Victoria Memorial: Masculinity, feminity and the eternal tension between the two took centre stage on Day 3 of the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, co-organised by the Victoria Memorial Hall in association with The Telegraph, on Wednesday.

Mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik traced the history of journey of feminity during a session titled The Myth are About Us that put into perspective the hermit and the householder, purush and prakriti, nature and humans.

Feminity is nature and the Hindu monastic world as well as the tenets of Buddhism were, till a time, all about rejecting feminity, abandoning the world of matter to dominate and domesticate nature or prakriti, said the author of My Gita and Myth=Mithya.

Feminism was taboo, it was considered inauspicious and hence everything feminine was put in denial. "Of course, the monastic orders were very patriarchal... like you see some political posters today where the women are all absent. You have Ram, but no Sita, you can spot Shiva but no Parvati... somehow coupledom is not celebrated," he said.

But in India, there is a masculine history and then there is a feminine history.

"Hence, the goddess came into the centre around 1,500 years ago, when the feminine energy and the goddess culture became mainstream. The goddess Tara came to the centre. Another name for Tara is Paramita or The Other. It's like asking the hermit how can you shut your eyes and forget the other?" Pattanaik asked, referring to how dhyana gave way to darshan and shunya (zero) to ananta (infinity).

The gyan of the day: To know yourself, you need to know the myths, as they are actually all about us but atma gyan or knowledge about one's self is "not something easy to digest".

Pattanaik was in conversation with Jash Sen, author.