The anguish of single women

(Photo Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/anxiety-tips_n_4171360.html)

Kurunthogai – 158

by Avvaiyar

In the high mountains

accompanied by loud sounds

of thunder

and the swirling water bearing winds

you arrive

O rain

you who can shake the Himalayas

Can’t you take pity

on us lonely girls?

According to books, this is a poem sung by a lonely lady who is waiting for her beloved to come and meet her. As she is waiting, with thunder and lighting, the rain arrives. She is now very worried whether her beloved will turn up or not and addresses the rain, asking the rain to take pity on the lonely girls.

Waiting is something everyone would have experienced in their lives. The kid waits for his / her parents, the lover waits for the beloved, the wife for the husband and the mother for the child. I still remember my Grandmother, Mother and Aunt, all waiting at the compound wall to await the arrival of my uncle, who would be very irritated to see the woman standing in line near the gate. “Be late by 5 minutes and the whole family is at the gate. I am not a kid”, he would say but the waiting happened every day.

If waiting for a person to return from office happens in many houses, you can imagine the sort of tension a girl would feel when she is waiting for her beloved to appear. (Or the man waiting for his girl to appear.)  Every passing second would be tension filled and the mind would fill itself with multiple scenarios, most of them not very optimistic. The person would understand why they call it ‘standing on fire’ or ‘standing on a bed of thorns’.

Imagination gets a free reign during this waiting period and as I said scenario after scenario is run through the mind to try and guess why the delay is happening. In many cases, there would no delay and yet the heart is anxious. The poem, when read with this in mind, makes us suspect that the rain may not be as intense as the poet says here. Maybe the rain is normal for that season and it is not heavy. Yet the imagination of the waiting girl turns the thunder into sound that could kill snakes, makes the rain heavy enough to destroy the Himalayas and the clouds darker that what they are. Any small obstacle which can prevent the man from coming now turns into a huge obstacle that cannot be overcome. Such is the tension in the lover’s heart.

Ofcourse, the recent times have made things easier for everyone. You can no longer see women leaning on the compound walls waiting for their husbands to come. This is because everyone carries a mobile and you can get the exact status of where the person is. This cuts down on the worry and enables women to watch serials peacefully. The same happens with the lovers. You can keep talking and talking till you arrive at your destination. That way the waiting girl knows not only where you but also whom you are talking to.

To me that is just one reading of this poem and the meaning revealed, while good is probably very evident. Now, think of all the information about the rain to be metaphors for passion and suddenly a new world opens up for us. The dark clouds, the intense winds, the heavy rains, the thundering sound that could kill snakes, everything points to passion. It is the passion inside the heart of a woman. It is this passion which can knock down the Himalayas. So if we read the poem as a young girl addressing the passion inside her, then the last line makes perfect sense. Have pity on the lonely girl. There is a passion raging inside the heart and I am lonely. Take pity on me. She is more afraid of the internal weather than the external weather.  How hard it must be for a girl to remain lonely when inside her a huge passion rages?

‘Parva’, the novel by Byrappa, which retells the Mahabaratha does not start with the ‘sarpa yagna’. Instead it starts in a tiny kingdom far away from Hastinapuram, where the princess has ‘come to age’ almost a year ago and the King’s father (who has now given up the throne to his son) is worried that time is passing and the princess has not yet had her union. In their kingdom, girls meeting boys and having children out of wedlock is common and an acceptable practice. They understand what girls go through in that age. The current King is against this practice since Hastinapuram is now putting into place a new moral code which does not allow this practice of girls having children before wedlock. The old king protests as to why practices need to change locally because Hastinapuram Is changing its morals but the king is adamant. He wants to see himself as a ‘civilized’ king and insists that his daughter, the princess, will have children only after she is married.

This gives an idea of how societies deal with the matter of pre-marital sex. To me it seems that the tribal societies (supposedly undeveloped) and the most developed societies seem to be on the same page as far as this issue is concerned, whereas many developing nations see this as a major crime. The argument in favour of more sexual freedom by developing countries and by many psychologists is that when such issues are discussed freely, the consequences can be explained to the young people and make them aware of where their actions could lead them. In the absence of such information and counseling, youngsters may end up suffering due to the consequence of their actions, consequence which could have been prevented if only information was available to the youngsters. (Coincidentally, as I am writing this article, I am also reading M.T.Vasudeva Nair’s ‘Varanasi’, which is about the same subject: the passion of the youth and the consequence of quenching the passion.)  It must also be noted that this debate is not just between the developed and the developing countries. Even within the developed countries, this debate happens. I have read one newspaper report which said that thousands of youngsters in USA took a vow that ‘true love can wait’ and that they would not have sex until they married. So this is a question which bothers the parents, the society and not to mentioned the youngsters.

It is amazing how the greatest literature talks about unchanging emotions. That is the reason why Sangam poetry still connects to us, for it speaks of issues which are relevant even today.  In Avvai the poems find the perfect voice to state the sentiments which echo across the generations.

