Ahalya - Assessment and Remembrance

Assessment and Remembrance

A well-known verse about Ahalya runs:

Sanskrit transliteration
ahalyā draupadī sītā tārā mandodarī tathā ।
pañcakanyāḥ smarennityaṃ mahāpātakanāśinīḥ ॥

English translation
Ahalya, Draupadi, Sita, Tara and Mandodari
One should forever remember the five virgins who are the destroyers of great sins

Orthodox Hindus, especially Hindu wives, remember the panchakanya, the five virgins or maidens, in this daily morning prayer. One view considers them "exemplary chaste women" or mahasatis ("great chaste women") as per the Mahari dance tradition, and worthy as an ideal for "displaying some outstanding quality". According to this view, Ahalya is the "epitome of the chaste wife, unjustly accused of adultery", while her "proverbial loyalty to her husband" makes her venerable. Ahalya is often regarded as the leader of the panchkanya due to the "nobility of her character, her extraordinary beauty and the fact of her being chronologically the first kanya". In the Devi-Bhagavata Purana, Ahalya is included in a list of secondary goddesses, who are "auspicious, glorious and much praiseworthy", alongside Tara and Mandodari as well as some of the pancha-satis ("five satis or chaste wives") Arundhati and Damayanti.

Another view does not regard the panchakanya as ideal women who should be emulated. Bhattacharya, author of Panch-Kanya: The Five Virgins of Indian Epics contrasts the panchakanya with the five satis enlisted in another traditional prayer: Sati, Sita, Savitri, Damayanti and Arundhati. He rhetorically asks, "Are then Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara, and Mandodari not chaste wives because each has 'known' a man, or more than one, other than her husband?" Because they exhibited sexual behaviours that were non-ideal and even unethical according to traditional norms, Indian social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was perplexed by the inclusion of Ahalya and Tara in the panchakanya. Although Ahalya's transgression blemished her and denied her the high status and reverence accorded to women like Sita and Savitri, this action made her immortal in legend.

The place where Ahalya is held to have practised her penance and was redeemed has been celebrated in scriptures as a sacred place called the Ahalya-tirtha. A tirtha is a sacred place with a body of water, where pilgrims generally bathe to purify themselves. The location of the Ahalya-tirtha is disputed: according to some scriptures, it is on the river Godavari, others place it on the river Narmada. Two sites are widely held to be the Ahalya-tirtha. One is located near Ahalyeshvara Temple in Bhalod, on the banks of the Narmada; another is located in Darbhanga district, Bihar. The Ahilya Asthan temple in Ahalya-gram ("Ahalya's village") in the same district is dedicated to Ahalya. For those seeking to attract women and be handsome like the love-god Kamadeva, the Matsya Purana and the Kurma Purana prescribe the worship of Ahalya at the Ahalya-tirtha. This is to be done on the day of Kamadeva, in the Hindu month of Chaitra. According to the texts, he who bathes in the tirtha will enjoy pleasure with the celestial nymphs.

For Bhattacharya, Ahalya is the eternal woman who responds to her inner urges and the advances of the divine ruler, a direct contrast to her ascetic husband, who did not satisfy her carnal desire. The author regards Ahalya as an independent woman who makes her own decisions, takes risks and is driven by curiosity to experiment with the extraordinary and then accept the curse imposed on her by patriarchal society. It is this undaunted acceptance of the curse that makes the Ramayana praise and venerate her. V. R. Devika, author of Ahalya: Scarlet Letter, asks, "So is it right to condemn adultery and physical encounters as modern afflictions and against our culture? Or do we learn from Ahalya who made a conscious choice to fulfil her need and yet has been extolled?"

Like Bhattacharya, Meena Kelkar, author of Subordination of Woman: a New Perspective, feels that Ahalya was made venerable due to her acceptance of gender norms; she ungrudgingly accepted the curse while acknowledging her need for punishment. However, Kelkar adds that another reason for making Ahalya immortal in scripture could be that her punishment acts as a warning and deterrent to women. Patriarchal society always condemns Ahalya as a fallen woman. In Bhavabhuti's 8th-century play Mahaviracharita, which alludes to Ahalya's redemption in a verbal spat with Parashurama, Satananda is mocked as the son of Ahalya, the adulteress. Jaya Srinivasan, in her discourses on tales from the Hindu epics, says that though Ahalya's action was "unpardonable", she was redeemed by the divine touch of dust from Rama's feet. Jaya adds that Ahalya's actions and the resultant curse are a warning that such immoral behaviour leads to doom, although sincere penitence and complete surrender to God can erase the gravest sins. In Hindu Tamil weddings in India and Sri Lanka, Ahalya appears as a symbolic black grinding stone, which the bride touches with her foot while promising not to be like Ahalya. The bride is also shown the star associated with the chaste Arundhati, who is cast as her ideal. The well-known treatise on sexual behaviour, the Kama Sutra (301–600), also mentions Ahalya and Indra while discussing how lust destroys men. However, it also urges men to seduce women by telling the romantic tales of Ahalya.

The right-wing Hindu women's organisation Rashtra Sevika Samiti considers Ahalya the symbol of "Hindu woman's (and Hindu society's) rape by the outsider", especially British colonisers and Muslim invaders, but also Hindu men. The feminist writer Tarabai Shinde (1850–1910) writes that the scriptures, by depicting gods such as Indra who exploit chaste wives such as Ahalya, are responsible for promoting immoral ways; she asks why so much importance is then given to pativrata dharma, the devotion and fidelity to the husband which is said to be the ultimate duty of a wife.

A similar tale of divine seduction appears in Greek mythology, where Zeus, a king-of-the-gods figure akin to Indra, seduces Alcmene by assuming the form of her husband, resulting in the birth of the legendary hero Heracles. Like Ahalya, Alcmene falls victim to Zeus's trickery in some versions or, recognising his true identity, proceeds with the affair in others. The main difference between the tales is that the raison-d'être of Alcmene's seduction is the justification of Heracles's divine parentage, so she is never condemned as an adulteress or punished; in contrast, Ahalya faces the ire of the scriptures as her encounter is regarded as purely erotic (not resulting in procreation).