Two ends of a spectrum

Swayamprabha and Surpanakha stand for the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ single woman in the Ramayana

There is a strange and largely unnoticed woman in the Valmiki Ramayana, a female ascetic named Swayamprabha, whom the monkeys going south in their search for Sita encounter in the woods. Tired, thirsty and hopeless, they stumble into a brightly lit cave filled with flowing streams, fruiting trees and flowering plants. There are vast mansions with doors and windows studded with precious gems, heaps of gold and silver and platters piled high with luscious roots and fruits.

As they refresh themselves, Swayamprabha appears and tells them that no one leaves that enchanted place alive, a place created by the danava Maya, the architect of illusion.

Power from austerities

Swayamprabha says that she will help the monkeys escape and tells them to close their eyes. By the power of her austerities, Swayamprabha leads them out of the cave and points them to the shores of the ocean. We know little of Swayamprabha’s own origins — all that she tells the monkeys is that her friend Hema, who was given these forests by Brahma after Maya had been killed by Indra, allowed her to live there.

Swayamprabha stands out in this story because typically, the women in the Ramayana are married. Within the bounds of marriage, we have so-called ‘good’ wives and ‘bad’ wives. Kaikeyi is a bad wife for using her sexuality to secure her position at the court of Ayodhya, Ahalya is a bad wife because of her extramarital sexual encounter with Indra. The other married women — Kausalya, Sumitra, Tara, Ruma, Mandodari and the wives of the sages in forest — are uniformly ‘good’ because they live and love well within the rules and expectations of the conjugal contract.

Apart from Swayamprabha, the only other single woman in the Ramayana is Surpanakha. When she meets the princes and Sita in the forest, Surpanakha proudly says that she goes where she pleases and that her powerful brothers have no control over her.

Within moments of her propositioning Rama, Surpanakha is brutally punished for her appetitive sexuality. The sexually active single woman is dangerous and here, she has been successfully neutralised. Arguably, it is her actions that set the cataclysmic events of the Ramayana in motion. Thus, the consequences of Surpanakha’s behaviour extend well beyond her own safety and well-being and she becomes responsible, in a sense, for Sita’s abduction and captivity as well as for Rama’s many hardships. Eventually, then, she is also responsible for her brother’s death.

The ascetic Swayamprabha and the sexually aggressive Surpanakha could not be more different from each other and it is very clear which one is the ‘good’ single woman and which one the ‘bad.’ Swayamprabha is obviously celibate and her name implies a radiance that comes from within. She reminds the monkeys of the powers that she derives from her celibacy. Swayamprabha is as proud of her disciplined asceticism as Surpanakha is of her licentious freedoms. Even if both these women have chosen the lives they wanted outside marriage, the text is in no doubt about who made the right choice.

The writer works with myth, epic and the story traditions of the sub-continent