminate life is endowed with a large reed" [1978: 91.

Indeed the text seems almost intentionally titillating,

weaving in and out of these ambiguous references as if to insist that the reader remain piqued by these paradoxes but unable to resolve them definitively. As Hiltebeitel puts it, "the epic descriptions leave it amusingly imprecise and ambiguous whether Aquna is physiologically a eunuch, a hermaphrodite, or simply a transvestite. As we shall see, in effect he is described as all three" [1980:

1.541. Aquna himself is n o help, announcing his disguise as they begin their year in hiding as matter-of-factly as his brothers announce theirs: Sire, I am a transvestite [sa&haka], I'll vow, for these big string-scarred arms are hard to hide! I'll hang rings from my ears that sparkle like fire, and my head shall sport a braid, king! I shall be Brhannadg. Listen, I'll be a woman, and tell sweet little tales and tell them again and again and amuse the king and the other folk in the seraglio. I myself shall teach the women in the palace of King Viraw to sing, king, and to dance in many ways, and to make music in still others!..."! was at Yudhisthira's palace, a maid of Draupadi's; I lived in!" so I'll tell the king if he asks me, Bharata. In this artful way, not unlike Nala,*I shall amuse myself pleasantly, Indra of kings, in Viraw's palace. [4.2.21-271 Indeed, the text alternates between affirming the undeniable masculinity underneath

Arjuna's

effeminate

exterior

and

reveling

in

his

disguise's

convincingness. The moment of recognition, in which Aquna comes to the rescue of the young prince of Matsya who has gotten himself in over his head in battle, is both a humorous vignette and an appreciation of the man behind the disguise: [Arjuna] leaped from that fine chariot and pursued the running prince; his long braid was trailing and his red skirts fluttering. Not knowing that it was Arjuna running there with the fluttering braid some of the soldiers burst out laughing at the spectacle. But on seeing him run nimbly the Kurus said: 'Who is that behind his disguise, as fire below its ashes? He has something of a man and something of a woman. He is built like Arjuna and wears the form of a eunuch [kliba N p a ] . That is his head, his neck, his bludgeonlike arms, that is his stride, he is no one but [Arjuna]! [4.36.27311 But as playfully and matter-of-factly as the text ostensibly treats the ambiguous gender of one of its central heroes, there are also deep symbolic dynamics at work. As Hiltebeitel notes, "it is in their disguises that the Pandavas and Draupadi reveal their 'deepest' symbolism" [1980: 1.531. Yudhisthira chooses to be a dicemaster

* It is interesting that Arjuna

should reference Nala here, for though he too passes a period of disguise in service to another king, he undergoes a physical transformation into a hunchback.

and brahmin, Bhima a cook and part-time wrestler, Nakula and Sahadeva horse and cow-tenders respectively, all occupations easily in keeping with their alreadyestablished proclivities as characters. Aquna's, then, is striking-how

can this

most virile of heroes' latent self, deepest self, be a eunuch, a transvestite, a transsexual? Is his hypermasculinity-his philandering-thus

famous martial prowess and well-known

overcompensation for latent effeminacy? Is this a weakness in

a staunchly patriarchal culture, a subtle subversion of it, or a testament to its subtlety and elasticity? What can this crossing of genders in the hero of the story mean? Hiltebeitel argues that Arjuna's transsexual disguise is a "clear evocation" of the androgynous Siva [1980: 1.531,which, if this link bears out, also supports the idea that in the Mahiibhiirata genders may cross much as the realms of human and divine. To use the ever-handy metaphor of weaving, strands of gender, as well as strands of humanity and divinity, are crossed and interwoven in key characters, that then lend them a richness, a symbolic depth, a subtlety and complexity that also weave out of them towards others, connecting them to other characters, gods, legends, and various components of epic society.

The most overdetermined

characters are veritable knots in the fabric of the text, so multidimensional are the strands that run through them and out again, and trying to trace these strands is thus the work of reading the text. So if Arjuna's human body can be transformed into a divine one through wrestling with Siva [Hiltebeitel 1980: 149, citing Biardeau 19761, his masculine body may also be transformed into a feminine or androgynous one through identification with this "god who is half woman" [Ibid.,

1531. And if Arjuna and Draupadi can be understood as evoking !ha and the Goddess [Ibid.], not only does his gender-bending become relevant, but hers does, too.

As much as Draupadi is extolled as the perfect wife-chaste, demure, and devoted to her husbands-she

repeatedly shows herself to be more intellectual,

assertive, and downright dangerous than the typical epic female.

As we have

already noted, not only is Draupadi a manifestation of Sri Laksmi, the auspicious goddess of good fortune, she also represents the destructive forms of the goddess in her totality, as her disguise and exploits in exile suggest [Hiltebeitel 1980: 1531. While Arjuna is singing and dancing with the girls, Draupadi vents her anger and frustration with him to Bhima: Sole chariot rider, he defeated Gods, men, and Snakes, he who is now the youthful dancing master of the daughters of King Virap! [Arjuna] of measureless soul who satisfied the Fire God in the Khandava lives now in the serail, fire hidden in a pit. [Arjuna] that bull among men of whom the enemies always lived in fear, wears a disguise that is despised by the world. At the sound of his bowstring and palms the enemies trembled-to his pretty songs do women now happily attend. A diadem resplendent like the sun sparkled on his head-now [Arjuna] has braided his hair in tresses. He, the great-spirited man who possessed all the celestial weapons, treasury of all sciences, now wears earrings. Thousands of kings of matchless prowess could not pass beyond him as the ocean does not pass beyond the floodline-now he is the youthful dancing master of King Virap, hiding behind his disguise, the servant of girls ...When I see him come, adorned with golden jewelry and earrings, with conch shell in hand, my heart sinks. My heart sinks, Bhima, when I see Arjuna of the terrible bow with his hair braided into a tress and surrounded by young girls. When I see [Arjuna] of the godlike appearance encircled by girls like a rutting elephant by its cows, and in the service of the Matsya Viram, his paymaster, with his musical instruments all around him, I don't know which way to turn. [4.18.9-23 VB] Bhima, in clear contrast to Aguna, fulfills his duty as husband and protector, vindicating Draupadi against the lustful Kicaka who has been harassing and

abusing her-and

we should note here that Bhima himself poses as a woman (as

Draupadi, in fact) to accomplish this. Sally Sutherland uses this episode to refer to "the transsexual roles of both Bhima and Aquna" [1989: 70]* in the Virataparvan, though Bhima's is employed for a specific purpose whereas Aquna's seems to be more gratuitous.

In any case, after Bhima successfully avenges

Draupadi's virtue, she snubs and mocks Arjuna who failed to be her champion: Then she saw strong-armed [Arjuna] in the dance pavilion where he was teaching the daughters of King Vir2m to dance. The girls came out of the pavilion with Arjuna and saw [Draupadi] come, who had been molested in her innocence...Brhannada said: "How have you been set free, chambermaid, how did the villains get killed? I want to hear from you everything that happened!" The chambermaid said: "Brhannada, what business do you have with a chambermaid? You always live comfortably in the girls' quarters, my pretty. You do not find the sorrows that chambermaids reap, so you question me, wretch, as a joke!" [4.23.17-22 VBI Aquna, whose philandering and marital prowess might suggest hypermasculinity, can in another sense be read as a failed husband, as it is Bhima who finally comes through in this pivotal marital duty.

Though Aguna and Draupadi's sexual

behavior does not become the stuff of classical myth as has ~ i v aand Parvati's (though it does take on a fascinating vitality in vernacular folk traditions, c.f. Hiltebeitel 1988), the alternating complementarity of their behavior has a suggestive salience to gender-bending in the Mahabhiirata. As Sutherland writes, this and other episodes (such as the dicing match) "all depict Draupadi as an aggressive and dynamic character. In these episodes she is effectively contrasted with her cautious and ineffectual husband Yudhisthira and his subservient, although less passive, younger brothers Bhimasena and Aquna" [1989: 711. * Hiltebeitel notes the transsexual implications of this scene as well [1980: 1631.

218

Furthermore, Sutherland astutely notes that "the repeated attacks on Draupadi [are] enhanced by the fact that the insults are overtly sexual and thus raise questions about their masculinity" [Ibid., 721.

Especially during the year in

disguise, not only are physical sexual characteristics put into question-on a psychological and behavioral level as well, Draupadi wears the proverbial pants while A y n a wears the skirt. Returning to the divine implications of Aquna's transsexual episode, Robert Goldman, approaching the question of transsexuality in Hinduism from a Freudian perspective, emphasizes the eroticized nature of bhakti* and the god/devotee relationship: if the god is male, the devotees must become female to intensify the experience of his love; if the god is female, the devotees must also become female in order to disavow any sexual desire for her [1993: 3891. As Doniger notes, too, "The devotee visualizes himself as a woman not merely because god is male but because in the Hindu view the stance of the ideal devotee is identical with the stance of the ideal woman.. .'Women yield; proud men don't. Men must renounce their masculinity if they would be devotees'" [1980: 88, citing Yocum 1977: 191. The significance of Aquna's transsexuality thus becomes dual, as he is intimately linked with both Qsna and Siva. As Qsna's primary friend and devotee in the epic and recipient of the bhakta message of the Bhagavad Gita, his feminine tendencies could be read within a register of devotion. Furthermore, if Arjuna is identified with Siva in relation to the Goddess, not only could his

* Devotion.

feminization be erotic,* but it could also be a renunciation of sexuality towards her.

Hiltebeitel, citing Biardeau, notes the theme of sexual abstinence or

renunciation (brahmacaryd) in Aquna's role as a eunuch [1980: 1501, and Draupadi herself is symbolically abstinent throughout the period of exile. The picture becomes even more complex when we realize that Qsna himself is by no means univocally masculine! We see him throughout the Puranas as Visnu in the persona of Mohini the enchantress, and, in folk traditions, on the eve of the great epic battle as Aravan's soon-to-be-widowed-bride. In the former case, Doniger notes, Visnu as Mohini "retains his male memory and his male essence, and so he can be regarded as having male homosexual relations, playing first the active role with the demons.. .and then the passive role with ~ i v a ..a. very rare instance of a consummated, explicit, male homosexual act+in Hindu mythology" [1997: 1371. In the latter case, the warrior Aravan, a son of Arjuna, agrees to be sacrificed for the victory of the Pandavas before the great battle, on the one condition that he be married before he dies: "the only one willing to be widowed in this way was Qsna, who became a woman, married Aravan, made love to him all night on the wedding night, saw him beheaded at dawn, and, after a brief period of mourning, became a man again" [Doniger 1997: 1381.$ In a variant cited by Doniger, Aravan is actually

* Doniger cites a passage in the Riimiiyana in which Siva is making love to Parvati, having "taken the form of a woman to please her" [1997: 1301, and another in the Mahabhagavata-Purana in a of Radha, Krsna's lover, "in order to make love which Parvati takes the form of e s n a , and ~ i v that in reverse" IIbid., 1371. f In this passage, Mohini turns back into Visnu as Siva is penetrating her from behind, and he does not give up the embrace. A child is actually born from this encounter, the god known as Ayyappan in South India, object of a famous pilgrimage in which thousands participate each year. 1 For a fascinating extended study of the folk cult that surrounds the mythology of Aravan, see Hiltebeitel 1998b.

a son of Qsna-if

this were the case, as Doniger provocatively suggests, "Aravan

thus one-ups Oedipus, by sleeping with (a transformation of) not his mother, but his father" [Ibid.] ! Even beyond Aquna's stint as Brhannada, other subtle suggestions of effeminacy are woven around his otherwise hypermasculine character.

Krsna

accuses him of being impotent in letting Draupadi be molested in the assembly hall [4.55.9], and after the year in disguise as events crescendo towards war, Kgna again taunts Arjuna who yearns for peace: "Aho! Are you a eunuch that you dare not hope for manhood in yourself?" [5.73.17]. Arpna's fitting response to Qsna after being exhorted to fight in the Bhagavad-Gita is, tellingly, "I am now firm" [6.40.74* (6.42.73) Dl.

Perhaps he is even concerned that his imputed

effeminacy might be hereditary, as we saw earlier, in accusing his son Babruvahana of acting like a woman [14.78.6 (14.79.7)]! It would not be a total stretch. Ila/a, founder of the Lunar Dynasty and Aquna's forefather, is a well-known example of transsexuality in the epicst ("we hear that she was not only hist mother but also his father" [1.70.16 VB]), and Goldman notes that Krsna's son Samba also "has a curious association with transvestism and mock transsexualism.. . [dressing] as a pregnant woman in a bizarre effort to mock holy men" [1993: 3901.Â

* Van Buitenen's translation is "here I stand with no more doubts," but I think the Indian translator's rendition is more interesting, and apt. In this and in other cases, I have chosen to retain the Indian translation instead of opting for more literal alternatives, as I think there is merit in allowing "native" interpretations of the spirit of a phrase to color its rendition into English. f We will touch upon this story further below. 1 Puniravas'. Not only does this bad joke have the disastrous effect of ensuring the destruction of Krsna's entire clan, it also "further ambiguates the question of biological sex and social gender. For as a consequence of his affront, Samba is made-like a real woman-to undergo an actual pregnancy

Furthermore, the fact that Arjuna is referred to throughout the epic as the left-handed archer is of note, since, as we have observed, the left side of the body is considered the feminine half.

Doniger describes Ar~una'sambidexterity as a

"man who shoots with both hands.. .a delightful metaphor for a bisexual" [1999: 2811. Aquna himself, of course, explains it innocuously: "both my hands are right hands when I draw the Gandiva, therefore they know me among Gods and men as the Left-handed Archer" [4.39.17 VB]-to

the extent that it feeds his famed

martial prowess, the seemingly feminine designation is thus actually a function of his hyper-masculinity. Here again we see resonances with Siva, whose left half is occupied by his wife Pamati, and who also has consistently "sinister" associations. Indeed, to return to Arjuna's disguise as Brhannada, it is interesting that the first comparison that Virap's son makes of A y n a when his disguise is revealed is precisely with ~ i v a :"By what karmic outcome does someone with the marks of such manly appearance come to be this kind of eunuch? I think of you, going about in the guise of a eunuch, as the trident-wielder [~iva],as the match of the king of the Gandharvas, or the God of the Hundred Sacrifices!" [4.40.10-111. To this Aquna responds: "It is at the behest of my elder brother that I observe for this year a vow of chastity; I swear this is the truth. I am not a eunuch.. .but under another's orders and compliant with the Law" [4.40.12-13 VB] . Here we see not only a continuing ambiguity about the exact nature of Arjuna's role as Brhannads, but also the question of how he could become a eunuch sidestepped with the response that he is observing a vow of chastity at the behest of his elder brother. and birth. Yet the product of this weird gestation is not a child but a phallic club that will be the instrument of destruction of the Yfidava clans (Mbh 16.2-8)" [Goldman 1993: 3901.

222

This resonates with some of the Oedipal themes we explored earlier in which a son's sexuality is deferred in favor of his father's, for in ancient Indian society an elder brother is in the position of father to his younger brother.

Aquna's

explanations in defense of his masculinity aside, his non-masculinity was nonetheless firm enough to be allowed into the princess's quarters-were

he

"truly" a man underneath his disguise, it is doubtful that his charade could have passed the vigilant eyes of the king to whose daughter h e was given access. Another episode in the Mbh provides a seemingly explicit explanation for Arjuna's transsexuality, which Goldman employs to make an Oedipal analysis of his predicament: The virile hero Arjuna, visiting the heavenly court of his father Indra, rejects the sexual advances of the apsaras Urvasi, precisely because her well-known liaison with his ancestor Punlravas places her in the position of a "mother" to him. The nymph is furious at being thus spurned and curses Arjuna to lose his manhood and become a nafmrksaka, a feminized transvestite of ambiguous sex and feminized gender. But, like the curse of his forefather Ila, this one too is modified so as to have its effect restricted to only a limited period. Indra intervenes on his son's behalf and sets the term of the curse at one year. It is Urvasi's curse, thus modified by Indra, that provides the underlying explanation for the necessity of Arjuna's having to adopt the humiliating guise of the feminized transvestite Brhannadz during the Piindava's year of enforced concealment at the court of Viriim. [1993: 3801 According to Goldman, Arjuna thus having refused the sexually voracious mother and been cursed to sexual impotence (read castration) for it, is rewarded for this gesture by his father who restores him his phallus, with only a traumatic trace of the original punishment to live out.

