Saamvaan or Saambwaan

Samavan, who became the wife of his male friend

From the Skanda Purana

Sumedhas and Samavan were two poor brahmins, so poor that no one was willing to give either of them a wife. They learned of one queen, Simantini, who served lunch and offered rich gifts to one brahmin couple every Monday, after worshipping them as the divine couple, Shiva and Shakti. The two youths were in a fix - they needed the gifts to get married but they could not get the gifts from the queen unless they went to her with a bride. So they decided to obtain the gifts by deceit. Samavan disguised himself as a woman and with Sumedhas acting as the ‘husband’, they introduced themselves to the queen as a ‘couple’. Simantini guessed these were two men pretending to be a couple. Still, imagining them as the divine couple Shiva and Shakti, she worshipped them. Such was the power of the queen’s piety and her imagination that Samavan lost his manliness and became a woman named Samavati. Sumedhas was at first surprised but later agreed to marry his former friend. With the gifts they received, the two set up house and lived happily. Samavan’s father moaned the loss of a son but was consoled when his wife was blessed with an equally intelligent male child.

• Skanda Purana was put down in writing between the eighth and twelfth century CE. • In the sixteenth century, a Tamil poet named Varatunka Rama Pantiyar retold the story of Samavan’s sexual transformation found in Skanda Purana. • The aim of the story is to speak of the power of fasting on Monday for expressing devotion for Shiva. • The theme of a man turning into a woman, or a woman turning into a man, by the grace of God is common in religious literature. For example, in one folktale, a girl escapes those who seek to rape her by entering a temple where the deity transforms her into a man. • Unlike female-to-male and male-to-female gender transformations that evoke discomfort in modern times, in these stories sexual transformation is accepted rather comfortably by all the characters, and the author. • Does physical transformation of Samavan take away the fact that his memory is that of a man and that his husband was once his friend? Will the equation between them post transformation and post marriage be one of equals considering it is a queer one, or will it align to traditional patriarchal hierarchies? • The punishment for men having sex with men in Manu-smriti has less to do with sex and more to do with ritual pollution of brahmin men, and involves purification rituals such as taking a bath. • The colloquial word for passive effeminate homosexuals in India is kothi, which is very similar to the Thai word for lady-boys, kathoey. One can speculate that they may have common roots because of sea-links between India and the South East in medieval times. The word for the active masculine homosexual is panthi, which may be traced to the Sanskrit panda and the Pali pandaka. There are many regional variations of these words.

Story reference taken from devdutt Patnaik's book shikhandee...