The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History

by Manu S. Pillai

‘We drink cow’s milk,’ he replies, ‘but you eat the whole cow. You must be more pure.’

We drink cows milk you eat whoe cow. You must be more pure 'sati dhana surama' shahuji bhonsle

subsequent

The shakuntala in mahbharat is very bold and she slept witg tge king onlf after he promised her that her son would be the next king. But in the abhijana shakuntalm and the english versions she is so innocent . She is delicatw as a flower

But the play also encapsulates a moment when the powerful woman of the epic makes way for a new ideal—an ideal that was embraced by Western audiences in Goethe’s day, and which Indians too accepted (in a nineteenth-century Urdu translation, Shakuntala is so chaste she even wears a veil).

Shivaji’s father and uncle—Shahaji and Sharifji—were both named after a Muslim saint called Shah Sharif. If one travels to Ellora, the ancestral seat of the Bhonsle clan, the samadhis of Shivaji’s grandfather and other relations so closely resemble Islamic mausoleums that they have been mistaken for ‘tombs’ like those of the Nizam Shahs and the legendary Malik Ambar.

These were women of uncommon brilliance who, in addition to their battles against caste and inequality, also challenged patriarchy’s grip over their bodies and thought.

Where elsewhere polygamy was a practice available to men, in Kerala there was polyandry on offer, because women were not unequal to their brothers (or, to be more exact, they were less unequal). They owned property and controlled resources, living fuller lives than the domesticated child-rearing destinies ordained to their sisters elsewhere. But this was, of course, the case of women of privilege.

The tale of Nangeli that they will tell you today has her fighting to preserve her honour, where honour is construed as her right to cover the breast. But in Nangeli’s time, the honour of a woman was hardly linked to the area above the waist.

When Nangeli offered her breasts on a plantain leaf to the rajah’s men, she demanded not the right to cover her breasts, for she would not have cared about this ‘right’ that meant nothing in her day. Indeed, the mulakkaram had little to do with breasts other than the tenuous connection of nomenclature. It was a poll tax charged from low-caste communities, as well as other minorities. Capitation due from men was the talakkaram—head tax—and to distinguish female payees in a household, their tax was the mulakkaram—breast tax. The tax was not based on the size of the breast or its attractiveness, as Nangeli’s storytellers will claim, but was one standard rate charged from women as a certainly oppressive but very general tax.

In 1783, on the contrary, since she had allied with the wrong side during the Company’s war against Tipu Sultan, her fort in Cannanore in Kerala was invaded, and her palace plundered. Plunder, that is, in addition to the 2.6 lakh she was compelled to pay as indemnity, of which a lakh, she discovered, was off the books to satisfy the personal (and secret) avarice of certain officers. A treaty was signed with both sides promising, somewhat ambitiously, to uphold it ‘as long as the sun and moon shall last’. Six years later, these exalted celestial bodies were brushed aside abruptly as the two parties went to war once again; and this time, the lady lost her fort forever.