Doniger, too, frames this episode in a

Freudian light: [Urvasi] plays the roles of the spurned, vengeful goddess and the incestuous mother who punishes her unwilling son. Arjuna's response to

these threats is to disguise his manhood twice over: he pretends to be a eunuch pretending to be a woman; that is, he castrates himself symbolically in order to avoid being actually castrated by the mother.. .This myth has been interpreted as a 'collective male fantasy of the child's encounter with the sexual mother [and of] anxiety about his inadequacy to fill her sexual needs. The conflict is resolved through a self-castration which appeases the mother' (Kakar 1978, pp. 9698). Here, as in other instances that we will encounter, androgyny is a denial of sexuality, an antierotic state. [1980: 2981 These Freudian analyses are useful and interesting, but I would suggest that Aquna's transsexuality is an intensely multivalent phenomenon, and accepting one mythic or symbolic explanation as the only can close more doors than it opens. Towards the conclusion of this chapter I will revisit these Oedipal analyses as a springboard to showing how a Lacanian approach might expand our set of interpretive tools and enrich our understanding of these stories. This episode in Indra's court should, I think, be one more interesting strand woven into the symbolic knot of ArJuna's transsexuality, but there are many other things going on. And the picture only becomes more complex when we turn to the story of Amba.

~mba/sikhandin(i) Amba's story is one that spans two lifetimes, in the latter of which she is ~ikhandin(i), the "man-child who is a woman9'*[5.189.5 VB]. Although it is in this second life that ~ikhandin(i)'stranssexualism is made an explicit focus, the state in which she ended her first life is already evocative of what is to come: "deprived of the world of a husband, neither a woman nor a man!" [5.188.4 VB].

* Literally, a female-male-stri pumams.

Both

Goldman and Doniger note that female-to-male transsexuality is a much rarer occurrence in the epics and Puranas; it is also more difficult, less stable, and often has lethal connotations [Goldman 1993: 380; Doniger 1997: 1401. Accordingly, even though Amba pursues a life of austerities, receives a guarantee from a god, and finally immolates herself in the fire to be reborn a man, and her future father Drupada performs rites for a son, Amba is actually reborn as a female, and only effects the sexual transformation with the help of a sympathetic Yaksa* after her guise as a male has been revealed by her bride. Even then, there is some cosmic gender balance that must be maintained, for Sikhandin(i) only receives her masculinity at the cost of the Yaksa's, who becomes female, and the swap can only be temporary, for their genders will revert back upon ~ikhandin'sdeath upon the battlefield. Whereas the status of Aquna's penis remains ambiguous, ~ikhandin(i) 's is made explicit: her dialogue with the Yaksa leaves no doubt but that she will wear his male organ, and he her female organ, and "the women sent to find out the truth.. .fondly report" that ~ikhandinis "male.. .of potency puissant9'+ [5.193.26

VB]. But even once the swap has been effected, and the status of ~ikhandin's genitalia has been confirmed in a test reminiscent of Aquna's, the authenticity of his/her masculinity remains in question. Bhisma acquiesces to his own death at ~ikhandin'shands by refusing to fight "a woman, a former woman, one with the

* A sort of forest troll, goblin, or friendly ogre; as Goldman notes, they are "often represented in Indian legend and literature as having the power to exchange their sex with people." [1993: 3811 1" This is a case of Van Buitenen waxing poetic, and perhaps slightly gallic, in his translation-but overall he has such a good sense of the language and feel for the epic's "mood" that it seems right to retain this charming phrase.

name of a woman, and an apparent woman" [5.193.60]. As Doniger puts it, for Bhisma it is imperative that "~ikhandinis in essence a woman, despite her outer male form" [1997: 1411. As striking as this incongruence is, it makes sense. It is easier to go down than up, in gender as it is in caste. If a man wants to become a woman, for devotional or other reasons-or, as we will see later in the case of Bhangasvana, because women derive greater pleasure from sex-he

can forsake

the privileges of manhood and do so, for it is he who, at least in the scheme of the social hierarchy, loses. For example, it is doubtful that a woman could be cursed to manhood the same way that both Aquna and the Yaksa are cursed to femininity.* A woman who wants to become a man, on the other hand, constitutes a direct challenge to the social and political status quo, and her sexual transformation thus must be allayed, undermined, inauthenticated, made only temporary, or outright denied. So though the epic permits the transsexuality of Amba/~ikhandin(i)-indeed it must, perhaps as valuable catharsis, for Amba is spurred to her transformation by revenge for injustices that could only be perpetrated upon a woman-it it.

must subvert it, undermine it, and ultimately deny

After Amba's hard-won austerities and self-immolation for the sake of

* Goldman cites a passage from the story of Thera Soreya in which the Buddha explains that "men who engage in adultery must, after suffering in hell for hundreds of thousands of years, suffer the further indignity of a hundred successive rebirths as women. Women, on the other hand, who perform meritorious acts with the desire of escaping their feminine condition or who are utterly devoted to their husbands can, he asserts, thereby be reborn as men." [1993: 3771

becoming a man, she is re-born as a woman, redies as a woman,* and doesn't even really ever accomplish what she set out to do. As Doniger notes: There is therefore something anticlimactic about the killing of Bhisma by ~ikhandin.. .~ikhandindoes not kill Bhisma outright, but merely functions as a human bulwark for Arjuna (or in Robert P. Goldman's nice phrasing, Bhisma is slain by 'Aquna hiding, as it were, behind the skirts of his "mothern Amba in her sexually ambiguous form of ~ikhandin). And Bhisma does not die immediately of his wounds but withdraws and dies long, long afterwards (after declaiming thousands of verses of renunciant philosophy.. .). [1997: 1411 Furthermore, I would add, Ambs's vow to become a man in order to kill Bhisma was in a sense nullified from its inception, since Bhisma had the boon of being able to choose the moment of his own death-she,

therefore, could only ever

really accomplish what Bhisma would be willing to allow anyway. Several feminist and psychoanalytic themes emerge here. The first, what Doniger calls "lethal transsexua1ity"-frustrated

by love, denied fulfillment in

marriage, "Amba thus epitomizes the no-win situation of a woman, tossed like a shuttlecock between two men, each of whom ricochets between inflicting upon her sexual excess or sexual rejection" [1997: 1411-and

her sexual and social

frustration turns male to effect revenge. Second, as the passage of Goldman's quoted by Doniger above indicates, Oedipal dynamics can be found at work in Amba's association as the mother goddess earth, Bhisma as the father sky,+and A y n a as occupying the position of (grand)son to both. Indeed, it is a veritable Oedipal soapopera: Bhisma symbolically and socially rapes Ambs, not for his own * We never receive an explicit confirmation that sibandin's reverts back

to a woman after his death on the battlefield, but this was the agreement that was struck between the Yaksa and Kubera, as we will see shortly. Bhisma is a reincarnation of Dyaus, one of the divine Vasus and sky god.

sexual gratification, but for that of his brother, whom she rejects for her former lover who in turn rejects her as second-hand goods. Amba then turns to Bhisma's father-figure guru Rama Jamadagnya, who fights Bhisma so that he will take her back, but he will not because he has already symbolically castrated himself in deference to his father's sexuality. When Bhisma defeats Rama Jamadagnya, Amba is left desolate, "neither man nor woman," and she takes up a life of austerities before finally immolating herself in the fire, vowing Bhisma's destruction, which she finally accomplishes with the help of Aquna who, on the one hand, is as a son to her, on the other, (in her reincarnation as ~ikhandin)is the husband of her sister Draupadi, and thus brother-in-law!

So, Oedipally

speaking, the alliance we have against Bhisma the father is either brother-brother or (grand)mother-(grand)son, and it is this transformability that makes it all the more psychoanalytically compelling. Even more provocatively, we have an alliance of two transsexuals against a father figure whose symbolic castration makes his own sexuality dubious. Let us back up here a bit, though, and trace Amba/~ikhandin(i)'sstory as it unfolds.

We first hear of her, along with her two sisters, when Bhisma has

decided that Satyavati's son (his half-brother) Vicitravirya must be married.

He

comes to learn that the king of the Kasis has three beautiful daughters who are all to choose their husbands at a svayariwara where princes by the thousands were assembled to vie for the sisters' hands. Bhisma goes to the svayahuara, lifts the girls onto his chariot, and in a thunderous voice announces:

Students of the Law hold that the bride is best who is carried off by force. So, princes, I am ready to carry these maidens off by force! Now strive with all your might to defeat me or be defeated: here I stand, princes, resolved in battle!' After thus challenging the barons and the king of the Kasis, [Bhisma] lifted all three girls on his chariot, made his farewell to the barons, and drove swiftly off, abducting the girls. [1.96.11-13 VB]

A great battle ensues, with the King of ~alva-who we will learn later was Amba's chosen-putting

u p the greatest fight.

But Bhisma emerges victorious, and

returns to give the three girls in marriage to his half-brother Vicitravirya. But while Bhisma is preparing the wedding, Amba, the eldest of the three daughters, approaches him and says "In my heart I had chosen King ~ a l v aof Saubha to be my husband, and he had chosen me; and it was my father's wish. I was to have elected him at the bridegroom choice. You know the Law: now that you know this you must d o as the Law dictates" [1.96.4849].

Bhisma considers this problem, and

decides to give her permission to go. Her two sisters, Ambika and Ambiilika, marry Vicitravirya but are left widowed and childless, and, as we saw in an earlier chapter, go on to bear Dhrtarastra and Pandu through niyoga with Vpsa. We hear nothing more of Amba until Bhisma states on the eve of the great war that he will not kill ~ i k h a n d i nin battle: The world knows that in order to please my father, I relinquished the kingship that was mine, and kept the vow of celibacy.. .Having proclaimed my title of Devavrata among all the kings on earth, I shall not kill a woman, or one who was a woman before. For you may have heard that Sikhandin was once a woman, king. Born a girl, he later became a man. I shall not fight him. [5.169.16-20 VB] This titillating piece of information of course intrigues his listeners, and Bhisma goes on to tell the story of Amba. The beginning of the story is more or less as we saw it related in the earlier version, though in the second telling the role of

Amba's father in her love match is different: "In my mind

I had chosen the king of

~ a l v aas my bridegroom, and h e too had chosen me secretly, unbeknownst to my

father. How can you, who have learned the scriptures, force me to dwell in this house, when I am in love with someone else?. ..The king of h l v a is clearly waiting for me" [5.171.6-9 VB; italics mine].

Famous last words.

Obtaining Bhisma's

permission to leave, Amba travels to the city of the king of ~ A v a : Completing the journey, she went up to king of ~ a l v aand said, 'I have come for you, strong-armed illustrious lord!' With the semblance of a smile the king replied, 'I do not want you as my wife: you have been another man's before, fair woman. Go back to the Bharata, my dear. I do not desire you after Bhisma's forcible abduction of you. Bhisma won you and you were carried off happily ...I do not want you as my wife, for you have been another man's, fair one. How can a king like me, who has learned his lessons and preaches the Law, allow into his house a woman who has been another man's?.. .Arnba, smarting from the arrows of the Bodiless God [Kama], said to him ...'Do not speak like that, king, for it is not that way at all! I was not happily abducted by Bhisma...He abducted me by force, in tears, after putting the kings to fight. Love me who love you, an innocent girl, King hlva, for the abandonment of loving people is not praised in the Laws.. .Strong-armed Bhisma does not want me.. .[he] has given my sisters Ambika and Ambalika, whom he also abducted, to his younger brother Vicitravirya. I swear by my head that I never dreamed of anyone at all but you, King ~alva,tiger among men! It is not as another man's previous woman that I have come to you. I speak the truth, hlva, I swear by my head it is the truth! Love me, a girl come to you on her own. ..not as another man's woman, hoping for your grace!' But although she pleaded in this way, &lva rejected the daughter of the Kasi king as a snake casts off its worn-out skin.. .With tears in her eyes she said, overcome with anger, in a sob-choked voice, 'May the strict be my shelter, wherever I go, rejected by you: it is true what I have said.' So she spoke, but King hlva cruelly rejected the piteously wailing woman ...repeating to her 'Go, now go! I fear Bhisma, fair-hipped woman, and you are Bhisma's chattel.' At these words of this not too farsighted ~ a l v ashe departed from the city wretchedly, screeching like an osprey. [5.172.3-23VB] As Amba leaves the city she ponders the misery of her situation and wonders who is to blame-herself,

Bhisma, o r her father. She wishes she had jumped off the

chariot and run for ~ a l v aas Bhisma was engaged in battle, and she curses herself,

~2lva,Bhisma, and her "dull-witted mindless father, who dangled me like a harlot for the bride-price of some derring-do*" [5.173.5 VB]. But finally Amb2 decides that Bhisma was the beginning of her misfortune, and it is he upon whom she must take her revenge.

As she wanders into the forest, she comes across a

gathering of ascetics and tells them her sorry story, eventually convincing the great Rama Jamadagnya-Bhisma's

guru himself-to

fight Bhisma on her behalf. A

tremendous duel ensues, but Rama is eventually overwhelmed, and is dissuaded from the fight by his ancestors who inform him that Aquna, "the Left-handed Archer, has been ordained to be the death of Bhisma in due time" [5.186.20 VB]-any

further battle is thus futile. Rama goes to Amba and admits that he can

do no more, and Amba vows that she, then, will herself bring Bhisma down in battleÑb'he eyes rolling in anger, she set her mind upon austerities, brooding upon [Bhisma's] death" [5.187.10 VB] . Amb2 gives herself up to "superhuman self-mortification...going without food, emaciated, coarsened, with matted hair, caked with dirt, she lived for six months on air, a stockstill ascetic...[Slhe wore through another year standing in the water, without food, glowering. Another year she spent in subsisting on one withered leaf, ferocious in her wrath, while standing on tiptoe" [5.187.18-21 VB] -and

continues thus for twelve years. Ganga

herself attempts to dissuade Amba from her purpose, but Amba responds: "[If] Bhisma was not defeated by Rama. ..I myself shall undertake the most gruesome self-mortifications for the destruction of Bhisma. I roam the earth, Goddess, so

* Virya, more conservatively translated as manliness, heroism, or virility. Van Buitenen here is probably trying to evoke Amba's disdain for her other suitors.

that I may kill the king. May this be the fruit of my vow in another body!" [5.187.30-32 VB]. Ganga, in protective retaliation for her son, curses Amba to

become a crooked river, flowing only in the monsoon season and filled with crocodiles, though because of the strength of Ambaysausterities she becomes that river with only half her body while one half remains her own. The ascetics in the forest try to dissuade Amba from her austerities as well, but she responds forcefully: I have been rejected by Bhisma and cannot abide by the Law I owe a husband.* I am consecrated to his death, not to a higher world, ascetics! I have resolved that only by killing Bhisma I shall find peace. I shall not desist, Brahmins, until I have slain Gangs's son in battle, him because of whom I have found this everlasting life of misery, deprived of the world of a husband, neither a woman nor a man! That resolve is lodged in my heart, and for that I have undertaken this vow. I am totally disgusted with being a woman and I have resolved to become a man: I want to pay Bhisma back, and I am not to be diverted. [5.188.2-6 VB; italics mine]

Then Siva appears, granting her a boon for her austerities, and she chooses Bhisma's defeat. When he grants her wish, replying "Thou shalt smite him," she asks, "How can it be that I, a woman, will triumph in battle, for since I am a woman, my heart is meek to its core" [5.188.8-9 VB]? Siva responds: My voice speaks no lies, good woman-it shall come true. Thou shalt attain manhood and slay Bhisma in battle. And thou shalt remember everything when thou hast gone to a new body. Thou shalt be born a great warrior in the house of Drupada;? thou shalt become a nimble armsman and a much honored exemplary warrior. All this shall befall as foretold, beautiful damsel. Thou shalt become a man after the lapse of some time. [5.188.ll-l4 VB; italics mine]

* Pati dharma. t Draupadi's father.

