“Goddess of the River” by Vaishnavi Patel

Vaishnavi Patel

The Indian epic Mahabharata continues to inspire novelists to retell the story of the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the cousins who fight over the kingdom of Hastinapur, especially from the points of view of the women characters who have been wronged. Many of these retellings—including Ira Mukhoty’s Song of Draupadi reviewed in the Asian Review of Books—narrate the battle and the politics from the points of view of the wronged women: the epic is full of awful stories about women being abducted so that they can be married to the prince of Hastinapur, or tricked into marrying the blind king Dhritarashtra or gambled away by her husband(s). 

To this body of experiments in contemporary fiction, Vaishnavi Patel’s Goddess of the River is a new addition. The focus of the story, as well as the narrator in parts, is the river Ganga. In Patel’s retelling, the story goes back to Ganga Devi (Goddess) who has a macroscopic view of the war and the affairs that lead to it. In the epic, Ganga is the first wife of King Shantanu, the great-grandfather of the Kauravas and the Pandavas. In most feminist retellings, Ganga remains a minor character: these nod to her presence in order to explain where Bhishma, the great warrior sworn to the sovereignty of Hastinapur, fighting for the jealous Kauravas, comes from. These stories mention that he is the son of Ganga, the first wife of Shantanu, who mysteriously drowns her first seven children, while Shantanu manages to save Bhishma. She vanishes from Shantanu’s and Bhishma’s life. Years later, Shantanu falls in love with Satyavati but their marriage materializes only after Bhishma swears that he will never marry or have children so that Satyavati’s children can rule. His vow, in a way, causes bitterness and war, allowing men unfit to rule to take over and keep messing until there is death and destruction.

Vaishnavi Patel works with these sketchy bits of the story to see if something new can be learned about a woman relegated to the sidelines.

 

Goddess of the River, Vaishnavi Patel (Redhook, may 2024)
Goddess of the River, Vaishnavi Patel (Redhook, May 2024)

And that’s why she takes the readers back to the beginning of the story in Goddess of the River. Humanity prays to Shiva so that the long drought may end. As the carefree Ganga falls from the heavens to the Earth, humans get scared: what if the Ganga destroys the planet instead of sustaining life? Shiva comes to the rescue of the human race. He traps her into his locks, the metaphor for the mountaintop in Himalayas that is the source of the Ganges so that she does not unintentionally cause any harm. Once she is among the humans, it doesn’t get very long for her to get involved in their affairs. She has eight Vasus, the godlings, whom she looks after. One day, a sage curses them for causing mischief. When Ganga sees this, she intervenes and gets cursed too! She and the Vasus are doomed to be born as mortals. King Shantanu of Hastinapur falls in love with her in her mortal form. She agrees to marry him on the condition that he shall never question her. Shantanu agrees but is horrified that she drowns each of their seven sons. (He doesn’t know about the curse and that the sons are the godlings, of course!) He takes the eighth son away before he meets the same end. This son grows into the mighty Bhishma who swears that he shall not marry and remain celibate so that his father can marry Satyavati (who keeps rejecting King Shantanu’s proposal because Bhishma and his heirs would get to rule after Shantanu.) The novel begins with this origin story and ends with, well, an end story, with Bhishma, finally leaving the mortal world, joining the other godlings after the great war of the Mahabharata.

Ganga sees it all: she has carried Krishna to safety when he is about to be killed by his evil uncle Kans; and she has seen Karna, the older brother of the Pandavas, kept a secret by Kunti. She hears of Bhishma and his oath of loyalty to the throne, his kidnapping of three princesses to get them married, Eklavya’s story, the quarrels among the cousins, Draupadi’s humiliation and so on. She is a witness and a character/participant in the events: sometimes watching humans, feeling baffled by the things they do, and sometimes granting them boons. The complexity of the epic and its story that she brings forth (or that Patel brings out in her rendering) is that tracing who or what started it all is a foolish line of thought when it comes to the Mahabharata. Things are too complicated and too intertwined with so many other factors that no blame can be assigned to anyone. While the Kauravas are hateful for their jealousy towards the Pandavas who build a rich kingdom out of nothing, or for the way they drag Draupadi into their political games, the Pandavas are not angels either: they, two of them at least, look down upon the lower castes, or are ready to gamble away their kingdoms (not a marker of a good ruler!)

 

However, these things have been said before. This version does not seem to add new insights into the story. The novel’s achievement is that it makes one realize that Ganga indeed is a good character to push to the front. The novel opens with the first person voice of Ganga getting trapped by Shiva:

 

When the humans saw me coming, they grew afraid of my unbridled spirit and feared they could not tame it. So they uttered a hasty prayer to Lord Shiva of the mountains, whose peaks reached up to the heavens from which I descended, and he heard them. He caught me as I fell, secured me  around his holiest mountaintop before I realised I had even been trapped.

 

In certain parts, the river’s perspective and voice are very interesting: different enough to be useful, as Ganga says it herself. And therefore, worth paying attention to. Not many people have wondered how Ganga must have felt being tamed by Shiva like that! Unfortunately, the author doesn’t stick to Ganga’s voice and switches in and out of first and third person, seemingly arbitrarily.

On the contrary, Patel might raise a few eyebrows when her retelling blames the woman (Ganga) in certain places. Here she wonders if the entire mess is her fault:

 

I heard again and again about my son’s attempts to make peace – to split the kingdom, to pay respects to both parties, to advise against warfare – and I could not help but think that it was his oath that had led to all this. And worse, it was my fault he had made that oath. I had thought I could deceive Shantanu because he was mortal; I had thought I could raise Bhishma like a god despite his mortality; in the holes I had left in their world, this unholy oath had been made. I did not blame myself for the actions of these men, but I understood with a sinking certainty that it was my failure to understand the mortal world, my disdain for them, that had allowed these circumstances to arise in the first place. I had failed to act toward Hastinapur. I had failed to act toward Hastinapur. I had failed to do what was best for Devavrata as a child. I had simply watched and acted on whims, and scared him with my talk of corruption. And there was nothing I could do now. Nothing to do but wait.

 

Ganga’s second guessing herself undoes everything that feminist or women-centric rewritings presumably try to do.


Soni Wadhwa lives in Mumbai.