Chapter Seven
Women's Lives and Deaths

The world of Nautanki is a strange place, full of disguises, reverses, and contradictions. An almighty emperor struts across the stage and next moment appears as a shirtless beggar. An executioner readies a heedless lover for hanging, only to be accosted by a black-caped, masked apparition—the lady to the rescue. The argument so far suggests that the unusual couplings that riddle Nautanki stories—be they of character, incident, or motif—couch meanings that pertain to the moral universe of the audience. Sharp contrasts surprise the spectator into new perceptions, casting light on issues that never fully meet satisfactory resolution.

Perhaps nowhere are startling elements more rife—and more productive of altered awareness—than in the last thematic area of this section, the Nautanki's representation of women. Nautanki poets delight in describing women as murderers, lustful vamps, warring goddesses, and potent sorceresses. Yet they expound an ideology of female chastity and subservience that belies the powerful posture of so many of the women in their stories. Once again, these plays probe a dilemma with firm roots in Indian society. How may the morality conventionally espoused for women (which is gender-specific, different from that prescribed for men) be reconciled with the ways the Nautanki actually presents women: as strongwilled, independent, heroic, dangerous? We may suggest the range of possible answers by comparing a number of narratives in which women play striking roles, roles that accost placid presumptions about the construction of womanhood in North India.

To appreciate the Nautanki characters, it may be useful to mention first the mythic female figures most often identified in India: the heroines Sita, Sati, and Savitri who appear in the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana . The epic heroine type—the wife who is sacrificing, chaste, and loyal represents the ideal for female behavior among the high Hindu castes. The ideal may be far from the real experience of many women.^[1] Nevertheless, the prescriptive force of the epic heroines remains strong. The story of Savitri, for instance, teaches unswerving devotion to the husband, which if faithfully practiced can endow women with supernatural capacities, even the power to bring back the dead. Passive endurance in adversity is the lesson imparted by Sita, heroine of the Ramayana , who follows Ram into forest exile. Willingness to suffer self-immolation for the preservation of her husband's honor is enjoined by the examples of Sita's fire ordeal as well as the self-sacrifice of Sati, wife of Shiva. In each case, self-abnegation and subservience to the husband are seen to bestow power upon the wife. She may use this power for various ends but customarily directs it toward the welfare, long life, and good name of her husband and the couple's offspring, particularly the sons. The epic stories do not portray woman as powerless; they define her power as derived from self-effacement in a relationship of subjugation to the male.^[2]

Hindu mythology offers another important female paradigm that contrasts with the wifely ideal, namely the mother goddess. The goddess, whether manifest in her benign aspect as Lakshmi or Parvati or in her more menacing form as Kali or Durga, derives her power fundamentally from her status as mother rather than spouse, a role in which she exercises uniquely female control through the ability to generate and nurture life.^[3] Outside folk religion, however, her power is often subverted or leashed by subordination to a male deity. Each god in the Hindu pantheon is matched with a consort who is understood as his activating energy or shakti . Philosophically the individual goddess consorts may be subsumed under one universal principle or Shakti, of which they are considered manifestations.^[4] The Hindu recognition of an underlying female principle has impressed some observers as a more positive formulation of woman's place in the cosmos than that offered by the Judeo-Christian tradition.^[5]

Although women in Nautanki plays most frequently figure as wives and mothers, they do not necessarily conform to the mythic prototypes of classical literature. In addition to these two roles, women appear in other relationships. A female unrelated to male characters, however,

scarcely exists; she is always some man's daughter, sister, or spouse and may act in more than one familial role. The relationships defined by kinship are crucial to understanding Nautanki's women, particularly in view of the cleavage that exists in North Indian society between a woman's natal family and her affines (her husband's family). In the patrilineal and patrilocal pattern that prevails over most of this region, the woman departs from her parents' home at (or soon after) marriage and takes up residence with her husband's family, becoming subsumed into it henceforth. When she returns to her parents' for visits, she enjoys the pampered status of daughter (beti ), while in her husband's house she is forever a daughter-in-law (bahu ), burdened with rules of avoidance of male kin and multiple domestic responsibilities. The transfer of the female from one household to another rarely brings those households together. The wife's loyalties are considered to be forever divided, her heart and child self attached to her birth home, her adult identity, duty (dharm ), and status lodged with her husband and his relatives.

It goes without saying that men are the heads of household, and that male kin (the father, his sons, their sons) ideally reside together in an extended family. Daughters are shorn away from one family and thrust into the midst of strangers. Because of these practices, women are reckoned an economic, social, and emotional liability, despite the large contribution they make to domestic welfare through the value of their labor and fertility. They are resented in their parents' home because they must be married off (nowadays often at great expense) and distrusted by their husband's family because they come into it from the outside. (The Hindi word for their outsider status is paraya , fem. parayi , the source for English "pariah.")

Beyond this structural inequality, men and women are further divided by separate moral codes. Women's sexuality is strictly controlled by family members, insofar as female fertility provides the "ground" for the male "seed," and chaste women are necessary to reproduce pure lines of caste and clan. Corruption of blood is an evil to be strictly avoided; that the avoidance occurs more through the surveillance of female sexuality than through self-control on the male's part is explained by patriarchal privilege. According to the dominant ideology of gender roles, a woman ought to be exclusive in her sexual and affectional fidelity to her husband; she may not remarry should her husband predecease her. Men, however, may have more than one wife or mistress, either serially or at once. As in other societies, this differential moral code has led to a variety of anomalies and inequities. Colonial

India was notorious for its "problems" of unmarriageable widows (including the occasional incidence of widow immolation or sati ) and incompatibilities of various kinds such as large age differences between husband and wife. These injunctions and conditions, in brief, form the background against which we must read and understand the Nautanki tales about women.

As we did in the preceding two chapters, we approach these narratives on women's lives in loose chronological order. At the center of the first group of dramas dating from the nineteenth century, we find lustful and dangerous women whose actions contravene the code for the ideal wife. These morality tales teach by inverse example; the destructive violence that female desire unleashes turns against the women, and they die untimely and often gruesome deaths—stern warning against following their path. The second cluster of examples paints a less lurid picture, granting its women the strength and nobility commensurate with their high Rajput status. These dramas, by focusing on the pivotal position of the married woman between competing houses or clans, portray women as untrustworthy not primarily because of their sexuality but because of divided familial loyalties. Here and in the dramas of the third group, an affirmative formulation of female agency emerges in the person of the virangana , the warrior woman who defends righteousness. Moving beyond both paradigms of the chaste wife and the ferocious goddess, the virangana model combines direct assumption of power with exemplary virtue. Finally, in the protofeminist texts of the midtwentieth-century Nautanki, these themes find new contexts. Issues of widow remarriage, working women, and unwed mothers frame perspectives on women's sexuality, family loyalty, and personal freedom that both differ from and restate earlier articulations.

The Dangers of Female Desire

The possibility of polygyny (a man marrying more than one wife) is accepted in the narrative universe of Nautanki almost without question. Heroes roam about, acquiring wives and mistresses as part of their quest for adventure and fame, and rarely does this fact spark any particular interest. As might be anticipated, it was not until the social reform movement left its mark on the twentieth-century Nautanki that the practice came under scrutiny out of a concern for women's welfare. Two earlier tales, Puranmal and Rup basant , contribute an intriguing commentary on the dynamics of the polygynous family from the prere-

formist perspective. These dramas generate a debate on the wisdom of a man marrying more than once—not from the standpoint of the possible neglect of the wives (except in a very restricted sexual sense) but from the position of the male offspring. The consequence of remarriage is damage to the unity of the family, inducing the father to murder or exile his son. The responsibility for this painful sundering is placed squarely on the shoulders of the younger second wife, who is conceived as concupiscent, shameless, and vengeful. In this manner, the difficulties created for the family by a practice that privileges men are ingeniously ascribed to women. The lust and guilt of the father are transferred to the young outsider female, and what results is the "lustful stepmother," a folklore motif of wide circulation all over the world.^[6]

A prime example is found in the well-known North Indian legend of Puranmal (also known as Puran bhagat ) (see fig. 7).

In the city of Syalkot in Punjab rules the king Shankhpati, who has a wife named Amba and a son called Puran. One day the king receives an invitation to the svayamvar (marriage contest) of Phulan, daughter of the king of Kusumnagar. Although Amba tries to advise the king against remarrying because of his advanced age, he replies that as a warrior it would be cowardly of him not to enter the contest, and besides it is the dharm of a Rajput to marry several wives.

Shankhpati marries Phulan but is unable to keep her happy. One day Phulan spots Puran and is attracted to him. She coaxes him into entering her apartment with the ruse that she is ill and needs his assistance. Once inside, Phulan reveals her feelings and tries to seduce Puran. Puran is appalled at this advance by one who is related as a mother to him. Further, he is committed to celibacy because of a vow. When he resists, Phulan makes threats and seizes Puran's waistband and sword as he leaves.

In front of the king, Phulan accuses Puran of violating her honor. Showing the waistband and sword as proof, she convinces the king of Puran's guilt. He becomes enraged and sentences his son to death. Puran is killed, his eyes are taken out and given to Phulan to appease her, and his body is thrown into a well. Guru Gorakhnath passes by, revives Puran, and makes him his disciple.

In subsequent episodes, Puran joins Gorakhnath's roving band of yogis. He continues to be pursued by lustful women. When he goes to China, the queen Sundra insists that he marry her, vowing to kill all the yogis who enter her land if he refuses. Later he encounters the princess Rupvati of Sinhaldvip who possesses great magical powers. She traps Puran and turns him into a parrot, but he eventually escapes with his guru's aid.