With those words, Amba gathers firewood from the forest, builds a high pyre, and sets fire to it. As it is blazing, "she spoke with her heart on fire with wrath, 'For Bhisma's death!' and entered the fire" [5.188.17-18VB] . A generation passes, and King Drupada undertakes austerities in honor of Siva both for the death of Bhisma and in order to bear offspring. ~ i v asays to him:

"You shall have a man child who is a woman.* Return, king, it shall never be otherwise." [5.189.5 VB ; italics mine]. Drupada returns to his wife and reports: "I have made a great effort for a son, my queen, by means of austerities, and [Siva] said to me, 'He shall be a man after having been a maiden.' Again and again I pleaded with him, but ~ i v asaid, 'It is fated, it shall not be otherwise, for it is so destined to be"' [5.189.7-8 VB; italics mine]. Drupada's wife duly becomes pregnant and gives birth to a beautiful daughter, proclaiming "I have borne a son!" [5.189.13]. Drupada has all the birth rites performed for a son, announces the child to the city as a son, and names her Sikhandin. As Sikhandin grows up, skilled in archery and manly crafts, her mother begins urging the king "to find a wife for the girl, as though she were a son. Seeing that his daughter had reached maturity and knowing that she was a woman, [Drupada] began to worry with his wife" [5.190.2-3

VB]. They decide that a marriage can be arranged, for if Siva said she would become a man, it must indeed happen. For some time after the marriage the bride does not know that ~ikhandinis a woman, and ~ikhandin"happily disported

himself like a man in the royal palace.. .dissembling his womanhood" [5.190.17

VB]. But when the bride does realize it (it is not clear how this happens), she tells * Again, the literal translation of this would be something like "woman-man."

233

her nurses and companions who send word back to her father. Drupada gets an angry note from the bride's father, who "after once more ascertaining that she was in fact a girl" [5.191.3 VB] (again, the text does not say how this is accomplished) sends an army to Drupada's gates. Seeing her beloved parents in this precarious situation, ~ikhandinidespairs and decides to kill herself. She wanders deep into an uninhabited forest, coming into the domain of the Yaksa Sthunakarqa who offers to relieve her of whatever trouble is ailing her. ~ikhandintells her story, and the Yaksa "under the press of destiny" agrees to make her a man under one condition: "I shall give you this, my own male organ, for a limited time; after that you must come back, I swear to you!. ..I shall wear your female organ, princess. Promise me truly and I shall do you this favor"

[5.193.24 VB]. ~ikhandinresponds: "I shall return your organ to you, blessed lord.

You will bear my womanhood only for a limited time.

When King

Hiranyavarman of Dasarna* has turned back, I shall be a maiden again, and you shall be a man" [5.193.5-6 VB]. Having made this pact, they exchanged their organs: "the Yaksa Sthuna wore the female organ.. .and ~ikhandinobtained the Yaksa's blazing form" [5.193.8 VB]. Just as the army of her bride's father is readying to storm Drupada's gates, Drupada, having received the joyous news, sends an envoy to offer that an "inquiry" be made: Upon hearing Drupada's message, the king Reflectively sent some fine young women Of gorgeous beauty in order to learn If ~ikhandinwas female or a man. The women he sent found out the truth

* Her bride's father.

And fondly reported it all to the king, That ~ikhandinwas male, 0 Kaurava prince, Of potency puissant.. .* [5.193.25-26VB] T h e Yak* unfortunately does not fare s o well. Kubera, t h e god of riches a n d king of Yaksas, passes by Sthuna's dwelling on a tour of t h e world a n d wonders why t h e Yaksa does not come o u t t o honor him.

U p o n learning that t h e Yaksa gave

~ i k h a n d i nhis manhood a n d now stays indoors o u t of shame for his womanhood, Kubera calls him outside t o curse him: Forasmuch as you have insulted the Yaksas, And given ~ikhandinyour manhood, churl, And taken the sex of a woman, scoundrelForasmuch as you have perpetrated a deed never been done before, most foul of spirit, therefore you shall henceforth be a woman and she a man! [5.193.42-43 VB] T h e curse is mitigated when Sthuna's fellow Yaksas plead his case: his manhood will b e returned to him when ~ i k h a n d i nis killed i n battle. And Bhisma thus closes his story: Drupada.. .found supreme joy in his son ~ikhandin,who had achieved his goal. He gave ~ikhandinto Drona as his student.. .this son who had been a woman before.. .Thus then, great king, ~ikhandin,the illustrious malefeinale child of Drupada, became a great warrior, best of the Kauravas. The eldest daughter of the king of the Kasis, famed as Amba, was born in Drupada's lineage as &khandin.. .When he encounters me with bow in hand eager to fight, I shall not look at him even for a moment, and I shall refuse to hit him. This my vow has always been renowned in the whole world: that I shall shoot no arrows at a woman, a former woman, one with the name of a woman, and an apparent woman.. .and for this reason I shall not kill him when he ambushes me in battle. Were a Bhisma to kill a woman he would kill himself; therefore I shall not kill him, though I may see him on the field of battle. r5.193.55-65 VB; italics mine]

* Apparently also potent enough to later father a son on this bride! We see a reference in the Vulgate to "Batradeva, the son of ~ikhandin"[7.23.6 Dl in the advance of the Paficalas against Drona, and at two other points in the Critical Edition [7.9.59; 7.22.181.

235

True to his words, Bhisma consistently avoids ~ikhandinon the battlefield, continually "remembering his womanhood" [6.65.28 (6.69.29); 6.82.26 (6.87.26); 6.99.07 (6.104.7); 6.1 12.80 (6.118.3); 6.113.46 (6.119.50)l; and never forgetting to remind others of it [6.16.15 (6.15.15); 6.95.8 (6.99.34); 6.103.10 (6.108.107);

All the world knows that to compass the pleasure of my father.. .I formerly relinquished a swelling kingdom and the company of woman. Therefore...I will not slay in battle females or those who were females before. I tell this truly. Before the commencement of the battle I have told you, and you have heard that this ~ikhandinwas born formerly as a female and was called ~ikhandin(i).Born as a female child she has come to be a man. If now I am to fight with him I will speed my shafts towards him on no account. [6.99.35-38;italics mine]

The reasoning above seems to contain a non-sequitur: "I relinquished a kingdom and the company of women and tlzereforewill not slay a woman (or former woman) in battle."

So his paternally-induced celibacy has something to do with his

unwillingness to kill a woman/former woman he might encounter on the battlefield? Indeed, as a life rule, how many women (especially former women) does he really intend to meet on the battlefield? Might this rule be formulated expressly for ~ikhandin? Will he not kill ~ikhandin(i)because he would not (could not) marry her? What, then is the inverse? One can kill whom one can marry? Would he have killed a former woman had he not taken his vow of celibacy? What is the link between the two? In two later formulations, his justification for avoiding ~ikhandinmakes slightly more sense: "[~ikhandin]was a female before, but afterwards attained manhood.. .Beholding then an inauspicious [amangalya] man in the person of him who was female before, I will not strike though I may be armed with arrows" [6.103.76-79 (6.108.82); italics mine]; "I will never slay

~ikhandin.He was created a female by the Creator, but has become a man out of chance only. This mighty son of [Drupada] is thus reckoned as an inauspicious sign. The son of ...Ganga will not therefore strike that inauspicious person" [6.108.18-19 (6.111.18-19) 1.

Framed along the lines of auspiciousness and

inauspiciousness, important guides for determining actions and decisions in the epic, the refusal to engage a transsexual may make more sense than the total nonsequitur above, but his reasoning still does not make total sense-the

"Creator"

did ordain ~ikhandin'smasculinity, and thus, according to Bhisma's own telling of ~ m b a / ~ i k h a n d i n 'story, s it was not "by chance only". There is something going on between Bhisma and ~ikhandinbeyond the latter's drive for vengeance and the former's ostensible vow that remains logically if not psychoanalytically suspicious. Bhisma insists on this haughty avoidance even face-to-face with ~ikhandin: "When ~ikhandinhit him very hard, Bhisma looked at him and, though enraged, remained unwilling; he said jeeringly, 'Hit me if you wish, or don't. I will not fight with you in any fashion. You are still the same woman ~ikhandinithat the Creator made you!'" [6.104.4043 (6.109.4144) VB] . Hearing these words of his, ~ikhandinbecomes overwhelmed with rage and redoubles his attacks, but he ultimately needs Ar~unato succeed. As I suggest above, it is both ironic and a little sad that for all Arnba underwent to be the cause of Bhisma's death, in her i nnever unequivocally so. As I noted earlier, Bhisma's reincarnation as ~ i k h a ~ dis death is actually a matter of his own choosing, a boon that, along with being undefeatable in battle, he received after renouncing his throne and taking his vow of celibacy: "I shall not fight with the Pandavas for two reasons: their protection by

Krsna and the femininity of ~ i k h a n d i n . Formerly, on the occasion of marrying [Satyavati], my father accorded me two boons: death at my pleasure and invincibility in battle. I think now the proper time for my death has arrived"

Furthermore, though both A r p n a and ~ i k h a n d i ndischarge multitudes of arrows towards him, Arjuna's are clearly given greater credit: These arrows of touch resembling that of the thunderbolt, coming in an unbroken line towards me have been discharged by Arjuna. Surely they are not ~ i k h a d i n ' s . Eating into my very vitals, and penetrating even through my invulnerable armor, these are striking like so many bludgeons. Surely they are not &khandin's. Of the touch like that of a Brahmin's rod, of velocity like that of the thunderbolt and incapable of being repulsed, these arrows are sucking out my vital energies. Surely they are not ~ i k h a d i n ' s .Of touch heavy like that of a mace ...these arrows are destroying my vital breaths like so many messengers of Death. Surely they are not ~ i k h a d i n ' s . Like infuriate snakes of virulent venom with their tongues protruding out, these arrows are penetrating into my very vitals. Surely they are not &khandin's. These are the arrows of Arjuna and not of ~ikhandin,arrows that are cutting my limbs as cows are cut down by cold in the winter month. [6.114.55-60 (6.120.60-65);italics mine] O n the other hand, though, there are also numerous references throughout the epic to Bhisma being killed by ~ i k h a n d i n[5.47.35; 6.14.5 (6.13.5); 6.15.46, 47 (6.14.49); (6.121.6); 14.59.11 (14.60.1I ) ] . As Satyaki is berating Dhrswdyumna for his preceptor Drona's death, he says 'You have accused [Ar~una] ...with the slaughter of Bhisma.

But.. .that vilest of wretches, your uterine brother*

~ i k h a n d i nwas , the cause of Bhisma's death.. .Your father had begotten ~ i k h a n d i n for the slaughter of Bhisma. As regards Arjuna he only protected your brother when he caused [Bhisma's] death" [7.169.15-17 (7.199.16-18) Dl. Yet as Ganga is lamenting repeatedly that her son has been killed by ~ikhandin-making explicit * A notable choice of words, since Dhrstadyumna and Draupadi were precisely ayonija births, rising out of a sacrificial altar.

reference to Bhisma's abduction of the princesses of Kasi-Rsna

consoles her by

saying "he was killed by [Arpna] on the field of battle while engaged in battle. He has not been killed, 0 goddess, by ~ikhandin"[13.154.29 (13.168.32) Dl .* The epic is thus ambivalent on whether or not to allow Amba as ~ikhandinto be credited as the cause of Bhisma's death, weaving in and out of it, circling around it, repeatedly contradicting and undermining itself on it. The question of who ultimately is responsible for Bhisma's death-~ikhandin, Aquna, or Bhisma himself-seems van

destined to remain as ambiguous as ~ikhandin'sultimate gender. Buitenen

makes

some

interesting

observations

about

Amba/~ikhandin(i).First of all, he notes that the name of the three sisters Amba, Ambika, and Ambalika are "variations on the vocative ambe, amba, a hypocorism for 'mother, mommy'," and suggests further that these three Ambas, of considerable antiquity, might well have "given rise to an old epithet of Rudra,t tryambaka: 'he of the three mothers,' which was later reinterpreted as 'three-eyed'" [1978: 173-1741. He also notes that after Bhisma's initial telling of the story of Amba/~ikhandin(i), it is pretty much forgotten, only recurring in connection to Bhisma's imminent death. van Buitenen's theory is that the story of Amba and the references to the invincibility of the warrior ~ikhandinin relation to Bhisma's death were unrelated, until some internal logic in the development of the epic linked the two in the story of Arnbii's vow and ~ikhandin'ssex change [Ibid., 1761781. Why? Because "it is

* Interestingly, as Doniger observes, Sikhandin(i) "meets a violent and appropriately androgynous end: he is pierced between the eyes and cut in two with a sword. This mutilation links him still more closely with Siva, the androgyne who is split in two and has a third eye in the middle of his forehead" [1980: 3071. t Another name for Siva.

so utterly appropriate: the great Bhisma, fearfully famed for his abjuration of all women, in the end finds his undoing at the hand of one of them, whom he had cheated out of her rightful marriage" [Ibid.]. For van Buitenen, this logic requires a diachronic view of the text: two chronologically disparate elements in the original epic material that would have been later linked as the Mbh grew into the vast opus that it is, becoming a fantastic, funny, instructive story that made absolute moral sense and tied loose strands up into a tidy little knot of transsexual reincarnation. "If we were to take this story seriously as simultaneous to the epic portions of the Mahabharata, we would ultimately have to lay the death of Bhisma at the fragrant door of the Yaksa Sthunakarna's mansion in a wood off Kampilya. I, among my trees of different ages, find this view of the enchanted forest absurd" [van Buitenen 1978: 1781. For the purposes of my analysis, however, it does not matter so much how the epic's stories were forged as that they exist as such. I state in the introduction my consciously synchronic approach to the epic, and am convinced that that is the only way to approach motifs and narratives that, however they may have come to be so, are symbolically and psychologically linked.

Can it not be just as

meaningful that as concentrated and intentional a design as Amba's-so overdetermined-should

only finally be realized by a seemingly fortuitous

encounter in a forest? Is that not ironic, and might not the epic's seeming avoidance till the last minute of something it is obliged to do tell us something? I would lay Bhisma's death "by" ~ikhandin(in quotations because its attribution as such remains equivocal) precisely at the door of whatever constitutes the node of

gender and sexual dynamics in the epic-whatever

it is that makes female-to-male

transsexuality so much harder to accomplish and maintain than the reverse, whatever at the same time continually undermines the staunchest affirmations and

exemplars

of

masculinity, whatever

effects

the

dizzying

multiple

transformations that complexity and call into question the dharma that ostensibly stabilizes and grounds the epic. In fact, let us return to the statement of van Buitenen's that I cited at the outset of this chapter: "'Show you are a man!' is the essence of the Mahabharata as epic." If we understand Amba/~ikhandin's miniepic in this context, we see the elements of her/his story come together in a delightfully intriguing interweaving of themes surrounding masculinity, its construction and deconstruction as such, its juxtaposition to femininity and the transformations, disavowals, and masquerades that are implicated in their relationship. First of all, as both Doniger and Goldman note, there is a dark, destructive, lethal undercurrent to ~ikhandin'sfemale-to-male transsexuality that simply does not exist even in the deepest symbolic currents underlying Aquna's male-tofemale transsexual episode.

Doniger sums up the Amba/~ikhandin story

highlighting these themes: First, she withdraws...into asceticism, designed to destroy a man; she becomes a Yogini, a dangerous, phallic woman. Second, she is cursed so that she endures an intermediary period of ambivalence, half woman and half "crookedn (perverse) river, lacking in fluids and teeming with crocodiles-the essence of the destructive mother. This aspect of her character is heightened by its contrast with the goddess who inflicts the curse upon her-the milky Ganges, who saves the life of her son, the essential act of the good mother. Third, and finally, Amba enters her incarnation of seesaw sexuality as ~ikhandin;but even here her previous

demonic qualities dog her, for ~ikhandinis said to be the incarnation of a flesh-eating demon, a Rsksasa. [1980: 3081 We have also noted destructive undertones in Draupadi,* who never switches genders but does challenge the epic's explicit dharmic formulations of what a woman and wife should be.

