Devyani was the daughter of Shukra, guru to the asuras. She was beautiful and proud and was devoted to her father. Devyani’s dearest friend was Sharmishtha, the daughter of the king to whom Shukra was an advisor. The two young women did everything together and were like sisters even though the lives they led were entirely different — Sharmishtha’s life overflowed with opulence and luxury whereas Devyani and her father adopted the simpler ways of forest dwellers.
One day, the young women went to the river to bathe along with Sharmishtha’s royal retinue. They left their clothes on the river bank and soon, they were completely absorbed in playing games and frolicking in the water. When they grew tired and emerged from the river to dress, Devyani accidentally put on Sharmishtha’s clothes. When Sharmishtha, the princess, saw this, she was enraged. She accused Devyani of coveting the fine silks and getting above her station. She reminded Devyani that she was the daughter of a lowly employee — Sharmishtha’s father, the king, paid Devyani’s father a salary. Devyani was aghast and retorted that she was the daughter of a brahmin and that in fact, Sharmishtha was the social inferior. The verbal insults quickly accelerated into a physical fight. Sharmishtha ripped off the garment that Devyani was wearing and pushed the naked woman into a well.
As it turned out, Devyani’s fate was to be rescued by Yayati who took her to his palace. Much later, further trouble ensued with Sharmishtha but for the moment, let us consider the way a relationship between two women is depicted in this story. The women are like sisters, we are told and yet, at the most critical moment in their relationship, it is caste and hierarchy that stand between them. It would appear that Sharmishtha has never actually thought of Devyani as an equal and in her turn, when push came to shove (literally and figuratively), Devyani, too, resorts to the rhetoric of her brahmin birth.
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Status as yardstick
This is yet another iteration of the fraught relationship between kings and priests, (brahmins and kshatriyas, in our context) as each woman cites her father’s position as the source of her own superiority. This is not a girl-to-girl squabble about borrowed feathers and fine birds. Did Devyani covet Sharmishtha’s fine garments, driven, perhaps, by envy for her friend’s riches and comforts? Or, did she put them on mistakenly? The princess does not care which and taunts her friend by mocking her father’s position as someone who is economically dependant. In the Indian situation, we know that Sharmishtha’s pointed insult is one of caste even though it is couched in the rhetoric of wealth and class.
Devyani ups the ante by responding from the same space — that of caste superiority. The measure of how profound these provocations are and how deeply both are felt lies in the fact that Sharmishtha abandons her friend to die in the wilderness.
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The writer works with myth, epic and the story traditions of the sub-continent