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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
dark
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
BOTM
hardback
Milton, FL / Pune, India / Lonavala, India
hardback
Milton, FL / Pune, India / Lonavala, India
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
this book kept me awake at night. i wish i was joking but literally the last two nights i would wake up and start thinking about it unprompted. it made me wanna throw up and gave me awful dread in the best way
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
informative
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
really trying to figure out how i felt about this book. i can't deny that part of my feelings are straight up discomfort--i grew up in a very religious hindu family and the ramayana was and is very important to me. on the other hand, i am faaaaar from the first person to say that hinduism perhaps deserves some critique! i think patel agrees with me, but we diverge on how we want that critique to be executed.
i don't disagree with the central premise of examining the idea of the "ideal man" -- like, who would rama, as this ideal man, be in a society with so much misogyny? but i find this premise weakened by a couple of things. first of all, giving rama like....god mind control powers? is really boring, to me. i think it's actually way more interesting and essential if the misogyny/other flaws are accepted by the people around him not because his godliness mind controls them or whatever, but rather because misogyny is, in fact, a societal thing! it's not something that emerges from the teaching of One Bad Teacher, it's baked into every aspect of society, especially back then. that's also why to an extent i don't totally vibe with ravana's portrayal in this book--like you can read a lot of paternalism and sexism into his character, but in the end i feel like he's not depicted as being as constrained by societal misogyny as rama, who is the only non-villain character who is a misogynist, which is crazy because much of the plot of the ramayana kicks off because ravana kidnaps sita and imprisons her against her will in lanka, an act of inherently misognyistic violence. but like...dasaratha? yeah no internalized misogny in the mind of a man raised to be king who has three wives. lakshmana, bharatha, satruguna? somehow all taught by the same guy as rama, but no misogyny in sight.
that's another issue i had, was that the world is for the most part divided into "people kaikeyi likes" and "misogynists" which is so antithetical to my own experiences with misogyny in hindu communities. i think that's why i liked the character of yudhajit, because he was the one character who was allowed to hold misogynistic views without the narrative going out of its way to make him a bad person (except rama, i guess, but see my point about the godly mind control powers lol). it felt really reductive to me, even more so because all the female characters were straightforwardly good. i think that's a really boring way to talk about misogyny! the fact that none of the female characters had internalized misogyny, that all of them immediately and unequivocally supported kaikeyi's work to advance the rights of women etc....idk it's just not interesting to me and again doesn't really reflect my experiences of misogyny in these communities. some of the women in my life are the greatest victims and to a certain extent staunchest defenders of misogyny that i know. that level of complexity is just lacking in this book.
and that extends to the character of kaikeyi herself. i think it's a massive, massive copout for her to be almost entirely sympathetic. feminist retelling does not have to equal women can do no wrong and are always right about everything! i feel that keeping the core of the original story--that kaikeyi exiled rama because of a desire for her son to be on the throne--could have very well been kept intact while still constructing a sympathetic and even feminist narrative around it. as an extension of this, i think it's a copout for manthara to be entirely absent from kaikeyi's decision to exile rama, because in the original story she is the driving force for this whole thing. it leaves me to wonder what the point of her character even was, really?
kind of related to all the above points, i don't love that the gods were also shown to uphold misogyny themselves, because what feels much more true to me is that misogyny is not a natural consequence of the world that we have to defy. humans created misogyny, humans institutionalized it, and humans uphold it to this day. it has nothing to do with god, except that god is used as a justification. the throwaway mention of sati in this book kind of grinded my gears in that regard, because kaikeyi is like oh we're too enlightened and progressive for that which is like...seriously? in this book critiquing hindu misogyny, you just brush over the most egregious and literally deadly manifestation of it??? maybe it's meant to show that the practice truly isn't rooted in any kind of religiosity but rather twisting a story inherently about female agency and power into a method to remove female agency/power but like.....i feel like the one throwaway line doesn't reaally support that opinion.
i think in the end my feelings about this boil down to: i appreciate what it's trying to do, and there are aspects of that attempt that i find really thought-provoking. at the end of the day, though, i think the way it tackled these topics was pretty reductive and uninteresting to me personally.
i don't disagree with the central premise of examining the idea of the "ideal man" -- like, who would rama, as this ideal man, be in a society with so much misogyny? but i find this premise weakened by a couple of things. first of all, giving rama like....god mind control powers? is really boring, to me. i think it's actually way more interesting and essential if the misogyny/other flaws are accepted by the people around him not because his godliness mind controls them or whatever, but rather because misogyny is, in fact, a societal thing! it's not something that emerges from the teaching of One Bad Teacher, it's baked into every aspect of society, especially back then. that's also why to an extent i don't totally vibe with ravana's portrayal in this book--like you can read a lot of paternalism and sexism into his character, but in the end i feel like he's not depicted as being as constrained by societal misogyny as rama, who is the only non-villain character who is a misogynist, which is crazy because much of the plot of the ramayana kicks off because ravana kidnaps sita and imprisons her against her will in lanka, an act of inherently misognyistic violence. but like...dasaratha? yeah no internalized misogny in the mind of a man raised to be king who has three wives. lakshmana, bharatha, satruguna? somehow all taught by the same guy as rama, but no misogyny in sight.
that's another issue i had, was that the world is for the most part divided into "people kaikeyi likes" and "misogynists" which is so antithetical to my own experiences with misogyny in hindu communities. i think that's why i liked the character of yudhajit, because he was the one character who was allowed to hold misogynistic views without the narrative going out of its way to make him a bad person (except rama, i guess, but see my point about the godly mind control powers lol). it felt really reductive to me, even more so because all the female characters were straightforwardly good. i think that's a really boring way to talk about misogyny! the fact that none of the female characters had internalized misogyny, that all of them immediately and unequivocally supported kaikeyi's work to advance the rights of women etc....idk it's just not interesting to me and again doesn't really reflect my experiences of misogyny in these communities. some of the women in my life are the greatest victims and to a certain extent staunchest defenders of misogyny that i know. that level of complexity is just lacking in this book.
and that extends to the character of kaikeyi herself. i think it's a massive, massive copout for her to be almost entirely sympathetic. feminist retelling does not have to equal women can do no wrong and are always right about everything! i feel that keeping the core of the original story--that kaikeyi exiled rama because of a desire for her son to be on the throne--could have very well been kept intact while still constructing a sympathetic and even feminist narrative around it. as an extension of this, i think it's a copout for manthara to be entirely absent from kaikeyi's decision to exile rama, because in the original story she is the driving force for this whole thing. it leaves me to wonder what the point of her character even was, really?
kind of related to all the above points, i don't love that the gods were also shown to uphold misogyny themselves, because what feels much more true to me is that misogyny is not a natural consequence of the world that we have to defy. humans created misogyny, humans institutionalized it, and humans uphold it to this day. it has nothing to do with god, except that god is used as a justification. the throwaway mention of sati in this book kind of grinded my gears in that regard, because kaikeyi is like oh we're too enlightened and progressive for that which is like...seriously? in this book critiquing hindu misogyny, you just brush over the most egregious and literally deadly manifestation of it??? maybe it's meant to show that the practice truly isn't rooted in any kind of religiosity but rather twisting a story inherently about female agency and power into a method to remove female agency/power but like.....i feel like the one throwaway line doesn't reaally support that opinion.
i think in the end my feelings about this boil down to: i appreciate what it's trying to do, and there are aspects of that attempt that i find really thought-provoking. at the end of the day, though, i think the way it tackled these topics was pretty reductive and uninteresting to me personally.