Puran returns to Syalkot and sees that the garden of the palace has

completely withered in his absence. As he enters, it turns green again. Hiding his true identity, he elicits Phulan's confession in the presence of the king. Phulan says she simply wanted a son that her husband was unable to give her, and she asks the yogi for forgiveness. Puran blesses her and says she will soon bear a son. He then restores the eyesight of his mother, Amba, who has gone blind with weeping at Puran's loss. Puran reveals his identity and vanishes.

Phulan bears a son named Risalu. Seeing the sadness of his mother, Risalu sets out to find his brother Puran. Before he leaves Amba falls ill, and Puran, who has dreamt that his mother is about to die, comes back to Syalkot again. Amba dies, and Puran conducts her last rites. Puran is persuaded by Guru Gorakhnath to remain in Syalkot. Shankhpati and Phulan retire from the kingdom and take up sannyas (the stage of renunciation). After ruling the kingdom for twelve years, Puran hands it over to Risalu. He at last joins Guru Gorakhnath in his forest abode.^[7]

The contrast between the two wives of the king, Amba (amba , "mother") and Phulan (phulan , "flower"), is consistently maintained throughout this story, illustrating the split constructed between the ideal female and the bad woman. Amba, the good mother, is nurturing, nonthreatening, and asexual. Like Sita, Savitri, and Sati, she uses against herself the power gained through her position as wife, taking on suffering for the anticipated benefit of her husband and son. She squelches her intuition, acceding to her husband's desire for a second marriage, even though she knows it will bring ruin on the family. Bereft at the loss of Puran, her pride and joy, she sacrifices her eyesight by weeping herself into blindness. For all her virtue accumulated through self-abnegation, she is unable to exert much influence on the course of events. She manages to attract Puran back only when she lies dying. The satisfaction of Puran's conducting her cremation rites seems to be her final (and possibly only) reward.

The chief characteristics of Phulan are her youth, beauty, and flowerlike freshness (she even hails from Kusumnagar, "city of flowers"). These traits imply fertility and sexual readiness and in themselves carry no negative charge. Phulan becomes dangerous insofar as she challenges Puran's lifelong vow of celibacy. Puran is called a jati (or yati , from the same root as and cognate with yogi ), a man dedicated to control over his senses. Any female presence is a potential source of anxiety to him; it is no accident that all the women in the drama except Amba are portrayed as having sexual designs on him. In Phulan, moreover, at-

tractiveness is coupled with a kinship bond (mother) that makes any hint of sexual contact taboo.

The situation is thus set for an explosive confrontation between Phulan and Puran. Phulan's chief vice, according to the morality prescribed for women, is that she does not suppress her own desires. She takes the initiative, drawing in the young Puran who is close to her in age and a fitter partner than the decrepit king. Her playful attraction is soon converted under his resistance into humiliation and anger. As she fights back at his affront to her pride, she employs the strategy of Potiphar's wife—accusing him of seducing her when she made the advances. Phulan's intentions, given the information available in the story, may not really be so terrible, but she comes across as a wicked mother, crazed by lust, vicious, out of control. Despite this negative characterization, it is important to note that her sexuality becomes dangerous within the context of the polygynous family, her proximity in age to Puran, and her distance from and unhappiness with the king.

Only at the end of the drama does the poet bestow some sympathetic touches on Phulan, tellingly when she confesses to her desire for a son. By bearing Risalu and accepting the mantle of real motherhood (as opposed to her legal motherhood or stepmotherhood in relation to Puran), she becomes a safer, gentler female. She publicly seeks absolution of her sins, an act that mirrors her earlier accusations against Puran, leading to his trial and public sentence. Because of the changes Phulan is willing to make, she and Puran are finally reconciled. For his part, Puran's position of self-righteous celibacy never alters. He resists all female attentions and remains unmarried to the last. His self-control is so perfect that he is even capable of resuming rulership without abandoning yoga. Unlike Gopichand and Bharathari, he is a yogi for all seasons, equally impervious to the temptations of women, wealth, family, and friends.

A similar series of events begins and ends the long saga of Rup basant , an adventure story about the differing fates of a pair of non-yogic brothers.

King Chandrasen and his queen Rupvati have two sons, Rup and Basant. One day they see a bird whose first mate had died bringing a new mate to the nest. The stepmother bird kills all the babies born of the first mate. Rupvati tells Chandrasen that if she dies, he should not marry, for a stepmother would in similar fashion destroy her sons. The king assures her he will never do such a thing. Soon after Rupvati dies, and the king, remembering his promise to his wife, refuses many mar-

riage proposals. Finally, however, he is persuaded to marry the princess Chitravati.

Chitravati sees Basant and falls in love with him. On one occasion, Rup and Basant are playing ball and the ball lands in her palace. Basant, going to retrieve it, is accosted by the queen, who demands sexual favors. When he refuses to oblige her, she threatens to have him killed. With the maid backing her up, she reports to the king that Basant assaulted her modesty. The king sentences Basant to hang but is convinced by his minister to convert the sentence to exile. Rup vows to accompany his younger brother, and the two leave the kingdom.

When they arrive in Egypt, Basant is bitten by a snake and swoons. Rup, taking him for dead, goes into the city to buy a shroud. The king of Egypt has just died without an heir, and it is proclaimed that the first man to cross the city gates next morning will be crowned king. Rup happens to be the first and becomes king.

Meanwhile Basant is cured by a yogi. He kills a man-eating tiger but then is attacked by guards and left in a ditch. He is rescued by a potter and then is sent to jail. He escapes, joins a merchant ship, and sails the world. He marries a princess, Chandraprabha, is attacked by sailors, jumps overboard, and is washed ashore to be sheltered by a gardener. And so on.

After many adventures, Basant returns to his father's kingdom disguised as a yogi. As he enters the garden, all that had shriveled turns green. The yogi is asked to stay and minister to the problems of the people, and when the king reveals his great sorrow at his childlessness, the yogi indicates that he should learn the real story now from his queen. Chitravati comes out with the truth.

The father goes to Egypt to ask for Rup's forgiveness. Rup relents and the father and sons, finally united, return home. As they touch their stepmother's feet in greeting, she dies. Rup goes back to rule in Egypt, Basant takes over the kingdom from Chandrasen, and the old king retires to a life of meditation.^[8]

Once more the willful desire of the stepmother leads to a family rift resulting in the sons' banishment and the father's grief. This triangular structure (father-stepmother-son) is common to several South Asian narratives in which polygyny is the indispensable but often unacknowledged precondition. Best known among them is the Ramayana of Valmiki. The aged king Dasharatha's young wife, Kaikeyi, demands that Ram, the son of senior wife Kausalya, be sent into exile and her own son, Bharata, be placed on the throne. Dasharatha, under the influence of passion and bound by a previous debt, is forced to grant her wish, even though the sorrow brought on by separation from Ram is so immense that it kills him. The motive that drives Kaikeyi, namely the wish

that her son inherit and that the title be stripped from her co-wife's son, is absent from the narratives of Puranmal and Rup basant . However, it lies at the core of the societal suspicion of stepmothers, insofar as a woman's position in an extended family is derived through a male relation, and a woman's own son is her primary economic and psychological asset. It is in the co-wife's interest to put forward her male offspring and diminish the influence of her stepsons. Despite the initial absence of sons born to stepmothers in Puranmal and Rup basant , the family structure resembles the Ramayana configuration in important ways. In both cases, the narrative follows a sequence of rupture, exile, purification, and return, propelled in the first instance by an aroused and angry woman.

The agency of the female appears prominently in this narrative structure, yet by its articulation it conjures fear and loathing rather than empathy or emulation. Because the Nautanki stepmothers assume an overtly sexual stance vis-à-vis the stepsons (an element lacking in the Ramayana ), their desire assumes almost monstrous proportions. The magnitude of horror may owe more to the potential reversal of the hierarchical relationship between father and son than to transgression of an incest taboo. The stepmother and stepson are not in fact related by blood; sexual contact between them would not in itself be abhorrent. What is hazardous is the competition between father and son for sexual possession of the same woman. The implication that the king is impotent to protect his rights over the queen's body undermines his authority as ruler as well as his sense of masculinity. It introduces an element of anarchy into the family structure—and by extension the public family, the kingdom—that seemingly leads only to breakdown.

While these stories impart a horror of the dangerous sexuality of women, especially young attractive women, they also reinforce the stereotype of the stepmother as homewrecker. The stepmother is not content simply to seduce a stepson; she usurps the very role of mother. Insofar as her actions precipitate the crisis that leads to the sons' exile, she orphans her stepsons, depriving them of both their mother's love and father's protection. Even more devastating is the blow to her husband, whom she renders heirless, an immense tragedy for a king. The king's loss of his sons and the sterility of relations between the king and his second wife are represented by the withering of the gardens. The absence of fertility in the kingdom is directly related to the absence of righteousness, specifically the injustice committed by the king in sentencing an innocent son. The symbolism of grief goes even further. The

great sadness of the queen Amba manifests in her excessive weeping followed by blindness—the "star of her eyes" (ankhom ka tara ) having departed and made her vision useless. Similarly, the return of the exiled son in yogi's weeds—a potent visual sign of grief and renunciation— conveys the child's feeling of loss attendant on separation from his parents.

