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Pingala, the public woman

The haunting case of Pingala, the public woman, may be found in one of India’s favourite books, the Srimad Bhagvatam, that is cherished even today as the biography of Sri Krishna.

In the portion concerning Pingala in the Srimad Bhagvatam, Krishna’s ancestor King Yadu happened to meet a young priest whose face and manners shone with serene self-possession.

King Yadu was so impressed by the priest’s air of nobility and wisdom that he wanted to know how the priest had achieved it. With becoming humility, the priest said that he had had many teachers including an ajgar or serpent and the pancha bhuta, the Five Elements of earth, water, air, fire and ether. He explained what he had observed and learnt from each.

And then, he shocked King Yadu, saying, ‘In the city of Videha, there used to be a public woman called Pingala. Now hear, O King, what I learnt from her.’

‘I can readily accept that the natural world and its creatures have many lessons for us. But really, a public woman . . . I don’t see how . . .’ murmured the king, not wishing to seem ill-mannered but unable to hide how startled he was.

The young priest smiled and got on with his story:

Pingala stood at her doorway as usual one evening, displaying her beautiful form to attract passing customers. Her city, Videha, was the proud capital of the kingdom of Mithila on the eastern side of north India. Mithila had a very good opinion of itself as a famous seat of learning and as the holy land of many spiritually revelatory dramas played out between old lawgivers and kings. Above all, it was proud that Sita, also called Maithili, Princess of Mithila, was renowned in the Indic world as the heroine of the grand Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. Ever after her story had become known to all, every Hindu bride was handed over to her bridegroom by her father, or whoever stood in for her father at the wedding, with the very words said by Maithili’s father, King Janaka, at her wedding, ‘Iyam Sita, mama suta . . .’ (This is Sita, my daughter.)

Pingala often thought about Princess Maithili, or Vaidehi as she was also called, and of her curious fate, which was to be punished and exiled by her husband, the king of Ayodhya, for no fault of hers. A bad person had kidnapped Sita and her husband had fought to rescue her and had even made her go through trial by fire to satisfy the vulgar public curiosity about her ‘purity’. But once tarnished, a woman’s reputation was not easily recovered in old societies. When a washerman in Ayodhya had quarrelled with his wife and said she was ‘as shameless as Sita for living in another man’s house’, the king of Ayodhya had cast out his queen as a blot on the throne, and had banished her to the jungle to fend for herself, not even caring that she was then pregnant.

Through it all, the heartbroken princess had been staunchness personified and no person, man or woman, could think of her without feeling wretched at the injustice of it and wanting to cry. What an inhuman standard it seemed to hold up for a human woman, especially for a victim of circumstance. Be that as it may, the public took her fate very personally and to star Sita’s name in their own weddings was their way of trying to make it up to her memory.

Pingala herself had been born into a respectable family and been taught her prayers and told many stories from the scriptures. But her parents had died of an illness and there was no one left to care for her. She had been put to work as a maid in a merchant’s kitchen and was seduced by the son of the house. Thrown out on the street when discovered, Pingala had no reputation left and nowhere to go. Videha’s richest bawd had picked her up and taught her the tricks of the trade. Pingala had done reasonably well for herself. She had a little house of her own now in the quarter of the public women and could afford to employ a maid to cook and clean while she devoted herself to looking her best with scented baths, regular oil massages, sandalwood face packs and carefully chosen clothes and ornaments.

But Pingala was very lonely and longed for a secure life. She fantasized every day about that one rich man who would fall in love with her and look after her for good with affection and respect. She prayed every day for this wish to be granted and worried about it all the time. She worried about it that evening, in the soft purple twilight of Videha as she stood at her door, and worried about it when she looked up, as she always did, at the evening star, and went on worrying till midnight, when suddenly she had a startling revelation.

‘Just what am I doing making myself so unhappy, selling myself to men who are lamentable themselves, desperately hoping that someone will love me and look after me? Am I so unintelligent that I can’t see how pointless this is? The best way to be happy is to be unafraid and live my life confidently with the faith that I’ll cope, that “someone” is with me already,’ she found herself thinking, amazed at her own clarity of thought. ‘Nor need I be ashamed of the life I was forced to live. After all, I belong to Videha, which means “bodiless”. My new understanding of what life is really about has set me free of my body.’

With that resolve, Pingala shut the door and sat down on her bed. Serene in her newfound realization, she went to sleep happy.

‘And so I learnt from Pingala that people can always remake their lives with independent reasoning,’ said the young priest to the fascinated King Yadu.