The Jungli Rani's Troubles

The same storyteller from whom I learned the jungli rani's tale had a number of others in her repertoire concerning resourceful brides who, against all odds, triumph over adversity in their husbands' houses. But in no tale, with half an exception, does this adversity include suspicion of practicing "magical arts" (jadu, kaman ). Rather, most of the other stories are about young women who overcome poverty, unkind in-laws, and so forth through a combination of a chosen deity's blessings, native intelligence, and good fate—in proportions that vary from case to case. Their success is more often praised by kin and neighbors than subject to hostility and disapprobation.

For example, there is a Brahman's daughter who, married off (by a cruel stepmother) to one among five ill-mannered, bachelor brothers, effectively brings order and religion to their chaotic household through her own unstinting labors and by enlisting the sympathy of neighbor women. Eventually she devises a foolproof plan to coerce the goddess into granting them infinite prosperity. Public opinion dubs this clever bride not "magician" but "Lakshmi"—goddess of auspiciousness and wealth (Gold n.d. [forthcoming]).

There is a sister who renounces her own hearth and home to save her brother's life. The peculiar actions she must perform to achieve this end lead others to judge her mad for a time. But she is never maligned for evil intentions or threatened physically, even though she pronounces vile curses on her brother (retold in Ramanujan 1991b: 62-69).

When a girl tricked into marrying a sword becomes pregnant (the goddess having miraculously produced a husband-prince for her in a secret room), although there is some scandalmongering about her condition, there is certainly no talk of black magic. In the end her mother-in-law touches her feet and praises her for the good fate that granted existence to a long-desired son (Gold 1982: 32-38).

Besides the jungli rani's tale, only one other women's story

that I know from my area includes the motif, expressed far more obliquely than in the jungli rani's case, of suspected magic. That is the story of King Nal, told on the last day of worship of Dasa Mata, the Mother of Well-Being (Gold 1982: 15-23). Nal notices a cotton string—Dasa Mata's emblem—on his queen's neck. The implications of their interchange about this string are that he finds her wearing such a thing, among her golden necklaces, suspicious as well as ugly. She forthrightly informs him, "This is my special women's power." The string represents, indeed is, the goddess of well-being. But the king, because he doesn't like its looks, rashly and brutally destroys it, bringing endless misfortune upon himself and his wife. Only her return to the goddess's grace, when the annual worship comes round again, restores their former prosperity and undoes all the disasters that have dogged both king and queen since his violent folly.

Why, when the majority of worship stories show women's power, acquired through devotion, accepted without question as an indication of great virtue, do a few describe such power as attracting violent suspicions? The jungli rani acts only according to moral precepts, both in her mother's house when she gives the bread to the holy man and in her husband's palace when she worships the Sun God. Yet she incurs abuse, distrust, and accusations of magical practice.

Before speculating on the reasons for the jungli rani's troubles, let me introduce another set of females of a very different type from those portrayed in women's worship stories. Neither Brahman's daughters nor queens, but low-caste artisans and traders, this group includes a female yogi, a potter, an oil presser, a wine seller, a laundress, and their ilk. These are the lady magicians of Bengal as presented in the Rajasthani folk epic of King Gopi Chand. They are "spicy" characters; indeed, the yogi Charpat Nath refers to the guru of them all, Behri Yogin, as "a bag of hot chilis."

These ladies have husbands, and they make some pretense of performing women's typical domestic chores when there is nothing more interesting to occupy their attention, but such drudgery is not their true avocation. Thus, although we meet them on their way to fetch water—the paradigmatic female task—the first to note the presence of a yogi near the water place

exclaims, "Burn up all other matters and listen to me. . . . Many days have gone by since we've played a contest, but today's our lucky day. So burn up all other matters, and let's hurry to the waterside, for today we'll have a contest with this yogi." They quickly abandon their unfilled pots and surround the hapless yogi and former king, Gopi Chand.