Only the downfall or recantation of the stepmother can balance the moral deficit. Phulan seeks atonement through giving birth to Risalu and making up with Puran. Chitravati, on the other hand, expires as soon as Rup and Basant touch her feet. Their gesture, a display of respect, submission, and forgiveness, so overpowers the unworthy woman that it kills her. Yet lurking just beyond the narratorial castigation of these women lies the inescapable countertruth: the kings opted to marry again. A moral confusion disrupts the stasis of each drama's conclusion. The onus lies on the woman, but is the male free of guilt? The old kings do not die; they go off to meditate, perhaps to ponder the errors of their ways. These dramas in short intertwine a muted but audible objection to polygamy. Perturbed in their very structure, they formulate a conflict between the gender ideology that teaches women chastity and submission and a more universal morality that holds both men and women responsible for the control of their sexual activity.

The perception of women as unruly, threatening, and shameless was in India encapsulated in a catchphrase, stri charitra or triya charitra . Literally this expression translates as the "moral nature" or "character" (charitra ) of women (stri, triya ). By extension charitra means "narrative" or "biography," and so the phrase could also be translated as "the woman's story" or even "hasty." In popular Indian parlance, however, the phrase has a decidedly misogynist ring, more equivalent to "female trouble" or "women's wiles." Triya charitra became a prevalent folklore theme in North India, one illustrated by a number of stories. The Nautanki play of this title, like Puranmal and Rup basant , is preoccupied with the potential infidelity of the young wife. Continuing in their mold, it pictures a woman who is deceptive, sexually voracious, murderous, and beyond redemption.

The Nautanki opens with a reference to the unhappy state of affairs in India where parents for the sake of money marry their young daughters to aged men or to boys who are still children. The latter was the case when Madan Seth of Andher Nagari (the city of darkness) married Champa, his sixteen-year-old daughter, to Panna, ten-year-old son of the millionaire Bhondu.

Champa, her desires unfulfilled, attempts to seduce a yogi who comes to her house begging for alms. Threatening to accuse him of assaulting her, she cajoles him into entering into an affair. Every night she goes to meet the yogi in the forest. Finally it is time for her gauna (final rite of marriage). Panna and his friend Khushdil arrive to take her to Panna's house. Champa explains her plight to the yogi, and in a fit of jealousy he asks her for her husband's head as proof of her loyalty.

Champa goes to the sleeping Panna, cuts off his head, and carries it back to the yogi. The yogi, shocked at her misdeed, calls her a murderess and sends her away. When she pleads with him, he bites off her nose. Khushdil, who has been watching all the while, leaps out and kills the yogi. In public, Champa tries to cover up by accusing Khushdil of seducing her, cutting off her nose, and killing her husband.

The commotion is overheard by a policeman who brings both Khushdil and Champa before the king. Their stories conflict, and the truth is only ascertained when Khushdil shows the king the piece of nose still caught in the yogi's mouth. Sentenced by the king, Champa goes to her death urging other women not to stray from the path of dharm . The lord Shiva revives Panna's dead body, and Panna and Khushdil proceed on their way.^[9]

This morbid didactic tale shows the wife, Champa, in a most unflattering light. Here too the young woman's name refers to a kind of flower, suggesting attractiveness and sexual appeal, but her character is short on lovability. Contradictions—or rather juxtapositions signaling clashes in viewpoint—abound in the narrative. Champa flagrantly conducts an affair after marriage, committing the (for women) unpardonable sin of adultery. The text tells us, however, as if in her defense, that she is not yet in the custody of her in-laws, her husband is not old enough to consummate the marriage, and consequently she may not meet the minimal definition of wife. She murders her own husband, but the idea is put into her head by her paramour, the yogi—who turns against her and disclaims all responsibility. Champa is coldhearted and cruel toward her boymate, Panna. But what about the behavior of the ascetic? Aside from fornicating with a married woman every night, he has a peculiar penchant for severed body parts: first the head of Panna and then Champa's nose. The immoral actions of Champa, if not softened by the counterindications in the text, are at least positioned in a moral arena where no one is perfect.

The framing editorial blames society and greedy parents in particular for the unhappiness of young women married to incompatible mates. Like Phulan and Chitravati, Champa is the victim of an inequitable social practice, but with a difference. Whereas they were married to

men twice their age or more, she is wedded to a partner who is younger, who is not yet a man. The perspective of social justice, however, is not consistently maintained, and in the punishment meted out to the errant women the flawed marital arrangements are overlooked. Champa is put to death for not following the dharm of a virtuous wife, just as Phulan is made to recant and Chitravati is killed by her stepsons' touch. The stress on female duplicity and blackmail (the Potiphar's-wife motif) reinforces the aversion to women inscribed in all three dramas. Champa seduces the yogi by threatening to reveal his alleged designs on her, and she later makes false claims that Khushdil, her husband's companion, tried to seduce her and cut off her nose.

In Bhain bhaiya (Sister and brother) the sexual dimension of male-female interaction is obscured, and murderous greed alone defines the woman's character. The key relationship here shifts from stepmother-stepson or wife-husband to sister-brother.

While traveling to earn money to maintain his wife and mother, the merchant Uttamchand visits his sister. As he retires for the night, he entrusts her with his bag of jewels for safekeeping. The sister tries to enlist her husband's support in killing her brother for his money. He refuses, and she murders her brother in cold blood.

When the sister returns to her husband, he is horrified and begins beating her. Hearing the uproar, a policeman stops to inquire. Uttam-chand's sister accuses her husband of killing her brother, while he maintains that she did it. Finally the king determines the truth by subjecting both parties to an ordeal: a poisonous snake is to be put around the neck of the accused, and whoever succumbs to snakebite will be proved guilty.

The sister refuses to go near the snake, but the husband readily dons the snake, and it does not bite him. The king sentences the sister to a gruesome death. Uttamchand lies dead, and his wife comes to commit sati with him. Lord Shiva responds to the prayers of the brother-in-law and resuscitates Uttamchand. Uttamchand, his wife, and his mother return home together.^[10]

It is difficult to extract anything but unalloyed gynophobia from this sparse tale. No visible ambiguity clouds the moral positions established: the brother is good, the sister is evil. What makes the story thought-provoking in the Indian context is that ordinarily a high degree of affection accompanies the sister-brother relationship. A woman's brother is considered her protector, her ally, even her companion on an equal footing, and tales about brothers and sisters usually speak of mutual

support and devotion. Ritual occasions such as the festival of rakshabandhan (the tie of protection) symbolically bind brother and sister together, the brother pledging to defend his sister and she to love and worship him. This drama points to an undercurrent of male suspicion and paranoia that the ritual may seek to allay. Are there any limits on the sister's desire for protection? Will she not suck her brother dry, asking more and more in the way of support? Does she care about him at all? Is she not just after his money? Bhain bhaiya details the dark side of brother-sister feeling, adding to the list of dangerous females even the offspring of one's own parents, one's flesh and blood. Not even distinguished by a proper name, the sister meets her end much as her counterpart in Triya charitra does. After the snake ordeal she goes to an ignoble death, whereas the innocent Uttamchand is restored to life—final proof of the law of just deserts (karmaphal ).

To sum up, this set of narratives revolves around raging female desire, desire that is explicitly sexual in three cases and perhaps obliquely so in the fourth (lust for the brother's jewels). The female characters are all young wives, women who are supposed to conform to the code of personal modesty, obedience, and fidelity exemplified by Sita, Savitri, and Sati. Yet their behavior more resembles that of the decapitating goddess Durga—except that her victim was the demon Mahisha, and these wives' victims are innocent stepsons, husbands, and brothers. In each story the women not only transgress the norms of wifely servility but proceed to commit moral outrages, instigating or perpetrating acts of murder. The women's misdeeds are punished with public shaming, either through the extraction of a confession and pardon or through royal sentencing and execution. Finally, in each story the wronged dismembered males are revived and made whole through the mediation of a renunciant figure, either a yogi, the guru Gorakhnath, or the deity Shiva. They return to their former estate or acquire an enhanced entitlement, while the wicked angry women completely and finally disappear.

The didacticism of these tales with regard to women's roles is transparent. It is unlikely that any spectator would mistake these characters for heroines or models of ideal conduct. Nonetheless, the untamed spunky young brides excite flutters of pleasure and temptation as they flirt with the protagonists—and the audience—on stage. For the moment they draw in the viewer, the voyeur, only to turn suddenly and assume a frightful posture. In converting the male response of attraction into avoidance and fear, the dramas reproduce the ideology of female chas-

tity by means of inverse illustration. They represent the unchaste wife as loathsome, all-devouring, and grossly immoral, teaching a hatred of her that only her ultimate annihilation seems to satiate.

The surface texture of exaggerated values—the wholly good men, the utterly evil women—operates to maintain the gendered sexual conduct that ideologically supports the patriarchal family, polygynous or otherwise. Doubtless the misogyny instilled by these dramas affects the daily lives of women outside the theatre. Much more difficult to discern is that for all of the Nautanki's simplification of issues, its reduction of characters to flattened stereotypes, its tired manipulation of melodrama, the theatre creates space for moral examination. It gives voice to a clash of viewpoints, making visible the cracks in the moral edifice. If this set of dramas enjoins self-control upon women, it also asks us—albeit more timidly—to consider the problem of male sexuality. The aging kings indulge in youthful fantasies and remarry, the yogic lover of Champa misbehaves and betrays his vows, and parents still marry off their daughters for monetary gain. The protagonists do not simply have flaws; the foundations of their motivation are open to question. These questions—of intention, accountability, and the universality of moral standards—are not resolved in the course of the Nautanki dramas. Viewpoints shift and collide, puzzling doubts remain beyond the apparent smoothness of the concluding deaths and rebirths. Significantly, however, the playing out of conflict on the theatrical stage has reactivated those doubts. The slack, the play, existing within the Nautanki narrative allows the probing of right and wrong, the disturbance in the complacency of moral presumption.

