UNDERSTANDING INDIAN WOMEN
LOVE HISTORY & STUDIES:
The Khmer empire, flourished between the 9th and the 13th century with its heart in Kambujadesha, now Cambodia, was deeply influenced by India, and its sovereigns highly embodied the cakravartin's ideal.
Due to this precious epigraphic patrimony we learn the importance of the
female component in the field of the royal sacredness: indeed it seems that the matrilineal descent was determining in the succession and nearly always an usurper used to legitimize his power through a marriage with the widow or the daughter of the preceding king. Furthermore a myth tells that the ancestors of the Khmer royal families were the Indian brahman Kaundinya and the Nagini Soma, daughter of Naga's king. The Nagini, the women of these mythical water creatures, partly cobra, were in India the ancestors of many royal lineages.
This study explores different figures of Indian widows found in eleventh century Sanskrit literature. The
traditional image is that of the inauspicious and at best wanton widow, but some texts suggest that she can also be considered successful as such.
In the long struggle for the indipendence of India women played a very
important role since the beginning: the name and deeds of Lakshmi Bai, the
Rani of Jhansi, who was one of the main leaders in the out-break of 1857-58,
are famous all around the world. Then came Swarn Kumari, Sarla Devi,
Sarojini Naidu, Kasturba Gandhi and others, each of them offering her own gift of heroism to Mother India. After them came more women, whose names remained unknown, but whose actions strongly contributed to make India free. In the large amount of patriotic songs, which people go on cherishing so far, these heroines are celebrated with great love and admiration. Verses and tunes are often very naive, nevertheless they help very well in keeping the memories of these brave women alive and stimulating till now.
Karniji is not only the Kuladevi of the Charans, but she has also become the Kuladevi of many Rajput clans. She represents as a whole the female power in Rajasthan. Due to her, all kingly authorities are legitimated. In fact, thanks also to many studies, including those of the noted Udinese linguist Luigi Pio Tessitori, we can see her fame spread by Charans, Bhats, Bhopas, Takhurs, and the Rajas.
As is well known, in the kaavya love is unhesitatingly defined as the most important of life's experiences (and as an essentially aesthetic one). Moreover, it is explicitly stated that this experience is best described and understood by means of typical female characters, or naayikaas. Thus woman, neglected and despised in almost every other area of the Indian literary tradition, in the kaavya becomes the object of the poet's worship and the pivot of his Weltanschauung, as he describes the charm, by turns delightful and disturbing, that she exerts on her lovers. But it also often happens that a poetical anthology is subdivided into monothematic sections: for instance, 'earthly wisdom', 'love', 'grief', 'spiritual peace', and so on. A strange fact about these anthologies is that these various themes are juxtaposed without being synthesised to reflect a consistent hierarchy of values. Therefore, after a section in which the love of women seems to be the unique source of bliss, we find another in which women are despised and condemned as an obstacle to renunciation. In these sections, exactly as in religious, ethical, and legal texts, woman is not herself, but the embodiment of the abstract idea of "womanliness", in which , not surprisingly, the stereotyped vices of ungovernable temper and lustfulness are predominant. The 128 stanzas of the RasikaraNjana, which I now present in its first Italian translation (R. Schmidt's 1896 German translation is the only other into a European language), can be read as both a paean of love, and a glorrenunciation. This text is thus a unique masterpiece, which leads the reader simultaneously along two paths: the way of bhukti and the way of mukti..
It is a traditional but common misconception that a considerable number of Rgvedic hymns were composed by women. Though female authors and interlocutors are not entirely absent from the Vedas the role of 'literate' women in the Rgveda will have to be re-evaluated. The traditional names given for female Rgvedic authors include those derived from the wordings of the hymns but also personified Belief, Speech and a bitch.