Supernatural childbirth and queer coding
Indic mythology is stuffed to the gills with supernatural pregnancies. Could some of them be queer coded?
To understand this we need to first learn the basic viewpoint about the mechanics of pregnancy and childbirth in Indic mythology. Here, one must remember that actual medical textbooks like Caraka or Susruta Samhita, which are more anatomically accurate, were written at least a few centuries after the various religious texts were composed. So the ancient mythological point of view did not concur with the ancient medical point of view.
That said, here’s what the Mahabharata says on the role of the mother and father in childbirth.
bhāryāṁ patiḥ saṁpraviśya sa yasmāj jāyate punaḥ
jāyāyā iti jāyātvaṁ purāṇāḥ kavayo viduḥThe husband entering the womb of the wife cometh out himself in the form of the son. Therefore is the wife called by those cognisant of the Vedas as Jāyā (she of whom one is born).
spoken by Shakuntala, Adiparva, 68, 36
01069029a bhastrā mātā pituḥ putro yena jātaḥ sa eva saḥ
The mother is but the sheath of flesh in which the father begets the son. Indeed the father himself is the son.
Antarikse Devavani (Voice of the heavens), Adiparva, 69, 29
This is not a one-off claim, neither is it restricted to the Mahabharata.
This philosophy is demonstrated repeatedly in multiple sources through the births of characters such as Rishyashringa, Drona, the twins Kripa and Kripi, and all examples in which the semen of sages, due to the power of their austerities, is amogha i.e. eternally effective, even in the absence of egg or womb. Although women (celestial nymphs aka apsaras) are involved in all these cases, their only role is to arouse the man in question so that the semen is produced in the first place.
This philosophy explains why the Gods had to have physical sex with Kunti and Madri in order to give birth to the Pandavas, and why Visnu had to turn into Mohini in order to conceive the deity Ayappa.
This philosophy is also the direct reason behind the various folk tales where two women having sex are able to conceive, such as the much quoted folktale about the birth of Bhagiratha. Because females only contribute the flesh of the child, the product of their coitus is typically a boneless, soul-less bag of flesh. It takes the magical involvement of a male sage to turn it into a real child.
Buddhists and Jain texts reveal that they also believed in male sufficiency, as far procreation was concerned.
Thus the overarching philosophy espoused by all Indic traditions is strictly heteronormative, and is not shaken by most examples of supernatural pregnancies.
That leaves us with the various cases of male pregnancies.
Four main cases come to mind — the pregnancy of the eponymous Purusha in the Purusha sukta, the case of Yuvanasva in the Mahabharata and the case of the Yadava prankster in the Mausalaparva of the Mahabharata and most famously, Vishnu giving birth to Brahma from a lotus growing out of his navel. Let’s investigate them one by one.
In the case of Purusha, the source is in Vedic Sanskrit, and usually considered part of the Rig Veda Samhita, but may be a later interpolation. Here Goddesses are indeed involved, and their role is to arouse the creative forces of the Purusha, who then impregnates himself. His children emerge from him, killing him in the process. Thus the universe is brought forth from the Purusha’s sacrifice.
This story is basically one of parthenogenesis — even comparable to the ancient Greek myth from which the term actually comes from. It is properly seen as a cosmogonical myth, and has no connection to human queerness whatsoever.
Second, I’d like to talk about the birth of Brahma. Or even better, show you a picture.
So basically, Vishnu giving birth to Brahma is a reverse embryo. The embryo Vishnu gives birth to the creator God Brahma. This is therefore just another origin story for the universe (and a rather brilliant, if sexist one), and also has nothing to do with human queerness.
Third, the Yadava prankster. The story goes that some sages visited the kingdom of the Yadavas and instead of treating them with respect, their hosts decided to play a trick on them. So one of the men dressed up like a pregnant woman and presented himself to the sages, asking them to predict the sex of the child.
The sages were upset by this prank, and cursed the man, saying that he would give birth to the doom of the Yadava people. And due to the mechanics of curses in Indic mythology, that is exactly what happened. The man developed labour pains and surgeons pulled out some bulrushes out of him.
These bulrushes were naturally thrown away carelessly and they took root. Later they brought forth weapons, which the Yadavas used to kill each other in an internecine war. And so the curse was fulfilled.
All curse, no queerness. There wasn’t even an actual baby.
Finally, Yuvanasva. In the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, Yuvanasva goes out hunting and at the end of the day, enters a hermitage, tired and hungry. Everyone is asleep, and there’s no food and water anywhere. However, the residents of the hermitage had recently concluded a sacrifice, and there was some spilled ghee (clarified butter) on the grass surrounding the sacrificial fire pits (presumably it spilled from the ladles and containers of ghee used to feed the fire). Finding himself at the end of his rope, Yuvanasva licked the grass clean, consuming what little ghee he found, and went to sleep. And in the morning he found himself with child.
The other gent who answered this question will tell you that the offering of ghee is a stand-in for the vital energy i.e. semen of the sages, and that the Fire deity Agni, in the capacity of mouth of the Gods, is therefore an eater of semen.
He will probably neglect to tell you that the fire pits were considered feminine, and addressed by the names Svaha and Svadha, and the ersatz semen was actually absorbed by the same Goddess, who then gave birth to/nursed Agni and Agni in turn conducted the sustenance to the other Gods. Thus Agni was most definitely not a semen eater.
But one thing is true, the ghee was most definitely a stand-in for semen.
Ghee is considered the essence of milk, and an example of the triumph of human enterprise (purusartha) because of the sheer amount of processing involved in its manufacture (Animal husbandry, milking, separation of cream, churning and heating).
Other things typically offered to the sacrificial fire include actual food-grains (which are seeds of plants) and the fat of sacrificial animals (which is considered the essence of the animal).
So what Yuvanasva did was consume the spilled ‘essence’ of the sages. And the essence of the sages is amogha. And if a sage’s semen can turn into a child inside a clay pot (drona), it certainly can turn into a child inside a human male’s body.
So Yuvanasva’s pregnancy was not so much about his gender or sexuality, but about the pious virility of the sages who had conducted the sacrifice. In that sense, the birth of Mandhata (for that was the name of the boy born from Yuvanasva) is no different from the birth of Drona and the others.
I mean sure, the surgeons who removed Mandhata from Yuvanasva’s body were the male deities the Asvins, and the baby was nursed by the male God Indra who simply manifested a stream of milk from his (intact) fingertip, but that just makes it an all-male miniature cosmogony.
Could this be queer-coding? Sure. Man swallowing symbolic semen gets pregnant without jeopardising his masculinity and gives birth to a hero — that’s a positively uplifting story compared to the gender bending stories. Hurray! We’ve finally found a good example of queer representation.
This is the appendix to a series of articles on the history of queerness in India.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Appendix I