Family, Chastity, and the Limits of Loyalty

In the second group of stories, the brother-sister relationship that plunged to such abysmal depths in Bhain bhaiya acquires a more complicated background of family and clan politics. The dynamics of the brother-sister bond are central to the Rajput Nautankis, especially the Alha plays and Amar simh rathor . Here we encounter a number of strong women in more positive circumstances than in the preceding stories. In one very popular Alha Nautanki, Indal haran (The kidnapping of Indal), the women are bold, outspoken, and insightful.^[11] The story opens with the capture of Alha's son Indal by his bride-to-be, the sorceress Chittarrekha. It ends with the defeat of her clan by Alha's army followed by the couple's marriage. Of special interest is the supernatural

power ascribed to Chittarrekha; she turns Indal into a parrot and imprisons him for her pleasure. Other women such as Indal's mother, Machhla, and an older relative similarly exercise magical abilities.

Further, the young women in the drama show their independence by choosing their own husbands, while the older ones inspire their menfolk to action by shaming them and questioning their valor. Machhla precipitates the kidnapping of Indal by insisting that they join Alha's brother, Udal, at the Baithur festival despite Alha's displeasure and forebodings of ill. On several occasions she rouses both Udal and Alha when their will is weak. Similarly, when Alha tries to kill his brother, it is their mother who inspires Udal to resist. Udal's mother-in-law has a vision that enables her to guide Udal in his quest for his nephew, Indal. Women thus seem to possess the inner energy or shakti that rises to activate the sluggish male principle.

In the chivalric code of honor and shame, however, this energy is circumscribed by an ideology of purity, powerlessness, and dependence on men. The virtue of a Rajput woman, her sat (truth, goodness), lies in preserving her virginity if she is unmarried or staying loyal to her husband once married. A woman may exhibit some independent agency in this regard, the final act of virtue being the supposedly voluntary commission of ritual suicide in the practice of sati or jauhar (suicide to avoid the dishonor of capture by enemy forces). But for the most part the surveillance of female purity is carried out by men. The duty devolves upon fathers and brothers prior to a woman's marriage, and it shifts to the husband and his clan at marriage.

During an interim period the claims of the two families conflict, as between the marriage ceremony and the gauna (when the woman is physically removed to her husband's residence). Romantic attachments may also circumvent parental authority. Familial consent to a woman's marriage is almost universally withheld in the Alha epic, because the Banaphar heroes are deemed to be of inferior rank to other Rajput clans. For these reasons, the "protection" of women leads to innumerable clashes. During courtship or even after marriage, women are commonly being "defended," that is, fought over, by their fathers and brothers against their lovers and husbands. In these struggles for honor, a woman's desire is taken as inconsequential. Once her physical purity is threatened, she becomes a source of shame to her male kin. They are obliged to defend her chastity, the primary determinant of their honor, regardless of her wishes. As an unstable chattel-like commodity she inspires distrust.

The tension between the two sets of relations continues throughout the woman's life. Although in the Alha women always remain loyal to their husbands, they cannot deter suspicion of harboring ties with their natal homes and of favoring their brothers. The affinal relative, especially the brother of a man's wife (sala , also used as a term of abuse), attracts hostility and suspicion. Often the brother-in-law assumes the role of traitor in the unfolding of the narrative. If the husband and his family are suspicious of the brother-in-law, by the same token a brother cannot fully trust his sister because she has married into another family and become loyal to her husband.

The triangle of the woman, her husband, and her brother lies at the core of many a conflict in the Alha . The central narrative offers a good illustration. The queen Malhna, a character of great strength and dignity, is the protector of the Banaphar heroes and the "real ruler of the kingdom," to quote Grierson.^[12] She is married to the weak king Parmal, lord of Mahoba and a member of the Chandel clan of Rajputs. The queen's brother, Mahil, belongs to a different clan, the Parihars. He holds a grudge against Parmal and the Banaphars because he considers himself Mahoba's rightful ruler. Being privy as her brother to Malhna's confidence, Mahil constantly plots ways to eliminate the heroes, to intervene treacherously in the events. In Indal haran , for example, Mahil deceives Alha when the boy is kidnapped by Chittarrekha, alleging that Alha's brother (Udal) slept with Alha's wife (Machhla) and murdered their son (Indal). Alha almost kills his brother because of this allegation; curiously, he never consults his wife to see if it is true.

In the climactic incident leading to the final war of destruction, the clans do battle over Bela, the wife of Brahma, Parmal's son and heir. Although her marriage with Brahma has already been sanctified, Bela is still residing in Delhi with her father, the mighty Prithviraj, by now a sworn enemy of the Mahobans. When Brahma goes to fetch her for the gauna he takes a large army, and in the first round he defeats Prithviraj's forces. At Mahil's instigation, however, Prithviraj resorts to treachery and devises a plan for Bela's brother Tahar to assassinate Brahma. Brahma is sorely wounded, but meanwhile the Mahobans have carried off Bela and brought her to him. Seeing her dying husband, she vows revenge on her brother Tahar. At the height of the entire epic, she dresses herself in Brahma's armor, rides on horseback leading the Mahoban army, and in single combat defeats and beheads Tahar. She carries his head back to Brahma, who now being satisfied breathes his last. When she mounts Brahma's funeral pyre to die as a sati , Bela's hair spontaneously catches

fire. As the conflagration engulfs the bodies a tremendous battle rages between Prithviraj and the Mahobans in which almost all the major characters are killed.^[13]

These triangles (Malhna-Parmal-Mahil and Bela-Brahma-Tahar) bring out two themes: the brother-in-law's treachery and the contest for the allegiance of the female. In the Bela episode, the attack by the woman's brother against her husband gives rise to a grand and horrific act of female aggression. Bela's grievance arises from the defense of her chastity by her own brethren, but it is an unwanted defense, a defense gone awry and carried out underhandedly. Tahar's duplicity triggers a counterdefense by Bela of her husband Brahma's honor. Bela seems to uphold Rajput chivalry and its code of fealty of wife to husband, but she also transforms the Rajput concept of female virtue, defending her husband—not her chastity or even her life as her most precious possession. The warring aspect of female fury—the virangana posture is not a trivial or eccentric response; it emanates from immense reservoirs of rage and shame, appearing again and again in the Nautanki literature as a positive image of female agency.

In another Rajput drama, Amar simh rathor , brothers-in-law again play the part of treacherous advisors, while female characters instigate significant feats of valor. Salawat Khan, the noble who incites Shah Jahan against Amar Singh by manipulating Hindu-Muslim tensions, is the emperor's brother-in-law, whereas Arjun Gaur, the traitor who cuts Amar Singh's throat when he is defenseless, is related to Amar Singh as the brother of his first wife. In three instances women threaten to go into battle as a means of coaxing action from their reluctant partners. Shah Jahan's wife taunts the emperor when her brother Salawat is killed; she tells him to put on woman's dress—she herself will go to avenge her brother. Bhallu, the brother of Amar Singh, refuses to fight to regain Amar Singh's body, but his wife volunteers to take his place on the battlefield as repayment for a time when Amar Singh saved her; Bhallu is roused by her words to put up a show of bravery. Finally Hadi Rani, the wife of Amar Singh, prepares to retrieve her husband's corpse with Ram Singh, Amar Singh's nephew, but he refuses to allow her to come and takes two male friends instead. Women in this drama uphold the respect of their menfolk, motivate their heroism, and are ready to perform acts of self-sacrifice, but because of their pivotal position in the kinship structure, their loyalties can never be entirely trusted. The lack of security surrounding women's allegiance manifests itself in the warriors' constant fear of betrayal. Treacherous acts are almost always the

instrument of the hero's final undoing, and they most frequently originate with the male kin of the wife, notably her brother.

Comparing the dangerous women of the preceding section with the heroines of the Alha and Amar simh rathor , we perceive that certain traits characterize both groups, but on the whole female agency is more positively portrayed in the martial dramas. Virginal women pose a danger to chaste men in Puranmal and Rup basant as well as in Indal haran , but the stepmothers turn to uncontrolled aggression whereas Chittarrekha uses sorcery, a magical force for good or evil. Bela's decapitation of her brother Tahar parallels Champa's beheading of her husband and the nameless sister's murder of Uttamchand, yet it proceeds not from lust but from a wellspring of outraged Rajput pride. Machhla disobeys Alha and takes Indal to Baithur, wreaking much havoc, yet she also inspires men to courageous action. The sister-brother tie is viewed with suspicion in both Bhain bhaiya and Amar simh rathor ; in the first the sister is jealous, greedy, and treacherous, but in the second jealousy and greed motivate the brothers of Shah Jahan's wife and Amar Singh's first wife to perform their dastardly deeds.

Despite the wider range of actions allowed to women and the larger moral space within which they transact them, female virtue is linked explicitly in the martial dramas to self-sacrifice. Nowhere is this clearer than in the denouements of both the Alha and Amar simh rathor , where Bela and Hadi Rani, the heroines of the two legends, perform self-cremation alongside their husbands' bodies. These events of sati are marked by extraordinary fanfare and supernatural occurrences (spontaneous combustion of the pyre). Whereas the dramas affirm the strength and heroism of a woman as chaste wife, the conclusions articulate the conviction that the purpose of a woman's existence ends with her husband's death. The best use of her body is to adorn his pyre and accompany him to the next world. Like the harridans of the previous set of narratives, these more exemplary wives leave the stage dead. They suffer demises that may be deemed glorious and spiritually meritorious but are still intensely public and painful. Once more, male honor is regained through destruction of the female body, an act that stands at the momentous point of closure.

