On Womanhood

The Pandavas divided Droupadi

As children would a guava. Helen of Troy

And Padmini,-their beauty was their doom.

A fair woman with a pretty nose

And dark hair and eyes drew after her

A swarm of centaurs who her kinsmen slew,

Burnt down her home, harried her countryside

Till beauty was regarded as a curse

Fallen on fated clans unloved of gods.

And the gods too were crimson with this guilt.

Indra raped Ahalya, old Gautum's wife.

The world knows Brahma's incest. A dancing girl

Lifting the wine-glass to their lips and feasting

Their lidless eyes, was woman to the gods!

One thought the poets would at least have sense.

But they sinned against our kind-for similes!

Like entomologists who classify

Rows of butterflies in glass-cases pinned,

They measured our waists with a tape and listed us

As lion-waisted, deer-shaped, elephantine.

They, in their emporium, hung us limb by limb,

Likening the nose to the champak, eyes to the bees,

Throat to the conch and thighs to plantain-stems!

Solomons, they said we were salmon-eyed.

We were a sofa set, a Chinese tea-tray,

A Persian carpet in a drawing room.

Gods and men like demons undid us

Deeming that Woman's body was Woman entire

And toyed with it, covering themselves with dust.

They flung away the creeper of the soul

That burgeoned in her earth and made her sing

Her ruin down the corridors of Time.

God gave woman her loveliness that she might

Gift it nobly to the man she loved;

And He gave her a soul that outlives sex,

Through which, though diverse, she is one with man.

Male and Female are two Ideas and Forms,-

Four constituents of the universe.

They meet and mingle in a million ways

In numberless individuals, age to age,

From earth to heaven and complete the world.

Commingling in the heart, and the body,

And intellect, in ever-varying measure,

They shape the Common, Masculine, Feminine,

With many mediate types shading between.

Man is something of Woman, Woman of Man.

Complements in the plan of life,

They both fulfil themselves and fulfil God.

Diversely endowed, they still obey

The call of the same Spirit that lives within

And towards the same Mansion bend their steps.

Half man, half woman in body, mind and heart,

Incarnate in the universe is God.

He is both and neither. He is all and none.

He has no gender, that engenders the universe.

The engendered is clay; the soul is genderless.

Bring in the new world, the new life

That has use for woman's soul. Bring in

The world where woman's body is a shrine

To her soul's starry flame. O worshippers

Of the vacant shrine, worship the divine light!

Move in the living temple and behold

The Creatrix flame-born, the Holy Mother,

Beloved, Redeemer, Mercy Infinite!

True companions in the pilgrimage,

Cupid and Psyche for youth,

Juno and Jupiter in loveliness

And in Love one soul in two lodgements-

Woman and Man will, to Time s end,

Pursue the One that lives in them as Two.

Translated from the Kannada by the author

Droupadi: in the Indian Iliad, the Mahabharata, she was the common wife of the

five Pandava brothers.

Padmini of Chitar: her beauty was the cause of a disastrous war.

Ahalya: the first woman created by Brahma, wife of the sage, Gautam, who

was seduced by Indra, foremost of the Vedic (Aryan) gods.

Brahma: first member of the Hindu triad who committed incest with his

daughter Saraswathi (Speech).

crlgphantine": the Indian classics say that a beautiful woman has the graceful

walk of an elephant.

Champak: the champak flower.