Whie convalescing from a bad bout of dengue and unable to read anything new, I returned to some of Kavita Kane’s books to read them again. Once more I got stuck at the only book of hers which I have never been able to wade through, Saraswati’s Curse. I realized that Saraswati, despite being mentioned a few times in the Vedas and puranas have never had a consistent myth. The reason for this may be worth investigating.

Paradoxes inhere Saraswati; whether she is the daughter of Brahma, or his wife, whether she is the daughter of Durga and Shiva as she appears in the pantheon of the “children” who accompany Durga in her autumnal worship, or whether she is just another woman in the trio of Durga, Lakshmi, and her. Despite many writings on her, we are confused about her status. In Kavita Kane’s book, she is the river who leaves the earth. If Saraswati the river has fallen through the cracks of the Aravallis as have Surajkund and the Badkhal lakes in very contemporary times, then the Saraswati myth reads so much like the Sita myth, who too sinks into the earth. The death by slipping into the cracks of the earth is usually associated with a curse, as curse befell the brothers of Ram and himself so did a curse befall the inhabitants of Bharatvarsha, or whatever the land was called at that hoary past. Saraswati’s curse remains with us even today for she had forsaken us for our disdain for knowledge. She objected to the slaying of Sambuka, to the killing of Shumbha Nishumbha, the murder of King Bali for all the above mentioned attracted the jealousy of the Aryans by their knowledge. Saraswati’s disappearance as the river is a reminder of our contempt for the intellect and education. She remains more of a Dravidian lady with her white attire, white being associated with celebrations and ceremonies in the south. Worshipped in Kashmir and the south, and overwhelmingly in Bengal and Odisha, Saraswati seems to be a favourite of the cultured non-Aryans, despite her milk white complexion and sharp features. So is Kartikeya, a handsome man in terms of Aryan aesthetics, but largely worshipped in the south and east.

Perhaps because of her slight anti Aryan slant, her proclivity towards the accumulation of knowledge rather than of wealth, that has made her a kind of an independent woman, one who cannot belong to the household of a husband and children. A married woman can be of valour, as Durga, or of the accumulation of wealth as for Lakshmi, but an intellectual woman, self-reliant, self-confident, self-sufficient does not need to have any relationships. Her total autonomy due to her intellectual genius makes her the odd one out in the Puranas where stories have had to be made up about her rather than emanate from her persona.

Like all women, not married and self-contained and self-contended, vile rumours have followed Saraswati too. For the lesser minds sex is the foremost preoccupation and hence they are beyond understanding that people of high IQ may not require physical intimacy. Rumours of the dirtiest degree have invaded her; that Brahma who imagined her and thus produced her was claimed to be her father rather than a Prof Higgins to an Eliza Do Little. Across Puranas, Brahma was supposed to have been attracted to his “daughter” and his worship was banned everywhere except at Pushkar, the mountain top, which could have been associated with the disappeared river. Close to Pushkar is Fatehpur Sikri, where water resources disappeared due to geological events.

It was perhaps not before the 15^th century that Saraswati was “rescued” from oppressive myths when she was made into a daughter of Durga and a sister to Lakshmi, Kartik, and Ganesh. Such iconographic shifts happened when Durga was being discovered as the Shakti figure and hence a need for her to be represented as a mother. Like Saraswati, Kartik too is mostly worshipped in the south and east and they are placed on the right side, or Dakshin, which also means the south. Under the Durga pantheon, Saraswati got a father in Lord Shiva and a husband, Brahma, though her husband is rather tentative. Kartik, like Saraswati, is unmarried. Those on the left are Lakshmi and Ganesh, much married and happily too.

Saraswati, for the Bengali is glamorous; in the south she became a part of modernized Hinduism when Raja Ravi Varma painted her in a white sari. She remains a matephor for the perfect girl, good in studies and accomplished in arts. The refinement of human sensibilities worships her as its deity, but this intellectual and accomplished single woman fails to generate a narrative which the society can cherish and relish. This means that the intellect in our societies have narrative, this is why Saraswati cursed us before disappearing into the underground, leaving a society unable to pursue higher learning into the desert of ignorance. What is more of a problem is that Saraswati born a woman, lived autonomously, taking her own decisions, generating her own resources, and needed to interact very little with others as she was immersed in her own creativity.

Saraswati, then seems to have been adopted into the Durga family; perhaps this is why hers is the only vahana, her white swan which is a migratory bird. Every other vahana, namely Lakhsmi’s owl, Ganesh’s mouse, Kartik’s peacock, and Durga’s lion are homebred and territorial.