The Virangana and the Legitimation of Female Agency

While Rajput legend and in due course the Nautanki theatre enshrined the sati , the virtuous wife who dies in the fires of self-sacrifice, North

Indian history also affords examples of women attuned to a greater glory—serving the homeland. Women such as Razia Sultana, Kurma Devi, Durgavati, Tarabai, Ahalyabai, and Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, chose to forego the path of sati and assumed power as queen-regents. Living in various periods and parts of the country, they shared certain experiences. Often they were tutored by their fathers, being educated in the arts of war and the skills of reading, writing, and administration; they rose to power at the death of a male kinsman, usually a husband. Once on the throne, they were reputed to be wise, just, and generous rulers. They attired themselves in masculine costume, adopted the perquisites of royal office, and exhibited military leadership and bravery in battle. Usually they died while defending the kingdom against an invader. These queens are known to Indian popular culture as viranganas , "warrior women," and they are celebrated in folk songs and legends, modern novels and poems, comic books and films. In popular iconography, they are usually depicted riding on horseback, wearing a turban and tunic with flowing trousers, and brandishing a sword high above their heads (figs. 17 and 18).^[14]

If the ideology of sati sanctions destruction of the female body and exalts passive suffering, the virangana ideal commends physical training and active deployment of the body in combat. The strength and efficacy of the virangana are in many respects similar to those of the warring goddess Durga or Kali, her defeat of threatening enemies corresponding to the goddess's punishment of evil demons. What is remarkable in the virangana concept is the different interpretation of "truth" (sat ) in contrast to the sati's "truth." While sat in the dominant gender ideology signifies sexual fidelity to one's husband (also identified as pativrat dharm ), little emphasis is placed on the physical purity of the woman warrior. The virangana's status is not defined by her relationship to a man as wife, widow, or paramour but is consequent upon her valorous deeds. Because her virtue is not reducible to the sexual transactions of the female body, physical relations cannot impugn her truth. The virangana thus conjoins physical prowess, moral strength, and sexual freedom in a startling counterparadigm of Indian womanhood.^[15]

The historical evidence for the virangana is supplied by queenly figures from the past. We have already encountered fictional Nautanki characters who illustrate the ideal. The noble women from Amar simh rathor , for example, entertained notions of charging into battle to avenge their husbands or family members, and their threat of doing so was a standard taunt to overcome male relations' cowardice. In the Alha epic, the heroine Bela not only threatened to but actually led her army into a

Fig. 17.
The Indian woman warrior (virangana ), reprinted from Anil Raj-
kumar, Bharatiya viranganaem .

military clash with her brother Tahar and beheaded him on the battlefield. True, she did not take up the staff of rulership after her husband's death but instead converted her fighting stamina into the kindling of mass conflagration and blazed as a sati . Had she stepped onto the throne as a ruling queen, the epic would have taken a different, and more original, course.

The avenging heroine has also appeared in the romantic melodramas focusing on love between a princess and a commoner. In plays such as

Fig. 18.
A virangana from the nineteenth-century stage, reprinted from Wil-
liam Ridgeway, The Dramas and Dances of Non-European Races (Cambridge,
1915).

Nautanki shahzadi, Saudagar vo syahposh , and Lakha banjara , the beloved at the beginning of the narrative is the ethereal beauty, dainty and difficult of access. Like a fairy occupying some realm between heaven and earth, she beckons to the lover from afar, inspiring him to cross boundaries of territory and social class. The ensuing love affair predictably leads to complications. The lover is discovered and sentenced to die for violating the woman's chastity—she is another man's possession. At this point in the dramas, to challenge the king's punishing arm the "violated" woman herself bursts onto the scene in a dark rider's disguise, sword in hand. Sweeping aside the state apparatus of trial and execution, the virangana effects a justice of her own, which entails the marriage of the lovers according to mutual desire followed by their reintegration into society. The transformation from demure beloved to daredevil swordswoman shocks and confounds: How will the lover relate to such a brash avenger? The question is sidestepped, for the plot requires a dea ex machina, a goddesslike apparition to return the moral balance point to normal after the king's violent reaction to the simple discovery of love.

The virangana -double in these dramas claims male positions for the female body; she rides on horseback, wears male dress, wields weapons ordinarily carried by men. She is an androgynous counterpart of the Rajput ideal, iconically identical to the male warrior. On the Nautanki stage, the visual symbology of cross-dressing arguably possesses voyeuristic appeal, and like other character transformations based on physical disguise it plays into the theatregoer's fascination with illusion and deception. It disturbs gender boundaries and masks in confusion the essential difference between female and male, much to the delight of an audience socialized to rigid codes of gendered dress and gesture.

Yet there is a larger logic to the advent of the virangana on the Nautanki stage that connects this phantasm of female power with an enduring history of womanly fortitude. The virangana arrives not simply when force is required but when moral order needs to be restored. Like the great goddess, she manifests her creative energy to return the world to righteousness. Hers is not a mission for destruction; her violence is radically different from that of the dangerous stepmothers and decapitating sisters in Puranmal, Rup basant , and Triya charitra . She exercises her bravery in the cause of justice. Since the upholding of justice is customarily conceived as the duty of the head of state or the king, she bears the symbols of kingly office. The virangana's appropriation of masculine signs thus encodes the crossover from the confines of female mo-

rality with its emphasis on chastity and chatteldom (women's conventional "truth") to the more spacious morality allowed to males, that is, justice or "Truth."

The most popular virangana story in the Nautanki world appears to be Virangana virmati .^[16]

King Udiyaditya of Malwa has two wives, Baghelin and Solankin. Baghelin's son is a coward while Jagdev, son of Solankin, is brave and virtuous and his father's favorite. Baghelin fears that Jagdev may soon become king, and she forces the king to insult Jagdev by asking him to return the horse and swords the father had presented to him previously. As a result, Jagdev leaves the court followed by his wife, Virmati, who vows to be at his side no matter what difficulties lie ahead.

After wandering for some time they reach a lake, and Jagdev leaves his wife while he goes to find lodging in the nearby city. Virmati is then approached by a prostitute and enticed to the brothel of Jamoti on the pretext that Jamoti is her husband's sister. Lalji, son of the kotval (chief of police), tries to seduce Virmati, but she gets him drunk and then kills him with his own sword. She dumps the body from the window, and when the kotval discovers his dead son, he rushes into the brothel to arrest her. However, Virmati, still holding the sword, proceeds to kill twenty-five of the kotval's men. Jagdev eventually finds Virmati and the couple are welcomed by the king of the city.

In the second part, Virmati proves herself capable of even greater courage when she beheads her own husband. Jagdev was tricked by the goddess Kankali into giving her his head, which she demanded as a religious gift (dan ) in retribution for Jagdev's assault on her son, the demon Kalua. Virmati impresses even the bloodthirsty Kankali with her tearless fulfillment of duty, supplying the head upon demand. Eventually Kankali joins Jagdev's head back to his body and revives him. Through this test, Virmati proves herself to be a true daughter of the goddess, and Kankali addresses her as such while Virmati in return addresses Kankali as mother. In the end, Jagdev and Virmati return home, where Baghelin has repented, and they all live happily.

In the initial part of the narrative, the events uncannily resemble the Ramayana . The rivalry between co-wives to determine whose son shall be heir, the exit of the favored son with his devoted wife, the wife's abandonment in the forest and her abduction—all parallel the well-known epic. At this point, however, the heroine's similarity to the patient Sita ends. She begins to fight back, using her wits to trick her assailant and then employing his own weapon against him. Inspired by these successes, she proceeds to take on a whole army of men, whom she engages like a lioness with bloodshot eyes and fierce roar. Virmati's

bravery is explicitly directed toward protecting her chastity. She is sexually accosted by her captors and responds by unleashing her full powers of self-protection. The tale thus appears to fit with the set of narratives that define women's sat or truth in terms of pativrat dharm .

In the second half, however, Virmati overrides this interpretation when her higher allegiance to the goddess causes her to offer up her husband's head. She performs the act of decapitation stoically, as a difficult test of devotion to Kankali, unlike the greedy sister in Bhain bhaiya and the lustful Champa in Triya charitra , who also killed their own men. In consequence of her sacrifice, she earns the goddess's favor and the ultimate restoration of her husband's life. This incident makes evident the virangana's adherence to a higher truth than that prescribed by the customary gender ideology. Setting aside the passive behavior recommended to the epic wife, Virmati assumes heroic stature through active intervention in the events of the world and in so doing moves beyond the morality of husband worship and feminine modesty to the transcendent position of daughter of the goddess.

The fascination with warrior women in Nautanki, especially in the years from 1910 to 1940, may be historically contextualized by reference to government restrictions on nationalist messages that were widely imposed on the print and entertainment media. Legislation incorporated into the Registration Act of 1867, the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, and the Press Act of 1910 formalized censorship of printed literature (dramatic texts, novels, and poems) as well as public performances, with severe consequences for any activity deemed seditious. Meanwhile, as the nineteenth-century sense of nationhood grew, a political symbolism developed in which female heroes and goddesses acquired significance. In Bengal, novelists such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee reinstated the goddess as Mother India, savior of the future Indian nation. Slightly later in the Gangetic heartland, the legendary figure of the Rani of Jhansi became the symbol of resistance to colonial rule because of her perceived leadership of the 1857 rebellion against the British. The image of the Rani riding on horseback became so potent a rallying point for nationalist resistance that articles, poems, plays, and even Vrindavan Lal Varma's Hindi novel on the Rani's life were immediately banned upon publication.^[17] Denied open reference to heroes like Lakshmibai, the public turned to fictional heroines from popular culture to voice their anticolonial sentiments. The popularity of the virangana stories thus is partially attributable to their allegorical political meaning.

