RitusaMhaaraM - Posted from Sanskrit Digest
Rao Veluri (rveluri@smtpgate.anl.gov)
Tue, 18 Feb 97 14:45:50 CST
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RitusaMhaaraM varShaa -7
Sid Harth <bakula@earthlink.net> is a prolific and
familiar poster on the Sanskrit-Digest. I admire
his posts and often often enjoy his commentaries!
I am reproducing (of course with Sid's permission!) the
following slOka from the RitusaMhaaraM - posted by SH on
February 16, 1997.
RitusaMhaaraM varShaa - 7
nipaatayantaH paritaTadrumaan@h
pravRiddhavegaiH salilairanirmalaiH
streeyaH suduShTa iva jaativibhramaaH
prayaanti nadyastvaritaM payonidhiM.
taatparyaM:
As wicked women do,-- uproot and break down strong, big and
mighty men with their amorously crooked ways-- rivers full of vigorous,
animated muddy waters, (so typical of wicked women's natural style)
knock down, everywhere, (strong and mighty, standing firmly and
majestically) trees on the banks and flow, quickly, towards a sea.
Sid Harth's comment:
Having understood the extraordinary powers of women yet not
acknowledging that fact, Kalidasian society did not give these women
their due share and status in social fabric. Women were treated like
household pets, more like, say, exotic birds, always taken care of, even
pampered sometimes but kept in guilded cages, nevertheless. Women were
always at a beck and call of their masters and caretakers, who else but
mighty men. Women were admired as sex objects. Their beauty and charm
was always subject of Sanskrit writing, both prose and poetry, but
seldom on human terms of equality of sex.
Sanskrit history is replete with raconteurs telling stories,
where romance was described in terms of wicked women conquering strong
and ascetic seers and destroying their various secret projects to dust.
When writers could not find these women characters to play such wicked
roles among their ordered society, they invented mythical race of
witches, apsaras from unknown lands. These mythical apsaras were hired
as hired guns, contract killers to demolish one's spiritual enemies. The
strugle for power, may it be spiritual or earthly, required men to
engage in secret projects. These apsaras, then, descended on lowly earth
and with their devilishly wicked ways, wreck havoc among crafty,
crochetty, almost asocial so called seers, brahmacharis.
The purport of these stories was simple, the readers were warned
to stay away from these or any other women while they were pursuing
their holy activities in faraway jungles.
Sid Harth says:"If women be wicked and wanton,
are men crooked and wanting?"
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Reposted by
Venkateswara Rao Veluri