Women: Duty and Dharma
Duty can be seen as an abstract concept elevated by many Americans to a plane above the grasping reach of mortals, as if existing solely in the proximity of those individuals who might aspire to lay claim to the ideological glories and honors permeating from such a noble divination. If this definition is liquid, it is to serve as a direct contradiction to what duty, or dharma, is in the understanding of a different group of people, namely South Asians. Duty, as an idea, seems to reflect a higher order of significance and cognitive perception to an American, whether in relation to military service, civic service, or anything else, so Americans view duty as something external that one must do for others, as certainly as flags wave or the national anthem peals. However, dharma is nothing of the sort; it is internalized, a reflection of the necessity of doing one’s allotted station, to be that essential cog in the machine so that society continues to operate. Just as certainly as Americans would not consciously reason out these externalized connotations to duty, South Asians would not be reasonably conscious of the implications of their own internalizations of dharma. With this perspective in mind, then, the pursuit of dharma for South Asians can be seen as an ingrained, integral part of life.
In Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve, a family’s adherence to dharma prevails even in the most discriminating of circumstances. The narrator and principle object of misery in the novel, a peasant woman named Rukmani, chronicles her life to the reader and, in the process, outlines in clarity how one lives a life of dharma even amidst excessive hardship. The underlying tenet of Rukmani’s life is her ability to persevere through any circumstance, as she does through famine, distress, and death. Her expression of this determination to endure comes about through her daily process of living. As it is the woman’s duty to help work the fields, Rukmani does this, even in the time of drought and, when opportunity allows, after the end of the monsoon floods. She prepares the meals, when the family has food to prepare, and goes to town to obtain what supplies she can, with what money she has. When the family produces a crop, it is Rukmani who goes to sell any surplus in town. In all of these cases, Rukmani serves as the dutiful wife, doing her dharma as part of a family and, in a larger sense, in society. As Rukmani’s story is intended to be representative of how life might be like for many South Asians, the author’s implication is that the role of wives, as seen through Rukmani, is essential to the continued existence of their families, as the uptake of their duties allows family to continue to live. Therefore, with dharma being thus administered, the importance of women’s roles is evident, without any external rewarding forces motivating action, other than the inherent need for survival; Rukmani does what she must for her family because she knows it is her duty, not because she can expect to be rewarded for her actions.
Indeed, for all her valor, Rukmani will nonetheless suffer exponentially as her life continues. Not long after her son Raja is killed at the tannery, another son dies of malnutrition. Eventually their landlord forces Rukmani and Nathan, her husband, off their land after selling the land to the tannery. In the ensuing journey toward a hopeful home, they lose everything they have, to ultimately discover their fate to be worse in the city than in the countryside where they originated. Markandaya’s thread of misery follows Rukmani to the end of her journey, with the death of Nathan, but even so, Rukmani persists in her dharma, looking after what family she retains. Rukmani obeyed the duties of her role as a wife steadily during her life, as per the prototype established in Dandin’s Tales of the Ten Princes, even after her husband’s death. “She served her husband indefatigably, as she would a god, and never neglected her household duties.” Even though Rukmani suffered her entire life, she did not fail to serve her husband or her family, as it was her duty to do.
Rukmani tried to help her family in every way possible, even at times stepping beyond the bounds deemed acceptable by society. This is indicative of her overarching determination to help the family survive. One such opportunity develops as Rukmani and Nathan arrive in the city. Hoping to find shelter with their son, Murugan, who had several years previously come to work as a servant in a wealthy home, Rukmani and Nathan are devastated to find that he no longer is with his wife and child, having left them some time before. Upon arriving at their son’s former home, they immediately realize they cannot stay, as his wife could hardly support her own child, much less two more people. However, as they had no money with which to provide for a return trip home, they were prisoners of the city, without a home or any possession, as all they had had been stolen. So, taking what shelter that was available from a temple, Rukmani and Nathan sought for a way to raise enough money to return to their village, so they might live with their other son, Selvam. In the pursuit of this goal, Rukmani oversteps society’s norms when she sets herself up as a “reader of letters.” The people of the city, obviously incredulous at Rukmani’s claims to literacy jeered her as she tried to work. “Says she can read! These village folk are certainly getting above themselves!’ ‘She is a writer as well! What do you suppose she writes with?’” Such skepticism clearly demonstrates that whether a woman is capable or not, as Rukmani obviously was, society disdained a woman who appeared to rise above her station. As literacy was generally reserved for people higher varna, especially men, such a peasant, and a woman at that, must have offended the dignities of her low caste peers. However, this was not Rukmani’s concern. In the end, her goal was to help support her family, as was her dharma, so perhaps overstepping societal norms was not eminent in Rukmani’s prioritization of concerns.
As the excerpt from Tales of the Ten Princes details the characteristics of a good wife, so does Nectar in a Sieve. Certainly, Tales is heavy on the physical attributes of a wife, but more important are the duties a good wife will perform. It is important to note Dandin’s method of initiating investigation into a woman to find her worthiness. Asking, “Dear girl, can you cook me a good meal from this measure of rice?” the man, Saktikumara, strikes directly at the woman’s duty to provide for her husband. In the story’s ideal response, the woman proceeds to resourcefully create an entirely pleasing meal from nothing more than the measure of rice provided by Saktikumara, using the husks from the rice to buy the necessary articles with which to prepare the meal. “Being thus wholly pleased with the girl, he married her with due rites, and took her home.” Similarly, although less ostentatiously, Rukmani provides for her family, as a wife must. She prepares the family food, managing the supply of rice when food is scarce, so that when hard times persist, the family continues to eat for a long while, even though the rice crop is failing. In this case, as in so many others, Rukmani ensures her family’s survival, as she continues to do her duty as a wife.
These examples of dharma all relate to the duty a South Asian woman has within her role as a wife in her society. To make the jump from the temporal to the ethereal in connecting the purpose of dharma is only as difficult as understanding the basics of Hindu religion. The earthly duties of a woman and the heavenly implications of her actions are two ends of the same string. The sense of duty a South Asian woman has, as shown by Rukmani, is not apparent by her internal beliefs, but by her actions. Rather than the conceptualized ideology attached to an American sense of duty, dharma runs much deeper in the Hindu culture. It is more than what one simply must do and steeped in pragmatism, not as an airy wisp of indefinable metaphysics. This is not to say that an American does not know what duty is; however, when the concept is broken down into its most fundamental parts, aside from the mental additions the American mind burdens upon it, only then will American duty begin to correspond with Hindu dharma. Then, perhaps, it could be seen that duty might be as integral to life in American as it has been in South Asian society for so long, as seen in Nectar in a Sieve.