This process extended to the early cinema, for when Indian films began to displace the folk theatre in the 1920s and 1930s, a veritable spate on virangana themes emerged. Some of these examined historical women warriors: silent movies of the 1920s and early 1930s include Sati Veermat, Devi Ahalyabai , and Sultana Chand Bibi ; later talking versions were released of Tara Sundari, Sultana Chand Bibi, Taramati , and films on the Rajput heroines Padmini, Pannabai, and Minaldevi. Others featured more fanciful viranganas ; sample titles include A Fair Warrior, Veerangana, Gallant Girl, Valiant Princess, Lioness , and Stree Shakti .^[18] Worthy of special mention are the films that star the actress Nadia: Hunterwali, Sher Dil, Lutaru Lalna, Diamond Queen , and others. In these Nadia plays the valiant heroine coming to the rescue, her most frequent entrance being on horseback. Stills from her films show her carrying every conceivable weapon—bow and arrow, sword, bull-whip, and pistol—as well as lifting men over her head and throwing them. The theatrical origins of Nadia's roles are suggested in the films' narratives, which typically focus on a besieged kingdom and include a restoration of righteousness at the eleventh hour by a daring princess.^[19]

The most recent variation on the virangana theme in Nautanki is the female outlaw figure, the gendered equivalent of the dacoit hero discussed in chapter 5. Just as in folklore the dacoit (daku ) is like a king to followers and villagers within his territory, so the "bandit queen" (dasyu sundari ) shares the symbolic character of sovereignty with the historical queen. She is a woman of indomitable courage, a merciless executrix of justice. Former viranganas defended their kingdoms against enemies of opposing ethnic and religious affiliation; the female outlaw of the twentieth century fights the police, landlords, and the wealthy in order to defend the rights of the poor and oppressed. Since the 1960s and 1970s, she is increasingly a low-caste heroine, in alliance with the disprivileged in rural society, in opposition to Brahmins, Thakurs (members of the landlord caste), and government officials.

The female outlaw as a subtype of the virangana appeared in several films of the thirties, for example, Lady Robinhood, The Amazon , and Dacoit Damsel . Numerous legends also grew up around Putli Bai, a famous one-armed dacoit of the 1950s.^[20] Most widely publicized has been the story of Phulan Devi. Her career has been reported in Time and Esquire on the one hand and on the other has inspired Hindi Nautankis, barahmasis, birahas , and other folklore genres.^[21] Several Bombay films have been produced about her, including the rather faithful version of her life, Kahani phulvati ki . Clay idols of Phulan are sold

together with images of gods and goddesses in local markets.^[22] Her impact has been such that other women of her region have increasingly turned to banditry, and by 1986 gangs considered it de rigueur to have at least one female member.^[23]

The following synopsis, based on the Nautanki version by Svaminath, closely follows other folk and media sources.^[24]

Phulan was born a Mallah (of the boatman caste) in a village in Jalaun district. When she was ten, her father married her to Puttilal, a lustful widower twenty years older. Escaping from him, Phulan returned to her village but was expelled by the panchayat. She went to live with an uncle whose sons and friends harassed and raped her. Seeking refuge with a cousin, she then met Kailash, a spy employed by the bandit Babu Gujar. Kailash and Phulan fell in love and got married, but Kailash later offered her to his friend Vikram and the gang leader for their sexual enjoyment.

Visiting home, Phulan was falsely implicated in a robbery and was arrested by the police. She was repeatedly assaulted in custody. Released through the good graces of a Thakur, she was afterwards forced to become his concubine. Kailash meanwhile had been killed by the police, and Phulan came under Vikram's protection. After killing Babu Gujar, Vikram established himself as gang leader with Phulan as his mistress. He taught her to shoot, and the two began a series of robberies and murders in the Chambal region.

Internal feuding in the gang led to Vikram being killed by Sriram and Lalaram, two Thakur gang members. They kidnapped Phulan Devi, took her to Behmai village, and kept her captive for twenty-two days while a number of Thakurs raped her. Finally she escaped, hitting her guard in the face with a waterpot when she went to the fields to defecate.

She met Mustaqim, a bandit of Robin Hood-like reputation, and they formed a new gang. They returned to Behmai to avenge the murder of Vikram and repay the Thakurs for dishonoring Phulan. Phulan oversaw the selection of the men who raped her, led them to the edge of the river, slapped them and spat in their faces, and had them killed. She killed twenty-seven people in Behmai village, although Sriram and Lalaram were absent at the time. The police were busy playing volleyball, and by the time they arrived, Phulan and Mustaqim had escaped. The play ends with Phulan in hiding.

As told in the Nautanki, the central theme of Phulan's life is repeated victimization, particularly sexual abuse. In multiple assaults, Phulan is looted of her chastity ("to rape" in Hindi is izzat lutna , "to steal one's honor"). Phulan eventually turns to resistance and counterattack against

the perpetrators; she takes to robbing and looting in return. The drama's obsessive concern with Phulan's sexual exploitation seems intended to supply an unambiguous moral ground for her violent deeds. She too is to be understood as a heroine defending her sat , the distinctive truth identified with the female body. But Phulan's struggle, like that of Virmati, is not simply a private affair. This drama introduces the perspective of class and caste, insofar as Phulan and the audience understand her violation to be a specific case of the more general violation of the poor and weak by the wealthy and powerful. A low-caste Mallah, Phulan endures rape many times by upper-caste men, and it is toward them that she explicitly directs her avenging fury. As she states in the play, "Thakurs have done whatever they wanted with me. High-caste men always played with my honor. Not until I shoot them all one by one will their oppression of me be repaid."^[25]

In the popular imagination then, Phulan is a wronged woman. Like other viranganas , she resorts to violence to restore her own and the larger world to moral order. Her act of truth extends, as it were, the physical boundaries of her own body to encompass others in her disprivileged position. She blends the examples of the historical queens—who defended their persons, their peoples, their kingdoms—with the male robbers who usurp authority in order to redistribute wealth within the underclass. A modern-day equivalent of the turbaned, sword-wielding virangana , Phulan wears the khaki uniform of a police superintendent, a headband tied around her cropped hair and a rifle slung over her shoulder. She continues the narrative tradition of valiant women who protect themselves and also serve a higher morality through their own bloody deeds.

Beyond the dramatic text, Phulan's image has provoked a range of responses in the mass media in India and abroad. One reaction is to portray her as a dangerous but irresistible man-eater. Esquire described her as "a legendary six-foot-tall, raven-haired, one-armed beauty," "a beautiful femme fatale who had butchered twice as many men as she had bedded."^[26] There is no doubt that a genuine terror of her (as of dacoits in general) existed in the countryside in the months following the Behmai massacre and preceding her capture in 1983. Yet we must deconstruct this representation in the light of folk narratives that portray female agency as dangerous and specifically as a sexual threat. The sensational reports of Phulan's ravishing appearance (proven false after her capture) parallel depictions in tales like Puranmal —where Phulan's namesake is both attractive and sexually aggressive toward men. In the

masculinist construction, be it folk theatre or popular journalism, female qualities such as strength and firm will that may challenge male domination are transposed into images of seductiveness in order to diminish their moral legitimacy.

It is noteworthy that Phulan has at the same time become a symbol of feminist resistance to rural women, cosmopolitan urban Indians, and women abroad. Phulan has removed the gender gap among Chambal Valley gangs; she and her sister bandits, Kusuma Nain, Meera Thakur, and others have been called "beacons of hope for countless young women who have a score to settle with society."^[27] In Bombay and Delhi, Phulan "appeared to represent the ideas expressed by such feminists as Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer," rejecting the traditionally subservient position of the Indian female.^[28] Her history has entered Western feminist annals via playwrights and artists such as Hélène Cixous and Carel Moiseiwitsch who have reimagined Phulan in their artistic productions.^[29] The feminist response comments on and celebrates the truth contained at several levels in Phulan's life. As a revised stri charitra ("herstory"), Phulan's narrative acknowledges the injustice of society toward women, names the acts of violence committed by men against them, and asserts the power of women to survive abuse, defend themselves, and struggle for survival. However inadequate the Behmai killings may have been to bring gender equality to even a single village, they assume global proportions through the affirmative feminist reception of the legend of Phulan, the 1980s avatar of the virangana .

Widows, Unwed Mothers, and Working Women

By the time Phulan Devi came into the public eye, women in North Indian society had begun to emerge from domestic seclusion. Beginning in the 1920s and in growing numbers during the decades following independence, women took their places beside men in schools and colleges, the workplace, and public life. The greater visibility of women and official encouragement for their increased participation hastened the changes proposed in nationalist agendas for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, both Nautanki folk plays and Bombay films began to treat issues of feminist import, developing roles for women unthinkable several decades earlier. In this final section we examine three Nautanki texts that address the topics of widow remarriage, unwed mothers and illegitimate children, and poor working women.

