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Reading Notes: Nine Ideal Women Part E



This will be the last of my reading notes on Nine Ideal Indian Women, so I'll be going over the last stories about Damayanti and Uttara, but mostly just talking about the book as a whole and wrapping up my thoughts about it.


Damayanti was the miracle daughter of a maharajah who had not had children for most of his life. A phrase that I really loved in the beginning of the story that described his happiness all blighted by this one sorrow of being childless:
     "A crumpled leaf lay in his bed of roses, and whichever way he turned he felt it, for no child had come to bless his manhood and his whole being yearned for the joy of hearing the name of father fall from baby lips" (page 175).

I loved that quote because it was the most poetic and graceful way of showing the sorrow of being childless I had seen out of all of the multiple instances in the stories I've read throughout the semester.  This story was also more poetic than most of the others throughout. It reminded me more of our Western fairy tales than some of the others, and had a beautiful ending. Besides the normal morals taught about faithfulness and being a good wife, this story also had an antigambling moral.

Damayanti was so beautiful that four gods also wanted to marry her, and disguised themselves as her true love Nal, to try and make her choose between them. She was truly in love, though, and chose the real Nal out of the lineup. 
The story of Uttara did not stand out to me, other than having a hard time keeping up with all of the different names, and who was related to who. It was a good story and ended with a nice note about her still being a role model for Indian women because of her devotion.

Final Thoughts :

I greatly enjoyed this book. Her detail and more poetic translation kept me much more engaged than many of the other versions of these old tales, which I now feel oversimplify and water down the stories. I understand that a lot of these were passed down through oral tradition for hundreds of years, and there are many different versions so perhaps the only way translators feel they can tell the essences of the stories are to pare them down that much. Ms. Devee, though, keeps the poetic and epic tone of the stories, which I greatly enjoyed.



Citation:

Devee, M. S. (2018). Nine Ideal Indian Women. London: Forgotten Books.

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