It’s Dussehra this week and while the big festivities focus on the victories of divine figures, what about mere mortals and their struggles and triumphs?
The haunting case of Pingala, the public woman, appears in one of India’s favourite books, Vyasa’s Srimad Bhagavatam, Canto 11: Chapter 8. The Bhagavatam is a Mahapurana and ranks with the Ramayana and Mahabharata as one of the three foundational Indian books. It is a complex compendium that relates the story of Mahavishnu. The Bhagavatam is also cherished as the biography of Sri Krishna. In the portion concerning Pingala, King Yadu, who is Sri Krishna’s ancestor, happens to meet a young ascetic whose face and manners shine with serene self-possession.
King Yadu is so impressed that he wants to know how the ascetic has achieved it. The ascetic humbly replies that he had many teachers, including an ajgar or serpent, and the Pancha Bhuta or the five elements of earth, water, air, fire and ether, and explains what he has learned from them. He then shocks King Yadu by saying, “In the city of Mithila in Videha, there used to be a public woman called Pingala. Now hear, O king, what I learnt from her.”
“I can readily accept that the natural world holds many lessons. But really, a public woman…I don’t see how,” says the startled king.
The ascetic smiles; “She used to come to the temple to which I was then attached, and told me herself,” he says, and gets on with his story:
Pingala stood at her doorway as usual one evening in Mithila city, displaying her beautiful form to attract customers. Her proud region, Videha, had a very good opinion of itself as a seat of learning. Above all, it was Sita’s home. Sita was renowned in the Indic world as the heroine of the Ramayana. No person, man or woman, could think of her without feeling wretched that she had been punished and sent away for no fault of hers. People took her fate very personally and when a daughter was married, they used Sita’s father’s words, “Iyam Sita, mama suta”(This is Sita, my daughter). To star Sita’s name in their own weddings was their way of trying to make it up to her.
Pingala often thought of Sita whose good character had not saved her from misery. She herself had been born into a respectable family and been taught her prayers. But her parents had died of an illness and there was no one left to care for her. She had been put to work as a maid in a merchant’s kitchen and was seduced by the son of the house. Thrown out on the street when discovered, Pingala had no reputation left and nowhere to go. Mithila’s richest bawd had picked her up and taught her the tricks of the trade.
Pingala had done reasonably well for herself. She had a little house of her own and could employ a maid to cook and clean while she devoted herself to looking her best with scented baths, oil massages, sandalwood facepacks and carefully chosen clothes and ornaments.
But Pingala was very lonely and longed for a secure life. She fantasised every day about that one rich man who would fall in love with her and look after her for good with affection and respect. She prayed every day for this wish to be granted and worried about it all the time.
She worried about it that evening in the soft purple twilight of Videha as she stood at her door; and worried about it when she looked up, as she always did, at the evening star; and went on worrying until midnight, when she suddenly had a startling revelation.
“Just what am I doing making myself unhappy, selling myself to men who are lamentable themselves, and desperately hoping that someone will love me and look after me?
“Am I so unintelligent that I can’t see how pointless this is? The best way to be happy is to be unafraid and live my life confidently with the faith that I’ll cope; that ‘Someone’ is with me already,” she found herself thinking, amazed at her own clarity of thought.
“This body is but a cage of bones that will burn one day. Somehow, detachment has risen in my heart and made me very happy. It has set me free of my body. After all, I belong to Videha, which means ‘bodiless’.”
With that resolve, Pingala shut the door and sat down on her bed. No more would she look for affirmation outside when true happiness lay in self-possession and faith in God. Serene in her newfound realisation, she went to sleep happy.
“And so I learnt from Pingala that people can always remake their life with independent reasoning,” says the young ascetic to the fascinated King Yadu. This poignant story made me marvel at the vast heritage of Indian storytelling—its depth and range, its inventiveness and subtle in-house cues, which nevertheless allow elbow room to a modern storyteller. The Bhagavatam, in particular, is a book of endless discovery with an all too human component, and is strikingly contemporary.
Also, in retelling the story of Pingala, it struck me that the tale could have been set in any one of the mahajanapadas or kingdoms and republics of the Upper Gangetic Plain. But by being set in Videha, the realm of Vaidehi Sita, Pingala’s story is textured with ironic depth. Realising the significance of that location made me feel close to the subversive mind of Vyasa, that master storyteller, who delighted in ‘chiaroscuro’—in playing with light and shade. It was a special Vyasa moment, as hundreds of thousands of people must have had before me, and always will.
Dussehra or Vijayadashami becomes deeply meaningful when we think of the personal victories, small and big, that we could effect. Pingala is discovered to us across time from no less than scripture as a moving example of that self-realisation.
RENUKA NARAYANAN
(shebaba09@gmail.com)