The moral dilemmas ensuing from gender-specific codes of sexual

behavior that began this chapter's discussion reappear in two dramas, Dukhiya vidhva (The miserable widow) and Dhul ka phul (Flower in the dust). To varying degrees, these plays expose the injustice of prereform social practices. The Miserable Widow is a narrative set within the Seth mercantile class of Bombay and focuses on an atypical family consisting of a father, his two sons, and three widows: his widowed daughter, his widowed daughter-in-law, and a widow who is the mistress of his second son. By the end of the melodrama, one son has died of asthma and the other has been disinherited, while of the three widows, one has killed herself by jumping into a well and another has been run over by her brother's car. Although the drama ostensibly campaigns for allowing widows to remarry, these catastrophes reinforce the popular belief that widows are unruly and that their inauspicious presence brings bad fortune on the family.

Ramnik Lal, a big businessman, lives with his two sons, Hari Das and Arun Kumar, and his widowed daughter, Raj Rani. Arun is in love with Usha, a widow, and he opposes the social prohibition against women's remarrying when men may marry as many times as they like. He decides to persuade his father to allow Raj Rani's remarriage, hoping it will pave the way for his own marriage with Usha. His father, however, is outraged and tells him not to even think of it.

Raj Rani persuades the family doctor to become her lover, and they meet daily. Hari Das, who suffers from asthma, is to marry Chandra. Arun protests that this marriage will ruin the life of the girl, for Hari Das will soon die, but his father proceeds anyway; shortly after the wedding Chandra becomes a widow. Chandra is unhappy, and she and Raj Rani often have tiffs. Chandra gets scolded unjustly, and Arun takes her side against his father.

Arun discovers the doctor and Raj Rani together in her room. When he reports this to his father, Raj Rani accuses Arun of pursuing Chandra. Ramnik Lal disowns Arun and expels him and Chandra from the house. Since Chandra's parents will not accept her back, Arun takes her to Usha's house, and he goes out to look for work. Meanwhile, the doctor visits Usha, and he alleges misbehavior between Arun and Chandra. Usha expels Chandra, and when Arun returns he goes out to find her.

Raj Rani leaves her house to search for the doctor, but when she finds him he refuses to have anything more to do with her. In public, he then accuses Chandra, who is passing by, of making advances to him. Arun arrives and believes the malicious gossip about Chandra. In desperation, she jumps into a well and dies.

Raj Rani is furious at the rejection by the doctor and stabs him to death. Running away, she is knocked down by a truck. She is taken

home and sheltered by a sweeper. The police come after Raj Rani and as she flees from them, she dashes against the moving car of Arun and Usha and dies. Arun is miserable at his sister's death and promises to take up the fight for widows' remarriage. The bill allowing widows to remarry is passed in the assembly, and no reactionary pandit is able to put a stop to it.^[30]

The chief advocate of widows' remarriage in this drama is Arun; his father, Ramnik Lal, represents the views of the orthodox. Arun is motivated by personal interest, namely his desire to marry his girlfriend Usha, and by sympathy for his widowed sister, Raj Rani, and later for his sister-in-law, Chandra. Arun is a prototypical male champion of women's rights. During the period of legislative reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elite men took up the banner of female emancipation while few women agitated openly or received notice in the body politic. The Nautanki drama, like most fictional documents of the period, does not express women's feelings about widowhood or articulate their experience. The sympathy it arouses for widows stems from patriarchal views of female sexuality and the assumed necessity of marriage and family life to women's happiness. The principal threat to the widows' well-being in The Miserable Widow is abandonment, specifically expulsion from the husband's home with no prospect of parental support. This perilous state does befall Chandra; left homeless, she falls prey to gossip and commits suicide in her anguish. Raj Rani, a more determined woman, runs away to be with the doctor. Finding herself unsheltered, she moves in with a sweeper family and earns her keep removing offal from the streets—a slap in the face of her high-caste father.

Named in the subtitle, Raj Rani is the most striking character. She could easily stand with Phulan of Puranmal ; sexually active, strong-willed and argumentative, she undermines family harmony with unruly conduct that leads to her own unnatural demise. Rejecting the lifelong celibacy and invisibility expected of widows by tradition, she stages a love affair right in her father's house, quarrels with her sister-in-law Chandra, and falsely accuses her brother, causing his and Chandra's exile from the family. Like the lustful young stepmother, she experiences boundless rage when her lover rejects her, and she murders him out of spite. Inevitably she comes to no good end. She dies in an accident fatefully involving the car of the brother whom she misused and who tried to aid her.

Raj Rani reacquaints the audience with the tenacity of the thwarted

female. Her example both mirrors and maintains society's paranoia about unattached and unconfinable women, especially young widows. Chandra on the other hand plays the good widow in following the normative code of meekness and modesty. Her weakness sends forth signals calling for male protection, yet she is repeatedly victimized, ostracized, and left defenseless. Here the stereotype of woman as physically powerless (abala nari , "the weaker sex") buttresses the ideology of male superiority. The third widow, Usha, the partner of Arun, remains a shadowy figure throughout; even though a law passes allowing widows to marry, Arun and Usha do not get married.

The case for widows' remarriage sketched by these events in no wise challenges the system of male privilege or prevailing notions of woman's nature. Remarriage for women is urged because women can neither control nor support themselves. Their happiness depends not just on the presence of a husband; it requires the confinement and restraint provided by male dominance. The inequitable practices surrounding remarriage are explained away as the rigidity of social custom, not questioned as part of a reexamination of gender roles. As a result, although the drama purports to hold a progressive viewpoint, it portrays women in the same androcentric mode as most folktales. It reiterates attitudes of distrust, fear, and condemnation of widowed women as it extends them a modicum of condescending support.

In the somewhat more satisfying Flower in the Dust , discussed in chapter 6 in relation to Hindu-Muslim unity, the sexual advantage accorded men through multiple liaisons is forthrightly condemned. A respected citizen for years denies his paternity of an illegitimate child, but he is exposed in court and blamed for the sufferings of his wayward son and the son's mother. The narrative takes us into the urban middle class, where the college student Meena endures rebuffs and reverses after she and Mahesh fall in love. When she tells him of her pregnancy, Mahesh abandons her to marry another woman. Subsequently Meena gets thrown out by her aunt and uncle (she is already an orphan), tries to commit suicide, is rescued by Nandu Dai (a midwife and naive advocate of women's rights), and then is left alone when Nandu Dai dies. After her son is born, she returns to Mahesh to plea for support; he spurns her. Distraught, she leaves the baby in the forest and returns to the city to start life anew.

Despite the pain of rejection, Meena responds to her position with resourcefulness. She is neither reduced to a victim's passivity nor embittered by anger. The drama accords her dignity, and she pursues a prag-

matic course, becoming a secretary to a barrister and eventually marrying him. In the drama's terms, neither Mahesh nor Meena is particularly to blame for the youthful sexual encounter; they both regret it as a momentary lapse. Mahesh becomes culpable when he turns against Meena and distances himself from her through deceit. He promises to ask her father for her hand, but he never does and from then on clings to a lie, disclaiming any connection with Meena. He refuses to help support his child although he is wealthy and Meena at that point is penniless. Pretending even to himself that he never sired a son, he chides his legitimate offspring, Ramesh, for befriending a schoolmate born out of wedlock (who happens to be Roshan, Mahesh's son by Meena). In court he claims that youthful criminal tendencies result from illegitimate birth and prepares to convict the unlucky Roshan until Meena's intervention reveals his own implication in the events.

In the restoration of moral order at the drama's climax, Mahesh is accused not only by Meena, who calls him a culprit for deserting her and remarrying, but by Malti, Mahesh's "second wife," who holds him indirectly responsible for the death of her son who she thinks was killed by Meena's curse. Mahesh repents and expresses willingness to welcome his illegitimate son back into the family, but the child ultimately goes with Meena; Mahesh, who once had two sons, is left heirless at the end of the play. The familial interrelationships here of husband, first wife, second wife, and two wives' sons curiously resemble the configurations found in Puranmal, Rup basant , and even the Ramayana . In all these narratives, the husband in some sense abandons his first wife to marry a second, and in so doing opens up a chasm that leads to the traumatic separation of both parents from the son and a period of exile and wandering. Whereas in the older narratives the second wife has responsibility for the rupture, in Dhul ka phul the man bears the burden of guilt. The prior stories raise certain questions: Should the sexual behavior of men be governed by the same self-control as that of women? Should not a single standard of moral conduct apply to both? But those dramas prevaricate, introducing an unrighteous female as scapegoat for the erring hero. The twentieth-century Nautanki, on the other hand, asserts the complicity of the polygynous husband in the spawning of unwanted children. The niceties of legal marriage do not absolve him of the moral consequences of his procreative acts, and he is brought to book for failing in his duty to protect his rejected kin.

These two dramas to some extent rework the moral issues surrounding male-female relationships, presenting modified guidelines within well

defined problem areas (remarriage for widows, unwed motherhood). Men are asked to assume responsibility for women's welfare where women were once fated to suffer. There is no hint that women should claim the use of their bodies as a right or engage in sexual transactions according to their own desire. Sexuality is still hedged in by fear and danger, and the recommended attitude toward it is control and repression. The difference is that women are no longer automatically perceived as transgressors and condemned. Men are brought into focus as sexual players, becoming culpable for their actions. This may not seem a great advance for women's rights or for the acceptance of human sexuality. Nonetheless, these Nautanki texts register the gradual dismantling of the fixation on female chastity, a cornerstone of the ideology that has obstructed the progress of women for centuries.

