Almond Eyes, Lotus Feet
Indian Traditions in Beauty and HealthBy Sharada Dwivedi
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 Sharada Dwivedi
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061246531
Chapter One
Marriage Mantra
I was born in Rajasthan in a small princely state. My father was its ruler, the Maharaja, and so I was a royal princess. When my five brothers were born before me, there was great rejoicing and beating of gongs. But when I was born, there was silence.
Rajasthan lies in the west Indian desert. It is a land of forbidding forts and great chivalry, but it does not welcome the birth of a girl any more than the rest of this land. I have heard that in Rajasthan, many newborn daughters were put in earthen pots and buried in the sands. That was before my time, but those were my people nonetheless: warrior caste Rajputs, sons of kings, sons of the sun and moon, according to legend. We are a race that takes the greatest pride in upholding honor.
I grew up hearing tales of Rajput women committing sati to avoid dishonor, burning themselves on their husband’s pyres to fulfill dictates of honor. That part did not appeal to me although we were supposed to esteem such dedication to husbands. I did question sati, but somehow I never questioned my status as a female, a creature of quiet submission. Everyone I knew took it for granted that women were under some male’s protection: their fathers and brothers until their marriage, their husbands after marriage, and their sons in their old age. It was understood that those men might do as they liked—short of fleeing from a battle—without incurring dishonor.
A Rajput’s ideal woman was Padmini. Padmini was a legendary princess of Rajasthan whose husband was captured in battle when she was still a young woman. Rather than submit to the desire of the conquering king, Padmini threw herself into the fire. She was brave and she was also exceedingly lovely. So my father, with great hope, named me Padmini.
Poor father! I didn’t live up to his expectations, I’m afraid. I was never very brave nor the least bit beautiful, but my mother always said that didn’t matter. A woman’s beauty, she said, was not just in her face, but also in her demeanor, in the goodness of her thoughts and her heart. My name means “lovely lotus flower.”
There was talk of my marriage from the time I was a child. “A daughter and a bullock are always in bondage” is one of our proverbs. Another says, “Daughters: their coming makes you weep and so does their going.” No one rejoices when females are born, but how everyone wails when the wedding is over and the bride departs with her husband to take up her new, married life. According to our customs, once a daughter is married, she no longer belongs to her father’s household. She is gone! She belongs to her husband and to his parents, and she must honor and obey them forever. A common saying is”An unmarried daughter in the house is like an elephant.” Marriage is not an option with us; it is an obligation. In their old age poor parents do not want another adult mouth to feed, nor do any parents want the shame of a spinster daughter, for it means they have failed in their duties to her. Sons on the other hand are very useful. They earn, support their elderly parents, and, when the time comes, perform their parents’ death rites—something a daughter cannot do, according to our customs and traditions.
Daughters are expected to leave. So for many reasons the status of married women—we call them suhagan—is much coveted. That is why we Hindu women very proudly wear our tilak, the spot on our foreheads, which shows that our husbands are still living. Even unmarried young girls wear the tilak spots because we believe that though she may not yet be married, every young woman’s future husband has already been born and awaits her somewhere. At all cost women must show the world that they are not widows! They wear their bangles and their mangalsutra necklaces (our form of wedding rings) proudly and conspicuously. Even if her marriage is unhappy, she wears them, because the worst fate that can befall a woman is widowhood. As a widow so many things are forbidden. Not just the tilak or tikka, the mangalsutra and the bangles, but also the wearing of colored clothes, the eating of spicy foods, and, in the olden days the company of others. “A woman without a husband is like a field without an owner.” Long ago it was considered unlucky to look upon a widow’s face because doing so could spoil your whole day!
So my granddaughter says I did well to come away from Madanpur and the palace when Grandfather died. Bombay is a much freer place. I do not think of myself as a widow living here. I even wear a small tikka, though I haven’t the right, because the memory of my husband is with me still and he would have wanted it thus—just as he wanted me to give up purdah when we married.
Purdah is something Miss Blake never approved of, though I think she may have come to enjoy it. Purdah means curtain. Indian women lived as though behind a curtain, sheltered from the eyes of the world. Purdah was not originally an Indian tradition. It came several centuries ago with the Muslim invasion of this country. Muslims kept their women in a zenana—a women’s quarter. Miss Blake used to call it a harem. Technically our faces, not to mention our bodies, were not to be seen by any but our husbands. In our day, the rules were not so strictly enforced, but there was a time in Indian history when the rules were so extreme that a woman would boast that “not even the eye of the sun had ever seen her sheltered face.” In Madanpur we never took things that far! We kept our heads covered with the ends of our saris or long scarves called odhnas or dupattas that we wore with long skirts and tight-fitting blouses.
Continues…
Excerpted from Almond Eyes, Lotus Feetby Sharada Dwivedi Copyright © 2007 by Sharada Dwivedi. Excerpted by permission.
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