The tale presents this readiness to drop household chores— whether filling water jugs, nursing babies, or making bread—as a dangerously contagious one; for although only the seven magicians themselves go to play with (and easily to best) Gopi Chand, when the first rescue team of fourteen hundred yogis arrives in search of the lost disciple, each of the seven lady magicians brings seven hundred more women to the contest. The bard describes this antagonistic mob as looking "like clouds mounting in the rainy season." And, hearing about the grand female victory that concludes this encounter, all the rest of the city's women clamorously beg, "Take me with you next time, take me with you. Next time, Sister-in-law, don't leave me behind."

The low-caste lady magicians of Bengal seek their own pleasure and power and appear to be without loyalties, whether to gods, husbands, or one another (for they blatantly lie to one another in competing over who should possess their victim). Even though Behri Yogin is repeatedly described as the guru of the other six, they are quite capable of attempting to lie to her too, demonstrating an amorality truly beyond the Hindu pale. Although a few of their husbands are mentioned, Behri Yogin is the only one of the seven actually portrayed interacting with her husband; her demeanor on this occasion is certainly not that of an ideal wife. She hopes to impress Asmal Yogi with her accomplishment of transforming Gopi Chand into a parrot. But her husband chides her for playing an ill-advised, foolhardy prank, warning her of its potentially dire consequences should Gopi Chand's guru Jalindar come to save him. Instead of accepting criticism or advice, she defies Asmal boldly and insultingly. Her parting lines as she stalks away are "My pockets are filled with many such as Jalindar Baba. I keep them in my pockets." The husband, not insignificantly, has the last word, calling after her, "Ho, Lady-Yogi, one day your pockets will split, and Jalindar Baba will emerge. Your pockets will burst, and on that day I won't come to help you."

Behri enjoys some sweet moments of triumph until Shiva's own disciple, Jalindar Nath himself, does indeed arrive in Bengal and, as predicted by Asmal, takes the wind out of her sails. Jalindar Nath sends all the Bengali women, transformed into, braying she-asses, into the wilderness, where they starve pathetically because the yogis they have previously turned into donkeys and camels have already stripped the terrain of edible plant life. For all their impudence, independence, and irresponsibility toward hearth and home, it is the wife and mother role that saves them by making their absence difficult to endure: bread burns, babies howl. Accordingly their husbands miss them, and eventually the king is persuaded to control the magicians and restore normalcy to society (Gold 1992: 219-64).^[7]

How might this excursion into a male oral tradition help to illuminate the questions raised by the women's tale of the jungli rani? In both genres indigenous distinctions are made between "magic" and "religion" (a partitioning that has often vexed anthropologists attempting cross-cultural definitions). In the Rajasthani view, magic—a manipulation of deliberately cultivated power for selfish or destructive purposes—is threatening and dangerous to particular victims and, when it gets out of hand, to the social order. Dharma—acting according to biomoral duties that, in relation to a grace-granting divinity, can bring special powers and boons—is by contrast beneficent and helpful, not just to the actor but to community and cosmos.

The chief characteristic of the lady magicians in Gopi Chand's tale would seem to be their selfishness. They have no higher purpose in life than the dubious aim of playing power contests for fun. To enjoy this sport they drop all pretense of serving domestic needs. A suggestive if undeveloped antipathy emerges here between women ready to abandon hearth and home for the selfish motives of exercising power and male yogis who also leave their families for the (perhaps equally) selfish cause of spiritual development. Such social irresponsibility, the tradition implies, is fine for male devotees; but female adepts are "sluts" (rand ). A familiar double standard is at work here.

[7] For a more extensive description and discussion of women in the Gopi Chand epic see Gold 1991; a complete translation of the lady magicians episode is provided in Gold 1992.

Aloof, independent, and uncompromising, the jungli rani clearly values her relationship with the Sun God above all human connections, much as the Bengali magicians value their magical sport. The transformation of the crazed mother into a golden icon speaks quite strongly for the priority of devotion over kinship, as does her giving the fatal bread in the first place. The Bengali magicians and their female followers abandon their babies when an opportunity to joust magically with yogis presents itself; the jungli rani does not mind pinching her baby hard in order to get her husband to leave the illusory natal home before the time allotted by the Sun God's grace expires. Those attributes that the jungli rani has in common with the lady magicians may reveal why her devotion is perceived as dangerous. It fosters independence from, rather than submission to, familial demands—whether natal or marital.

