Shabari's Fruit Basket

According to the Ramayana, an elderly devotee of Ram, Shabari, longed to achieve moksha, which she believed was possible by touching or serving Ram. Every day she would collect fruits from the forest, taste them to select only the sweetest, and keep them in a basket for Ram, awaiting with profound patience his impending but unfixed arrival, until she grew old and bent. One day Ram did appear before her, accompanied by his brother, Lakshman. With love she offered Ram her basket of fruit. As Ram was about to eat one of them, Lakshman objected that Shabari had already bitten into it, and it was therefore unclean, impure [jhoota]. Ram explained to Lakshman that any offering made to him with devotion was sweet and pleasing to him: what mattered was the intensity and sincerity of devotion, and nothing else. He ate the fruit, and thus, supposedly, Shabhari achieved liberation, for which she had waited all her life.

It is most unfortunate that Shabari's liberation does not equate with women's liberation in what we call our human civilisation; women still suffer from inequality, objectivisation, commodification, and exploitation. Given man's dominance, with no hope in sight, I have been apologetic for this inequality and inequity. For me, Ram was among the classiest examples of male chauvinism, and while my fruit basket may, to many, look very enticing, I hasten to inform that no guarantee as to its quality or any divine intervention or elevation is attached. Forgive my imperfections, and bite at your own risk.