I bit the dust and watched Padmaavat last night. I had heard and read so much about the film that I thought I knew everything about it, but I was in for a surprise. In focusing on Rani Padmavati, on just her, no opinion piece, review or response spoke about the other women in the movie. I remember now, that my copy of Padmavati — yellow font on pink-bordered Amar Chitra Katha edition — from which I first heard the story — also made no mention of Mehrunisa who is Khilji’s wife, and Mewar’s first Queen. In the movie, she features in a few scenes and I don’t remember her being addressed as anything but Badi Rani. It’s unfortunate I thought, that in celebrating the valour and the virtue of one woman, other integral characters get left out on and off screen; actually in every telling of the story.
Already, all the women we see or hear of seem to share the same mind — in not having dialogues or dissent amongst them, we are given one narrative — that the women of the kingdom unanimously committed Jauhar. Now I wonder if the other women will cease to exist in future tellings of the story. And I wonder how many women, and therefore how many stories we have lost so far in oral transfers, poor documentation and poorer representation.
Take Madhavi in Silappatikaram. Though she features in a large portion of the original text, pop culture has reduced her to the woman Kovalan was briefly with. The then queen of Madurai too has vanished from the stories we show and tell of Kannagi, hailed a veera-thamizhachi now. Though Kaikeyi and Shoorpanakha are hard to forget, Manthara and Mandodari of the Ramayana are now merely names that we try to place. There lie a thousand such forgotten women in each epic or mythical story we know off.
Off the women whose stories we will never know are the thousands of Kanni ammas in this state. Kanni means virgin and Kanni Kovils can be mapped in every far off part of the state. Scholars are unable to put a timestamp on most Kanni Kovils, so we will never know when they came about but it is often theorised that the temple itself could have been built to remember a virgin, who was murdered for falling in love outside the community. From marital concerns to motherhood woes, we pray to thousands of very localised child gods, but because their stories have not been penned down, we have lost out on the lives of as many women who lived and died, all categoried kanni kadavuls.
Padmaavat has shown me that the story of the good woman will live forever, while those of ‘bad’ women will all be blown away in telling. That is a scary thought to have, and a scarier world to live in. In this background of divisive politics, of being able to easily ‘otwwher’ communities, of rewriting history, we have each the responsibility of holding on to our histories, putting down our stories, pushing for women’s voices to be heard, and shared and stored so that generations from now there is no doubt of who did what, how and why.
While we change the notions of good and bad, of whom to celebrate and not, lets start prioritising the story of every woman. And let’s start before we are asked to believe that the Taj Mahal is actually a Ram mandir, or some bizarre equivalent of it.
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton