By Manisha Kulshrestha
Long long ago during my adolescence I read this Hindi poem and just copied it. Then I was horrified to know that I am also a girl and today also I am frightened because I am a mother of two girls. At that moment I could not understand this poem in totality but now today I can understand it completely in its vivid and right contexts of legendary comments on their writings.
Oh! Nothing has changed, same heinous feelings of being a female, it does not make any difference whether it is this country or that religion. Even if you don't cross the door that also does not ensure your safety at home! If those females who go out of villages to study are not safe then are those females who live in villages under long veils can feel safe?
Harassment, sexual violence, mental tension, everything is same. The only change that is visible is that now these things cannot go unnoticed even when Honorable Supreme Court also does not give justice to Bhanvari Devi. Now the statistics do not increase rather the volume of these cries have become really bold and loud. Women are now all set to shed this wrong habit of so called tolerance. She has been told by this religion and male dominated society since ages, "Tolerate! But don't say a word, you will lose your prestige and place; we would not lose anything because we are males!" Religion was never with women. Right from the Vedic era to today's constitution there are hundreds and hundred pages written on female equality and devotion to her. Reality tells a different story; so far all the way it is only a glorified paradox.
Is it not sad that in this country there is lot of noise on cow slaughter or temple-mosque disputes but no one talks about abortion of female fetus. Even doctors also forget their noble profession's oath. I happen to be a witness of this heinous crime‚ when I saw a gynecologist misguiding a village couple. There are no serious restriction and legislation; this issue has been neglected for a long time. All religions and all strata of our society are equally responsible for promoting this evil practice. Inheritance laws are also tilted in favor of male offspring. None of the successive governments have been successful in controlling dowry custom; all awareness, noise and ineffective laws can not help female. She is still considered a burden due to economic problems. Religion, custom, wrong practices and male discrimination are not only responsible for this sorry state of Indian woman, up to certain extent she herself is also to be blamed. If she is a mother, she should oppose abortion of female fetus. If she is a daughter then she should oppose the dowry system. She should stand up and oppose to physical abuse and rape.
Our constitution clearly says that there should not be any discrimination on the basis of sex and the women are also empowered with the right of voting but still she is neglected even for basic health services and literacy. However, the government seems to be helpless as in reality nothing reaches to her.
After independence there have been a few progressive women who have made their place in this all male dominating world by using their freedom but a common woman still remains in her own cocoon. Slowly now the women are getting onto the path of progress through the medium of education. She has come forward to acclaim her place in a variety of fields. As an educated housewife and mother she had given right direction to the family and provided a new vision to the next generation. There are no two thoughts that women has awakened to her rights but on the darker side she still continues to suffer from lot of physical and emotional excesses.
The empowerment of women is directly connected to the family, society and in turn to the development of the country. The cruelty with women is very painful, for her and her family and also shameful for society and country. A single crime with a woman reverses all forwarding steps of other women and the chain of development breaks up. There should be a positive change in attitude of man, society, religion and government so that woman can be given a fair chance to develop without any fear.
Monday, April 20, 2009
A New Indian Woman?
By Kusum Choppra
Have you ever heard of a woman called Sitaram ? Or Radhakrishna or Radheshyam? Why?
The names sound feminine enough. Then why does one only hear of men carrying those double-barreled names? Legend has it that these double-barreled names are the outcome of a "vardaan" from the Gods to two women, Sita and Radha: that their names would always precede the man's. This was because their steadfast loyalty and pure love had raised them head and shoulders above their communities, even their men, Ram and Krishna, respectively.
For Krishna had dallied with dozens and married two, but Radha, a married woman defied home, family and society, to abide by her steadfast love for her Lord.
Sita too proved her mettle, in banwas, in imprisonment, in the agnipariksha and ever after, to place herself a cut above the Maryada Purushottam, against whose later days and apparent lust for power, question marks still stand.
Yet it was the men who were named Radhakrishna, Radheshyam, Sitaram or Shivaramakrishna.
The issue here is the usurpation, by the male of the species, of the double-barreled name, which was the vardan of the Gods for the females of the species.
In earlier times, and often in our times too, men were conscious of the threat of being out shone by their women. Hence the girls are never christened Sitaram, Radheshyam or Radhekrishna; only plain Sita or Rama, Radha or Krishna. It is the boys who get the double appellation.
The oldest cultures saw the woman as the Life giver, the Nurturer. Hence the personification of earth, nature and the rivers etc. as female deities and the matrilineal communities. At some juncture, when a crisis erupted when the woman was going through her reproductive cycle, the Man used his brute physical force to meet the crisis and to take over.
What proof is there that the Cave Woman did not accompany the Cave Man on his hunting expeditions? Or that Cave Man actually slung Cave Woman over his shoulder to cut short the wooing process? Except the buffoonery of some Western writers? Where brute force takes the day. In the Orient, female deities held sway longer - in fact, almost until the precursors of the Occident arrived, after the Occident had outgrown its own female deities with the advent of Christianity.
The precursor of the ghunghat was the purdah of Islam, while ancient India celebrated its women in the carvings of Mohenjadaro and Khajuraho. Now Hindutva choses to opt for aping Christianity and Islam in imposing uniformity in organized religion, where rather than reap souls, religious leaders prefer reap real estate riches from their devotees.
In recent times a new Indian woman has emerged.
There are two ways of looking at it. The New Indian woman can be termed a very nebulous creature populating the hyper active mind of writers only; for there remain to this day millions upon millions of women who might dress like the new Indian woman but mentally and physically remain steeped in the post partition era and mentalities.
Or she can be a many splendored creature, super woman, ranging from the ‘done that, seen that, type of person’ to a well-rounded personality who combines profession with personal admirably. It all depends on the spectrum of society you interact with.
The New Indian Woman is in fact a many splendored creature, more educated and aware than her predecessor, although very large segments of the New Indian Woman seems to be losing out on the massive store we have as heritage. This is because parents, more especially mothers, push daughters towards careers so vigorously that earlier ‘feminine’ arts such as embroidery, knitting, cooking, more temperate housekeeping, even child and health care is left by the wayside as women climb rapidly up the career ladder. Housekeeping becomes cursory or relegated to a housekeeper who is also a professional, a career woman perhaps lower down the ladder than the corporate executive whose house she looks after. But then, the housekeeper too is a new Indian woman.
So it is, that you win some, you lose some for the New Indian Woman who scales new heights, crashing through all the glass ceilings. More than the urban woman whose heights were scaled even before Partition and regularly thereafter, in today’s India, it is the rural woman who is more deserving of the New Indian Woman categorization.
Statistics confirm that the number of families headed by women is rising dramatically, especially in the rural areas. And thousands of women are making their mark in panchayats and other local self-government bodies and organizations across the country working at the grass roots levels, with startling results.
Another aspect is the New Indian woman depicted in media, especially electronic media and films…generally a more feather headed person than may be actually the case. In the current crop of serials, the New Indian Woman comes across very sorry. Tulsi and Parvati are hardly new Indian women, for all their glamorous homes, they are as hectoring as any old time Nanad or Sasuma, and as regressive.
But for all the hectoring and the ruling that the women do, they will still do the perfunctory know-towing to the male and forgive them all their sins, although each and every single digression of the woman becomes an earth shattering event for the entire joint family.
Rare is the woman in any of those popular soaps ever does anything except dress to kill; even a supposedly professional like Prerna is never seen working as one, although she does dare to take on issues as rapid-fire marriages and divorces and recently, rape and marital differences. A symbol like Jassi, despite her hi-fi career and transformation remains a creature of her father, and then family, rather than her own.
Unfortunately producers are still rather shy of translating literary works into films, serials or plays. Heroine oriented, author backed roles are a rarity. I cannot recall a recent example, beyond Parineeta. Before the K serials of the Ekta Kapoor’s society women genre inundated TV, there was a very interesting series that translated short stories into single episode short TV plays. Some of them brought out the strengths of women much more powerfully than any of the big names in the K soaps. But if I recall correctly, again most were nostalgic rather than contemporary.
Feminism may be big headlines and page three chatter; but hard-core feminism where women think like women, not like men, is still struggling for a voice.
Novels would undoubtedly make an impact, if they managed to get read in the first place. Perhaps in the smaller towns and campuses, where reading has not yet gone out of fashion novels are devoured with some appetite.
In elite circles, it is no longer fashionable to read. And if anyone does read, it is totally incomprehensible for everyone why anyone should read an Indian author, except may be a Shobha De or Jhumpa Lahiri ?
Big-ticket authors find a wide readership. Those who come via an NRI tag enjoy an edge, no doubt. But the impact is limited to much the same elite circles that produce that limited edition of the New Indian woman who populates the soap operas on TV.
Who or what constructs this media image, or what are some of the factors that contribute to this construction?
Unfortunately the construction of the New Indian Woman, who is publicly projected, has been left more in the hands of persons who are out of touch with the reality of most of India. Writers of plays and serials and films today, even the more popular pulp fiction which finds publishers easily, are by and large persons from upper middles or plain wealthy homes, whose exposure to the Other India outside their world of internet cafes, international rock shows, malls, multiplexes and foreign holidays is very very limited. That is why perhaps that their characters act very out-of-character as women from homes other than those that are super rich.
Hence even so-called middle class heroines wear designer outfits and make up and are very rapidly propelled into the hundreds of crores category. Their concerns are rarely down to earth at all. Has anyone seen any really good middle middle class serial in the mould of Humlog or film like Chitchor or Gharonda in recent times? Has anyone seen a serial heroine dressed like the ordinary woman on the street in any of our non-metropolis or if not actually working professionally or at least keeping house like any normal “real life” woman?
Even writers, it is rather depressing to note, quickly hark back to early, post independence eras for a middle class touch, while most recent writing is devoted to multiplex ma’ams and their counterparts from smaller towns.
Chhote ghar ke log or chhote gaon ke log are a subject of derision, rather than an exploration of their emotions, problems, issues. Glamour, it is felt, sells and everyone goes all out for that glamour, and literature be damned. Kal kisne dekha? Is the attitude. For the big city slick writer, the new woman is a combination of the people he knows, is familiar with, therefore easier to depict in words or pictures.
It is ironic that modern Indian English writers often write in the nostalgic mode. Should it be interpreted that modern writers do not find too much worth writing about the modern miss. Or that the modern miss is already nostalgic about the past when she was not a cutting edge, gizmo driven DINK?
Apart from the nostalgia segment, we have an imitation of the west, whether it is post-Harold Robbins sex driven novels or the Harry Potter imitations. Where is the New Indian woman in these?
She scores, if at all, in the short story genre and in the regional languages. India is a vast country with countless talents waiting to tell their tales. Whenever they get the chance, they present a smorgasbord of the Indian woman’s experience in all her harrowing variety. Humor is usually in short supply. Every other emotion aplenty.
Writing in English does give the writer a snob value when interacting with readers of regional literature. Inversely, regional writers do often display an inverse snobbery when meeting writers in English…we’re in touch with the real India, tum to angrez ki juthan ho; sort of unspoken vibes are common.
In some ways, one may be tempted to accept the New Indian Woman is a political construction, viewed from the point of view as politics being relationships of power at all levels of society, and not just as government or party politics.
Writers sculpt this female political construction with an agenda dictated in very many cases, through suitable veils, by the presiding deities in India today, the political parties and the Sangh Parivar. Those who are aware of the nuances can recognize the guiding hand quite easily.
The day has yet to come when Woman Power will be truly womanpower and not a creature of its author. There are very few women who think like a woman and move forward. All too frequently, they succumb to that admonish “ think like a man”. Remember that famous quip about Indira Gandhi being the only Man in her cabinet. If women continue down that path already beaten by men, how will they ever bring the world back from the brinks that Men have brought it to?
Have you ever heard of a woman called Sitaram ? Or Radhakrishna or Radheshyam? Why?
The names sound feminine enough. Then why does one only hear of men carrying those double-barreled names? Legend has it that these double-barreled names are the outcome of a "vardaan" from the Gods to two women, Sita and Radha: that their names would always precede the man's. This was because their steadfast loyalty and pure love had raised them head and shoulders above their communities, even their men, Ram and Krishna, respectively.
For Krishna had dallied with dozens and married two, but Radha, a married woman defied home, family and society, to abide by her steadfast love for her Lord.
Sita too proved her mettle, in banwas, in imprisonment, in the agnipariksha and ever after, to place herself a cut above the Maryada Purushottam, against whose later days and apparent lust for power, question marks still stand.
Yet it was the men who were named Radhakrishna, Radheshyam, Sitaram or Shivaramakrishna.
The issue here is the usurpation, by the male of the species, of the double-barreled name, which was the vardan of the Gods for the females of the species.
In earlier times, and often in our times too, men were conscious of the threat of being out shone by their women. Hence the girls are never christened Sitaram, Radheshyam or Radhekrishna; only plain Sita or Rama, Radha or Krishna. It is the boys who get the double appellation.
The oldest cultures saw the woman as the Life giver, the Nurturer. Hence the personification of earth, nature and the rivers etc. as female deities and the matrilineal communities. At some juncture, when a crisis erupted when the woman was going through her reproductive cycle, the Man used his brute physical force to meet the crisis and to take over.
What proof is there that the Cave Woman did not accompany the Cave Man on his hunting expeditions? Or that Cave Man actually slung Cave Woman over his shoulder to cut short the wooing process? Except the buffoonery of some Western writers? Where brute force takes the day. In the Orient, female deities held sway longer - in fact, almost until the precursors of the Occident arrived, after the Occident had outgrown its own female deities with the advent of Christianity.
The precursor of the ghunghat was the purdah of Islam, while ancient India celebrated its women in the carvings of Mohenjadaro and Khajuraho. Now Hindutva choses to opt for aping Christianity and Islam in imposing uniformity in organized religion, where rather than reap souls, religious leaders prefer reap real estate riches from their devotees.
In recent times a new Indian woman has emerged.
There are two ways of looking at it. The New Indian woman can be termed a very nebulous creature populating the hyper active mind of writers only; for there remain to this day millions upon millions of women who might dress like the new Indian woman but mentally and physically remain steeped in the post partition era and mentalities.
Or she can be a many splendored creature, super woman, ranging from the ‘done that, seen that, type of person’ to a well-rounded personality who combines profession with personal admirably. It all depends on the spectrum of society you interact with.
The New Indian Woman is in fact a many splendored creature, more educated and aware than her predecessor, although very large segments of the New Indian Woman seems to be losing out on the massive store we have as heritage. This is because parents, more especially mothers, push daughters towards careers so vigorously that earlier ‘feminine’ arts such as embroidery, knitting, cooking, more temperate housekeeping, even child and health care is left by the wayside as women climb rapidly up the career ladder. Housekeeping becomes cursory or relegated to a housekeeper who is also a professional, a career woman perhaps lower down the ladder than the corporate executive whose house she looks after. But then, the housekeeper too is a new Indian woman.
So it is, that you win some, you lose some for the New Indian Woman who scales new heights, crashing through all the glass ceilings. More than the urban woman whose heights were scaled even before Partition and regularly thereafter, in today’s India, it is the rural woman who is more deserving of the New Indian Woman categorization.
Statistics confirm that the number of families headed by women is rising dramatically, especially in the rural areas. And thousands of women are making their mark in panchayats and other local self-government bodies and organizations across the country working at the grass roots levels, with startling results.
Another aspect is the New Indian woman depicted in media, especially electronic media and films…generally a more feather headed person than may be actually the case. In the current crop of serials, the New Indian Woman comes across very sorry. Tulsi and Parvati are hardly new Indian women, for all their glamorous homes, they are as hectoring as any old time Nanad or Sasuma, and as regressive.
But for all the hectoring and the ruling that the women do, they will still do the perfunctory know-towing to the male and forgive them all their sins, although each and every single digression of the woman becomes an earth shattering event for the entire joint family.
Rare is the woman in any of those popular soaps ever does anything except dress to kill; even a supposedly professional like Prerna is never seen working as one, although she does dare to take on issues as rapid-fire marriages and divorces and recently, rape and marital differences. A symbol like Jassi, despite her hi-fi career and transformation remains a creature of her father, and then family, rather than her own.
Unfortunately producers are still rather shy of translating literary works into films, serials or plays. Heroine oriented, author backed roles are a rarity. I cannot recall a recent example, beyond Parineeta. Before the K serials of the Ekta Kapoor’s society women genre inundated TV, there was a very interesting series that translated short stories into single episode short TV plays. Some of them brought out the strengths of women much more powerfully than any of the big names in the K soaps. But if I recall correctly, again most were nostalgic rather than contemporary.
Feminism may be big headlines and page three chatter; but hard-core feminism where women think like women, not like men, is still struggling for a voice.
Novels would undoubtedly make an impact, if they managed to get read in the first place. Perhaps in the smaller towns and campuses, where reading has not yet gone out of fashion novels are devoured with some appetite.
In elite circles, it is no longer fashionable to read. And if anyone does read, it is totally incomprehensible for everyone why anyone should read an Indian author, except may be a Shobha De or Jhumpa Lahiri ?
Big-ticket authors find a wide readership. Those who come via an NRI tag enjoy an edge, no doubt. But the impact is limited to much the same elite circles that produce that limited edition of the New Indian woman who populates the soap operas on TV.
Who or what constructs this media image, or what are some of the factors that contribute to this construction?
Unfortunately the construction of the New Indian Woman, who is publicly projected, has been left more in the hands of persons who are out of touch with the reality of most of India. Writers of plays and serials and films today, even the more popular pulp fiction which finds publishers easily, are by and large persons from upper middles or plain wealthy homes, whose exposure to the Other India outside their world of internet cafes, international rock shows, malls, multiplexes and foreign holidays is very very limited. That is why perhaps that their characters act very out-of-character as women from homes other than those that are super rich.
Hence even so-called middle class heroines wear designer outfits and make up and are very rapidly propelled into the hundreds of crores category. Their concerns are rarely down to earth at all. Has anyone seen any really good middle middle class serial in the mould of Humlog or film like Chitchor or Gharonda in recent times? Has anyone seen a serial heroine dressed like the ordinary woman on the street in any of our non-metropolis or if not actually working professionally or at least keeping house like any normal “real life” woman?
Even writers, it is rather depressing to note, quickly hark back to early, post independence eras for a middle class touch, while most recent writing is devoted to multiplex ma’ams and their counterparts from smaller towns.
Chhote ghar ke log or chhote gaon ke log are a subject of derision, rather than an exploration of their emotions, problems, issues. Glamour, it is felt, sells and everyone goes all out for that glamour, and literature be damned. Kal kisne dekha? Is the attitude. For the big city slick writer, the new woman is a combination of the people he knows, is familiar with, therefore easier to depict in words or pictures.
It is ironic that modern Indian English writers often write in the nostalgic mode. Should it be interpreted that modern writers do not find too much worth writing about the modern miss. Or that the modern miss is already nostalgic about the past when she was not a cutting edge, gizmo driven DINK?
Apart from the nostalgia segment, we have an imitation of the west, whether it is post-Harold Robbins sex driven novels or the Harry Potter imitations. Where is the New Indian woman in these?
She scores, if at all, in the short story genre and in the regional languages. India is a vast country with countless talents waiting to tell their tales. Whenever they get the chance, they present a smorgasbord of the Indian woman’s experience in all her harrowing variety. Humor is usually in short supply. Every other emotion aplenty.
Writing in English does give the writer a snob value when interacting with readers of regional literature. Inversely, regional writers do often display an inverse snobbery when meeting writers in English…we’re in touch with the real India, tum to angrez ki juthan ho; sort of unspoken vibes are common.
In some ways, one may be tempted to accept the New Indian Woman is a political construction, viewed from the point of view as politics being relationships of power at all levels of society, and not just as government or party politics.
Writers sculpt this female political construction with an agenda dictated in very many cases, through suitable veils, by the presiding deities in India today, the political parties and the Sangh Parivar. Those who are aware of the nuances can recognize the guiding hand quite easily.
The day has yet to come when Woman Power will be truly womanpower and not a creature of its author. There are very few women who think like a woman and move forward. All too frequently, they succumb to that admonish “ think like a man”. Remember that famous quip about Indira Gandhi being the only Man in her cabinet. If women continue down that path already beaten by men, how will they ever bring the world back from the brinks that Men have brought it to?
Wailing Womb, Weeping Heart
By Satya Chaitanya
It was another beautiful morning in the village. The sun had come up in the eastern sky and the village was now bright with a gentle glow. The cold hadn’t cleared fully, though Holi was over and people had stopped taking bath in warmed water. The bakul trees swayed gently in the soft breeze, as though in some light trance born of an intoxication of which only they knew the secret. Or maybe they were in some sweet dream of a near future when the sacred feet of a dark child would take steps under them, sending unspeakable ecstasies into their grateful hearts. Small herds of cows stood idly here and there, soaking the warmth of the early morning sun. Goats nibbled at tufts of grass growing here and there. Something told you that deep within, far beneath the serenity and beauty of it all, the morning hid some deep sorrow. Maybe, it was the distant hills that told you of it with their stoic silence: they seemed to be so still.
There were already a group of men under the banyan tree, some sitting and others standing in various poses. Their talk was whispered, as though they were afraid someone might overhear. And they were talking of what they always talked about these days – Kamsa and his wickedness. “The time for the incarnation has come,” one of them said. “True, it is impossible to tolerate Kamsa anymore,” added another. The others nodded their heads vigorously, fear making them look left and right with frightened eyes even as they did so.
It was time for me to go to fetch water from the Yamuna. This was the part of the day’s chores that we women enjoyed best. It was our own time, with no men around. The walk to the Yamuna took no more than fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes to walk back. But we were never back before an hour – and it was certainly not filling water in the pots that we spent the remaining half hour. That was time when we shared among ourselves everything that women always shared. This part of the day made the rest of the day meaningful – just as sleep made the day meaningful. It put everything in its place. It cleansed us – of the worries, the pains, anger, disappointments of the day gone by. It was as though when we came back from this daily chore all that was sad and mournful that had been in us earlier was washed clean of us. Giving place to hope, to longings, to desires and yearnings, to all that made life beautiful. Making us feel as though we were born fresh. No woman in the village missed this part of the day if she could.
I called out to Sita, Durga, Uma and others of my neighborhood and we all took our pots in hand and started walking. From a few houses away we could hear Gauri calling the women of her neighborhood. Usually there were some twenty women in the group as we went to the Yamuna. I looked forward to this part of the day. I enjoyed the walk as much as I enjoyed the company and the talk, especially in weather as pleasant as this. It was a pleasure to lose myself to the music of anklets and bangles and the sounds of happy chatting as twenty of us walked together.
A cloud of disappointment floated into my mind when I thought that I would miss the walk soon – my pregnancy was fast advancing. But then, that disappointment was nothing compared to the joy of what was coming – this would be our first child. A thrill passed through me at the very thought – nothing, nothing in the world, is as thrilling to a woman as the birth of her first child. Marriage makes a girl a woman, true, but it is her first child that makes her truly appreciate what it means to be a woman.
Nanda wanted a girl. But I told him it was going to be a boy, for that is what I wanted. “A mother’s wish is always more important than a father’s,” I told him and he laughed.
Nanda always laughed. And I imagined him laughing with our child soon. He was a very cute child, our son – seemed to be made of butter. As I suckled him, a joy that I had never experienced seemed to fill me. An image floated into my mind: that of Nanda playing with him in our courtyard. He was chasing Nanda all over the courtyard, his laughter sounding like a hundred temple bells ringing all together. Then I was chasing him with a tiny stick in my hand, and he turned around and looked at me, smiling, and then continued to run. I threw the stick down and called him into my hands. He turned around and ran back, and jumped into my hands, laughing.
Peels of laughter.
Women’s laughter.
It was my friends. They were teasing me. They were looking at me with eyes full of mirth, trying hard to control their laughter and failing miserably. There was no need for words – they knew where I was lost and I knew they knew it.
Yamuna was still flowing in her sleep and I felt bad about waking her up. There was such calm about the way she flowed. That was another reason why I loved the Yamuna. She was always so serene, as though nothing could upset her. As though she had surrendered to existence and accepted whatever life brought to her. The eternal journey had its ups and downs, but nothing affected her rhythm. She flowed on in a tranquility that was amazing. Oftentimes I have just come here, either alone or with just a single friend, to sit quietly on her banks and allow her serenity to flow into me. I loved it.
We had already washed our hands and feet and then entering the Yamuna filled our pots when I suddenly heard a wail from across the river.
Looking up, I saw a woman standing alone on the other bank. It was she who was wailing.
I had never heard a woman wailing like that, so deep, so tortured, was her sorrow. It did not seem to be coming from her heart, but from some part of her far deeper than her heart, maybe her soul itself. The cry of a woman’s unutterable anguish. Anguish so terrible it was as though not one, but a hundred, a thousand, maybe a million women were wailing. As though every female soul on earth was wailing at once.
The sorrow in every woman’s heart, past and present, came out in that woman’s wail.
And then I heard the trees around her wailing with her. I heard the kadambas, the mangoes, banyans, peepals, jamuns, all wailing with her. The bamboos in every thicket began to wail with her. Then I heard the ashokas, the mandaras, jabas, kaminis, champas on the banks of the Yamuna wailing with her. Now the distant hills joined her tortured soul’s wail. And from nearby I suddenly heard the Yamuna herself wailing. The wind was wailing. All earth and the sky were wailing.
When I looked into the eyes of my friends, there were tears in them. They stood motionless in the weeping Yamuna, tears running down their cheeks.
It was the lament of life I heard coming out from that woman across the river. All existence wailing.
Perhaps this was how Sita wailed when Rama abandoned her in the jungle, I thought.
I left my pot on the ground and walked towards the woman, wading across the Yamuna. As the waters of the Yamuna touched me, I felt shaken as I had never been shaken.
Across the river I held the woman to my breasts for a long, long time, until her wails became silent sobs that shook me with their agony. Then I led her to a large stone under a kadamba tree.
I asked her of her sorrow.
It took her a long time to be able to speak.
And then she told me of Kamsa. She told me of the first child of hers whom Kamsa held by its feet and dashed against a rock, scattering its brains all over. And of her second child. And of her third child. And of her fourth child. And of her fifth child. And of her sixth child… Each of whom Kamsa had held by its feet and dashed against a rock, their white brains mixed with red infant blood scattering all over the empty courtyard where he had done it.
Then she told her about her seventh child whom she had lost before he was born.
And then she was unable to continue. She just sat there, the woman who had given birth again and again and had witnessed the heads of her infants being dashed against rocks by her brother.
Her hands lay over her swollen stomach, protectively. They shook in terror, in unspeakable sorrow.
My body trembled as my heart’s weeping became unbearable.
I made her stand up. I stood before her. I took her hands from her stomach and placed them against my own swollen stomach.
And I told her: Your child shall live. Mine shall die for his sake.
Devaki looked at me with disbelieving eyes. With horror-filled eyes. With eyes that held more sorrow than before. A thousand times more sorrow. And bottomless horror.
I took her by her hand and led her into the waters of Mother Yamuna. There, standing knee deep in Yamuna’s dark, sacred waters, I pledged solemnly: Devaki, your eighth child shall live. My child shall die for his sake.
Walking back across the river with unwavering steps, I no more felt the pressure of water against my legs. Looking down I saw the waters of the Yamuna had parted and given me way.
I walked on wet sand over which the Yamuna had flowed until a moment ago. Flowed ceaselessly for a hundred thousand years.
Now she had parted to give me way.
Surging waters waited on both sides as I walked along the path she had made for me.
From the riverbanks, I heard the music of numberless birds that had suddenly begun to sing in a sweet chorus.
Heaven showered a slight drizzle on me.
The child in my womb moved.
I heard a voice calling me Mother.
The voice had come from the middle of the river.
Looking up, I saw the Mother of the Universe looking at me.
The smile in her eyes was beautiful beyond words
It was another beautiful morning in the village. The sun had come up in the eastern sky and the village was now bright with a gentle glow. The cold hadn’t cleared fully, though Holi was over and people had stopped taking bath in warmed water. The bakul trees swayed gently in the soft breeze, as though in some light trance born of an intoxication of which only they knew the secret. Or maybe they were in some sweet dream of a near future when the sacred feet of a dark child would take steps under them, sending unspeakable ecstasies into their grateful hearts. Small herds of cows stood idly here and there, soaking the warmth of the early morning sun. Goats nibbled at tufts of grass growing here and there. Something told you that deep within, far beneath the serenity and beauty of it all, the morning hid some deep sorrow. Maybe, it was the distant hills that told you of it with their stoic silence: they seemed to be so still.
There were already a group of men under the banyan tree, some sitting and others standing in various poses. Their talk was whispered, as though they were afraid someone might overhear. And they were talking of what they always talked about these days – Kamsa and his wickedness. “The time for the incarnation has come,” one of them said. “True, it is impossible to tolerate Kamsa anymore,” added another. The others nodded their heads vigorously, fear making them look left and right with frightened eyes even as they did so.
It was time for me to go to fetch water from the Yamuna. This was the part of the day’s chores that we women enjoyed best. It was our own time, with no men around. The walk to the Yamuna took no more than fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes to walk back. But we were never back before an hour – and it was certainly not filling water in the pots that we spent the remaining half hour. That was time when we shared among ourselves everything that women always shared. This part of the day made the rest of the day meaningful – just as sleep made the day meaningful. It put everything in its place. It cleansed us – of the worries, the pains, anger, disappointments of the day gone by. It was as though when we came back from this daily chore all that was sad and mournful that had been in us earlier was washed clean of us. Giving place to hope, to longings, to desires and yearnings, to all that made life beautiful. Making us feel as though we were born fresh. No woman in the village missed this part of the day if she could.
I called out to Sita, Durga, Uma and others of my neighborhood and we all took our pots in hand and started walking. From a few houses away we could hear Gauri calling the women of her neighborhood. Usually there were some twenty women in the group as we went to the Yamuna. I looked forward to this part of the day. I enjoyed the walk as much as I enjoyed the company and the talk, especially in weather as pleasant as this. It was a pleasure to lose myself to the music of anklets and bangles and the sounds of happy chatting as twenty of us walked together.
A cloud of disappointment floated into my mind when I thought that I would miss the walk soon – my pregnancy was fast advancing. But then, that disappointment was nothing compared to the joy of what was coming – this would be our first child. A thrill passed through me at the very thought – nothing, nothing in the world, is as thrilling to a woman as the birth of her first child. Marriage makes a girl a woman, true, but it is her first child that makes her truly appreciate what it means to be a woman.
Nanda wanted a girl. But I told him it was going to be a boy, for that is what I wanted. “A mother’s wish is always more important than a father’s,” I told him and he laughed.
Nanda always laughed. And I imagined him laughing with our child soon. He was a very cute child, our son – seemed to be made of butter. As I suckled him, a joy that I had never experienced seemed to fill me. An image floated into my mind: that of Nanda playing with him in our courtyard. He was chasing Nanda all over the courtyard, his laughter sounding like a hundred temple bells ringing all together. Then I was chasing him with a tiny stick in my hand, and he turned around and looked at me, smiling, and then continued to run. I threw the stick down and called him into my hands. He turned around and ran back, and jumped into my hands, laughing.
Peels of laughter.
Women’s laughter.
It was my friends. They were teasing me. They were looking at me with eyes full of mirth, trying hard to control their laughter and failing miserably. There was no need for words – they knew where I was lost and I knew they knew it.
Yamuna was still flowing in her sleep and I felt bad about waking her up. There was such calm about the way she flowed. That was another reason why I loved the Yamuna. She was always so serene, as though nothing could upset her. As though she had surrendered to existence and accepted whatever life brought to her. The eternal journey had its ups and downs, but nothing affected her rhythm. She flowed on in a tranquility that was amazing. Oftentimes I have just come here, either alone or with just a single friend, to sit quietly on her banks and allow her serenity to flow into me. I loved it.
We had already washed our hands and feet and then entering the Yamuna filled our pots when I suddenly heard a wail from across the river.
Looking up, I saw a woman standing alone on the other bank. It was she who was wailing.
I had never heard a woman wailing like that, so deep, so tortured, was her sorrow. It did not seem to be coming from her heart, but from some part of her far deeper than her heart, maybe her soul itself. The cry of a woman’s unutterable anguish. Anguish so terrible it was as though not one, but a hundred, a thousand, maybe a million women were wailing. As though every female soul on earth was wailing at once.
The sorrow in every woman’s heart, past and present, came out in that woman’s wail.
And then I heard the trees around her wailing with her. I heard the kadambas, the mangoes, banyans, peepals, jamuns, all wailing with her. The bamboos in every thicket began to wail with her. Then I heard the ashokas, the mandaras, jabas, kaminis, champas on the banks of the Yamuna wailing with her. Now the distant hills joined her tortured soul’s wail. And from nearby I suddenly heard the Yamuna herself wailing. The wind was wailing. All earth and the sky were wailing.
When I looked into the eyes of my friends, there were tears in them. They stood motionless in the weeping Yamuna, tears running down their cheeks.
It was the lament of life I heard coming out from that woman across the river. All existence wailing.
Perhaps this was how Sita wailed when Rama abandoned her in the jungle, I thought.
I left my pot on the ground and walked towards the woman, wading across the Yamuna. As the waters of the Yamuna touched me, I felt shaken as I had never been shaken.
Across the river I held the woman to my breasts for a long, long time, until her wails became silent sobs that shook me with their agony. Then I led her to a large stone under a kadamba tree.
I asked her of her sorrow.
It took her a long time to be able to speak.
And then she told me of Kamsa. She told me of the first child of hers whom Kamsa held by its feet and dashed against a rock, scattering its brains all over. And of her second child. And of her third child. And of her fourth child. And of her fifth child. And of her sixth child… Each of whom Kamsa had held by its feet and dashed against a rock, their white brains mixed with red infant blood scattering all over the empty courtyard where he had done it.
Then she told her about her seventh child whom she had lost before he was born.
And then she was unable to continue. She just sat there, the woman who had given birth again and again and had witnessed the heads of her infants being dashed against rocks by her brother.
Her hands lay over her swollen stomach, protectively. They shook in terror, in unspeakable sorrow.
My body trembled as my heart’s weeping became unbearable.
I made her stand up. I stood before her. I took her hands from her stomach and placed them against my own swollen stomach.
And I told her: Your child shall live. Mine shall die for his sake.
Devaki looked at me with disbelieving eyes. With horror-filled eyes. With eyes that held more sorrow than before. A thousand times more sorrow. And bottomless horror.
I took her by her hand and led her into the waters of Mother Yamuna. There, standing knee deep in Yamuna’s dark, sacred waters, I pledged solemnly: Devaki, your eighth child shall live. My child shall die for his sake.
Walking back across the river with unwavering steps, I no more felt the pressure of water against my legs. Looking down I saw the waters of the Yamuna had parted and given me way.
I walked on wet sand over which the Yamuna had flowed until a moment ago. Flowed ceaselessly for a hundred thousand years.
Now she had parted to give me way.
Surging waters waited on both sides as I walked along the path she had made for me.
From the riverbanks, I heard the music of numberless birds that had suddenly begun to sing in a sweet chorus.
Heaven showered a slight drizzle on me.
The child in my womb moved.
I heard a voice calling me Mother.
The voice had come from the middle of the river.
Looking up, I saw the Mother of the Universe looking at me.
The smile in her eyes was beautiful beyond words
The Fallen Womb
By Sudeshna Sarkar
The sixty-two-year-old woman sat huddled in the corner of the clinic in Banepa, near Kathmandu. The foul stench emanating from her body kept the other patients at a distance. A little further away in the makeshift clinic, her daughter-in-law clamped the loose end of her sari over her nose to block the smell as she spoke to the doctor about her ailing mother-in-law. "She's been like this for more than 20 years... My father-in-law left her and married again. Our relatives do not like her to visit them because of the foul smell. Everyone avoids her. Please help," she begged.
Dr Rajendra Gurung, reproductive health officer with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), has attended to a number of such patients from the disadvantaged sections of society over the past decade or so. About the Banepa case, he says, "She had a uterine prolapse, which is treatable. However, patients continue to suffer because of lack of awareness and the feeling of shame."
The woman was suffering from an illness now prevalent among 10 per cent of women in the reproductive age group in Nepal.
Uterine prolapse is the displacement of the uterus from its normal position. It occurs when the muscles and tissues supporting the uterus weaken, causing the womb to sag, dragging along some parts of the vagina, bladder or rectum.
In the worst cases, the uterus may even fall out of the vagina, forming a fleshy protuberance that causes severe problems. Other than lower back pains and urinary disturbances, uterine prolapse causes pain when defecating; incontinence; and a foul-smelling discharge. Women suffering from second or third-degree uterine prolapse may be unable to walk or stand.
"If left untreated, it can lead to infections, bleeding and even cancer," elaborates Gurung.
"I suffered excruciating pain for 12 years without knowing the cause," says Meena Pariwar, 35, a mother of three. She and her husband work as a farm laborers. Meena works in the fields, lifting heavy loads of firewood. Even when she was pregnant, she worked till almost a day prior to her delivery, and resumed her strenuous work soon after giving birth.
"While doctors advise six weeks of rest after delivery, along with care, exercise and a balanced diet, women have to return to work sooner. In Nepal, poverty is the major cause of uterine prolapse," Gurung notes.
In most cases, work means manual labor. In the hilly districts, women have to carry heavy loads of firewood or ferry water over long distances. In the plains, they work in the fields. The delicate uterine tissues do not get time to heal after delivery, leading to their weakening.
The high rate of home deliveries as a result of the unavailability of healthcare services in the remote, mountainous areas is another factor contributing to the high incidences of uterine prolapse.
"More than 80 per cent of women give birth at home," says Dr Ganesh Dangal, consultant gynecologist at Kathmandu Model Hospital. The hospital, in partnership with UNFPA, offers treatment for uterine prolapse. "Unskilled maneuvering during delivery by the 'dais' (traditional birth attendants) increases the risk of uterine prolapse," he explains.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) at the Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu's oldest university, was one of the first organizations to detect the high incidence of uterine prolapse in Nepal. About two years ago, it approached the UNFPA and World Health Organization for funds to conduct research on reproductive morbidity.
The study, conducted between 2005-2006, with a sample of 2,070 married women in the reproductive age group, covered eight districts, mostly in western Nepal. The preliminary findings suggest that 10 per cent of married women in the child-bearing age are affected by the condition. In the age group of 45 and 49 years, 24 per cent of women suffer from the ailment. This is the highest rate of incidence of the condition in Nepal. Nearly three per cent of the cases comprise that of teenagers, between 15 and 19 years of age.
Uterine prolapses are not unique to the hilly regions alone. When the Family Planning Association of Nepal (FPAN) began an awareness drive last year, it found a high prevalence of such cases in the Terai plains in the south, along Nepal's border with India.
"Our mobile health camps in the plains also reported frequent cases of uterine prolapse," says Babita Thapa, programme manager at FPAN. "The women are generally people from poor families, who have to do hard physical labor and are mostly illiterate. They are ashamed to tell their families or doctors about their problems and the concealment aggravates the condition."
"Currently, there are about 600,000 uterine prolapse cases in Nepal," says Dangal. "Of them, 200,000 - about 31 per cent - need immediate surgical treatment." Though there are no comprehensive surveys, Dangal feels the number of sufferers is on the rise.
He warns: "As Nepal 's population increases, the number of women in the reproductive age group is rising. Since economic and social conditions remain unchanged, there will be more women suffering from uterine prolapse. Also, add to this the worsening condition of the earlier cases that have been left untreated and a cumulative effect is created."
If detected at an early stage, uterine prolapse can be controlled by pelvic exercises. For more severe cases, the remedy is to insert a ring pessery - a rubber-coated ring pushed up the uterus to stop it from descending. Though the ring pessery can be administered by trained attendants at mobile health camps, the downside is that the ring has to be changed every four months.
In the rural areas, where there is a high level of illiteracy and a lack of health camps, women either neglect or forget to have the ring replaced. "A 60-year-old woman came to a camp with a severe problem," Gurung recalls. "She hadn't changed the ring for 30 years. It was badly infected and the consequences were terrible. Her husband left her, she was ostracised by the villagers for the stench around her, and she lost her capacity to work."
For the most severe cases, there is no remedy other than hysterectomy in which the uterus is surgically removed. The operation costs about US $250, a small fortune in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world.
"It is cheaper for a man to leave his wife and marry again," says Gurung. "We once successfully operated on a patient but couldn't save her from a family tragedy: her husband had left her earlier. It was her daughter and brother who accompanied her to the camp."
The UNFPA has started a major drive to raise awareness about the issue and to generate funds to treat the cases that need immediate surgical operations in Nepal.
"We estimate it will require at least $37 million," says Junko Sazaki, UNFPA's Nepal representative. "We are trying to raise the money from our donors in Nepal and abroad and for that we need a greater awareness about uterine prolapse. It is not just limited to Nepal. It is found in other developing nations - India, Bangladesh and Pakistan - where the economic and social conditions are similar."
The sixty-two-year-old woman sat huddled in the corner of the clinic in Banepa, near Kathmandu. The foul stench emanating from her body kept the other patients at a distance. A little further away in the makeshift clinic, her daughter-in-law clamped the loose end of her sari over her nose to block the smell as she spoke to the doctor about her ailing mother-in-law. "She's been like this for more than 20 years... My father-in-law left her and married again. Our relatives do not like her to visit them because of the foul smell. Everyone avoids her. Please help," she begged.
Dr Rajendra Gurung, reproductive health officer with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), has attended to a number of such patients from the disadvantaged sections of society over the past decade or so. About the Banepa case, he says, "She had a uterine prolapse, which is treatable. However, patients continue to suffer because of lack of awareness and the feeling of shame."
The woman was suffering from an illness now prevalent among 10 per cent of women in the reproductive age group in Nepal.
Uterine prolapse is the displacement of the uterus from its normal position. It occurs when the muscles and tissues supporting the uterus weaken, causing the womb to sag, dragging along some parts of the vagina, bladder or rectum.
In the worst cases, the uterus may even fall out of the vagina, forming a fleshy protuberance that causes severe problems. Other than lower back pains and urinary disturbances, uterine prolapse causes pain when defecating; incontinence; and a foul-smelling discharge. Women suffering from second or third-degree uterine prolapse may be unable to walk or stand.
"If left untreated, it can lead to infections, bleeding and even cancer," elaborates Gurung.
"I suffered excruciating pain for 12 years without knowing the cause," says Meena Pariwar, 35, a mother of three. She and her husband work as a farm laborers. Meena works in the fields, lifting heavy loads of firewood. Even when she was pregnant, she worked till almost a day prior to her delivery, and resumed her strenuous work soon after giving birth.
"While doctors advise six weeks of rest after delivery, along with care, exercise and a balanced diet, women have to return to work sooner. In Nepal, poverty is the major cause of uterine prolapse," Gurung notes.
In most cases, work means manual labor. In the hilly districts, women have to carry heavy loads of firewood or ferry water over long distances. In the plains, they work in the fields. The delicate uterine tissues do not get time to heal after delivery, leading to their weakening.
The high rate of home deliveries as a result of the unavailability of healthcare services in the remote, mountainous areas is another factor contributing to the high incidences of uterine prolapse.
"More than 80 per cent of women give birth at home," says Dr Ganesh Dangal, consultant gynecologist at Kathmandu Model Hospital. The hospital, in partnership with UNFPA, offers treatment for uterine prolapse. "Unskilled maneuvering during delivery by the 'dais' (traditional birth attendants) increases the risk of uterine prolapse," he explains.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) at the Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu's oldest university, was one of the first organizations to detect the high incidence of uterine prolapse in Nepal. About two years ago, it approached the UNFPA and World Health Organization for funds to conduct research on reproductive morbidity.
The study, conducted between 2005-2006, with a sample of 2,070 married women in the reproductive age group, covered eight districts, mostly in western Nepal. The preliminary findings suggest that 10 per cent of married women in the child-bearing age are affected by the condition. In the age group of 45 and 49 years, 24 per cent of women suffer from the ailment. This is the highest rate of incidence of the condition in Nepal. Nearly three per cent of the cases comprise that of teenagers, between 15 and 19 years of age.
Uterine prolapses are not unique to the hilly regions alone. When the Family Planning Association of Nepal (FPAN) began an awareness drive last year, it found a high prevalence of such cases in the Terai plains in the south, along Nepal's border with India.
"Our mobile health camps in the plains also reported frequent cases of uterine prolapse," says Babita Thapa, programme manager at FPAN. "The women are generally people from poor families, who have to do hard physical labor and are mostly illiterate. They are ashamed to tell their families or doctors about their problems and the concealment aggravates the condition."
"Currently, there are about 600,000 uterine prolapse cases in Nepal," says Dangal. "Of them, 200,000 - about 31 per cent - need immediate surgical treatment." Though there are no comprehensive surveys, Dangal feels the number of sufferers is on the rise.
He warns: "As Nepal 's population increases, the number of women in the reproductive age group is rising. Since economic and social conditions remain unchanged, there will be more women suffering from uterine prolapse. Also, add to this the worsening condition of the earlier cases that have been left untreated and a cumulative effect is created."
If detected at an early stage, uterine prolapse can be controlled by pelvic exercises. For more severe cases, the remedy is to insert a ring pessery - a rubber-coated ring pushed up the uterus to stop it from descending. Though the ring pessery can be administered by trained attendants at mobile health camps, the downside is that the ring has to be changed every four months.
In the rural areas, where there is a high level of illiteracy and a lack of health camps, women either neglect or forget to have the ring replaced. "A 60-year-old woman came to a camp with a severe problem," Gurung recalls. "She hadn't changed the ring for 30 years. It was badly infected and the consequences were terrible. Her husband left her, she was ostracised by the villagers for the stench around her, and she lost her capacity to work."
For the most severe cases, there is no remedy other than hysterectomy in which the uterus is surgically removed. The operation costs about US $250, a small fortune in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world.
"It is cheaper for a man to leave his wife and marry again," says Gurung. "We once successfully operated on a patient but couldn't save her from a family tragedy: her husband had left her earlier. It was her daughter and brother who accompanied her to the camp."
The UNFPA has started a major drive to raise awareness about the issue and to generate funds to treat the cases that need immediate surgical operations in Nepal.
