Skip to main content

Shikhandi and other transgenders


 


Book Review

Title: Shikhandi

Author: Devdutt Pattanaik

Publisher: Zubaan and Penguin India, 2014

Pages: 179, Rs 299

Gender is a social construct unlike sex which is a biological status. Until recently, the human world was divided neatly into the male and female. Every child born was assigned one of these genders on the basis of its genitals. The child might grow up to be something else eventually. We have lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders. These were all considered as aberrations. And, obviously, unwanted. Why these, even female children were not quite wanted in many families.

But the Indian mythology has far too many characters who apparently question the validity of the traditional male-female duality. Devdutt Pattanaik’s book presents these ‘queer’ characters. They are queer in both senses: (1) transcending the male-female duality; and (2) strange or odd. Those who are familiar with Indian mythology will also be familiar with most of these characters and the stories associated with them. But they are likely to learn something more, something new even, from Pattanaik’s book because he gives his own interpretations to their stories. He also adds further information about them from various sources. These interpretations and additions make the book an interesting read.

The book is divided into 2 parts. The first part, just over 30 pages, approaches the theme of queerness from a theoretical point of view based on “Hindu mythology.” The author states explicitly that Hindu mythology is not an advocate of patriarchy and the superiority of men over women. He cites the Mahabharata as an example of a time “when there was no concept of marriage. Men and women were free to go to anyone…” He also asserts that feminism is found in Hinduism where “the scriptures point to the difference between the soul and the flesh. The soul has no gender. Gender comes from the flesh. The unenlightened value the flesh, hence gender, over the soul.”

Hinduism celebrates ‘queerness.’ This is what the author is striving to prove in this book. The second part presents all the queer characters from Shikhandi to Ratnavali, Mandhata to Urvashi, Samba, Alli, Pramila, and a whole lot of others who were queer part-time or full-time.

It is certainly worthwhile to take another look at these mythological characters which is what its author helps us do. But were they really meant to teach anyone about the need to accept the divergent genders? Was Hinduism indeed celebrating ‘queerness’ through them? Or were they just serving certain fictional purposes in the stories to which they belonged as characters?

For example, does Amba becoming Shikhandi convince us about the broadminded acceptance of eunuchs by Hinduism? Or did s/he become a eunuch to fulfil her determination to wreak vengeance upon her bête noire, Bhishma?

The problem with Pattanaik’s book is that it seeks to show that Hinduism was exceptionally broadminded towards gender issues but it lacks the intellectual resources to convince a critical reader of these stories many of which sound rather bizarre if not perverse.

PS. I received a copy of this book as a compliment from The Blogchatter.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Interesting... shruti does, in places, emphasize the fact that within all of us are both male and female powers, but in reference to the spiritual nature and how, if we are diligent, we can harness both to live the most spiritual life - a case of neutralising gender, in fact. To take this up to wave the rainbow flag is a bit of a stretch. Though not entirely without precedent. It is not likely to be a book I would opt to read, but my instinct (reading the blurb on it) might well match your final paragraph's conclusion! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pattanaik is a popular writer these days. Shallow interpretations are gaining undue popularity!

      Delete
  2. I completely agree with your view on Pattanaik, there's a fine line between modest and pompous and he crosses the line several times

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...