Both of these characters' trajectories away from

"traditional" femininity are towards vengeance, and I would suggest that this current of feminine vengeance-which major events of the epic-is

I would also go so far as to argue drives the

an important strand of femininity in the Mbh not

articulated in the stri dharma that constitutes the dominant conscious discourse on femininity in the epic. For example, though motherhood is spoken of in terms of maternal love, breasts flowing with milk, self-sacrifice, and tearful loyalty, we see mothers such as Vidula and Kunti sharply inciting their sons to battle, in Vidula's case, insulting his manhood to rouse his valor. Draupadi speaks of herself as a submissive, docile wife but in her actions prods her husbands on to revenge when they might have settled for a peace-dharmic

discourse leaves out the reality of

feminine vengeance that is an indispensable element to female figures in the epic and Hinduism more broadly. The vengeance that hovers around the edge of Draupadi's character and the undertones of destruction that are rumbled at her birth-as

well as the femininity that, though wearing a male organ for revenge,

nonetheless continues to hover around ~ikhandin's masculinity "of potency puissant," the kernel of femaleness that continues to exist at the core of the "lethal transsexual" figure of ~ikhandin-these come out of the gap, the blind spot, the

* Though Doniger sees Draupadi's "hypersexuality"as standing in "dramatic contrast with the reborn AmbZ's ambiguous sexuality" [1999a: 2821.

absence that is woman constructed according to the phallic signifier. Behind the masquerade of stri dharma, behind the idealized constructions of feminine sexuality embodied by the apsards (though, as we have seen with Urvasi, apsards can be vengeful, too!), behind the passivity and "meek hearts" consistently avowed in speech by the epic's female protagonists, there is agency, there is insistence on recognition of rights, wrongs, and some balance to be enforced, and there is an undeniable presence as a shaping force to their own lives, the course of history, and the destiny of male characters. But this is oblique; it can be seen only out of the corner of the epic eye. The lacuna of what is disavowed in Woman may exist as a gap or absence in the Symbolic, but I would suggest that it literally returns with a vengeance in the transsexual figure of ~ikhandin,and, refracted differently, in the provocative figure of Draupadi. Second of all, the phallus recurs throughout the epic as an unstable construct, at least inasmuch as it is supposed to be the bedrock of masculinity and the dharma that is predicated upon it.

On the level of signification and

subjectivity, the phallus represents a unity that is as symbolically suggestive as it is impossible-for

subjects inhabiting a symbolic world of law and language, the

phallus stands as an example of coherence where there exists fragmentation, of full presence where there is lack, of meaning where there is dissonance, of law where there is chaos. For Woman who is constructed and projected beyond the borders of this symbolic world, who occupies the role of the phallus in relation to male subjectivity in the sense that-like

God-unity,

meaning, truth, and full

presence are attributed to her, the possession of the phallus is not a requirement

for her status as subject, though she may desire it for its symbolic value and cultural capital. For Man, however, subjectivity is predicated upon the possession of the phallus, which can only ever be an ideal, a master signifier that defines and bounds the realm of male subjectivity by necessarily being located apart from and outside of it. There is a constant striving toward it coupled with the inevitable confrontation of its escaping out of reach. Bordo draws a compelling contrast between the phallus as cultural ideal and the penis as the reality of embodied masculinity. The phallus as it represents Man is a "timeless symbolic construct.. .singular, constant, transcendent" whereas the penis, representing actual men as "biologically, historically, and experientially embodied beings,

...evokes the temporal not the eternal.

And far from maintaining steady will and

purpose, it is mercurial, temperamental, unpredictable" [Bordo 1994: 265-661. Indeed, Bordo suggests that "far fresher insights can be gained by reading the male body through the window of its vulnerabilities rather than the dense armor of its power-from

the 'point of view' of the mutable, plural penis rather than the

majestic, unitary phallus" [Ibid.].

We see such a sense of failure read as

impotence in heroes' references to themselves and each other as eunuchs-if masculinity is constructed upon possession of the phallus, the inevitable failure to possess the phallus fully is poignantly and tellingly described in the image of a castrate. Third, returning more specifically to the case of ~ikhandin,the fact that Bhisma as patriarch of the epic is involved should draw our attention to the role of dharma in this story, and the implications for it that this story might suggest. I

would be tempted-and

might have done so were it typographically possible-to

put a bar through "patriarch" as Lacan puts a bar through the S that stands for subject. Bhisma occupies the role of patriarch in the epic without actually being so, an absence holding a place around which the royal genealogy is arranged, a l a c k - o r more strongly, a failure-at

the origin that both sets in motion and

continually spurs the intergenerational dysfunctionalities and fratricidal neurosis that culminate in the final devastating breakdown.

Yet as primary exponent of

dharma in the epic, Bhisma is a very real presence, though his actions much like his words seem to be continually contradicting and undermining themselves. He expounds upon the dharma of kingship as the kingdom that he watched over lies shattered, the dharma of fraternal relations as his family ruthlessly kill one another, the dharma of relations between the sexes as he lies dying at the hands of a "woman" upon whom he had effected a travesty. Indeed, beyond the weak excuse that he is "bound by wealth" to the Kurus, it is never really clear why, as patriarch and ostensible embodiment of dharma he ends up fighting on the side that (he admits) is clearly in the wrong. I note above the strange ambiguousness of his death "at the hands o f sikhandin-on the one hand it must be so, for it was a vow taken by Arnba, and a boon granted twice by siva; on the other hand, it cannot be so-a

warrior and patriarch of Bhisma's stature being felled by an

otherwise undistinguished prince, and even more so a "former woman," an inauspicious transsexual who wears the penis she received from a Yaksa. It both must be and cannot be, and it exists in the epic in precisely this ambiguous, tenuous, unresolved balance.

This is suggestive of dharma in the epic-a

seemingly staunch patriarchal order, firm laws, all the answers, eternal and unchanging; yet also a tension of contradictions, a dynamic flux of rationalizations and inverted mirror images, continually folding back upon itself and coming out the other end upside down, a circle of discourse that continually seems to be on the verge of lapsing either into tautology or radical contingency. Much like Bhisma's death at the hands of ~ikhandin,dharma in the Mbh is simultaneously overdetermined and continually receding; it must be so, it must be so, yet in the final analysis it is not necessarily so. Before concluding, let us touch briefly on two other examples of transsexuality in the epic as a means of providing some contrast to the examples of Arpna and ~rnbii/~ikhandin and to move us toward some final reflections. Though the story of Ila/a is only mentioned briefly in the Mbh, it is most likely that the epic's audience would have already been well-acquainted with it [Goldman 1993: 3791, and for us it can thus be useful as a story that exists within the epic's greater narrative and social context even if it is but a reference in the text itself. The gist of the story (as recounted elaborately in the Ramiiyana, 7.78-

81) is that the prince Ila is hunting in the forest and wanders into the spot where the goddess Parvati is sporting with her husband Siva who, in order to prevent any man from seeing her in his embrace, has ordained that any male entering the vicinity would be turned into a woman. Ila is thus transformed into a woman-

now 11%-who, ashamed of her new condition, begs Siva to reverse it. It is Parvati who finally mitigates the curse, granting that Ila will alternate between genders on a monthly basis. In 112's first month as a woman, she meets the sage Budha and in

a whirlwind of lovemaking conceives Purfuavas. S/he then continues to switch back and forth between the genders on a monthly basis, "alternating accordingly between the erotic dalliance of a woman and the manly exercise of kingly duty until, having performed the Asvamedha rite, he permanently reverts to the male sex and is thus restored to his previous state of happiness" [Goldman 1993: 3801. This is thus a story of an erstwhile man making the best of a bad situationenjoying the erotic experience of a woman until his curse can be expiated. The tables turn somewhat, however, in the story of Bhangasvana, a story that Bhisma recounts to Yudhisthira when he asks whether men or women derive greater pleasure from sex. The story begins once again with the common trope of a king losing his way while hunting in the forest: Bhangiisvana, overcome by thirst, plunges into a beautiful lake of transparent water, emerging to find that he "had obtained femininity. Having seen himself made into a woman, he was ashamed" [13.12.9-10 (13.12.10-1I ) ] . S/he bemoans his/her lost manhood: [Sages] versed in the truths of duty and religion and other matters say that mildness and softness and susceptibility to extreme agitation are the characteristics of women, and that activity, hardness, and energy are the characteristics of men. Alas, my manliness is gone! For why has femininity possessed me? On account of this change of sex, how shall I succeed in riding my horse again? [l3.12.13-14 (13.12.1415) Dl Bhangasvana somehow makes it onto his/her horse, rides back to city, leaves the kingdom in the hands of his hundred sons and re-departs for the forest. In the forest s/he meets an ascetic and by him gives birth to another hundred sons, whom she brings back to the city and presents to her first brood: 'You are the children of my loins while I was a man. These are my children born to me in this

state of change. Sons, all enjoy my kingdom together, like brothers born of the same parents" [ 13.12.22 (13.12.24) Dl.

Indra, however, always the mischief-

maker, sows dissension between the two sets of sons, who kill each other off. As Bhangasvana is mourning, Indra goes to her and asks which of her sons she would like him to revive: those born to her as a woman, or those born to him as a man. Bhangasvana replies that she would like him to revive those who were born to her as woman, for "the affection [sneha] that is cherished by a woman is much greater than that which is cherished by a man. Therefore, 0 ~ a k r aI, wish those children to revive that were born by me as a woman" [13.12.41 (13.12.46) Dl. Surprised but pleased, Indra then offers her the choice of remaining either a woman or a man. Bhangaivana replies: "I wish to remain a woman, 0 ~ a k r a .In fact, I do not wish to become a man" [13.12.45 (13.12.49) Dl. Stunned, Indra asks why, and Bhangasvana responds: "In sexual intercourse, the pleasure that women enjoy is always much greater than what is enjoyed by men. Therefore, 0 ~ a k r aI, wish to continue a woman. 0 foremost of gods.. .I derive greater pleasure in my present state of womanhood. I am quite content with this state of womanhood" [13.12.4748 (13.12.51-53)Dl.

Both Goldman and Doniger comment upon this story. Though on the one hand, Doniger suggests, it is a "happy accidentn-in woman and is content with the transformation-it

that a man is turned into a

also has "insidious implications.

The statement that Bhangasvana had more pleasure as woman is part of a syllogism that pervades the mythology: a woman should not take pleasure in sex.. .a woman who does enjoy sex is a phallic woman and thereby deprives a male

of his own virility" [1980: 30.51. In this sense, Doniger contends, "Bhangasvana's transformation is yet another instance of androgyny as a sign of conflict between the sexes" [Ibid., 3061. Goldman notes that "Bhangasvana's choice provides a unique empirically derived confirmation of the belief-found sources-that

in a variety of Indian

a woman's pleasure in the sexual act is greater (usually eight times

greater) than that of a man" [1993: 3821. This feeds into related beliefs about women's sexual voraciousness and the consequent need for them to be kept at all times under the thumb of some male. Goldman goes further to suggest more broadly that "in most cases, whether mythical or associated with historical personages, transsexualism, which overwhelmingly occurs in the direction of male to female, takes place as the consequence of a desire to avoid or defuse a potential sexual liaison with a prohibited female seen as the property of a powerful and revered male and/or the desire to be passively enjoyed sexually by such a male" [1993: 3911. It is clear how this argument might apply to Ila, but not so much in the case of Bhangfisvana. Yet Goldman goes on to conclude that these cases support the Indian "Oedipal" pattern he identifies elsewhere, "the pattern in which a real or surrogate son is punished, typically by castration or impotence, for intruding upon the sexual life of his 'father'" [Ibid.]. In the cases of Ila/a and Bhangasvana, however, "the victims actually become biological females and can legitimately enjoy sexual intercourse with and even be impregnated by the kind of powerful forest sage that functions, in the more typical legends, as a standard fathersurrogate" [Ibid.]. Goldman links this argument also to the cases of Pandu (who,

we might remember, is functionally castrated when he encounters the "primal scene" of the Brahmin mating with his wife in the form of deer) [Goldman 1993: 3941 and, with a slight twist, Bhisma, who by refusing; to take possession of AmbZ (whose name, he also notes, means "mother") must fight his father-figure/guru Rama Jamadagnya and is eventually-to

repeat the nice phrase quoted above by

DonigerÑL'slai by his 'son' 4 u n a hiding, as it were, behind the skirts of his 'mother' Arnba in her sexually ambiguous form of ~ikhandin"[Ibid., 3921 .* On the one hand Goldman recognizes that Amba's female-to-male transsexuality is qualitatively different than the male-to-female examples which occupy the bulk of his study. Not only is it "far more complicated, gradual, and overdetermined" but it also "has as its purpose neither the avoidance nor the facilitation of an erotic relationship. Instead, its goal is vengeance" [Ibid. 3911. But he eventually returns to his original premise: The issues and relationships underlying this carefully hedged and evidently more problematic female-to-male transsexualism are not entirely different from those involved with the variants of the more common type of transsexualism. At the heart of the whole elaborate episode is the traditional culture's powerful investment in the rigorous definition of gender-appropriate roles and its profound disquiet when such roles are questioned. In essence it is Bhisma, the archetypal renouncer of his own male sexuality in deference to that of his father, who prevents Amba from fulfilling her culturally determined role as wife and mother. IIbid., 3921

Indeed, Goldman goes so far as to suggest that in all these episodes of transsexuality and throughout the epic, "women [are] a screen for power struggles

* Bhisma's self-castration, along these lines, could also be read as a preventative measure precisely against accessing Satyavati, the young desirable girl who would have made a more fitting partner for him than for his father: "The only alternative the traditional culture holds out.. .to castration at the hands of the father [in contest over the mother] is a kind of voluntary preemptive castration or renunciation of sexuality, such as is represented in the well-known Mahibhirata legends of Bhisma and Pam" [Goldman 1993: 3961.

between males" [1993: 3971, an extreme formulation that, I would argue, undermines his otherwise rich analysis. To the extent that the authors of the Mahabharata were most probably male and the events described in it unfold within a strongly patriarchal society we certainly must concede some validity to this statement, but I don't think that we can wholly accept it. If this were indeed the case, what a drab Mahiibhiirata it would be, and why rob the rich and dynamic female characters of their agency, their motivations, their own feelings and actions in the epic? As neatly as Goldman ties the narrative and symbolic strands of transsexuality into tidy Oedipal knots-and find his work to be-he

as incisive and valuable overall as I

seems to seriously run the risk of replicating in his analysis

the patriarchal attitude he purports to describe. This is perhaps a conundrum of the chicken-and-egg variety-which first, content or analysis-but

comes

I find the almost ironclad seamlessness of his

conclusions to be suspect, as well as the insistent repetition that no matter how recurrent certain themes of femininity, motherhood, or female sexuality may be, it really is all about men and male relationships. For example, Goldman claims that that the pervasive male fantasy of becoming a woman that Bose, Carstairs, and Kakar note even in modem India is either a "demeaning punishment for some kind of Oedipal transgression against a powerful and dreaded male figure" or "a deeply longed-for metamorphosis that makes possible an erotic liaison with a powerful and desired male" [Ibid.]. Fine, certainly possible, but what about at least introducing the possibility that there might also be other reasons why men would want to become women? Goldman seems to want to deny femininity any

interest or desirability for its own sake: "For in actually becoming a woman, and thereby identifying wholly with the Mother, one can fulfill a powerful fantasy of sexual possession by the very father the fear of whom lies at the root of the focal anxiety centering on one's own maleness" [Goldman 1993: 3941. Even when Goldman seems to detour into the "carefully acculturated male dread of the autonomous power of women, especially as it is seen as a consequence of their physiology and sexuality" [Ibid.]-at women that actually has to do with women-he

least something about

returns to the conclusion that "a

careful study" will "suggest that underlying the fantasized fear of harm deriving from women and sexual intercourse with them is a more deeply rooted but far less explicitly stated anxiety derived from the coercive and potentially castrative power of dominant males such as fathers, older brothers, gods, gurus, and sages" IIbid.,

3951. In summation, Goldman concludes that "much of the fascination with becoming a woman that we find in the Indian tradition, as well as the seemingly contradictory misogyny that is another of its recurrent features, proceeds not from a primary anxiety about women but rather from a deep and, in many cases, wellfounded anxiety about men in the form of culturally validated authority figures" [Ibid., 3971. The feminist objections to this line of reasoning and the conclusions he draws are probably rather obvious. It's all really just about men, isn't it? There is nothing the women characters can show us or tell us that actually has to do with them as women-certainly

not as individuals or thinking, feeling, intending

subjects, but not even in how they might relate to male characters as women in se.