"We estimate it will require at least $37 million," says Junko Sazaki, UNFPA's Nepal representative. "We are trying to raise the money from our donors in Nepal and abroad and for that we need a greater awareness about uterine prolapse. It is not just limited to Nepal. It is found in other developing nations - India, Bangladesh and Pakistan - where the economic and social conditions are similar."
In Defense of Dupatta
By Karuna Jha
On the question of many westerners, some sophisticated Asians and even Indian expatriates as to why Indian women still cling to the “outdated, unsteady and always-slipping-off-the shoulders” garment resembling a shawl worn backwards, one tends to feel either defensive or fall into the trap of assertion of false modernity and new concepts of modesty.
Jyothirllata Girija addressing the issue of dress code for college girls in India in an article for The Hindu writes “One should never deride and discard certain good things just for the reason they are age-old customs or accept and glorify anything solely because it is new and modern, without delving deeply into the pros and cons of it”.
We don’t really know the exact origin of a narrow scarf or veil commonly known as Dupatta, however an over garment, resembling it, seems to be present in the Vedic times. The upper part of the body of both men and women was covered by a long and ample scarf of light texture. One can claim that today Dupatta remains only a fashion garment, the one which adds grace and breaks the monotony of a dress, but try asking a woman and you will be amazed of its various purposes and lasting importance.
Apart from being worn over the head as a mark of respect while going to worship or talking to elders, Dupatta has multiple uses in day-to-day life. Dupatta is draped over the head to avoid burning sun of summer’s heat or pouring rain if caught by a sudden outburst of monsoon shower. Dupatta protects you from the freezing cold of foggy night and is to make yourself comfortable on the rough floor of a railway platform or overcrowded government hospital. But don’t be enchanted by the picturesque images of a lofty life a decently clad Indian woman leads. Other usages bring one back to the age of Kalyug and to modern day India.
Will a girl be able to face her numerous relatives if shown on major TV channels in Meerut’s Gandhi Park caught in the rage of “Operation Majnu” without the protective cover of Dupatta? Will she manage to uphold her dignity in a country where such social evils as eve-teasing and molestation in public have been long since accepted? Regardless of admitting it to be a misconception, it is ground reality in India that people believe that woman's indecent attire invites harassment. It is enough to observe the way general public, including elderly females comment on rape cases, wondering whether the girl was “provocatively dressed” or “asked for it”. Again Dupatta comes as a savior. However not a panacea it gives a girl an inner feeling of being protected and covered from ever lusting eyes.
The only usage of a Dupatta, one can neither be defensive nor proud of is that of Nafisa Joseph, Kuljeet Randhawa* and hundreds of others, their personalities not considered famous enough for the cases to be reported. One can only hope that it won’t become the most widespread adoption of an “old-fashioned” garment for a modern India of the 21st Century.
On the question of many westerners, some sophisticated Asians and even Indian expatriates as to why Indian women still cling to the “outdated, unsteady and always-slipping-off-the shoulders” garment resembling a shawl worn backwards, one tends to feel either defensive or fall into the trap of assertion of false modernity and new concepts of modesty.
Jyothirllata Girija addressing the issue of dress code for college girls in India in an article for The Hindu writes “One should never deride and discard certain good things just for the reason they are age-old customs or accept and glorify anything solely because it is new and modern, without delving deeply into the pros and cons of it”.
We don’t really know the exact origin of a narrow scarf or veil commonly known as Dupatta, however an over garment, resembling it, seems to be present in the Vedic times. The upper part of the body of both men and women was covered by a long and ample scarf of light texture. One can claim that today Dupatta remains only a fashion garment, the one which adds grace and breaks the monotony of a dress, but try asking a woman and you will be amazed of its various purposes and lasting importance.
Apart from being worn over the head as a mark of respect while going to worship or talking to elders, Dupatta has multiple uses in day-to-day life. Dupatta is draped over the head to avoid burning sun of summer’s heat or pouring rain if caught by a sudden outburst of monsoon shower. Dupatta protects you from the freezing cold of foggy night and is to make yourself comfortable on the rough floor of a railway platform or overcrowded government hospital. But don’t be enchanted by the picturesque images of a lofty life a decently clad Indian woman leads. Other usages bring one back to the age of Kalyug and to modern day India.
Will a girl be able to face her numerous relatives if shown on major TV channels in Meerut’s Gandhi Park caught in the rage of “Operation Majnu” without the protective cover of Dupatta? Will she manage to uphold her dignity in a country where such social evils as eve-teasing and molestation in public have been long since accepted? Regardless of admitting it to be a misconception, it is ground reality in India that people believe that woman's indecent attire invites harassment. It is enough to observe the way general public, including elderly females comment on rape cases, wondering whether the girl was “provocatively dressed” or “asked for it”. Again Dupatta comes as a savior. However not a panacea it gives a girl an inner feeling of being protected and covered from ever lusting eyes.
The only usage of a Dupatta, one can neither be defensive nor proud of is that of Nafisa Joseph, Kuljeet Randhawa* and hundreds of others, their personalities not considered famous enough for the cases to be reported. One can only hope that it won’t become the most widespread adoption of an “old-fashioned” garment for a modern India of the 21st Century.
The Cultural Designation of Feminism: Theory and Praxis
By M H Ahssan
Feminism is a vital area in contemporary intellectual literary discourse. This paper aims at an analysis of the impact of this theory that has given rise to issues like ‘men in feminism’, ‘feminism without women’, ‘the origin and the types of feminism’, keeping in view its fundamental significance and impact on literary studies during the second half of the twentieth century. Also, the paper discusses several major theories related to feminism as a whole, their origin and development across the years. Feminist theory can be compared with some major conceptual developments like Marxism and psychoanalysis. This theory helps one analyze and understand the major factors through which the two genders – male and female – have been constructed with specific languages and ideas in literature.
Chronologically, 1960s and 1970s helped theorize a woman’s discourse; in 1980s, feminism concentrated on changing the intellectual fields for women; and in 1990s it began and reached its culmination in playing a major role in directing women’s feeling of themselves as the other sex.
The word ‘feminism’ has so many meanings and directions in the current century that it is hardly possible to attribute it some precise definition. Janet Radcliff Richards observes: “women suffer from systematic social injustice because of their sex,”1 and a voice against this social injustice is the ideal of feminism. It is a common belief that feminism is a movement of women and men are not allowed into it which is rather a narrow definition. In fact, feminism is not concerned with a limited group of people to benefit their demands, rather it wants to eliminate social injustice, works in favor of the oppressed. Lisa Tuttle defines feminism thus: “the term feminism, taken from the Latin word ‘femina’ (woman), originally meant having the qualities of females. It originated in the perception that there is something wrong with the treatment of the females by the society.”2 The feminists attempt to analyze the reasons, dimensions of women’s oppression, and the remedies. Feminism incorporates both a principle of equal rights for woman (the organized movement to attain women’s rights) and philosophy of social renovation aiming to create a world for women beyond uncomplicated social equality. But feminism must distinguish for itself between women’s rights and women’s emancipation. Coming to the Feminist ,like feminism, there is not a single definition of feminist since feminists have many differing affinities – of sexual preference, class and race. In short a feminist is a woman who recognizes herself, and is recognized by others, as a feminist, as the one who has the awareness and knowledge of women’s oppression, and has a recognition of women’s differences and commonalities. Some feminists argue for a classification that is future oriented – that a feminist must have a notion of social change.