Passion of Women

(Picture: Separation by Edvard Munch)

Kurunthogai – Poem 39

by avvaiyAr

The hot wind
blowing strong and hard
rattles the dried fruits
of the ‘vaagai’ tree
in this hilly place
where the forests
are difficult to cross

such is the path
of my man
who went away 
refusing to lie down
on my breasts

We take up one more Avvai poem this week. Last week we saw the situation of girl who is yearning for her lover, who is not in town. In this poem, Avvai talks about the lover/husband going away to another place, probably in search of fame and fortune. This is how the poem would read the first time. It is about the separation of a couple for livelihood purposes. All of us would have seen this happen in our own families or to people whom we know. Separation happens for various reasons: job and children’s education being the primary reasons in modern times.

At another level the poem talks about the need of the man to find fame and fortune. This need is so strong that he is willing to be separated from his beloved wife. Being away from a woman he has just married would be the ultimate sacrifice a man can make.  It is a sacrifice he would definitely avoid if not for the circumstances or due to his own burning ambition. Sangam poetry has lot of poems which talk about this conflict: woman on one side and the need to seek fortune elsewhere on the other side and the separation hurting the woman a lot.

To me the poem is just not about separation, it also about the impact separation has on the sexual life of a person. The last line gives the clue to the state of the mind of the woman. Instead of saying the softer form of “refusing to lie down on my bosom”, Avvai says, “refusing to lie down on my breasts (‘mulai’ in Tamil)”. That is the key image of the poem. The lover / husband is not around to lie down on her breasts to satiate her sexual longing.  That image also conveys the loneliness of the body, not just the heart. There is no one now around whom the woman can put her arms, no on sleeping of that breasts and the absence weighs a lot on the breasts. The body will become lighter only when the lover returns and lies on her.

With this in mind, if you now notice the initial words of the poem, we can see how subtly the poet has incorporated the woman’s state of mind into the poem.  “The hot wind blowing strong and hard” takes a total different meaning now.  From the external image when read as normal separation to an internal image when read as the passion of a lonely woman. The desire of physical union is so great that it “rattles” her and without her man to quench her thirst she is like the “dried fruit” of the vagai tree. The external and internal become one in this outstanding poem. (In Sangam literature, especially the agam poetry, merging of external with internal is a standard feature.)

Poets at various points in time have understood the depth of a woman’s desire. Velchuri and Shulman in their book ‘A Poem at the right moment’ talk about a woman in times of Raja Bhoja and Kalidasa. Bhoja is walking the streets of his city incognito when he notices a woman fainting on hearing the mooing of a cow. When asked by her husband as to what happened, she replies saying that ‘pativratas’ can’t handle such harsh sounds. Bhoja is suspicious and waits near her house at night. Very late in the night, after everyone has slept, the woman comes out, carrying with her a basketful of meat and starts walking towards river Narmada. Bhoja follows her. On reaching the banks of the river, she starts throwing the meat into the river. Crocodiles in the river flock to eat the meat. With crocodiles out of the way, she swims across the river, meets her lover on the other bank and has sex with him.  Next day Bhoja tells Kalidasa these line, “In the morning, she is scared of the cow” and asks him to finish the poem. Kalidasa understands what would have transpired and finishes the poem with “in the night she swims across Naramada”. ‘ratre tarathi narmadau’ he says, a phrase which wonderfully describes the depth of passion in the heart of woman. Maybe it was this understanding that made people to get girls married at a young age.

The complete poem reads thus:

In broad daylight she is scared of a crow

In the night she swims across the Narmada

swarming with crocodiles

Mysterious are the ways of these

beautiful women

In the same book, through a Telugu poem, Velchuri and Shulman point out that sexual desire is natural. The poem talks about a woman who enjoys herself a lot during the wedding night leading her husband to have some suspicion. Seeing the look on his face, she draws a picture of a lion cub trying to kill an elephant and says that some things are natural and need not be taught.

An uneasy relationship exists between our society vis-à-vis expression of female desire by females. Society is very tolerant when males express the desire of females in their poems {Padams of Kshetrayya are an example.) whereas it is very scared and lashes out when a female expresses her passion. The Sangam age was definitely the golden age in Tami literature wherein woman can express her sexual desires in a very normal fashion. The social mores of those times seem to be more relaxed in this aspect compared to even our modern times. There is certain naturalness in the way sexual desire is expressed and more importantly man y such poems were written by female poets. Somewhere along the line things changed and it became a taboo for female poets to talk about their physical needs. In recent past we have seen many female poets challenging society by explicitly talking about sexual matters. I cannot claim to have read all such modern poems but in the few I read, there is more anger than eroticism. Somehow the naturalness of Sangam poems is missing and we cannot blame the poets for this.

This conflict will not be resolved easily in our society.  On one hand we imbibe the dreams of the west. On the other hand we refuse to change our social mores. The modern urban woman is in an unenviable position.