In many explicit and sometimes implicit ways, our cities tell us, especially our women, how to dress, work, interact with each other, travel and lead our lives. Arshia Sattar, writer, translator and co-founder, Sangam House, would call these ‘ways to be’ the dharmas of our cities. In a fascinating exercise held recently at the Indian Insititute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Arshia traced some of these modes of behaviour back to the Ramayana, the epic written more than 2,500 years ago.
During a master class titled ‘Three cities, Three dharmas’, hosted as part of the Unpacking Urbanism series conducted by IIHS, Arshia presented a paper in which she identified three cities in the Ramayana- Ayodhya, Kishkindha and Lanka- each possessing a dharma which is different from the other. What was significant in this identification was the fact that “the dharma a city sanctions is visited most especially upon its women- that women are expected to embody the dharma of their city. As such, the violations of the city’s dharma involve transgressions perpetrated on women,” she said.
Ayodhya is a peculiarly correct city, Arshia said reading out her translation of the description of Ayodhya by Valmiki: “The people who lived in Dasaratha’s city were happy, learned and virtuous. There was no greed, for each was satisfied with what he had and spoke the truth…Nowhere in Ayodhya would you see a man who was lustful, cruel or miserly, nor one who was illiterate nor an atheist…” Arshia said that along with the abundance in Ayodhya, there is an environment of restrictions and a specific kind of goodness. She argued that even in the case of the disputed kingship, the resolution is amicably brought about with Rama quietly following his father’s decision.
Relatively, Kishkindha, the city of monkeys, she said, has an atmosphere that is emotionally charged and sensual. “The monkey citizens were all children of the gods and gandharvas and they could change their forms at will…Kishkindha’s roads were perfumed with flowers and sandal paste and the fragrance of natural liquors like mead and toddy wafted through the air.” In a sharp contrast to the women of Ayodhya who had to be chaste and pure, the women of Kishkindha are seen “..revelling in their youth and beauty.” Far more lenient than the dharma of Ayodhya, “the dharma of the monkeys permits the transfer of wives between brothers and monkey women appear to have freedoms that human women do not. While Tara and Ruma are Sugriva’s wives, Tara is also a wise counselor who advises her first husband Vali and then does the same for Sugriva when he takes her as wife after Vali’s death,” she explained.
The ‘best of the three cities’ is of course, Ravana’s Lanka. She quoted a significant passage from the epic to showcase how different Lanka was: “…Hanuman reaches the northern gates and saw the city spread before him like a woman, the walls and ramparts her body, the vast ocean her clothes, the fortifications her hair and the upper stories of the mansions her earrings.” The description of the city in terms of a woman’s body is noteworthy here. Phrases such as ‘bare breasted’, ‘skin like moonlight’ are freely used in the descriptions of Lanka’s women. There are also women in Lanka who had come to live with Ravana out of their own free will.
Arshia’s argument was that the manner in which the women of each of these cities are portrayed is representative of the culture or dharma of the city. For example, she said, “The conservative nature of human relations in Ayodhya is amplified by the fact that the city’s women are not described in terms of their bodies or in relation to men. Ayodhya’s women are chaste and submissive and stay well within their conjugal boundaries, which makes Manthara’s conniving and Kaikeyi’s petulant greed all the more remarkable.” In relative terms, Kishkindha and Lanka allow far more leniency.
The maintenance of the dharma , therefore, Arshia pointed out, is dependent on the women. If it is violated, it is generally seen in terms of a woman’s actions or actions performed on the woman. The demand of Ayodhya’s citizens that Sita must undertake the Agni pariksha is a case in point.
The point of Arshia’s paper was to show how epics such as the Ramayana speak directly to a contemporary reality of ours. They are at the base of our cultural perspectives and have a bearing on expected modes of behaviour, especially of women even today. “As with Sita in Ayodhya, we know that a city is only as liberal as the freedom it gives to its daughters — only as liberal as the promises and dreams it bestows upon them. If our most beloved and most repeated stories tell about the violence, angst and humiliation of women, we have to go a great distance to overcome these ideas and these behaviours,” she said poignantly.
Arshia flagged another important concern in her paper. That the choice to be the way we want to be is increasingly being taken away from us in our present circumstances- which is why there is more of a need to scrutinize these popular epics and truly gauge the merit of what we take from them. Hundreds of Sitas even today are, in both explicit and implicit ways, sent out, or scared away from cities because the dharma of a particular city tests their behaviour. And then there are those, as Arshia pointed out, that continue to live in these dharmas, fighting their own battles each day.
