Captive Wives and a Widower King: Grief, Particular Love, and the Work of Tears in Three Sanskrit Laments

Abstract In traditional religious settings and in literature, laments—and particularly women’s laments—serve to reinscribe and witness to particular loss in all its human power; they enact a systematic attentiveness to pain, overwhelming emotion experienced with and within acts of language. Though they weep, shriek, or sigh, women’s laments are also artful and ethical; they give structure and rhythm to rage, moving from “experience to art, from tears to ideas,” troubling the traditional binaries of “raw” emotion and “secondary” reflection. This article focuses not on ritual forms of lament and their ethnographic transcriptions, but on three seminal examples of literary transformations of male and female lament in Sanskrit epic and kāvya literature, lament ( vilāpa ) as an oral-derived literary form of affect, a powerful form of ethical witness self-consciously deployed by the epic bard of the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and one of the most accomplished of all Sanskrit poets, Kālidāsa ( c. 350–340 CE). The article will focus on the laments of two captive wives from the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa , Sītā, our epic heroine, and Mandodarī, the enemy queen; and the lament of Sītā’s grandfather-in-law King Aja from Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃsa , male lament “in the mirror of women’s tears.”