Goldman seems content to see the female characters, in all their depth and complexity, as simply a "screen for a power struggle between males." Not only do I want to call out the masculinist bias here that threatens to undermine an otherwise rich and ground-breaking study of transsexuality in the epics, but I also want this critique of Goldman to provide an example of the limitations of Freudian analysis and the unfruitful paths down which it might sometimes lead us. Though I would not want to dispense with Freudian analyses altogether, I do think that, especially in a contemporary theoretical climate that widely credits Lacan for taking psychoanalysis into the twenty-first century, psychoanalytic studies of Indic material should begin to engage the sorts of interpretive innovations and contributions Lacan offers. Doniger, also coming from a Freudian orientation, frames her study of transsexual masquerades in a way that is certainly more friendly to feminist sensibilities, and relatively more amenable to inviting Lacanian insights. Contextualizing her study of transsexuality in the greater Indian universe in which human identity may be constructed over several lifetimes and throughout different bodies or even species, Doniger discusses Hindu notions of gender in terms of authenticity/inauthenticity and fluidity/durability that are also in turn linked to other dynamics of memory, agency, and subjectivity. For example, she argues that in cases where a man is fully transformed into a woman, taking on "a female mentality and memory," we see a conception of gender that is fluid, whereas in episodes when the male merely assumes a female outer form,"retaining

his male essence, his male memory and mentality," we see a conception of gender as something durable, internal, essential [1997: 1291. Whether one remembers one's previous gender is thus an important determinant: for Ila/2 to be able to make love with Budha one month then study dharma with him the next, it is essential that s/he not remember the other half of their alternating relationship. So is recognition: "when Ila does not recognize himself after he has been restored to his primary form as a man, he is said to be someone whose power of recognition has been destroyed; and as a woman, in his secondary, alternative form, she is not himself, but only his (female) shadow or

inverted mirror image (patima)" [Doniger 1997: 1321. We might remember here that a (proto)subject's self-recognition in the mirror phase is, for Lacan, one of the crucial stages along the path to full subjectivity, and this passage also recalls the earlier quote from Grosz that describes the feminine subject position within the Symbolic as a "(pale reflection of the) masculine subject." So the continuity of gender, then, seems partly to be a function of how the subject recognizes, remembers, and identifies him/herself and partly a function of how that person is located symbolically by the Other-is

Ila as woman framed in the epic eye as a

"pale reflection" of her former male self, or, more along the lines of Bhangasvana, might she be represented (to the extent that this is possible within the Symbolic) as taking on full subject status in her new female form? For Doniger, these dynamics of memory, recognition, and subjectivity suggest a Hindu view of gender according to which, if the outer form changes but the inner core of memory and identity stay the same, the "original" or "authentic"

gender remains intact. Conversely, in the case of Ila where loss of memory is part of the curse, gender changes along with the body's physical sexual characteristics [Doniger 1997: 1341. In other words, according to Doniger, Hindu notions of gender may construct it either as "not fluid or superficial but embedded in memory" or "fluid and superficial, changing completely when the body changes" [1999: 2681. Yet, to pause here for a moment, not only does this interpretation of Hindu notions of gender operate off a seemingly clear-cut distinction between mind and body that has become increasing problematic in contemporary theory, it also risks replicating the sex-versus-gender distinction that much contemporary feminist and queer theory has challenged. Furthermore, to return to the primary materials, it is not exactly clear which gender Bhangisvana is identifying with-or to what extent her "male memory" had been retained-when

s/he, in perfect

clarity and full consciousness of her choice, chooses to remain a woman and articulates her reasons for doing so. Though Aguna retains a clearly masculine identity underneath his female trappings and despite the ambiguous status of his genitalia, ~ikhandintoo is ambiguous on the question of identity, memory, and gendered subjectivity. Arnba is told that she will remember everything in her new body, but ~ikhandinnever explicitly speaks with her voice or attributes his actions to her motivations. Bhisma, obviously, considers ~ikhandinin essence a woman, but it is not clear that ~ i k h a ~ ddoes, i n or anyone else, really, for that matter. But these meditations on the role of memory in constituting gender carry some interesting possibilities. For example, if, as Lacan suggests, meaning is constructed retroactively, we might also think of gender as a symbolic construct

that comes into being retroactively, as an after-effect of signification that then assumes an "original" or "authentic" quality in subjective formation. We introject meaning and subjectivity-both

of which would have come into being only

through our entry into the Symbolic-into

our earliest memories. And something

that would seem to be "essential" to us, apparent from our biological emergence into the world-our sex or gender-is

subject to the same retroactive

reconstitutions based upon symbolic and linguistic factors. Desire, too, is an important element introduced by the Freudian interpretations of these transsexual narratives, though in both Goldman's and Doniger's analyses the desire in question is primarily homosexual. For Goldman, as we saw, these stories are really all about desiring or fearing the father figure, most accurately probably a bit of both. Doniger tips her hat to Goldman's analysis and continues to build on it, eventually arriving at bisexual desire, by which these are "stories about men and women who enjoy sex with both men and women on different occasions, offering, in subversion of the dominant homophobic paradigm, closeted images of a happily expressed and satisfied homosexual desire" [1997: 1441.

Margaret Trawick, in a passage on transvestitism in

contemporary south India that Doniger cites at her conclusion, moves it rightly, I think, into broader questions of desire and jouissance-. 'We might consider the proliferation of androgyny there to be one aspect of a pleasure in sexuality in its original polymorphous nature that we ourselves miss, together with an intellectual enjoyment of paradox, which, also we fail to share" [Doniger 1997: 1451. Ultimately, I think, Doniger's earlier reflections on the nature of gender are more

productive and promising than the route of homosexual desire that both she and Goldman eventually take. Sure, there might be some of that, and I wouldn't want to preclude queer readings of these stories, but I think there is much more going on. In an epic context where gender, like caste, must be rigidly and immutably defined in order to preserve dharmic order, where social roles are fixed and definite, there must be some cultural outlet, some symbolic steam valve to allow the human imagination to explore what it must at some level sense is contingent and constructed no matter how immutable law and language insist that it be. In closing, Doniger returns the problem of the mythical androgyne or transsexual to an attractively pithy (and classically Hindu) solution: "To the question posed by these myths-How or truly deep, essential?-Hinduism

deep is gender? Is it skin deep, superficial, answers Yes" [1999: 3011. It is this kind of a

response-one that does not require airtight formulations, tidy knots, or erudite explanations, one that in fact resists and avoids such reductionist or essentialist approaches to matters so big, complex, and ultimately unanswerable-that

makes

Lacanian theory well-suited to address these questions. Furthermore, if on some level we can agree that these myths of transsexual transformation revolve around the compelling question of sexual difference, then Lacan can offer a way of thinking about this question that moves us beyond "the Freudian commitment to.. .phylogenetic, pseudobiological explanation" and toward "social, unconscious, and linguistic explanations" that provide much greater theoretical flexibility and feminist possibility [Grosz 1990: 701.

Whereas for Freud women really are in a sense castrated, in that they lack the biological penis, the sense in which women are castrated within the Lacanian framework has more to do with their perceived powerlessness in relation to phallic structures of signification and authority, and in fact all subjects must experience castration in order to successfully negotiate the Oedipal complex and accede to full sexed subjectivity. This "relation of the subject to the phallus.. .is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes" [Lacan 1977: 2821, and indeed, "woman has to undergo no more or less castration than the man" [Lacan 1982: 1681. Castration, as the advent of the Symbolic, interrupts the Imaginary specular sense of wholeness and narcissistic mirroring with the mother and introduces the lack that will continue to dog all subjects no matter how they are gendered. The child must renounce the attempt to be the object of the mother's desire and give up "a certain jouissance which is never regained despite all attempts to do so" [Evans 1996: 221. Or as Lacan says, "castration means that jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l'echelk renver&e) of the Law of desire [1977: 3241. According to how one negotiates this Oedipal gauntlet will determine which position one takes as desiring subject, and what one will desire. It could be argued that in these Hindu narratives of transsexuality, as in Lacan's treatment of sexual difference, the presence or absence of the phallus-being

or having it-is

the crucial determinant of gender and the subject's

position in the Symbolic, though-as demand clear designation-the

opposed to Western notions of gender that

exact status of the phallus with regard to these

subjects is often playfully and intentionally obscured, confused, or questioned.

For feminists, it may seem counterintuitive to buy into the notion that the phallus is the sole determinant and signifier of sexual difference-why

can't we

determine sexual difference by saying that men don't have a uterus, vulva, or clitoris? But this is where we must remind ourselves of Lacan's crucial distinction between the Imaginary, the Real and the Symbolic. Of course female sexual organs have equal ontological status and functional value in relation to the male organ-this

is at the level of the Real-but,

as Evans notes, "the question of sexual

difference revolves around the symbolic phallus," and on the symbolic level there is no female signifier that corresponds to the phallus: "the phallus is a symbol to which there is no correspondent, no equivalent. It's a matter of a dissymmetry in the signifier" [1996: 1431.

Because of this symbolic inability to signify the

feminine position, Woman is always constructed as the mysterious "other sex," the "dark continent" both for herself and for Man. Women may exist within the symbolic world of law and language bounded and ordered by the phallic signifier, but Woman is located outside it, in the position of Other, a place functionally similar to that of God. I touched upon this earlier in my discussion of the Mahavidyas, and it is worth requoting the passage in Mitchell's introduction to

Feminine Sexuality: As negative to the man, woman becomes a total object of fantasy (or an object of total fantasy), elevated into the place of the Other and made to stand for its truth. Since the place of the Other is also the place of God, this is the ultimate form of mystification.. . In so far as God has not 'made his exit' [E., p.1541, so the woman becomes the support of his symbolic place [1982: 501.

Whereas God is in the Western context constructed as a male with whom men would form a positive father-figure sort of identification, not only can God be

female in the Hindu context, but even when he remains masculine, the male devotee may assume a feminine position towards him.* This is, I would argue, not simply a homosexual desire for and fear of the father, as Goldman's Freudian analysis suggests.

Coming from a feminist

Lacanian direction we might also see the act of feminization, and other examples of the desire to be female, as a fascination with and desire to occupy this position of Other that has such a profound and powerful role in the forming and sustaining of male subjectivity. Just as women may want the phallus for the authority, agency, and mastery it confers-in

Arnba's case the ability to take up

arms, go into battle, and effect vengeance; in Draupadi's, too, inasmuch as she is a "phallic female," the active shaping of the fate of her husbands, family, and kingdom-men

desire to occupy the role of Other to which the phallic structure

of signification has relegated Woman.

The mysterious "dark continent" holds

great attraction as such. If Woman is the phallus, and if Man possesses the phallus but this possession of the phallus always risks being undermined by lack and failure, then it makes sense that Woman would be a position that Man, at some level, would want to occupy. Furthermore, along those lines, I would suggest that juuissance is another element that figures into the fascination with transsexuality that we see in these epic sub-plots. Though on the one hand Lacan describes jouissance as phallic, in

* It bears noting here, however, that assuming a sexualized relationship toward the deity is not the only form of bhakti-another form developed throughout the epic is that of sakhya bhava, the bhakti of friendship, that we see most poignantly in the relationship between Aquna and b s n a but also, interestingly, between b s n a and Draupadi, one of the few if only instances of true malefemale friendship in the epic.

keeping with Freud's assertion that there is only one libido, which is masculine [Evans 1996: 921, he later writes that, in being bbnot-all" (pas-tout), "excluded by the nature of things," Woman has "in relation to what the phallic function designates of jouissance, a supplementary jouissance" [Lacan 1982: 1441. This is "a jouissance of the body which is beyond the phallus.. .a jouissance proper to her, to this 'her' which does not exist and which signifies nothing. There is a jouissance proper to her and of which she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it-that

much

she does know" [Ibid., 1451. Men are not wholly excluded from this jouissance, though it is not the "normal" man who will experience it: "Despite, I won't say their phallus, despite what encumbers them on that score, they get the idea, they get the sense that there must be a jouissance which goes beyond. That is what we call a mystic" [Ibid., 1471. Here we return to spiritual/mystic implications of androgyny and transsexuality in the Hindu context. Putting aside her Freudian hermeneutic of suspicion for a moment and allowing herself a more typically Hindu interpretation, Doniger writes, "the image of the androgyne expresses with stark simplicity the problem of how one may be separated from god when one is united with god.. .As a theological image, therefore, the androgyne may represent either the bliss of union with god or the ironic agony of longing for a deity with whom one is in fact consubstantial" [1980: 3331. The god may be androgynous (in ~iva's case) or transsexual (in the case of Visnu as Mohini), and the devotee may either feminize himself in an ecstatic merging with a male god (in the bhakta tradition) or seek to combine both male and female elements simultaneously in his body (as

in the Tantric tradition) in order to experience the ecstatic sensation of the merging of the God and Goddess at the most fundamental level of creation. None of these examples really conflict with Lacanian thinking on mysticism, indeed they may even surprisingly corroborate it.

These spiritual or mystical images of

androgyny or sexual transformation all have feminine erotic resonances, and draw their ecstasy (ex-stasis) and enlightenment from a symbolic position that may be God, Woman, or the Other. As Lacan asks, it seems these images might even offer answers-"why

not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as supported by

feminine jouissance?" [ 1982: 1471. We saw above that Arpna's transsexual episode has resonances both of identification with the androgynous Siva and bhakti devotion to Qsna. Though Siva presides over Amba/~ikhandin'sfemale-to-male transformation, however, the symbolic themes are more secular, probably because Amba is more concerned with pursuing this-worldly privileges of the phallus rather than other-worldly jouissance. Yet beyond the quest for vengeance driving ~rnba/~ikhandin's story that seems to differentiate it from other examples of transsexuality in the epic, there remains a male fascination with the mystery of feminine jouissance that is at least hinted at in her case when s/he is referred to as "~ikhandin,tiger among men.. .who has realized in himself the pleasures of manhood and femininity9'* [7.9.46 (7.10.46)l. In the story of BhangSvana, of course, male curiosity (and their sneaking suspicion that women actually have it better) is made explicit, and * The text here is nuanced-it could be more conservatively translated as "he who knows both the merits and defects of masculinity and femininity," but the Indian translator sexualizes it, casting it in the language of pleasure. As in earlier choices, I find this telling and interesting, and especially in a work about desire, choose to retain this sense.

Ila, too embodies in his/her alternating genders the excessive erotic pleasure that is attributed to women as opposed to the dharrnic rectitude of men.

So, to

respond once more to Goldman, there are many good reasons in and of themselves why a man might want to become a woman, if only for a month or a fleeting episode.

Beyond the misogynist hyper-sexuality that is attributed to

Woman, there is, as Lacan suggests, the prospect of jouissance beyond the phallus that must be attractive to "normal" men and mystics alike, but beyond even that, the Otherness of Woman's place in the symbolic order holds the promise of knowledge, full presence, subjective affirmation, and most compellingly, absence of the lack that dogs the ostensible possessor of the phallus. These things may ultimately only be grasped in brief moments of orgasm or mystic ecstasy, but their promise, so near yet so fundamentally Other, is enough to eternally propel the search that is destined to remain unfulfilled-otherwise

known as desire.

Conclusion

Desire is thus the thread that weaves through the sexual and subjective permutations examined in this dissertation, and dharma the greater symbolic fabric into which its various designs are embroidered. Much like a thread in embroidery, desire moves both above and below the dharmic surface of the social and symbolic order-it

may be consciously expressed, articulated, and debated, or

it may be a seemingly endless confusing criss-cross interweaving in broad yet tangled connections underneath the surface of the epic's consciousness. Let us, in closing, cull through the intricate designs animating the rich tapestry of the Mbh and try to discern some of the broader patterns running throughout them. I will attempt to pull out what I see as some of the most salient and interesting insights that have emerged in the preceding chapters and, by placing them at the conclusion, hopefully position them to be taken up elsewhere for further reflection. First of all, as I suggested in the first chapter, much as Woman in Lacanian theory is said to be a symptom of Man, she is, I would argue, also a symptom of the Mbh, especially inasmuch as its prevailing logic, rhetoric, and symbolic structures

are masculine. Woman, women, and feminine motifs run alongside the ostensibly male narrative as a sort of subtext, subtly suggesting dharmic alternatives, subverting seemingly solid dharmic

reasoning, exposing the gaps and

inadequacies of dharmic pretensions to knowledge, authority, and coherence, and exposing and articulating desires, fears, and wishes the male subject might never admit to himself. Woman is guarantor of male subjectivity yet also potentially unsettling to i t - o n the one hand, 'Woman is constructed as an absolute category (excluded and elevated at one and the same time), a category which serves to guarantee that unity on the side of the man" [Lacan 1982: 471, but on the other, "as the place onto which lack is projected, and through which it is simultaneously disavowed, woman is a 'symptom' for the man" IIbid., 481. The symptom seeks both to hide and reveal itself, and by seeming to point away from its origin creates symbolic linkages that metonymically signify it. The symptom is a sort of dam between the Symbolic and the Real, and Woman-assymptom is able to draw attention away from the trauma and lack that exist at the origin of the male subject and reaffirm his cohesiveness, identity, and agency. As Rose and Mitchell write, "Lacan argues that woman's position in the sexual relation is that of a 'symptom' for the man, which serves to ward off the unconscious, and to ensure the consistency of his relation to the phallic term. Once again Lacan underlines the precarious nature of any such consistency" [Ibid., 1621. In the broadest sense, then, we see in the Mbh a masculine symbolic order-dharma and the law-of-the-father-struggling with the symptom of Woman that is both necessary to its constitution as such and fundamentally destabilizing to

it. The difficulty of acknowledging feminine desire and sexuality outside the bounds of wedlock (and the ensuing uncertainty surrounding paternity), the female gaze, the instability of gender, and the prospect of a mysterious jouissance beyond the phallus surfaces again and again throughout the text as a repetition that bespeaks a symptom simultaneously desiring to reveal and disguise itself. These motifs recur throughout both the main story and its numerous sub-stories (though often handled differently in each) as if the epic were trying to figure out what to do with these difficult yet insistent psychic realities.

