Maithil Women's Tales by Coralynn V. Davis

Author:Coralynn V. Davis [Davis, Coralynn V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Women's Studies, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9780252096303
Google: 6t5dBAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00NPD0YMI
Barnesnoble: B00NPD0YMI
Goodreads: 24626855
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2013-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Mothers and Mamatā

In Sanskrit, the derivative parts of mamatā are mama, meaning “my, our,” and tā or tva, meaning “quality of,” and roughly translatable as the English suffix “-ness”, as in this case “mine-ness” or “the quality of being one’s own.”24 In the entire set of Maithil women’s tales recorded for this study, only one associates mamatā with fatherhood, and this is the One-Day-Old Baby (Ek Dinke Bachha) Tale, told to me on separate occasions by both Indu Karna and Indu Misha. In this tale, an impoverished Brahman couple are unable to care for their newborn son, so at the mother’s urging, the father carries the infant into the forest, intent on abandoning him there. Taking care to leave him up in a tree for safety, the man turns for home. But because his love for his son pulls on him so strongly, the man turns back toward the tree twice in succession. Each time he does, the baby utters this remark: “Whosoever grows [a baby] in their belly is the one who provides it sustenance.” Later, the baby ends up being rescued and cared for by a king and queen who have no children of their own. Upon their death, the boy inherits their kingdom, at which point he broadcasts a notice that whoever can explain the statement, “Whosoever grows [a baby] in their belly is the one who provides it sustenance,” will win half the kingdom. His still impoverished original father answers the “riddle” correctly, explaining that though he left him in the forest, “I could not let go of my love [mamatā] for the baby.” The boy thereby recognizes that this man is his own father, and says to him, “I have taken birth from your womb [koikh]; how will I repay this debt? It was to search for and look after you that I put forth this question.” The boy then asks after his mother. His father explains that for propriety’s sake she was unable to come greet her son, as she had no clothes to wear. (In other words, the couple was so poor that she had no clothes with which to cover herself appropriately.) From that day forth, the son (now a wealthy king) took care of his birth parents in great luxury.

Even in this rare narrativized case of paternal devotion, the maternal connotation of mamatā is operating, as is signaled by the use of the word koikh, “womb.” In this manner, in this unusual story maternal and paternal love are conflated, with paternal love “defaulting” to the maternal semantics of loving devotion. Indeed, in all the tales retold in this chapter, the loving compassion and devotion denoted in the concept of mamatā is idealized in its maternal form. In the One-Day-Old Baby Tale, it is noteworthy that while the father can come to find his son, the mother cannot, due to gender norms (purdah) that make it more tenable for an incompletely clothed man to go out in public than for an uncovered woman to do so.

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