Mahabharata – 202
by
Sankar Mukherjee
&
Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya
Aadivamsavatarana Parva

A Note on Madri’s death

The Madri episode is rather singularly important.One of the  present authors Ramesh has visited a few alien lands.And he has learnt from them that India is such a country where wives must accompany their dead husbands to the funeral pier.Is it not horrible? This is known as suttee custom.But the truth is otherwise.In the puranas it has been narrated how the wife of Lord Shiva died on her own hearing humiliating words regarding her husband Lord Shiva during a yajna or sacrificial rite organised by the father in law of Lord Shiva whose name was Daksa.The wife of Lord Shiva was so deeply identified with her husband Shiva that she could not tolerate a single humiliating word about her husband.When her father himself maligned Lord Shiva, her husband, with harsh words she could not bear with them and she voluntraly gave up her body.She is the ideal of Indian womanhood on a particular level.There could be different ideals in any society whatever.In other words with some women the worship of the husband is the be all and end all.So if the husband is maligned she can give up her own life.She is called a suttee.There was a one little girl named Savitri.She was married to a young man named Styavan.Satyavan died presently after the marriage.Savitri through her penance encountered Yama or the god of death and brought back the fleeting breath of Satyavan.There are many such instances of suttees in Indian mythology,puranas and even in history.In fact suttee is a term to describe a woman who is cent percent devoted to her husband.Madri was such a suttee who voluntarily ended her own life to accompany  her beloved husband on his journey to the life here - after.Kunti another wife of king Pandu however lingered on earth to look after the children of king Pandu.Although every one was full of praise for Madri no one slighted Kunti for not going to death in an attitude.In fact many people in ancient India believed that the body is not the self.There is the individual soul or jivatman that presides over what we call the living body.The soul or jivatman does not die with the death of the body.Weapons can not tear it asunder.Fire can not burn it.Water can not wet it.The wind can not dry it.Now those who believe in this myth can give up their lives merrily for a cause.We know that Jesus did not die on the cross.May be he let his body die on the cross.The women who are devoted to their husbands always carry a cross with themselves.In all probabilities the oldest inscription as to a woman becoming a suttee entering into the funeral pier of the deceased husband  date back to either eleventh century or thirteenth century A.D. in Orissa. Dr.A.K. Coomarswami of Ceylon and Dr A S Altekar in their seperate books have dwelled on suttee tradition with great insight.In the inscription of Orissa it has been narrated how a princess voluntarily gave up her life when her husband had passed away despite entreaties of her royal parents.A Mughal emperor tried to prevent a lady from dying on the funeral pier of her husband.He promised her all the glory and gold of the emperor.But he failed.Later he wrote a poem in praise of a Hindu woman.In nineteenth century Ahalya bai of Gujrat tried to prevent her widowed daughter from dying on the funeral pier of her husband.In 1948  (?) the elder sister in law of Dr. A.S. Altekar the great Indologist,voluntarily died on the funeral pier of her dead husband. And of late there has been the incident of Roopkanwar.Reporters are divided among them as to whether Roop died on her own or not.Be that as it may when the Mughals killed Hindu kings and raped Hindu women, the women of the royal family of Rajasthan leaped into the fire lest they were molested by Muslim aggressors. Since then it was customary for royal women to follow their dead husbands to the funeral pier.But fine.If people think that a wife is pushed into the funeral pier of their dead husband in India, it is far from truth.The present authors belong to the brahmin caste. The brahmins are said to be most orthodox. But in last two hundred years no widow of their family has died in the funeral pier of their dead husband.So pushing the widow into the fire as soon as her husband dies is a myth about Hindu custom.True that the Potuguese Indo - Anglian poet Derozio witnessed a widow being burnt presently after her husband’s death. But this does not speak of Hindu custom.With the advent of the Britishers and the Europeans India’s economy was shattered.India was richer than Europe in the seventeenth century.But when the  economy was out of joints some widows were pushed into fire.The colonial India and the  post colonial India has been witnessing the shut down of factories.Consequently mothers have often killed their children and husband kill their wives.The fear of hunger often goad them to collective sucide.Such incidents have taken place in the so called civilised West.Jude the Obscure of Thomas Hurdy holds testimony to it.But this does not mean that killing wives and children or that children dying on their own has been the custom of human society today.So we will request our readers not to be carried away by the propaganda that India was a land where widows were pushed into the funeral pier of their dead husbands.And  one must not read false and manipulated truths about ancient Indian society in the episode of Madri.We are all praise for Madri who followed her husband to the life hereafter.Besides,the West should be aware of Foucalt.Foucalt pointed out that every age has its episteme.With the passing away of the age the episteme vanishes.Hence we can not know the past as it was.The past remains to us unkown and unknowable despite the fact that often we know much about the past.