The Ring of Truth

Title: The Ring of Truth – Myths of Sex and Jewelry
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Speaking Tiger, 2019 (First published 2017)
ISBN: 9789389231755
Pages: 397

Many legends and stories from all parts of the civilized world are in fact recognition stories in which a long-lost husband, wife or offspring is reunited with his or her relatives when they come across a piece of jewelry, most typically a ring, in the custody of the unknown person. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala is the most well-known tale in India in which the royal lover forgot about his sweetheart in a hermitage and refused to recognize her when she presented herself at his court with unmistakable signs of pregnancy. Unfortunately, the girl had also lost the ring gifted by the king. By a strange coincidence of events, the ring which was lost in a river was swallowed by a fish which ends up in the royal kitchen. The king quickly remembered the ring’s past and is reunited with his wife and son. This book narrates similar stories from other cultures as well, such as ancient Greece, medieval Europe and Arabia. The pattern of such stories strikingly resembles each other across cultures. The stories given here are about circular jewelry, particularly rings even though bracelets and necklaces also make in their appearance quite regularly. The shape mimes the circle of eternity in the face of ephemeral human lives. We also find that sex and jewelry are often connected. Stories of rings frequently get into marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery and identity and masquerade. Wendy Doniger is a controversial professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. Her book ‘The Hindus – An Alternative History’ is banned in India because of the contemptible way in which it handled the sacred lore of Hinduism. You can, however, find it reviewed here.

Readers are treated with a fine variety of legendary stories from various parts of the world. A curious exemption is China from where nothing is heard though this may be attributed to the author’s poor research on the Far East. Apart from the genre of innocent wives who are reunited with their husbands upon presenting the ring which was gifted by him earlier in the story, there is another category called clever wives whose stratagems outsmart the restrictions set by a heartless husband who declines to consummate the marriage and set restrictions upon the wife which could be mitigated only by the son borne to her of him who leaves her. Such clever wives escape their detention, goes in disguise to follow the husband and trap him in the guise of a dancing girl or courtesan. The union eventually results in the birth of a male child thus setting into play one of the conditions of mitigation. The first seven chapters deal with stories of rings throughout history. The next two chapters veer towards necklaces in particular cultures and particular historical periods. The final two chapters return to rings and to the invention of the mythology of diamond engagement rings and a concluding consideration on the cash value of rings and the clash between reason and convention throughout the world. It may come as a surprise to many that the practice of presenting a diamond ring to the would-be bride at the time of betrothal was the result of a change in social mores brought about by persistent advertising campaign initiated by the De Beers company which produced diamonds around the end of World War II.

The author’s exposure to Indian mythology helps to construct parallels between it and European concepts which are very similar. A great deal of Orientalist study has gone into this subject so as to puff up the current comparative literature to such levels of advancement. The ancient myth of the submarine mare is a case in point. According to this legend, a mare triggers the final fire and the final flood. Hindu mythology tells of a fire that threatened to destroy the universe until it was placed in the mouth of a mare that roams at the bottom of the ocean. The flames that shoot out of her mouth are simultaneously bridled by and bridling the waters of the ocean. This delicate balance and the hair-trigger suspension will finally be disturbed at the moment of doomsday. Doniger mentions Scandinavian and Norse myths comparable to this Indian tale. Richard Wagener’s nineteenth century operas featuring the adventure of Siegfried and Brunnhilde also display cross-cultural affinity.

The book includes different variants of the Shakuntala story and we wonder at the freedom taken by Kalidasa as poetic license in embellishing and transforming a minor story in the Mahabharata into a world classic. Doniger quotes the comments of other scholars on these and unfortunately, she has chosen only Left-Islamists like Romila Thapar and Akhtar Hussain Raipuri who handles the subject matter under the lens of their religio-political prejudices. Raipuri had translated Kalidasa’s works into Urdu. He finds fault with Kalidasa and argues that he was a man identified with ‘Brahminical high culture’ and changed the original story. It is only in India that we find the opinions of Islamists posing as liberals getting a treatment at par with established wisdom. Hussain Raipuri is, in spirit, almost on the same page as those Muslim scholars in the Mughal court who were tasked with translation of Hindu texts to Persian. Even though they did the job well, they bitterly complained about ‘the unsavoury task of handling a religious text of the unbelievers’. Mulla Shiri, who translated the Mahabharata, termed the epic as containing ‘rambling, extravagant stories that are like the dreams of a feverish, hallucinating man’. Centuries have gone by, but this genre of bigoted scholars remains the same. For further details on the translation of Hindu texts in the Mughal era, please read my review of Audrey Truschke’s ‘Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’ here. Doniger has learned Sanskrit well and her treatment of the nuances in literary texts point to the fact that she has mastered the language. However, this mastery is not translated into respect to the ancient texts. Her irreverent, mocking style sets her up as an insensitive braggart. Once she remarks that ‘Had Dushyanta, Yven, Tristan and Siegfried lived to our time, they might have attributed their memory lapses to another sort of a drug and cited a study reported in an article in Nature Genetics (p.135). In another instance, the author describes the legends linked to Durga Puja in Bengal and claims that Parvati berates Shiva for his ‘refusal to beget a son, his addiction to marijuana, his poverty, his infidelity and his refusal to get a job’ (p.150). Such is her disgusting style.

A good point of the author’s effort in writing this book is the consolidation of narratives similar in action and morals neatly laid out across cultures and millennia. A really creative attempt is to link the tales to the present-day world where myths are still widely prevalent but which are spawned and spread by commercial organisations for facilitating increased sales of their product – such as diamonds by De Beers. The significance of the genuineness of jewelry also seems to have made a diametrical shift. Whereas in old tales it was the genuineness of the ornaments that ensured that everything went well, in the modern stories the recurring theme is that faithful women cannot afford to possess expensive, real gems like genuine diamonds or pearls. We read of some stories in which a supposedly loyal wife silently implores an appraiser to pronounce a pearl necklace in her possession as fake when in fact it was gifted to her by another man. Morals change over time and so does morality – that’s what the author stresses. The book also provides an accidental glimpse of the loot of India in the colonial period, and the author is an unwitting party to it. Doniger proudly claims that she wears a bracelet of ancient Indian gold coins from the fifth century Gupta period. John Marshall, who excavated them, stole this treasure and gifted it to his mistress in the 1930s. She eventually married another man but kept the coins for herself. It was later bequeathed to the author. The book is not difficult to read but feminism ooze out of every pore in the narrative. Without implying any kind of disrespect to the author and solely copying an old Sanskrit idiom, let me conclude that the literary content of this book is like a garland in the hands of a monkey!

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star