The last drama renews the discussion of woman's relationship to her affinal and natal families, an area of conflicted loyalty explored in a previous group of tales. In Sati bindiya (The saintly Bindiya), the audience encounters not only a lower-class heroine but a working woman, successful wife and sister, and latter-day sati who holds together two families through the power of her goodness.

Devraj works as an overseer for the contractor Rai Sahib, and among the laborers in his construction gang is Bindiya. Devraj has an errant brother, Raju, who is always in trouble at school; there is some mystery surrounding their parents. Bindiya is the sole support of her mother and her brothers, Chandan and Ramu. Devraj and Bindiya fall in love, and Devraj proposes to marry Bindiya, giving assurances to her family that he will care for them as well. Devraj marries her and brings her family home, assisting her brothers in finding jobs and schooling. Bindiya becomes a housewife, and when Devraj's fortunes increase, he credits it to the good luck she has brought to the home.

Raju continues in his bad ways, stealing money from the Rai Sahib. Whereas Devraj usually beats his brother, Bindiya curbs him through kindness and instruction. Her brother Ramu is in direct contrast to Raju. An excellent student, he completes his B.A. and starts an engineering course. The Rai Sahib wants Ramu to marry his daughter Rama, but Ramu wishes to establish himself first.

Devraj's past returns to haunt him when his stepmother and step-sister descend on the family after his father's death. Without revealing their identity, he takes them home where Bindiya readily agrees to shelter them. A wall in the newly constructed house literally cracks. The two women begin to alienate Devraj from Bindiya's family members.

Meanwhile, Raju has decided he must marry Rama, and he appeals to Bindiya to give her consent. Bindiya requests her brother Ramu to

forget Rama for the sake of family harmony, and he agrees. However, Rama and the Rai Sahib disapprove of the plan.

Devraj's stepsister continues to create trouble in the family, and soon she acquires all the household keys. Raju steals a ring from Rama and drops it in Ramu's pocket, causing him to be falsely arrested. Finally, thanks to his female relatives' scheming, Devraj comes to suspect even Bindiya's fidelity, and he expels her and her brothers from the house. He realizes his error when he overhears the women complimenting each other on their victory.

Devraj goes to find Bindiya, giving the women an opportunity to run off with all the valuables, but Raju appears in the nick of time to prevent the theft. All are forgiven and persuaded to return home, and Bindiya prevents Devraj's stepmother and sister from being handed over to the police. Rama and Ramu get married, a bride is found for Raju, and the play ends happily.^[31]

This remarkably contemporary Nautanki at first seems to give voice to female experience in a way not seen before. The heroine Bindiya is financially self-supporting, the provider for her mother and two brothers. Because of her family's dependence on her, her future husband must propose a more generous offer in exchange for her consent to marriage. Her family members accompany her into her new home, and she avoids the pain of separation from them experienced by most newly married women. Furthermore, they are hardworking and talented as well as devoted to her. Her brother is so upwardly mobile that her husband's boss proposes to marry his daughter to him. Her husband, although a capable man himself, is saddled with a miscreant brother and devious female relatives. The balance between the two families, usually tilted toward the husband by rules of hypergamy and patrilocality, favors the woman in this case. This may reflect the actualities of marital and economic relations among the working poor, where women arguably enjoy more independence than in the middle class. Uncharacteristically, the couple has no children, and this presents no problem. The attention that would be directed to bringing up children goes to the younger brothers of both the husband and wife.

Whatever the source of these initial anomalies, the emphasis of the drama eventually (and quite predictably) shifts to the virtue of the faithful wife and her ability to lessen discord through self-sacrifice. Naturally Bindiya quits her job as soon as her marriage is settled, molding herself easily to the role of housewife even though she once enjoyed financial security and independence. (Her job as a construction worker may not have been very enviable.) She still resides with her mother and

brothers, but devotion to her husband becomes her foremost duty, and at crucial moments she sides with him and even the delinquent Raju rather than appearing to favor her own family. For some time, her forbearance and good counsel keep harmony and bring welfare to everyone, but ultimately she meets her match in Devraj's stepmother and stepsister. Bindiya's downfall is engineered by the jealousy of these outsiders, an example of women's supposed inability to coexist with one another in the joint family. Much as Sita did on her return from Lanka to Rama, Bindiya silently accepts her husband's command to leave home; through this self-sacrificing move she finally brings about a change of heart among all members of the family.

In mapping Bindiya's virtue and the steprelations' villainy, the drama resorts to comfortable categories of womanhood. Although she begins the drama as a laborer, a sort of lower-class heroine, Bindiya comes into her own only after marriage. Her name, which refers to the bindi or cosmetic dot on a woman's forehead, connotes the auspicious state of matrimony, a state enjoyed by women as long as their husbands live. Despite her impoverished origins, Bindiya fulfills the expectations associated with middle-class housewives, becoming a grihlakshmi , a manifestation of the goddess Lakshmi in the home (grih ). According to this ideal, a woman's modesty and domestic talents bring prosperity, respect, and good luck on a household—the very opposite of what happens in the family containing three widows. By a materialistic but entirely accepted logic, the virtues of the grihlakshmi are measured by the family's increasing fortunes. Devraj's promotion, Ramu's academic success, and his engagement to Rama are all attributed to Bindiya's correct performance of wifely duties. The interloping second wife of Devraj's father and her daughter are as thoroughly evil as Bindiya is good. Their status as steprelations immediately discredits their motives; everything suggests that they intend to destroy the hero's happiness and rob him of his wealth. This polarization of roles indicates that even if a feminist imagination inspired Bindiya's worker status, it is one highly restricted by the conventional paradigms. Searching for a vocabulary of feminine excellence, the author invokes the ideology of self-sacrifice and the auspiciousness of marriage, as in situating discord and malice he latches onto the stereotype of the greedy stepmother. The drama thus shies away from the implications of Bindiya's independence and moral strength, redirecting her toward the nurture and instruction of those present in her home. It redefines the sati as a contemporary housewife perfect in her performance of domestic duty.

In this overview of Nautanki's representation of women, the more recent examples show that women have begun to act differently from their mythical forebears. They seek higher education, have premarital sex, even become unwed mothers—and then marry and lead comfortable lives. They work side by side with men at rough outdoor jobs and raise families on their earnings—yet still maintain their virtue and status. Some are in the unfortunate position of being widowed, although this does not prevent them from seeking comfort, love, and remarriage. All these behaviors would have been considered disreputable several decades earlier; there is reason to believe that for many Nautanki spectators they still touch chords of surprise or even outrage. Perhaps the biggest change is that most of these women survive: they stumble and fall but pick themselves up and keep going.

Looked at in this way, these texts suggest a stage of protofeminism that holds up for emulation positively valorized changes in women's lives. Certainly the cracks visible in the moral worlds of earlier narratives have widened. Male characters have lost the exclusive shelter of masculine privilege, and female characters have become capable of a range of initiatory, mediatory, and retaliatory behavior. The ground of moral action is still intersected by planes of contention, but the small space allotted to female-specific moral duty has expanded, and the larger arena of masculine righteousness has shrunk.

Yet we cannot but notice—and question—the texts' reinstatement of patriarchal concepts of womanhood. Abala nari, sati, grihlakshmi , and even the musty old pativrat dharm return in force although women get stronger, louder, and more visible. These "modern" heroines may not leave the stage in burial shrouds or flames as their ancestresses did, but whenever they can they pair off, get married, and raise families. Meena weds the barrister and reunites with her child; Bindiya reconciles with Devraj's nasty relatives, and both her son Ramu and his son Raju find brides; meanwhile not one of the widows (poor things) sees the face of a second husband. These unions are not just felicitous plot-closers. Each story, propelled in one direction by the winds of female emancipation, comes back to the culturally imposed necessity of male protection and guidance. Without it, female existence is unmanageable and unimaginable. Bindiya's evolution from construction worker to domestic angel is perhaps the best example of the circle back to patriarchy. The same narrative impulse guides Meena's path from unwed motherhood into the barrister's arms, and the absence of male protection leads Raj Rani and Chandra astray.

The reaffirmation of marital and family values so apparent in these recent Nautanki tales summarizes the consensus achieved in contemporary Indian society on the "woman issue." Women are now allowed to get education, to work and bring in money for the family, and even occasionally to follow their hearts in love and marriage. But marriage remains a universal norm. Life without a male guardian is still an untenable proposition for all but the most adventuresome and resilient of women. Although the legal status of women continues to improve under the impact of feminist activism, the social conditions of women's lives are limiting and often oppressive. Remarriage for widows remains a near impossibility, divorce is available only under certain circumstances, and neither female celibacy nor childlessness is valorized as a choice. Women are constrained by male relations even when through some misfortune a husband is not present.

Within marriage the expected role for women is graceful submission and support. The tried-and-true concepts of pativrata, abala nari , and grihlakshmi continue to inform the socialization of young girls, shaping their self-image in adulthood. These ideals not only exert great influence on the reproduction of gender roles from generation to generation; they have become part of the distinctive cultural identity of a large section of the public in the postcolonial period. Viewed in this context, the more recent Nautanki dramas do not simply expose viewers to modernity and teach them to adjust to change in women's roles. They advocate a modern and Indian response to change as opposed to an alienating and Westernizing response. To obliterate entirely the traditional vocabulary of womanhood might entail a deep cultural excision, a profound injury to national self-respect. But for how long can an emerging, purportedly secular and democratic, nation afford to base its sense of cultural distinctiveness on an ancient patriarchal ideology? This is a question with implications for millions of women's lives, and one that demands serious reflection from the architects of cultural policy, the designers and critics of culture, and the scholarly and feminist communities alike.