I would note here again Ramanujan's analysis of repetition in the Mbh. Much like Lacan in his approach to language, Ramanujan sees the Mbh as an unconsciously structured work-structured

precisely by repetitions that are not

simply replications but transformations, elaborations, and variations. Through the subtle symbolic interplay of these recurrent yet variegated motifs, there emerges for the reader/listener an intuitive sense of coherence that brings even the seemingly unwieldy and disparate epic together as a literary and lifelike whole. Dharrna, too, in all its subtleties and seeming contradictions throughout the epic, likewise manages to partake of a similar intuitive coherence-a

coherence not

predicated on wholeness and homogeneity but instead articulated through linkages and flexibility. Indeed, as Ramanujan suggests, the Mbh is not concerned with laying down strict laws of conduct as much as exploring the "subtle nature of dharma-its

infinite subtlety, its incalculable calculus of consequences, its endless

delicacy" [1991: 43-51. This is not necessarily a simple or painless process, however-there

is a pleasure of the text, but also an anxiety associated with it, an

angst that underlies it. As I note earlier, Woman, as the primary thorn in the epic's dharmic side, as a recurrent itch it must scratch, as symptom of the male Symbolic order, produces both pleasure and anxiety, and it is these dual dynamics that propel the structures of repetition along throughout the epic. Kristeva's notion of the abject, incorporating both Lacanian and feminist insights, is also particularly salient in exploring dharma both in the epic and in Hinduism more broadly, and I hope to be able to explore it further in future work. If the subject must be constructed around the void of the disavowed mother, and the mother relegated beyond the boundaries of this fragile desiring subjectivity, it makes sense that all else the subject disavows in the creating and sustaining of its self is likewise relegated to the position of Other that the mother occupies. Other liminal substances-to of the abject-such

pick up echoes of Mary Douglas [I9661 in Kristeva's notion

as feces and menstrual blood are particularly challenging to

these fragile borders and must, like the maternal body, be firmly placed in the realm of what is polluted or taboo. Yet it is not monolithically so-Woman

is a

powerfully charged site of ambivalence for the male subject, for she is simultaneously abjected and desired, and, as I hope I have shown, the epic provides many rich opportunities to explore these symbolic and imaginary dynamics. Kristeva's notion of the semiotic likewise brings fertile possibilities for

thinking through the epic. As I suggest in my earlier treatment of it, Kristeva's semiotic is in many ways what I call the left half of the Mbh-its

feminine subtext,

an undercurrent to masculine dharma that at times flows quietly underneath, at

times transgresses, challenges, and threatens to overflow it.

If the Symbolic

stabilizes meaning, organizes it according to societal and patriarchal prerogatives, the semiotic destabilizes meaning, exposes the slippages of signification, the contradictions and lacunae in the dharmic discourse. In many ways it is the interplay between the symbolic and the semiotic in the text that animate it and lend it vitality-there

is a tension between order and chaos, meaning and

confusion, dharmic equilibrium and disaster that gives the epic its psychological pull and timeless appeal. If we read the Mbh as an epic about subjectivity, gender, and the fragile worlds we create around them, we can see how the tension between the symbolic and the semiotic on a literary level mirrors dynamics that also profoundly resonate on an existential level. Woman is not the only symbolic construct that drives the epic-as

we have

seen in the preceding chapters, the phallus is a symbolic construct that haunts the Mbh, especially its male protagonists. It is the symbolic counterpart to Womanpresence where Woman signifies lack, unity and coherence where Woman connotes absence and fragmentation, intention and agency where Woman implies passivity and indecision, authority where Woman suggests subordination. But as Lacan incisively notes, the phallus best plays its role when veiled. The phallus is a master signifier that must bound the field of discourse, not occupy it; it must govern the structures of signification, not be subject to them; it must be outside, beyond the imaginary that constitutes our ordinary world of discourse and meaning-making. The phallus is not to be an object of the critical or inquisitive gaze, it is to be the gaze that frames and objectifies the subject, and to do so it must

be located outside the subject's immediate linguistic, visual, and experiential field. Thus the phallus is the principle that makes dharmic discussions aspire to reason and coherence even if that is ultimately impossible, makes Man try to prove himself as such even if it is ultimately futile, makes Woman Other even if she is as much self and agent as Man. Lacan, in discerning the symbolic power of the phallus while recognizing its necessary veiling in the wielding of this power, gives us an analytic tool by which to trace the subtle nature of dharrna in the epic and the sexual and symbolic dynamics that structure and propel it. Furthermore, I think it is also important to highlight here in closing the interpretive potential that the Lacanian notion of the phallus opens up beyond Freudian thinking on it. We should remember that though Man is symbolically aligned with the phallus and constructed as possessing it, this is, for Lacan, emphatically on a symbolic and linguistic level, not biological-and

even then it is

not a stable, abiding relationship but instead precarious and vulnerable. What changes here is that it is not about a penis per se but rather a whole host of symbolic, psychological, and linguistic components that coalesce around the phallic signifier, the phallic structure of signification, and the corresponding power and authority that derive therefrom. Thus, as we saw in the preceding chapters, motifs of castration do not necessarily have to be read on a biological level-a

little boy's fear or fantasy of actual physical dismemberment by an angry

father-but

rather come to imply subjective dynamics that all subjects must

undergo in their formation as such. This approach provides a somewhat more sensible explanation for the psychological interest that castration motifs have for

readers and listeners of both genders and various cultures. Moreover, if castration is reread as a trauma necessary to socialization, subjectivity and sexual difference-a

difficult passage that is nonetheless a normalizing function-it

alters the more traditional Freudian readings of cultural objects such as Hindu myths. As I noted earlier, whereas Goldman tends to focus on the subversive, dangerous, and antisocial aspects of castration motifs in the epic, an alternative psychoanalytic reading might emphasize their allegorical value as a positive transformation that, in Lacanian terms, rewards the subject for his or her renunciation of the Imaginary dyadic narcissistic mirroring relation with the mother by welcoming the subject into the Symbolic order of law and language. Thus we might say that by attributing castration to both males and females as a necessary part of subjective and sexual formation and emphasizing its normalizing function, Lacan extracts a universal symbolic function out of what had been thought a solely masculine context. Another Lacanian and feminist insight that we can draw out of the Mbh is the possibility that-even if, according to Lacan, the phallus is the sole signifier of desire-it

is not necessarily the phallus in all its majestic plenitude. Just as

castration may be a positive normalizing function, desire may operate according to dynamics not obviously at play in the masculine Symbolic.

Gangii's erotic

attraction to Mahiibhisa after seeing him "fallen from his firmness" and

Damayanti's choice of dusty, sweaty, mortal Nala instead of perfectly virile and boundlessly puissant gods suggest dynamics of erotic attraction and female desire that contrast with more traditionally masculinist notions of what is attractive and

desirable. If desire is an unquenchable thirst that arises out of the lack that exists at the core of all subjects, and if subjective aspirations to completeness and coherence have tended to be read in a register that emphasizes phallic unity, these examples provide counterpoints suggesting that sometimes failure, lack, and vulnerability-recognition

of limitation, fragmentation, and mortality-can be as

desirable as the phallic illusion of completeness and might. In the instances of transsexuality in the epic and the "wish to be female" that both Bose and Kakar discern in their clinical work, too, we see a desire for something other than phallic unity, a desire for the positive feminine presence that the masculine symbolic must deny in order to construct itself as such-we

see

some recognition of the jouissance that lies beyond the phallus and the existential possibilities opened up by claiming and embodying what is Other, what is lacking, what is abjected. Furthermore, if men supposedly have the phallus and desire women for not having but being it, perhaps the examples of Ganga and Damayanti might in turn suggest women who are complete in and of themselves, who are possessed of their own plenitude, and rather find vulnerability attractive in men. This returns us, yet again, to an interrogation of the premise upon which Lacan's notion of the phallus rests. Why must subjective aspirations to wholeness and completion be symbolically signified by the phallus? Why must Man be attributed as having and Woman lacking? Is not the pregnant belly just as powerful a signifier of plenitude, even excess? If, as Freud says, women want a child as the phallus they are denied, could not, on the contrary, men desire the phallus as the pregnant plenitude they are denied?

The answer, of course, comes back to power-who cultural production and representation-and,

controls the means of

at least within the scope of this

project, it would be vain to attempt to answer that "why?" here. Of course the symbolic economy, in another world or possible future, could be reversed-there is certainly nothing essential about woman that is lacking. It is how otherwise neutral, "natural" objects are charged, how otherwise indifferent relationships are valued, that determines the sexual and symbolic valences of acts, objects, and individuals. Without going into an etiology of it all, I simply want to suggest that the Mbh gives us tantalizing peeks of possible alternatives to what might otherwise seem stalwartly, univocally masculine.

An appropriate image on which to close is one we touched upon only briefly in the first chapter: Ganesa and his broken tusk, with which he is said to have written down the Mahabharata as Vyasa dictated it to him. The notion of Ganesa having written the Mbh with his broken tusk is a widespread and popular one, though it is not found in the Critical Edition or the Nilakantha Vulgate. It is, however, found in the first verse of Villi's Bharatham, the 1 4 century Tamil version of the epic,* and is the common explanation given around the Draupadi temples of South India.? Furthermore, it enjoys widespread currency in modem, urban Hinduism-a

Google search reveals over 200 websites that recount the story

of Ganesa breaking off his tusk to write the Mahabhgrata. How fitting-at within the context of this project-that

least

the Mbh should be written down with a

* Many thanks to Pradip Bhattacharya and Prema Nandakumar for helping to track down this source. t Personal communication, Alf Hiltebeitel.

broken tusk, a motif that to the psychoanalytic sensibility bespeaks fairly obvious castration symbolism. And how fitting, again within the context of this project, that the Mbh should be written down by Ganesa, who was created unilaterally by his mother to protect her from the male gaze as she is bathing, and whose head is cut off by his angry father who does not know him and suspects something improper between the two. Ganesa, whose head is then replaced with that of an elephant with an ambiguously phallic trunk-a trauma-who

recurrent reminder of that

is the son of an androgynous god and who is himself effeminate.

This story-or better, the tusk-has

taken on a life of its own over centuries

on the subcontinent and beyond: lacking in the Critical Edition and the Nilakantha Vulgate, then appearing as a southern medieval interpolation, diffusing throughout the oral traditions, and finally spreading throughout the far reaches of the worldwide web. It is a story that everyone knows, though few have any idea of its origins, and it is as much a part of Mbh lore as the plot and protagonists themselves. In its existence as such, as part of the living, breathing Mahabharata that continues to animate the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world, yet whose roots stretch back to antiquity, it is an evocative image on which to close. Concluding with a pause on this story will also, I hope, reaffirm what I have demonstrated throughout this dissertation: that approaching the Mbh with dual Lacanian and feminist sensibilities holds great promise for enriching our understanding of it. Bruce Sullivan recounts the story as follows:

Brahma, the Guru of the World, appeared before Vyasa, who was pondering the problem of transmitting his poetic composition. Vyasa said, "Oh Lord, I have created this highly venerated poem in which I have proclaimed the profundity of the Veda and other topics, 0 Brahma." Vyasa went on to describe his poem at length as containing almost everything, but he confessed no writer could be found on earth for his composition. Brahma told him to think of Ganesa for the role of scribe. Vyasa thought of Ganesa, and when the god appeared, asked him to write down the composition Vyasa had in his mind as he recited it. Ganesa agreed to do so, as long as he never had to stop writing, a condition to which Vygsa agreed as long as Ganesa would not write anything he did not understand. They agreed to their mutual conditions, and the recitation and writing began. But Vyasa, "/or the sake of diversion, mysteriously wove knots into the composition." Sauti the bard commented that because of the knotty verses, "even the omniscient Ganesa would ponder for a moment, and all the while Vygsa created many more verses." As a result, he said, "even today, no one is able to penetrate that closely woven mass of verses because of the profundity of their hidden meaning." [1990: 11-12; italics mine]* T h e first verse of t h e Villi Mahabharata, i n which t h e broken tusk makes it into t h e textual sources, reads as follows, t h e translation by Prema Nandakumar: To make it firm as the fifth along with the four Vedas On this sea-girt earth When the Mahgbharata was spoken by the King of sages Who possess unfading [wisdom] and Truth, Vinayakat wrote with the Mount Meru As the cadjan leaf, And his own tusk as the sharp stylus. I salute him with shoreless love. Again, it is interesting that a tusk, which t o t h e psychoanalytically-inclined suggests a phallic symbol-castrated,

n o less-should

b e used t o write t h e Mbh. If

we choose t o continue with this vein of interpretation, it would lead us t o a n intriguing symbolic linkage between t h e phallus a n d language-particularly written language as opposed to spoken, o r t o reference Saussure, langue as opposed to parole. And not only would it evoke t h e phallic structure a n d shaping

* The original passage can be found in the Nilakantha Vulgate, 1.55-87, and also the Critical Edition's vol. I, Appendix I, passage no. 1. Another name for Ganesa.

of signification, it would also re-introduce the Law-of-the-Father into the signifying, writing process. Ganesa breaking off his own tusk to write the Mbh would be a sort of self-castration, especially with as imposing a figure as Vyiisa standing over him. As we have seen, Vyasa occupies a powerful paternal function in the epic, as the "biological" father and grandfather of the protagonists, the author of the epic, and recurrent arbiter and interpreter of dharma throughout it. In this image, then, if we focus on the paternal function and the Law-of-the-Father, we can see an evocation of the castration that makes the subject, genders the subject, and introduces the subject into the Symbolic order of law and language. Yet the gendering-and

the separation from the mother-is

precarious. We see

an unstable, ambiguous masculinity in the character of Ganesa: widely-adored, but a mama's boy, unusual among gods for having no consort, and a great lover of sweets-the

big belly suggestive of an overconsumption that is the hallmark of

unsatisfied, unfulfilled, eternally unquenchable desire. Vyasa, too, is by no means an uncomplicated figure. As I noted above, he is a sort of shadow patriarch of the epic, both character and author, arbiter of dharma yet personification of its anomalies and imperfections, both inside and outside the name-of-the-father as bastard and ascetic, yet father and grandfather to the epic's protagonists who carry another's name. The knots that Vyasa weaves into the composition evoke the tangled knots of the Lacanian symptom, clusters of meaning, symbol, and representation in which the origins are lost and then reemerge in different forms, as signifying strands from an indefinable nexus of words, images, and acts.

Moreover, Vy%a weaves these knots just for fun,

"diversionw-evoking the notion of lila, divine playfulness in the act of creation, that stands in stark contrast to the trauma and unthinkable devastation of the epic's nightmare Real. Though the knots referred to in the text are of a more linguistic natureknotty verses, impenetrable riddles, and obscure grammar-Woman,

I would

suggest, is, in a psychoanalytic sense, one of these knots, a tangled cluster of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, woven into the text by the author but then taking on a life of her own within it. If we continue with the textile metaphor, in the dharmic, masculine right half of the Mbh-the

side presented to the world, the

side that faces up, the side onto which images are woven that convey meaning and order and intent-she

presents the image of the good wife, loyal, subservient. She

makes sense, fulfills a role in the Symbolic economy. In the left half of the Mbhthe tangled backside of the tapestry where disparate images are connected, where threads cross each other and are lost-the

unified image disintegrates and the

feminine becomes a flux of disparate currents of desire, agency, and vengeance. On the right side, she is controlled, bounded, and fits harmoniously within a cosmic order predicated on male prerogative, purity, and rectitude. On the left she eludes the dharmic grasp, reveals its holes and inadequacies, teases out its contradictions. I could not hope to paint one portrait of Woman in the Mbh, or summarize the feminine subtext that she represents, but what I hope to have done is suggest the various possibilities that exist for our understanding of the left half of the epic and offer some strategies for insight into it.

