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What kind of father leaves the choice of a husband to a mere girl? The Konkan town talk was that Mohanappa was over-reaching. Yet, on the third day of Chaitra, when the moon and stars jittered into the right places in the night, messages were drummed to the men of Konkan district that Mohanappa would, in the manner of the ancients, hold a May swayamwaram for his daughter Shivani. Challenges would be laid before the men, and the best of them, the men who hurdled all, would stand before the bride. The bride would confirm her choice by garlanding her groom. Only then, would the marriage feast proceed. Such an ancient custom could only still hold for the most peerless of women. For most, in our modern day, the Times of India lists the matrimonial ads, the men demand dowries from their brides, and the brides pay or burn away. Did he think he was being clever, giving his girl a choice? Would anyone show up to parade before her? Did he think she was such a pearl, beyond price or pride? His defenders said he was merely using the precedents set in Vedic scripture.
We have our laws, Mohanappa would say. In 1425, when the Sultan razed our temples, we stuck with scripture, despite threats. Mohanappa was comfortable, but not rich. He taught mathematics at Mysore University, and his wife had long since moved back to her ancestral village, it was said, to renounce the world and do good deeds. He was an amiable man, who liked to talk of what he felt was most important: the virtue of traditional Hindu women, why Sanskrit should be spoken in government offices, Gandhiji's mud pack cures, and the need to teach Bayes theorem to every luckless student in the land. He taught haphazardly but lavished a great love on his daughter, for whom he wrote a daily schedule out every evening, meticulously planning her course of study at the University, where most students chose their own. He was not a particularly good mathema- tician, as he preferred social occasions to the rigors of silent work in his small, cramped office, lit dimly by a fly-dusted window wedged into the sandstone Saracenic walls that some Maharaja had...