‘Love,’ Victor Hugo wrote, “ is the foolishness of men and the wisdom of God.” The word love, rather the expression can either bring kingdoms together or burn them to ashes. Shakespeare also warned that “ The course of true love never did run smooth.” Yet, he also showed us how love’s wounds can so easily fester into tragedy. In the words of Khalil gibran love, “ possess not, nor is it possessed,” but, society has proven through history’s verdict that it can be owned,policed and punished. Love, left unreturned can turn into humiliation and humiliation into destruction. In the Ramayana this is not seen through the rose coloured lenses of Rama and Sita but, in the silence of Shurpanakha- a woman whose love and desires were not dealt with compassion but with mockery and mutilation. Her tale not only displays rejection but also shows how a patriarchal world decides which loves are noble and which are monstrous. Through Shurtpanakha’s eyes the Ramayana is not merely a great war but a mirror reflecting the ancient and enduring politics of love, desire, and judgement.
Shurpanakha was not born into the world as the villain of history would later name her. She was the daughter of the sage-turned-asura Vishrava and the rakshasi princess Kaikesi, a lineage that condemned her to the label of demoness before she had even spoken her first word. Her name itself—meaning “woman with nails like winnowing blades”—became a verbal cage. Her very birth was marked as of an “other” , a woman who could never belong to the sanitized ideal of beauty or virtue constructed but by the patriarchal order. In a society where women were valued for their gentleness, soft voices, downcast eyes, and bodies shaped to please ; Shurpanakha’s boldness, her laughter, her unashamed desire, were all acts of rebellion. Her strength spoke to the world not of confidence but of threat ; her independence not dignity but deviance. Society and the world around us has a very subtle way of saying : if you are not the Sita that they worship you will be the Shurpankha they fear.
Her life already had a ‘X’ marked in the spot of love as she endured the loss of her first husband before she even stepped into the forest that day. Her first husband, Vidyutjihva, was killed by her own brother Ravana for political reasons. The irony is almost poetic : The men who are known to protect women often become the architects of their grief. Patriarchy does not weep for the widow; it instructs her to erase her yearning, to swallow her pain, and to stand aside as the men continue their games of war and vengeance. Shurpanakha was left with nothing but a hollow that no courtly alliance could fill. Her desire, when it finally reemerged, was not the fantasy of a princess awaiting rescue; it was the desperate reaching of someone who had once held love in her hands and had it snatched away. That longing, the very thing that made her human would be used to strip her of her dignity.
The day Shuranakha stepped into the forest that day was not with a web of lies or a scheme but rather a simple proposal. Multiple texts tell us that she didn’t hide behind the curtain and expressed her desire boldly and without the coating of subtlety. But patriarchy has never been kind to women who articulate their wants. Ram dismissed her with mocking courtesy, suggesting she seek Lakshman instead. Lakshman’s rejection was not merely refusal, it was an act of humiliation. In Valmiki’s version of the story Lakshman his words are biting: he tells her he is merely a servant, unworthy, and that she should return to her “own kind.” In Kamban’s version, the cruelty sharpens—he calls her ugly, unfit, and mocks her physical appearance. These were not just personal insults; they were weapons, meant to remind her that desire in a woman, especially an “unacceptable” woman, is shameful. The insult was not a simple “no”; it was a reminder of where she was meant to stand in the order of things. In a fraction of a second he sliced away her nose and ears. The forest must have fallen silent in that instant, the warm rush of blood marking not just the end of an encounter, but the erasure of a woman’s face, her most visible claim to dignity and the only thing that decides if she is worth something . If beauty opens the door, then what kind of woman whose beauty has abandoned or been denied from the start? Does she knock, or does she turn away? Even in the greatest stories and histories, can cruelty be excused if it is sugar coated in the name of Dharma? Here, the scales of justice seem tipped by a belief that a woman : especially one marked as “other” deserved punishment for desiring what the male hero would not grant.
The wound forced on her was not only physical but also a stripping of her dignity. In a second the entirety of her identity changed from the sister of a great king to a woman pitied and mocked. In ancient societies, a woman’s beauty was often her unspoken passport to safety and civility; by stripping her off her beauty, Lakshman did more than reject her, he cast her into a kind of living exile. But was her “crime” truly the pursuit of love, or was it the greater sin of placing herself in the story without being invited? Here the line between sin and purity blurs, and the reader is left to wonder whether dharma can exist without compassion for the fallen.
From the remains of that moment, the Ramayana’s great war began to burn. Shurpanakha, bleeding and shamed, carried her pain to her brother Ravana. What she brought him was not merely a tale of insult but a wound transformed into a weapon. In telling him of Sita’s beauty and Rama’s arrogance, she shifted her humiliation into a spark for revenge ( also showing how she, the one named a demoness, portrays the same shift of human nature that makes someone a human. The desire for revenge, jealousy and the ability to feel these emotions to great extent and depth) And so, a single exchange in the quiet of Panchavati spiraled into the abduction of Sita, the march of armies, and the fall of Lanka. History remembers the war as a clash of dharma and adharma, of divine justice against demonic evil. She is remembered as the villain who put fire in the hole, not the widow seeking connection, not the sister whose loyalties were tangled, not the woman whose agency, though flawed though it may have been, was met with a violence so personal that it still stings when read today. Even in mythology, love, when expressed by a woman outside the rules, is seen not as a human emotion but as a dangerous transgression.
After the war, Shurpanakha’s fate is not one of redemption but of erasure. As her brothers lie and Lanka is reduced to ashes, she is left wondering the shadows by the story which had already said that she was unworthy of closure. No one in the story, not even Rama who is known as the ‘ Mariyada Purush’ didn’t pause and think of the woman whose humiliation caused by his own brother, his own blood is what set the chain of events in motion, nor did he attempt to restore his dignity. Some versions of the Ramayan say she retreats into the forest, living in seclusion, her disfigured face a constant reminder of the day her voice and body were violated. Others suggest she sought refuge in her Rakshasa kin, but even there, her identity was reduced to her role in the war, a cautionary tale of desire gone astray. In silence surrounding her story the epic sits in silence as Shurpanakha is never to be remembered as a grieving widow, wronged woman, but is frozen in the memory of a villainess who derived her fate, and deserved her humanity to be stripped long before the war even began just because of the label ‘other’. And in this silence, the question lingers: was dharma truly served, or did it merely choose its victors?