Returning to our image of the writing, or weaving, of the Mbh, Woman is not a part of this portrait of Ganesa writing as Vyasa dictates-she

is outside the

writing process, the phallic structure of signification, the production of the dharmic narrative and its articulation in language-but

not far from it. Or in a

wonderful image of Biardeau's, conjecturing what the writing of the Mbh might have looked like, "I would imagine a father, a son, and a maternal uncle of the father or son working together, and, in a comer out of the way, just beyond voice range, a woman, wife of the father, mother of the son, and sister of the uncle" [Hiltebeitel 2001: 165, citing Biardeau and ~kterfalvi1985: 271. Woman may be outside the means of cultural and symbolic production, but she is intrinsically implicated in it. Furthermore, if we wish to see Woman outside, but framing, the linguistic and symbolic production of the Mbh, we might see her in Sarasvati, goddess of knowledge and music, who is invoked at the beginning of every one of the Mbh's eighteen books. She is the spectral mother completing the triad of the Mbh's production, the muse to whom the male authors look for inspiration and approval. She is also Vac, the older Vedic goddess of speech. The male author(s) and scribe(s) may be stewards and arbiters of langue, but the goddess reigns over parole. If we were to map this division onto the gender dynamics in the Mbh writ large, we might say that the written word, produced and controlled by the masculine, permanent and fixed, is akin to dharma, or the Law-of-the-Father, that seeks to stabilize meaning, order signification, and manage unruly desires. Speech, somewhat more abstractly in an epic that is written, is all that which is evanescent-it

has the power to do, perform, and it has lasting traces and effects,

but it is elusive, hard to pin down, intangible. This evokes Woman as I have attempted to chart her in the Mbh, placed, perhaps, outside the privileged sites of law and language production, but nonetheless framing, infusing, acting upon, and driving them. More broadly, it is the left half of the Mbh that is fluid where the right seeks stability, that slips where the right fixes, that recedes where the right establishes. What Lacan offers us is a frame for looking at both right and left, a theoretical filter for distinguishing between the Symbolic that attempts to order meaning and the signifying process, the Real that floods those boundaries with immediate experience, and the Imaginary that seeks to mitigate between them. With a Lacanian analytic framework we can discern Woman in the epic as the gaze that sustains and reinforces the male subjects as they write and legislate, the mirror in which their identities and activities are reflected, the disavowed desire that drives them, and the capacity for jouissance that inspires them-a

fictive

Symbolic construct that may exist only in their own minds but as such is as Real as the flesh-and-bloodwomen that surround them. If we look at this portrait of Vyasa and Ganesa through a Lacanian framework we see Woman, hovering just outside the frame, obliquely to the left.

Appendix I - Genealogy -.

, ,

Ganga

,

=

-

;~arti

,

~ h i s m a Citrahgada

Gandhan =

/

Dhrtarsstra

Kunti = Pandu = Madri

Vidura

(Dharma)(Vayu) (Indra)(Asvins) Duryodhana 99 sons

Yudhisthin Bhima buns Nakula Sahadeva

Appendix I1 - Summary of Narrative King ~ a m t a n umarries the Goddess Ganga and they have a son Devavrata. After some time Ganga leaves ~ a m t a n uwho , then falls in love with Satyavati, a daughter of a fisher king. Satyavati's father agrees to give Satyavati in marriage on one condition: that her son(s) be king. ~ a m t a n urefuses this condition, but when Devavrata learns of it he goes to the king himself and agrees. Not only does this require Devavrata renouncing the throne for ~amtanu'ssons, though; it means his renouncing having children altogether, for the king notes that future sons might not abide by their father's vow. Devavrata then takes the awesome vow of renouncing conjugal pleasures and offspring altogether, earning him the name "Bhisma". ~ a m t a n uand Satyavati have two sons, Citriingada and Vicitravirya. Citrangada is killed in battle before he marries. Bhisma then abducts three princesses of Kasi as wives for Vicitravirya, letting one go whose affections were committed elsewhere (Amba). Vicitravirya dies before either of his wives conceive, and Satyavati, concerned for the continuance of the line, asks Bhisma to father sons upon the widows according to the law of the levirate. Bhisma refuses due to his vow, and Satyavati then reveals that she had a premarital son, Vyasa, a great sage (and author of the epic), whom she will summon to father sons upon her daughters-inlaw. Vyasa appears and agrees to this, but when he goes to the first bride, she closes her eyes at his appearance and Vyasa thus curses her son to be born blind. The second bride blanches at Vpsa's appearance and her son is cursed to be pale. Satyavati requests a third round, but the bride sends a servant girl in her stead, who pleasures Vyasa with skill and grace. He blesses her child to be a perfect man. The three children born are thus Dhrtariistra, the eldest but unable to rule because he is blind, Piindu who, though pale, is able to rule, and Vidura, perfect in every way but, because he was born from a lowly womb, can only ever be a trusted advisor and minister to the king, but never king himself. Dhrtarastra marries Gandhari, who blindfolds her own eyes out of deference to her husband and bears him one hundred sons, the eldest of whom is Duryodhana. Pandu marries Kunti and Madri, but because of a curse, must have his sons fathered upon his wives by various gods. Upon Kunti, Yudhisthira is fathered by Dharma, Bhima by Viiyu, and Arpna by Indra. Upon Madri, the twins Nakula and Sahadeva are fathered by the Asvins. Shortly after this, Pandu succumbs to the curse by having sex with Madri and dies. She mounts the pyre with him, and Kunti takes the five brothers, known as the Psndavas, to be raised at the court that Dhrtarastra now rules. At court the boys excel in their studies but are the object of intense jealousy by Duryodhana, who plots to send them out of town and bum them alive in the lacquer house in which they are lodged. Through Vidura, they learn of this plot and escape, but with Kunti go into hiding disguised as Brahmins. After some

time they learn that the daughter of king Drupada, the princess Draupadi, is holding a svayahvara (bridegroom choice). The winner of the archery contest will take her as a bride. The Pandavas go and are smitten by her beauty, and Aquna easily wins the contest, still disguised as a Brahmin. When they return home with Draupadi, Kunti, who thinks they have returned with alms, tells them to share whatever they have gotten equally among themselves-and Draupadi thus becomes the common wife of the five brothers. Their true identities are then revealed to their father-in-law Drupada and a powerful alliance is forged. When Dhrtarastra and his sons (the Kauravas) learn that not only are the Pandavas alive, but now in a wealthy and powerful alliance, they offer the Pandavas a part of the kingdom-the rugged Khandava tract, to rule. The Pandavas go there and build a splendid capital, Indraprastha, that outdoes even Hastinapura, the capital of the Kauravas. Shortly after they settle there, Aquna enters the room where Yudhisthira is with Draupadi and, due to a pact the brothers had made when they married herjointly, must leave for twelve years. He begins a pilgrimage of sacred fords during which he has many adventures (amorous and otherwise), and returns with a new wife, Qsna's sister Subhadra. They become so prosperous and powerful that Yudhisthira decides to perform the rite that will make him universal monarch. Their ascendancy seems complete. But Duryodhana, after a visit to Indraprastha, is so envious that he hatches a plot , brother, to ensure the Pandavas' downfall. Yudhisthira with ~ a k u n i Gindhari's and his brothers are invited for a "friendly" family dicing match, which, though suspicious, they cannot refuse. ~ a k u n is i a master gambler and easily out-tricks Yudhisthira, who finally bets away not only his kingdom and riches, but also his brothers, himself, and finally Draupadi. Draupadi is then ordered into the assembly hall for the Kauravas to complete their triumph, but she refuses, sending back a question that calls into doubt the validity of Yudhisthira's final bet. Finally she is dragged in by her hair and humiliated before the assembly; one of Duryodhana's brothers attempts to strip her but miraculously new cloths appear as her are being ripped away. She continues to pose her question, which the assembly of elders cannot answer. Finally, spooked by inauspicious omens that begin appearing, Dhrtarastra calls an end to the match, restoring to the Pandavas their kingdom and freedom, and allowing them to return to their capital. But Duryodhana will not let them go, and challenges them to a final round by which the loser must go into exile for twelve years, and spend a thirteenth in disguise. If they are recognized in that thirteenth year, they must return again to the forest for twelve years. Yudhisthira cannot refuse the challenge, plays, and loses. Amidst great mourning, the Pandavas and Draupadi depart for the forest. While they are in exile, Arjuna leaves his brothers and Draupadi again-this time of his own initiative-to go procure celestial weapons so that they can win back their kingdom after the thirteenth year. During this time he battles with ~ i v a ,

spends time in his "father" Indra's heavenly court, and has various other adventures. The other four brothers and Draupadi while their time away in the forest, also having numerous adventures. The Pandavas, reunited for their thirteenth year in disguise, decide to go to the kingdom of the Matsyas, ruled by King Viraw. They each choose their disguises: Yudhisthira will be a Brahmin and dicemaster, Bhima a cook and wrestler, Arjuna a transvestite/eunuch and dancing teacher, the twins horse and cow-tenders, and Draupadi a hairdresser and ladies' maid. The year passes fairly uneventfully except for Draupadi being harassed and abused by General Kicaka, the queen's brother. He desires her, but when she resists he publicly beats and humiliates her in Vir@a's assembly hall. Finally Draupadi schemes with Bhima to entice Kicaka to a late-night rendezvous-Bhima is waiting there dressed as Draupadi and beats Kicaka to a bloody pulp. When Kicaka's body is discovered, Draupadi narrowly avoids being executed or expelled herself. But the year draws to a close, and one day the Kauravas plan a cattle raid on the Matsya kingdom, suspecting they with find the Pandavas there. Ar~unacomes to the rescue, and his disguise is revealed just as the term expires-he singlehandedly routes the Kauravas, and the Pfindavas prepare to demand their kingdom back. Duryodhana, however, refuses to return them their kingdom, and though mediation and diplomacy are attempted, events begin to crescendo towards war. Broad alliances are formed on either side, and the looming battle involves all the kings, princes, and warriors of the land. As the lines have been drawn, the last attempts at diplomacy fail, and the two sides face each other across the battlefield, Aquna's resolve crumbles as he faces the prospect of having to kill his cousins, friends, teachers, and elders. At this point, Aguna's dear friend and charioteer Qsna, who is also (a) god, incites him to fight in the famous Bhagavad-Gita, revealing his divinity and the cosmic meaning behind this confrontation. With Arjuna's resolve now set, the battle begins. It lasts for eighteen bloody days-as many days as there are books in the Mbhand at the end of it only the Psndavas, Qsna, and Satyaki remain. On the Kaurava side, only three remain: Asvatthaman, Q p a , and Qtavarman. Bhisma has been killed (though he remains laying on his bed of arrows expounding dharma for an inordinate amount of time), all of Draupadi's relatives have been decimated, as well as her five sons, the hundred sons of Dhrtarastra-Duryodhana was the last to go in a duel with Bhima-and the Pandavas' own brother, Karna, a premarital son of Kunti by the Sun god, unbeknownst to them as such when Aquna slew him. In the aftermath of the battle, Asvatthgman-son of the preceptor Drona-releases a cosmic weapon into the wombs of the Pgndava women, killing the one remaining heir who was in Aquna's daughter-in-law's womb. Luckily Krsna intervenes, and with his divine powers is able to resuscitate the child.

After the "victory," the Pandavas return to rule a decimated kingdom, and Yudhisthira repeatedly wishes that he could give up the kingship altogether. Dhrtarastra, Gandhari, Kunti, and Vidura all leave to retire to the forest, where they are all killed in a forest fire. Krsna's clan kills each other off in a drunken brawl, and Krsna, too, dies. After some time the Pandavas decide that it is time for them to retire, too. They leave the kingdom in the hands of their heir and begin their final pilgrimage to Mount Meru. As the Pandavas and Draupadi are climbing, each falls off, one by one, due to their respective faults. Only Yudhisthira is left, after passing a final test of dharma reaching heaven in his own body. There he sees everyone who was killed in happy, celestial forms, as well as his own dear brothers and Draupadi. He wants to ask Draupadi a final questionwe are not told what it was, he is never able to ask her, and the epic ends.

Bibliography -

Abel, Elizabeth, ed. 1997. Female Subjects i n Black and Wtite: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alper, Harvey, ed. 1989. Understanding Mantras. Albany: State University of New York Press. Althusser, Louis. 1969. For Marx. London: Verso. Austin,J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard Unviersity Press. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.

. 1974. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang. Bell, Catherine. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Bell, Susan Groag, and Mollie Schwartz Rosenhan. 1981. A Problem in Naming: Women Studies-Women's Studies? Signs:Journal of Women i n Culture and Society 6 , 3. Benjamin,Jessica. 1998. Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender i n Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Bhaktin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Biardeau, Madeleine. 1964. Theorie de la connaissance et philosophie de la parole dans le brahmanism classique. Paris, Mouton.

. 1972. Clefs Pour La Pen&e Hindoue. Paris: Seghers. . 1981. Etudes de Mythologie Hindoue. Paris: Publications de 19Ecole Francaise d'Extr6me Orient.

. 1985. Le Mahdharata, Limes I 2 V, Vol. 1. Paris: Flammarion.

.

1986. Le Mahabh&-ata,Limes Via XVIII, Vol. 2. Paris: Flammarion.

.

1989. Hinduism: The Anthropology of a Civilization, trans. Richard Nice. New York: Oxford University Press.

. 2002. Le Ma?uib/uirata: Un &it fondateur du brahmanisme et son interpretation, Vols. 1 and 2. Paris: Editions de Seuil. Bordo, Susan. 1994. Reading the Male Body. The Male Body, ed. Laurence Goldstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Bose, Mandakranta, ed. 2000. Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modem India. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Douglas. 1990. The Secret of the Three Cities: A n Introduction to Hindu h k t a Tantrism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Robert, ed. 1991. Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God. Albany: State University of New York Press. Buhle, Mary Jo. 1998. Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Caldwell, Sarah. 1996. Bhagavati: Ball of Fire. D M Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press.

. 1999. Oh Temfying Mother: Sexuality, Violence, and the Worship of the Goddess Kah. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Carstairs, G. Morris. 1961. The Twice-Born:A Study ofHigh-Caste Hindus. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. Language and Myth, trans. Susanne Langer. New York: Dover Publications. Cixous, Helen and Catherine Clement. 1986. The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clement, Catherine. 1994. Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O'Driscoll and Dierdre M. Mahoney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clifford,James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Coburn, Thomas. 1991. Encounten'ng the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahdtmya and a Study of Its Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press.

. 1996. Devi: The Great Goddess. Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coehn, J. M., trans. 1957. The Life of Saint Teresa ofAvila by Herself. London: Penguin Books. Collins, Alfred and Prakash Desai. 1999. Selfhood in the Indian Context: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Header i n Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, ed. T.G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffery Kripal. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

. 2000. Dancing with Prakriti: The Samkhyan Goddess as Pativrata and Guru. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Copjec, Joan. 1989. Female Spectatorship. Camera Obscwa (20/21).

. 1995. The Symbolic Without the Father.

Lacanian Ink (10).

Cornell, Drucilla. 1997. Where Love Begins: Sexual Difference and the Limit of the Masculine Symbolic. Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman, ed. Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin. New York: Routledge. Crimshaw,Jean. 1986. Philosophy and Feminist Thinking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine:Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Culler, Jonathan. 1976. Ferdinand de Saussure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. De Saussure, Ferdinand. 1986. Course i n General Linguistics. Chicago: Open Court. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Signature, Event, Context. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Desjarlais, Robert. 1992. Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Devereux, George. 1951. The Oedipal Situation and Its Consequences in the Epics of Ancient India. Samiksa, 5/ 1. Dhand, Arti. 2000. Poison, snake, the sharp edge of a razor: Yet the highest of Gurus: Defining Female Sexuality in the Mahgbharata. Ph.D. Dissertation, McGill. Doane,Janice L., ed. 1992. From Klein to Kristeva: PsychoanalyticFerninism and the Search for the 'Good Enough' Mother. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dokou, Christina. 1997. Androgyny's Challenge to the 'Law of the Father': Don Juan as Epic in Reverse. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 30 (3). Doniger, Wendy. 2000. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1999a. Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1999b. When a Lingam is Just a Good Cigar: Psychoanalysis and Hindu Sexual Fantasies. Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, ed. T.G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffery Kripal. Delhi: Oxford University Press. . 1997. Myths of Transsexual Masquerades in Ancient India. India and Beyond: Aspects of Literature, Meaning, Ritual and Thought, ed. Dick van der Meij. Kegan Paul International.

. 1996. Saran@/Samjfi%:The Sun and the Shadow. Dai: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. . 1985. Tales of Sex and Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1980. Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. .

