A gem of writing

The ring is a simple thing, as simple as things can get, next perhaps only to the straight line. It is basic and elemental, and imitates the forms and movements of cosmic bodies. But the connection rings have had with the human mind and behaviour has not been simple, as they have played diverse roles in relationships (individual and social), self-definitions, narratives of power, and the construction of jewellery with their artistic, economic and social meanings. Wendy Doniger, in her The Ring of Truth, takes a wide view of the ring and scans geographies and time to study the role of the ring in human affairs. It is an exploration of the myths of sex and jewellery in which rings played an important part. Doniger asks the question why rings appear as symbols of true or false love across the world. She also asks why jewels keep appearing in stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss of memory and recovery, and identity and masquerade. The answer is a ringside view of history and civilisation.

Wendy Doniger is well known in India as the author of The Hindus: An Alternative History. She has also done many other studies on Indian themes and topics like the Kama Sutra, and has undertaken translations of Sanskrit works including the Rig Veda. She is considered a prominent Indologist, and has invited controversies too. Doniger’s scope in The Ring of Truth is very wide. She studies numerous tales from Hindu, Jain, Christian, Mesopotamian and other traditions, and analyses a number of Indian stories where rings figure in crucial ways. The ring has roles in many Greek, Welsh and other stories from Europe. The study also extends to modern times with music and films (Richard Wagner and Marilyn Monroe) figuring in them. What emerges is a cross-cultural view of the role of the ring, which is a symbol not only of romance and faithfulness, but also of deception and infidelity. It also speaks for power, and is mixed with memory and desire, and also forgetting, sometimes natural and at other times deliberate. Plays of Kalidasa and Shakespeare, fairy tales and folklore, and film scripts and songs combine with personal anecdotes in the discussion. Characters like Shakuntala are familiar, but unknown characters are also presented to show different aspects of and relations between love, sex and human passions as seen though the ring. Interesting ideas and insights emerge from the discussion.

There are rings and rings, and one ring does not fit them all. In the rings from India which Doniger studies, two are very known: the ring of memory in Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, and the jewellery Sita wears in the forest. In Shakuntala, there is conflict between the knowledge hidden by the royal jewellery and the innocence of a girl brought up in the forest, expressed with the motif of the ring in the fish. In the Ramayana, there’s a clash between one tradition that holds that a good woman must not wear jewellery in her husband’s absence and another that says that a lady can always be identified by her jewellery. Royal privilege, social status, ideals of virtues and ideas of vices, and mental processes like memory and forgetting are represented by rings in various ways. Stories evolve according to particular characteristics of cultures and historical circumstances. In many narratives, rings mark turning points in man-woman relationships. Doniger wonders why there are so many stories about men who forget their women and so few about women who forget their men. But she notes that there are also stories about clever women who use the ring to get one up on men.

Doniger observes that most of the stories are about the interaction between jewellery, sex and gender on the one hand, and money and power on the other. She explains some of them with the help of ideas from Freud. She feels that the ring story survives because it fulfills some positive functions like salvaging the sense of a moral world. Rebalancing the world in a moral sense mitigates the asymmetrical relations between rich, lecherous men and poor, vulnerable women. Since myths repair the immoral universe and give us hope that we might make it more moral, these stories are valuable for us.

Doniger presents the stories in their diversity, but many of them have a common strand running through them. She finds some common human concerns and needs in these stories. She says that the myth carries the day, so the ring rings true.

The ring represents some basic human sentiments and emotions like no other piece of jewellery does. Come to think of it, there are few human tools too, perhaps other than the stick, which have played such a role in human life and imagination as the ring. Is it because of the elemental shape, the uses and functions to which rings have been put, the universality of their usage, other reasons, or a combination of all these? There is no certain answer. But we get a fairly rounded view of the ring in the book.

Doniger is known for her clarity of thought, lucidity of expression, and scholarship. All this is seen in ample measure in the book. Such a well-written book should not have a production flaw which annoys the reader. Some pages — pages 170-171, 174-175, 190-191, 194-195 and 198-199 — are missing in the book and appear as blank pages. Not much reading may be missed, but no reader would welcome such a break in reading.