Devayani my baby 💔💔💔💔 I'm forever gonna be a Sharmishtha hater for this
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Devayani my baby 💔💔💔💔 I'm forever gonna be a Sharmishtha hater for this
@sambhavami's Devayani and Madhavi posts have brought back my obsession with them. I've reblogged and rambled in the tags endlessly, however between these and the Sharmistha post, I keep making myself miserable by thinking about Shukra. Poor man, he tried his best, you can tell, but his best is never enough. Not for his side to win decisively against the Devas, not for his wife/lover to remain with him, not even to save his daughter.
Like. The whole story starts because he sees a beautiful woman and gets together with her, and they have a daughter, and for a while they are so, so happy. And then he's realises, oh, I'm running from my duty to my people, and wants to return, but Jayanti his wife will not come, not when she of the Devas (the enemy, the enemy), not when she loves her father, not when her father is the king of gods, able to come down on them like a ton of bricks.
So she leaves. But no matter, he has his daughter, and it's not a consolation, it's a whole trophy. If this separation was a battle he has already won (it wasn't supposed to be a battle between them). He calls her Devayani, so she knows she might follow the path of her mother's people, so she has something of her mother even if he cannot give her Jayanti herself. Which is fine. She's sweet, she's beautiful, she's growing up fast and he loves her. It's not as well as can be but it's not all bad.
And then Brihaspati's son shows up. He's not even bad, is the thing. Shukra can be unhappy with his closeness to his daughter if he had any tangible evils but he doesn't. The Danavas kill him anyway, and his daughter comes begging and he sees at once what the gods want, knows that they will get it. It takes three tries. Shukra would be angry at his daughter's infatuation, but Kacha turns her down, and no greater punishment may be rendered by Shukra's hand.
Her grief turns to simmering rage and bitter pride. She quarrels with her friends, and speaks ill words to a companion who tongue has as many knives as her own. She is hurt, she is rescued, and now she weeps at the city gates, asking "Are you a sycophant? Are we beggars? Leave me here, if that is so."
"No," he says, "we are not. I will see you are compensated."
The compensation is a girl enslaved.
Shukra keeps failing.
His daughter finds another man to chase, and for a while Shukra is happy, because this king loves her, and there are grandchildren to dote on, and he has warned Yayati away from Sharmistha while asking him to care for her in the same breath.
And yet love makes traitors of all men, and Devayani returns to him in tears. He should not have been surprised. He too was once a traitor. That guilt is his rage, and his rage is blind, and he curses.
"Father," Yayati says, "how can your daughter be happy when I am old? What woman wants her lord unmanned?"
Shukra cannot take back the curse, but he can offer a caveat. Yayati leaves. He hears of the outcome from others, the change in inheritance. He looks out to the path outside his home. Devayani does not come again.
She is happy, he tells himself. She knows to come to me if she is not.
The thought is not as convincing as he would like it to be.
Devayani does not return.
Hope dies last, but hope dies as well, and Shukra leaves. From the corner of his eye he sees a girl by the side of the road, her face turned away. The curve of her chin reminds him of a distant dream, but when he looks closer, she is gone.
.
Women in Mahabharata - Devayani
Abandoned by her mother Jayanti, she is swindled easily by Kacha, Vrihaspati's son. Kacha sees a vulnerable adolescent, who he woos with stories of svarga, a place where her absent, idolized mother resides, and uses her as a human shield against the danavas, all while buttering up her father to gain access to a very coveted magic trick that is the key to win the war ongoing from the previous generation.
When Kacha breaks her young heart, this destruction of her first love fundamentally shifts something in Devayani's brain, and she slides into an ultra-fundamentalist school of thought, using her identity on her father's side as a brahmin to bully Sharmishtha, the danava king's daughter.
After Sharmishtha, tired of her behaviour, tries to kill her, Devayani is rescued by Viraja's son Yayati.
Devayani uses her father's unconditional, compensatory devotion to herself to force Sharmishtha into submitting to be her slave, and then forcing Yayati later to marry her despite both his and her father's unwillingness and a documented caste-incompatibility.
She develops a chip on her shoulder, where even after several years she is unable to allow Sharmishtha any happiness, disproportionately punishing her by effectively keeping her prisoner in a garden mansion.
She later shortsightedly forces her father to curse Yayati after the latter has an affair with Sharmishtha, effectively pushing her own children, Yadu, Turvasu and Madhavi, out of the order of succession.
Her story seems to embody the saying: "Hurt people hurt people."
Mmkay so this is just a fic idea that was swirling in my head, based off the tale of Kacha and Devayani. hope you like it :D
tagging some : @gopikanyari @momo-all-the-way @carmen-riddle @taareginn @reddish-green-personality
@holding-infinity-and-a-book @aadyeah @weird-u @the-fault-in-our-inquilab @dragonfairy1231 @allegoriesinmediasres @mango-pickle
Murugan with wifes, Devayani and Valli.
An Alphabet of Legendary Ladies - D for Devayani, for @queenofmahishmati!
“You will never know love,” she snarls at Kacha, and he only looks at her sadly, his shining earrings swinging about that elegant neck—no, Devayani, no more.
“Then neither will you, little sister,” he replies, and how dare he, how dare he call her sister when all he did was come out of Father’s body at her request, when she burned for him…
Enough. Enough with men, she decides, after Kacha is gone; and holds to it. What are men, any way to her friend Sharmistha’s company, to Sharmistha’s sharp humor, and sparkling eyes, and sense of justice?
Curses are persistent things, though, and work their way into the most precious things. It is only when Devayani looks up at Sharmistha’s retreating form from the bottom of the well when she realizes how very foolish she has been, loving her as she did.
Women in Mahabharata - Jayanti
She is the daughter of Shachi and the mother of Devayani.
Her father, Sakra, sends her to distract Shukra from his penance, but she herself falls in love with him, and the two of them run and hide from both the Devas and Asuras up until the birth of their daughter.
After Devayani's birth, Shukra attempts to return to the Asuras upon finding out that Vrihaspati has been masquerading as him for all this time. However, Jayanti refuses his offer to seek shelter with the Asuras, unable to betray her own side completely.
She therefore returns to her father, leaving Shukra, who is still madly in love and yet similarly devoted to his own side, to raise their daughter alone.
She appears as a fleeting enigma in the wide canvas of the epic and yet her abandonment leaves a fatal scar upon the direction of the narrative, as her decision shapes young Devayani, whose course of actions eventually snowballs into the devastating war of Kurukshetra.
Women in Mahabharata - Ghurnika
She is a young nanny employed by Shukra to take care of young Devayani in the absence of Jayanti, and she often takes messages back and forth for Devayani.