1973. ~ i u a The : Erotic Ascetic. New York: Oxford University Press.

Doniger, Wendy and Sudhir Kakar, trans. 2002. Kamasutra. New York: Oxford University Press. Doniger, Wendy and Brian K. Smith, trans. 1991. The Laws of Manu. London: Penguin. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: A n Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Dumizil, Georges. 1952. Dieux des Indo-Eur*ns. France.

Paris: Presses Universitaires de

. 1968. Myth et ~popek,1: L'ldeologie des trois fonctions datzs les &@ks des peuples indo-eurofhns. Paris: Gallimard. . 1970. Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1973. Destiny of a King, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

.

1978. D&ses latines et mythes vediques. New York: Arno Press.

Dutt, M. N., trans. 2001. Mahdbharata (translated into English with original Sanskrit text), vols. 1-9, ed. Ishvar Chandra. Delhi: Parimal Publications. Eck, Diana. 1996a. Darian: Seeing the Divine Image i n India. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 1996b. Ganga: The Goddess Ganges in Hindu Sacred Topography. D M : Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1958. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Erndl, Kathleen. 1996. ~eranvali:The Mother Who Possesses. DezC Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press.

. 2000. Is Shakti Empowering for Women? Reflections on Feminism and the Hindu Goddess. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press.

Evans, Dylan. 1996. Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

. 1996. Reading seminars I and 11: Lacan's return to Freud. Albany: State University of New York Press. Flueckiger,Joyce Burkhalter and Laurie J. Sears, eds. 1991. Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances i n South and Southeast Asia. Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books.

. 1977. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan.

New York: Vintage

Books.

. 1978.

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books.

Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon Books.

. 1918. Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Vintage Books. . 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

. 1930. Civilization and Its Discontents. James Strachey, trans. and ed., New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

. 1978. The Question of Lay Analysis, ed. and trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Gallop,Jane. 1982. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

. 1985. Reading Lacan.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

. 1988. Thinking Through the Body. New York: Columbia University Press. . 1991. Juliet Mitchell and the Human Sciences: Lacan and Feminism: Strange Bedfellows? Lacan &r' the Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Ghosh, Jayatri. 2000. Satyavati: The Matriarch of the Mahabharata. Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modem India, ed. Mandakranta Bose. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Robert. 1978. Fathers, Sons and Gurus: Oedipal Conflict in the Sanskrit Epics. Journal of Indian Philosophy (6):

. 1980. Ramah Sahalaksmanah: Psychological and Literary Aspects of the Composite Hero in Valmiki's Ramayana. Journal of Indian Philosophy (8). . 1993. Transsexualism, Gender, and Anxiety in Traditional India. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 113/3. . 1999. Karma, Guilt, and Buried Memories: Public Fantasy and Private Reality in Traditional India," Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, ed. T. G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffery Kripal. Delhi, Oxford University Press. Gonda,Jan. 1965. Change and Continuity in Indian Religion. The Hague: Mouton.

. 1966.

Loka: World and Heaven in the Veda. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company.

. 1969. Eye and Gaze in the Veda. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. Greer, Patricia Meredith. 2002. Karna Within the Net of the Mahibhirata: Reading the Itihisa as Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia. Gross, Rita. 2000. Is the Goddess a Feminist? Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

. 1990. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge. Gupta, Samjukta Gombrich. 2000. The Goddess, Women, and Their Rituals in Hinduism. Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modem India, ed. Mandakranta Bose. New York: Oxford University Press. Haberman, David. 1994.Journey t11roug11the TwelveForests: A n Encounter with Krishna. New York: Oxford University Press.

Handelman, Don and David Shulman. 1997. God Inside Out: &a's Game ofDice. New York: Oxford University Press. Harlan, Lindsey. 1996. Sati: The Story of Godavari. Dew Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hartnack, Christiane. 2001. Psychoanalysis in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hawley,John Stratton. 1996. The Goddess in India. Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hess, Linda. 2001. Lovers' Doubts: Questioning the Tulsi Ramayan. Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition, ed. Paula Richman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hiltebeitel, Alf. 1980a. ~ i v athe , Goddess, and the Disguises of the Pandavas and Draupadi. History of Religions, 20/ 1, 2.

. 1908b. Draupadi's Garments.

Indo-IranianJournal 22.

. 1981a. Mahabharata. Abingdon Dictionary ofLiving Religions, ed. Keith Crim. Nashville: Abingdon Press. . 1981b. Draupadi's Hair. Autor de la deesse hindoue, ed. Madeline Biardeau. Purusartha 5.

. 1988. The Cult ofDraupadi. Mythologies: From &gee to Kumetra, Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1990. The Ritual of Battle: Knshna in the Mahabharata. Albany, State University of New York Press. . 1991. The Cult of Draupadi: On Hindu Ritual and the Goddess, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1994. Epic Studies: Classical Hinduism in the Mahsbhsrata and Ramayana. Annals: Amrtamahotsava Supplementary Volume, Vol. LXXIV. Poona: B.O.R. Institute. . 1998a. Empire, Invasion, and India's National Epics. International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2, 3.

. 1998b. Hair Like Snakes and Mustached Brides: Crossed Gender in an Indian Folk Cult. Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara Miller. State University of New York Press.

. 1999. Rethinking India s' Oral

and Classical Epics: Draupadi Among Rajputs, Muslims, and Dalits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 2000.

Draupadi's Question. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press.

. 2000b. The Primary Process of the Hindu Epics.

InternationalJournal of

Hindu Studies 4, 3.

. 2001a. Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader's Guide to the Education of the Dharma King. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 2001b.

Bhisma's Sources. Vidy&navavandanam: Essays in Honor of Asko Parpola, ed. Klaus Karttunen and Petteri Koskikallio. Studia Orientalia 94. Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society.

. 2002. Krsna and the Death of Kama. Unpublished. Hiltebeitel, Alf and Kathleen Erndl. 2000. Introduction: Writing Goddesses, Goddesses Writing, and Other Scholarly Concerns. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Humes, Cynthia. 1996. Vindhyavgsini: Local Goddess yet Great Goddess. Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press.

. 2000. Is the Deui Mahatmya a Feminist Scripture? Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Ian, Marcia. 1993. Rememben'ng the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism and the Fetish. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985a. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

. 1985b. This Sex Wzic/iIs Not One, trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

. 1991. The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine. The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. . 1993. Je, T u Nous, trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge. . 1996. ILove to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge. Jarrow, E. H. Rick. 1999. The Letter of the Law and Its Discourse of Power: Kama and the Controversy of the Mahiibhsrata. Journal of Vaisnava Studies 8, 1. Johnson, Barbara. 1998. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

. 1980. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kakar, Sudhir. 1978. The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of CI~iIdhoodand Society in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

. 1982. Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions. Delhi: Oxford University Press. . 1985. Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Cultures. International Review of Psychoanalysis 12.

. 1989. The Maternal Feminine in Indian Psychoanalysis. International Review of Psychoanalysis 16.

. 1990. Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1991. The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1999. Clinical Work and Cultural Imagination. Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, ed. T.G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffery J. Kripal. Delhi, Oxford University Press. Kakar, Sudhir and John Munder Ross. 1987. Tales of Love, Sex, and Danger. New York: Basil Blackwell. Karve, Iravati. 1974. Yuganta: the End of an Epoch. Poona: Sangam Press.

Kessler, Suzanne. 1998. Lessons from the Intersexed. New Bmnswick: Rutgers Unviersity Press. Kinsley, David. 1989. The Goddesses'Miwor: Visions of the Divine from East and West. Albany: State University of New York Press.

. 1996. Kali: Blood and Death Out of Place. Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press.

.

1997. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahdvidyds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rondos, Vivienne. 1986. Images of the Fierce Goddess and Portrayals of Hindu Women. Contributions to Indian Sociology 20. Kripal,Jeffrey. 1995. Kali's ChiId: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrislma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 2000. A Garland of Talking Heads for the Goddess: Some Autobiographical and Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Western Kali. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press.

. 2001. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom :Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krips, Henry. 1999. Fetish: An Erotics of Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. .

1986. Stabat Mater. The Kristeva Reader, ed. Tori Moi. New York: Columbia University Press. Kurtz, Stanley. 1992. All the Mothers Are One: Hindu India and the Cultural Reshaping of Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press.

. 1999. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Hindu Child Rearing: A Critique. Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, ed. T.G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffery J. Kripal. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

. 2000. In Our Image: The Feminist Vision of the Hindu Goddess. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1973. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

. 1977. kcrits, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. . 1978. The Seminar ofJacques Lacan: Book 11, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

. 1982. Feminine Sexuality:Jacques Lacan and the ~ c o l Freudienne, e ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: W. W. Norton and Pantheon Books. Leupin, Alexandre, ed. 1991. Lacan and the Human Sciences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lkvi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobsen and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Basic Books. Lipner, Julius. 1994. Hindus: Their Beliefs and Practices. New York: Routledge. Lord, Alfred. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. MacCannell,Juliet Flower. 1994. Love outside the limits of the law. Lacan and Love. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marglin, Frkd6rique. 1985. Female Sexuality in the Hindu World. Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa Atkinson, Constance Buchanan, and Margaret Miles. Boston: Beacon Press.

. 1985. Wives of the God-King: The Devadasis of Puri. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Masson,J. Moussaieff. 1980. The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

. 1999. Sex and Yoga: Psychoanalysis and the Indian Religious Experience. Vishnu on Freud's Desk: A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism, ed. T.G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffery J. Kripal. Delhi, Oxford University Press.

McDerrnott, Rachel Fell. 2001. Singzng to the Goddess: Poems to K d i and Umdfrom Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press.

. 1996. Epilogue: The Western Kali. D M : Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. McKean, Lise. 1996. Bharat Mata: Mother India and Her Militant Matriots. Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mellard,James. 1997. The Other Desire. Clinical Studies: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 3, No. 1. Menon, Usha and Richard Shweder. 2000. Power in Its Place: Is the Great Goddess of Hinduism a Feminist? Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Meyer,Johann Jakob. 1930. Sexual Life In Ancient India. Vols. I and 11. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company. Mitchell, Juliet. 1974. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Pantheon Books. Moorjani, Angela. 1994. Fetishism, Gender Masquerade, and the Mother-Father Fantasy. Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Future of Gender, ed. Joseph H . Smith and Afaf M. Mahfouz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Morel, Genevieve. 2000. Psychoanalytical Anatomy. Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl. Duke University Press. Muktananda, Swami. 1971. Play of Consciousness. New York: SYDA Foundation. Nabokov, Isabelle. 2000. Religion Against the Self: A n Ethnography of Tamil Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press. Narasimhan, Chakravarthi, trans. and ed. 1965. The MaJ~abhcWata.New York: Columbia University Press. Narayan, R. K., trans. and ed. 1972. The Ram&ya?za.New Delhi: Penguin Books. Narayanan, Uma. 1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge.

Narayanan, Vasudha. 1996. Sri: Giver of Fortune, Bestower of Grace. Dezk Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press.

. 1999. Brimming with Bhakti, Embodiments of Shakti: Devotees, Deities, Performer, Reformers, and Other Women of Power in the Hindu Tradition. Feminism and World Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma and Kathleen Young. Albany: State University of New York Press. Neumann, Erich. 1955. The Great Mother: A n Analysis of the Archetype. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nuckolls, Charles W. 1996. The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1981. Medusa's Hair: A n Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

. 1984. Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1990. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation i n Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olivelle, Patrick, trans. 1996. The Upanisads. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oliver, Kelly, ed. 2000. French Feminism Reader. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Pintchman, Tracy. 2000. Is the Hindu Goddess Tradition a Good Resource for Western Feminism? Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Quint, David. 1993. Epic and Empire: Politics and Genen'c Form from Virg1l to Milton. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Ramanujan, A. K. 1983. The Indian Oedipus. Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes and Lowell Edmunds. Garland Press.

. 1991. Repetition in the Mahabharata. Essays on the Mahabharata, ed. Arvind Sharma. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Roland, Alan. 1978. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Personality Development in India. Samiksa 32.

. 1988. In Search of the Self i n India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Roland, Alan. 1991. The Spiritual and the Magic-Cosmic in Indian Patients in Psychoanalytic Therapy. Journal of the Psychology of Religion 1. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Sax, William S. 2002. Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance i n the P w a v a Lila of Garliwal. New York: Oxford University Press. Schimmel, Annemarie. 1999. My Soul is a Woman: TheFeminine i n Islam, trans. Susan Ray. New York: Continuum. Shalini Shah. 1995. The Making of Womanhood: Gender Relations i n the Mafiabhdrata. New Delhi: Manohar. Sharma, Arvind. 1980. Textual Studies i n Hinduism. New Delhi: Manohar. Sharma, Arvind, ed. 1988. Sati: Historical and Phenomenological Essays. Delhi: Molital Bandarsas. Sharma, Arvind and Kathleen Young, eds. 1999. Feminism and World Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press. Shaw, Miranda. 1994. Passionate Enlightenment: Women i n Tantric Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

. 2000. Is Vajrayogini a Feminist? A Tantric Buddhist Case Study. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Sheperdson, Charles. 2000. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Sherma, Rita DasGupta. 2000. 'Sa HarnÑ Am She': Woman As Goddess. Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Shulman, David. 1980. Tamil Temple Myths: Saen'fice and Divine Marriage i n the South Indian Saiva Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shulman, David and Galit Hasan-Rokem. 1996. Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shulman, David and Guy Stroumsa, eds. 2002. Self and Self-transformationin the History of Religions. New York: Oxford University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge. Smith, Joe. 1991. Arguing With Lacan: Ego Psychology and Language. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Mary Carol. 1991. Epic Parthenogenesis. Essays on the Mahabharata, ed. Arvind Sharma. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, trans. and ed. 1995. Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Maheswata Devi. New York: Routledge. Spratt, Philip. 1966. Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psycho-Analytic Study. Bombay: Manaktalas. Sprengnether, Madelon. 1990. The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Staal, Frits. 1996. Ritual and Mantras: Rules Without Meaning. Delhi: Molital Banarsidass. Strenski, Ivan. 1987. Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth Century History: Cassirer, LhiStrauss, and Malinowski. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press. Sukthankar, V. S. 1957. On the Meaning of the Mahdbhdrata. Bombay: Asiatic Society of Bombay. Sullivan, Bruce. 1990. IQ-sna Dvaipayana Vyasa and the Mahabharata: a new interpretation. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. 2000. Real and Imagined Goddesses: A Debate. In Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl. New York: New York University Press. Sutherland, Sally. 1989. Sita and Draupadi: Aggressive Behavior and Female RoleModels in the Sanskrit Epics. Journal of the American Oriental Society 109. Sutton, Nicholas. 2000. Religious Doctrines in the Mahabhdrata. Delhi: Molital Banarsidass. Tardo, Emma. 1996. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thapar, Romila. 1992. I n t ~ e t i n g E a r l yIndia. New York: Oxford University Press. Tokunaga, Muneo. 1994. Machine-readable text of the Mahaabhaarata based on the Poona Critical Edition. First revised version. Kyoto. Trawick, Margaret. 1990. Notes on Love in a TamilFamily. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, Victor. 1987. The Anthropology of Perfarmance. New York: PAJ Publications. van Buitenen, J.A.B., trans. 1981. The B h a g a v a d p in the Mahabharata. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , trans. and ed. 1973. The Mahabharata, Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , trans. and ed. 1975. The Mahibhirata, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , trans. and ed. 1978. The Mahabharata, Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vanita, Ruth and Saleem Kidwai, eds. 2000. Same-sex love in India: readingsfrom literature and history. New York: St. Martin's Press. Verhaeghe, Paul. 1999. Does the Woman Exist?From Freud's Hysteric to Lacan's Feminine, trans. Marc du Ry. New York: Other Press. Warner, Marina. 1976. Alone Of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Random House. White, David Gordon. 1996. The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wright, Elizabeth, ed. 1992. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Cambridge: Blackwell. Wulff, Donna M. 1996. Radha: Consort and Conqueror of Krishna. In Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John Stratton Hawley and Donna Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yocum, Glenn. 1977. The Goddess in a Tamil ~ a i v aDevotional Text, Manikkavacakr's Tiruvacakam. Journal of the American Academy of 'Religion45: K372.

Zizek, Slavoj. 1994. Otto Weininger, O r 'Woman Doesn't Exist.' Lacan and Love. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

. 1995. Woman is one of the names-of-the-father.

Lacanian Ink 10.

. 1999. "Femininity between goodness and act." Lacanian Ink 14.