Arti Dhand's work, with its focus on issues of gender and sexuality, is welcome and long overdue, and the energy, enthusiasm, and thoroughness of her effort is commendable. The author demonstrates a solid knowledge of her material and uses a convincing array of primary and secondary materials pertaining to traditional India. While Dhand demonstrates a familiarity with the standard theoretical works on gender and sexuality, there are numerous recent works that address issues of sex, sexuality, and gender that would have strengthened her discussion. Within the parameters of the primary sources, one would have liked to see her expand her textual sources to include at least the Citraśālā edition, as it includes the only available printed version of Nīlakaṇṭha's commentary, as well as variants of narratives that provide windows through which divergent voices and concerns can be identified.
The book appears to be a reworking of Dhand's thesis, and many remnants of the dissertation style—both in content and in structure—remain. Coupled with this is a feeling that the intended audience for this book is not well visualized in the author's mind. For example, pages 5–14, a rather pedestrian overview of scholarship on the Mahābhārata, could have been reduced drastically or omitted altogether. Similarly, on pages 25–53, the author turns her attention to religion in the Mahābhārata and its historical antecedents; this section largely rehashes material found in most introductory texts. The long chapters on nivṛtti and pravṛtti dharma, with their somewhat simplistic charts of ascetic figures (pp. 59–62), would have benefited from substantial pruning.
Dhand confines her understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender to the religious sphere and does not, seemingly, allow for an understanding of sexual behaviors and patterns that fall outside religious praxis. On page 25, she rationalizes, “All discussions of sex and gender are from within the theological and metaethical discourses of dharma and adharma, righteousness and unrighteousness, and the study of sexuality in the Mahābhārata is therefore inalienable from the study of religion. It is necessary from the outset then, to take some account of the religious platform on which discussions of sex are permitted.” This leads to a discussion of pravṛtti and nivṛtti dharma in which the reader is reminded that this tradition is “a commodious device employed by the writers to claim knowledge of the plurality of religious practices and to let them assign them relative value” (p. 27). The author clearly accepts these devices as effective and thus positive, but never negotiates possible limitations associated with such a binary construct or allows that such a frame might be problematic. Moreover, the terms “sex” and “gender” are neither problematized nor disambiguated, and, given the Mahābhārata's myriad and complicated permutations of various characters' gender(s), sex, and sexuality, a much more contextually apposite and nuanced discussion would have served the author's goals well. Dhand's premise is reductive of the understanding of gender and sexuality in the traditional brahmanical context. Certainly religion is a frame from which culturally sanctioned and prohibited sexual behaviors are articulated, but the epics present challenges to, deviations from, and negotiations of these norms. Gender, sexuality, and sex permeate all areas of the social nexus and must be examined within multiple frames that both include and cross “religious” boundaries.
Additionally, Dhand states that “the anchoring premise” of pravṛtti dharma is “concern with procreation” and with “maximizing the procreative potential of men and women.” She goes on to comment that “procreation is the fundamental premise on which its sexual ethics are structured” (p. 97). If this is true, then what does it mean for the epic to so frequently deny woman the biological function of childbirth? This denial pervades every level of the Mahābhārata's narrative. And while one might not necessarily disagree with Dhand, her discussion fails not only to address, but even note, what must considered one of the most fundamental sexual phobias of the Mahābhārata.
Perhaps the strongest segment of Dhand's work is chapter 4, where she takes up a discussion of “Female Personality in Male Ascetic Discourse” (pp. 79–80), which is then followed by a specific discussion about women ascetics. Here, Dhand offers a clear and organized discussion on women ascetics and provides numerous, interesting examples with sustained and nuanced discussions of their roles, interrelations, and so on. It would have served the larger project well had this section been greatly expanded.
Dhand's section on Draupadī is solid, although this important character deserves even more attention. Epic characters are not static; circumstances drive their behavior and their attitudes with respect to sexual identity. It is in the culturally unexpected challenges that one can identify what can be termed “situational ethics.” Draupadī is perhaps the most problematic and nuanced of these figures, as she has the added culturally dystonic feature of five husbands. The author's classification of Draupadī as among those women who “act without desire for themselves, in a mood of niṣkāmakarma, they care not what trials and challenges they face of their path—exiles and abductions, unremitting physical hardships, and various types of personal indignities: all these they take in stride, undeterred from their larger purpose” (p. 179) is problematic. Draupadī defines herself (or is defined by others) to be one way, but, in fact, depending on the context, she acts in ways that challenge traditional behavioral paradigms. Thus, Draupadī might well describe herself or be described in terms of her status as a pativratā, but when she interacts with one of her husbands, especially Bhīma, one is hard-pressed to describe her “mood” as one of niṣkāmakarma (p. 160).
Despite these concerns, Dhand's work contributes a much-needed study to the field, and it is exciting to see new and thought-provoking scholarship focusing on issues of gender and sexuality. Her work fills a major lacuna in epic studies and provides an excellent base from which to further examine these and related concerns of gender in the early tradition of the Indian Subcontinent.
