—The Jataka contains the remarkable story of Sulasa, a courtesan who lived in Kasi (now Varanasi), of great repute. She was beautiful and had amassed a great fortune, of hundreds of thousands of gold coins.
One day, she caught sight of a handsome young thief, who had committed a serious theft, and was just about to be put to death. It was love at first sight for the courtesan Sulasa. She put to use the great wealth she had accumulated, and managed to stop the execution of the thief by paying a large sum to free him. Then, she married him.
The thief should have been ecstatic at his good fortune, but he was a thief, and soon he began to covet his wife’s jewels and wealth. He came up with a plan to steal her jewels and then kill her - he claimed to have prayed for his life at a shrine atop a hill just before his execution, and felt obliged to return to thank the deity of the shrine. He bade his wife to put on all her numerous jewels and then they set off for the shrine.
On the hill top
When they reached the top of the hill, where the shrine was, the thief instructed his wife to remove all her ornaments.
“Why?” She asked.
He told her, plainly, that he intended to kill her. Sulasa was dismayed, but she thought fast. She removed her jewels and asked her husband if she might embrace him, for once last time. He agreed, and so Sulasa made as if to embrace him, but instead — and this where the story gets even more bizarre — possessed by amazing, superhuman strength — the strength of an elephant — she grabbed him by the ‘hinder’ parts and threw him off the hill. The thief died and Sulasa was alive.
This story bears a great similarity to the story of another Buddhist figure, a nun, Kundalakesa. One of the five great Tamil epics, the Kundalakesi, is supposedly about this figure, but only a few fragments of this epic remain, the rest are lost. But Kundalakesa also makes an appearance in the Therigatha, a fifth century BC collection of poetry by Buddhist nuns — where verses are attributed to her. The Kundalakesa of Therigatha is purported a treasurer’s daughter, but apart from that her story is the same as Sulasa’s — she falls in love with a thief, who covets her wealth, and so entices her up a hill where he attempts to kill her. Kundalakesa, like Sulasa, pushes him off the hill, and when she comes down abandons her profession and previous life, becoming a Buddhist nun.
What is startling and remarkable about both these stories is the fact that here women do not need to be rescued by a hero; they, in themselves, possess the strength and the presence of mind to deal death instead to those who would kill them. Which is why, to me, it is such a tragedy that the epic Kundalakesi is lost to us — for I wonder if this epic could have been the empowering story of a woman who saves herself; the sort of epic that I believe would be relevant, inspiring and transformative to read in these times of mass molestation and increasing gender-based violence.
Samhita Arni is the author of ‘The Mahabharata - A Child's View,’ ‘Sita's Ramayana’ and ‘The Missing Queen.’
