Pancha Kanyah - Ahalya

The “Magic Suggestiveness” of Pancha Kanya
An exploration into some aspects of classical Indian feminism
http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/175.html
by: Dr (Mrs.) Ralla Guha Niyogi

(Original article on Pancha Kanya by Pradip Bhattacharya is at: http://www.boloji.com/hinduism/panchkanya/pk01.htm )

Extract from Dr.(Mrs.) Niyogi's article:

The author’s independent research reveals that Ahalya being turned to stone is the Katha-Sarit-Sagara version, expressing the male backlash of a largely patriarchal society [PK, p.23]. Valmiki’s Ahalya, like the heroine of Aparna Sen’s remarkable twentieth century Bengali film, Paroma undergoes, “not an actual physical transformation, but “a psychological trauma [involving a] ‘freezing’[of] the emotions… making her socially into a non-person”. When Rama and Lakshmana socially recognize her by touching her feet in salutation, her “self-respect and status in society [is restored] so that she truly live[s] again”, [PK., p. 23].[19] The fact that she is regarded by the Prince of Ayodhya as “blameless and inviolate” shows that the ancient concepts of virginity or morality were quite different from that of subsequent ages. Thus, the goddesses Ishtar and Aphrodite, too, were regarded as virgins, though later they were considered ‘immoral’. Ahalya, the foremost of the five Kanyas projects the essence of feminism by independently and willingly undertaking a daring act by yielding to her kutuhala or curiosity and thereby she transcends the limits or confines of her gender, asserting in the process, her strong individuality. It is this “dangerous” power of self-assertion in Ahalya that is sought to be curbed by her husband, Gautama.
Ahalya’s consequent acceptance of Gautama’s wrath and her acquiescence to his sentence of temporary segregation from society may be regarded as her awareness and acceptance of existing societal norms and traditions. Thus, she may not be regarded as a “failed Kanya” as the author asks – on the contrary, she exhibits the equivocal position of women in India, portraying “a more complex and perpetual negotiation taking place between women’s culture and general culture”.
As Gerda Lerner states :
Women live their social existence within the general culture and, whenever they are confined by patriarchal restraint or segregation into separateness (which always has subordination as its purpose), they transform this restraint into complementarity (asserting the importance of woman’s function, even its ‘superiority’) and redefine it. Thus, women live a duality – as members of the general culture and as partakers of women’s culture.
Ahalya is perhaps one of the earliest known exponents of “women’s culture” in a largely patriarchal society. Her kutuhala also leads to a partial fulfillment of the feminine jouissance, a word which to Helene Cixous denotes intense, rapturous pleasure present in women, and which Luce Irigaray interprets as a combination of the corporeal and the celestial. Significantly, Ahalya’s act differs from Irigaray’s interpretation as she seeks merely a corporeal union with a celestial being, but she nevertheless displays a variation of Irigaray’s concept of jouissance, for her union with Indra excludes any yearning for motherhood. Jouissance or ananda, in this case, reinstates a woman’s existence as an individual, feminine entity, and she is looked upon as such by her lover :
The female jouissance would [ascribe] to women freedom and a kind of mobility or fluidity … It would be possible only if women have their …. own jouissance, which they could feel …. , and undertake the upward journey necessary for their survival.
Ahalya’s independence of spirit and her desire for union with Indra may be regarded as an instance of women’s need “ to move freely [around] … an axis which grounds them in the earth and connects them to the heavens”. Gautama’s wrath at his wife’s transgression reiterates women’s “lingering status” as the “secondary sex” in Indian society which prevails even today, prompting modern intellectuals to “figure out a way to change [this] dominant [patriarchal] culture”. Ahalya thus emerges as “a metaphor for patriarchy, exploitation and society’s double standards. In the trap of modernity – science and progress … women… are expected to be superwomen.”25 Rabindranath Tagore’s poem on Ahalya, short stories, television programmes, various Bharatnatyam performances on Ahalya’s life and Dr. Pratibha Ray’s Oriya novel Mahamoha which won the Sahitya Academy Award, describing Ahalya’s journey from transgression to transcendence, continue to reinforce the essence of dynamic femininity that this first Kanya represents, which makes her pratah-smaraniya.