The clever bride who manages the five bachelors puts her energies not into worship but into cooking and cleaning. The sister totally dedicated to her brother's well-being averts fate itself without evident recourse to a deity.^[8] The wife of the sword-husband misbehaves a bit in her daughter-in-law role (snitching the keys to the inner room when her mother-in-law is dozing) but only toward the approved end of perfected wifehood. But the jungli rani's devotion to God overrides her domestic attachments. It appears to be selfishly inspired and thus is perceived as magic, not religion. This is the main source of her troubles. If all women's worship stories have a foundation of devotional emotion and action, the jungli rani's is unusual in giving these concrete priority over the family (although that of King Nal's wife being well justified in spoiling the looks of her golden ornaments with the goddess's white string might also be said to do this).

Connected to the public misperception of the jungli rani's character is the ambiguity attached, in her case, to both daughterly and wifely roles—an ambiguity deriving from her devotional prowess. Such indeterminacy in one woman's identity has no place in Gopi Chand's epic. Where split images prevail it is never hard to decide what kind of woman you are dealing with. The females connected to Gopi Chand by kinship may be loving impediments

[8] On Brother Second, it is said, the brother is the deity.

to his renunciation but are of unassailable virtue; the rest—dangerous, defiant "bags of hot chilis"—threaten his life and passage and insult his person. All the latter types, including servant girls and slaves as well as the magicians and their followers, are often referred to by the male bard as "sluts." The jungli rani is never called a slut, but for her to be called a lady magician means that her devotion and character have been misunderstood, if not without cause.

Whenever she is accused of magical practices by her husband, the jungli rani responds, "From where did you bring me?" as if demanding that the king himself acknowledge her as a jungli rani. She, however, consistently describes herself as a Brahman's daughter—that is, as high-caste and part of a family. Others dub her "jungli" with its implications of tribal castelessness and uncivilized kinship patterns. In fact her daughterhood is quite problematic. She has no brothers or father. When the story opens she has a mother. (Indeed, the tale begins: Do man betyahi . . ., "There were two, a mother and a daughter . . . .") But the initial episode concerns her total rejection by that mother, and soon enough there is only one, the daughter, alone in the jungle. After she becomes the king's wife—one of seven—she is still isolated, bearing the stigma of her jungli origins.

In chapter 2 I described a prevailing dichotomized view that depicts Hindu women as tamed, paired, matched, motherly, and safe or else untamed, single, unmatched, unmotherly, and dangerous. I also showed how women's songs offered far more unified self-images. In the case of the jungli rani and in a few other worship stories a homologous opposition between women's miraculous manifestations of power as divinely bestowed or as acquired through black magic seems to exist within women's own performance traditions. But, this chapter argues, women's tales define such splits as externally imposed, and work against acceptance of their validity. The jungli rani's troubles come from false, externally imposed splits that are magnified and exacerbated by her lack of a family, especially her lack of male kin. In reality, the barbaric jungli rani and the innocent Brahman's daughter are one. Village women speak the words "jungli rani" with fond approval rather than insultingly, as do the citizens of the story kingdom.

Definitions of the self in women's lore are probably in part responses to male labeling and in part expressions of self-knowledge. In examining the jungli rani's tale, we have seen some interplay between these two modes—an interplay reflecting something of the ambivalence aroused in the Hindu world by manifestations of women's power when divine gifts are not immediately channeled into domestic bliss. Presumably, as the story ends, the king lowers his sword and takes his seventh queen home vindicated, but his recognition of her innocence is never verbalized. It would be easy to imagine her troubles continuing, yet the closing prayer, a standard one, brings the jungli rani's somewhat odd gifts within the circle of blessings sought after by all women. After all, through the Sun God's grace, she has a wealthy husband, a palatial home, and a son, and this is far more than a virtual orphan, from a starving kind of natal home, could reasonably expect.

The jungli rani is not afraid to remind the king that although she is a Brahman's daughter, he took her out of a tree. She maintains her integrity as devotee first; daughter, wife, and mother second. The Sun God blesses her for just this. Perhaps the implicit happy ending to the jungli rani's tale gives expression to women's visions of themselves as persons empowered by divine beneficence as well as maintaining familial bonds—stretched, but not split, by characterizations of female duplicity.