Some sources say that Viking women were the first feminists. Broka Aubur, one of Iceland’s legendary Viking heroines, attacked her unfaithful husband with a sword 10 centuries ago and defied social tradition by wearing trousers. Another Icelandic woman, Gudrid Porbjamadottir, helped lead the third Viking expedition to America early in the 11th century and gave birth to the first European child on the new continent. Since the origin of the American civilization, women were assigned a subordinate role within the family irrespective of wealth or talent and were denied the political and civil rights enjoyed by men; the feminine world was basically alienated from the masculine world. By 1870, American women challenged this restrictive view of family. Higher education gave women their most important opportunity to reject the traditional claims of male-female distinctions. During 1870s, Mrion Talbot and her mother Emily Talbot persuaded the Harvard University premises to open the doors for women. Dr. Edward Clarke, a former medical school professor and a Harvard overseer, opined that higher education would destroy women’s health, beauty and reproductive ability which the Talbot mother and daughter proved false with research and survey. This seems to be the first recorded attempts of the feminists to challenge male supremacy. Sam Shephard has said “The real mystery of American life lies between men, not between men and women.” 3 “Women’s movement and thinking has emanated from the urgency of the age,”3 says Helen Cixous, one of the pioneering feminists in France. Her writings challenge the male hegemony that exists in opposition to the prevailing ideology. She says, “When I started writing I instinctively felt an ethical obligation towards women and decided to take up cudgels on behalf of them. When I say ‘women’ I’m speaking of women in their inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal women subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history… we don’t need to be apart of men, we stand as entities by ourselves.” 3 She warns against the danger of confusing the sex of the author with the sex of the writing a man or a woman produces.
In an essay entitled ‘Women and Fiction’ (1929), Virginia Woolf speculated on the new colors and shadows in women’s writing after the English woman was transformed from a weak, fluctuating, vague character to a voter, wage-earner, a responsible citizen. Woolf considered that the relations of the new woman with the society will not only be emotional, but also intellectual and political. She described the woman’s world of cooking, child bearing as intangible, vague, anonymous, as if that were a dark country, which could be compared to Mary Wollstonecraft’s view in a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (1722) that women were immured in their families, groping in the dark. The second wave feminists were just the followers defining women’s oppression as her imprisonment in the bourgeois household as a mother and unpaid servant. First-wave/second-wave feminism has been a long tradition of writers and thinkers who have criticized the position of women in western societies, but not until the nineteenth century did that critique inspire a mass movement. Between approximately 1880 and 1920, and beginning again in the 1960s, questions of women’s social, economic and political rights generated substantial popular support and public discussion, initially in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand and then, in the twentieth century on all continents .
Although the term feminism did not come into popular use until the 1910s, commentators since have termed the two movements ‘first’ and ‘second-wave’ feminism, likening the ebb and flow of the movements’ mass appeal to that of a cresting wave. The origins of nineteenth-century feminism lie in the changes that altered western societies in the early part of the twentieth century. Foremost was industrialization which undermined household production and established a hierarchy between the male-dominated public sphere and the female-dominated private one. At the same time, liberal-democratic ideologies, socialism, evangelical Protestant Christianity, and social reform movements, especially abolitionism and temperance, propelled a wide spectrum of women to challenge their exclusion from the public realm. The relative importance of each factor depended on the specific national or even regional circumstances, as historian Chiristine Bolt has observed, the story of first-wave feminism ‘is one of national distinctiveness within an international cause’. Feminist criticism is just one aspect of the cultural revolution in America in 1960s. In 1970s that was categorized as Black feminist criticism, Lesbian feminist criticism with women as the reader as well as woman as the writer. Some such books are Alice Jordine’s Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Noami Schor’s Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987), Tania Modeleski’s Study of Hitchcock: The Women Who Knew Too Much (1988) and Elaine Showalter’s Towards a Feminist Poetics (1979), where she coins a new world, ‘gynocritics’, making women conscious of “only what men have thought women should be”.4
Feminism has been classified under certain categories keeping in view its characteristics and dimensions. Liberal feminism refers to the tradition defined by John Stuart Mill in his book, The Subjugation of Women. It argues in favor of the basic liberty of women to determine their social role and to walk equal to man. Liberal Feminism confers upon the state the duty to ensure that every individual, both man and woman, has got the right to engage himself/herself in the competition to gain his/her self-interest. The state must ensure and enforce equality of opportunity. Liberal Feminism is the theory of individual freedom for women. Liberal feminism is one of the main streams of feminist political and social theory and has the most long-term history. Liberal feminism argues for individual fulfillment free from the strictures of highly defined sex roles. It limits itself to reformism, seeking to improve the status of women within the system but not fundamentally contesting either the system’s operation or its authenticity.
Contemporary liberal feminists espouse women’s rights in terms of welfare needs, worldwide education, and health services. For example, liberal critics point to unfair employment practices rather than attacking the society as a whole. The Classical Marxist Feminism states that women’s oppression is a result of our larger socioeconomic system. Man’s traditional responsibility to provide woman with the means of living makes him look down upon her. Women’s traditional position excludes her from participating in public production, confines her only to domestic works in the private world of the family. Thus, even if she takes maximum responsibility of the family, still she is not recognized by the society. This domestic slavery of the wife can come to an end only under socialism, in the Marxist feminists’ view. Because now the state will undertake food preparation, childcare, nursery and other major female activities within the sphere of public production by providing public sector services like childcare centers, hotels, hospitals etc. specially for women. After this man will no longer be the bourgeois and woman the proletariat. To the feminists, a woman should be provided with her basic rights in her own individual world. Elizabeth Cady Stanton has written, “In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider first what belongs to her as an individual is a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe, with his woman… on a solitary island.”5
Radical Feminism is a rather recent concept that argues in favor of the sexual liberty of women. The different forms of social oppression upon women are basically the outcome of the sexual oppression. Woman is generally accepted as the weaker sex, the second sex. It is a neo-Freudian theory; Fred believed that “The crucial problem of modern life is sexuality.”6 The heart of women’s oppression is her role as a child bearer and rearer. Writers as Ti Grace and Alkinson and Shulamith Firestone do not believe that woman’s oppression consists in her lack of political or civil rights. Neither do they support Marxists who classify women in the society in a lower class. Rather the radical feminists require a biological revolution for women, a liberation form fundamental inequalities in sex through developed technology and artificial reproduction. The prototype role of woman as a child production machine should be challenged, renovated by the state making her equal with the male. “The situation of a woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world, where men compel her to assume the status of the other.”7
Radical feminism argues that woman’s oppression comes from her categorization as an inferior class. Radical feminism aims to destroy this sex-class system. What makes this feminism radical is that it focuses on the roots of male domination and claims this all forms of oppression are extensions of male superiority. Radical feminism argues that patriarchy is the defining characteristic of our society. The other central hypothesis of radical feminism is the belief that the personal is political and that woman-centeredness can be the basis of an upcoming society. Cultural feminism is an approach to feminism thinking and action which claims that either by nature and/or through nurture, women have developed what society refers to as ‘feminine’ or ‘female’ characteristics. This set of characteristics, say cultural feminists, is to be compared and contrasted with the set of ‘masculine’ or ‘male’ characteristics which men have developed, also through nature and/or nurture. Cultural feminists fault western thought for its tendency to privilege ‘male’ ways of being, thinking, and doing over ‘female’ ones. Specifically, they argue that the traits typically associated with men – ‘independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domination, culture, transcendence, product, asceticism, war and death, - are no better, and perhaps worse, than the traits typically associated with women – ‘interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace and life’. Existentialist feminism draws inspiration from existentialists including Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. They see women’s and men’s lives as concretely situated and highlight concepts like freedom, interpersonal relations, and experience of lived body. They value the competence for fundamental change, but recognize that various factors limit it, such as self-deception, and anxiety raised by change and self-responsibility.
Feminism as a theory has very recently given rise to a new area in criticism, known as Feminist Literary Criticism. The motto of this literary criticism is to search for underlying, powerful female tradition in literature. The feminist literary critics attempt to uncover and interpret women’s writing from a symbolic point of view and to rediscover the lost works of women in the past. They aim at interpreting the works of the male writers from a feminist standpoint and to distinguish between the politics, style and language of the male and female writers. Feminist theory is a locale of writing which represents a critical and original contribution to current thinking. With increasing acts of physical belligerence towards women, there is an even greater need for feminist psychoanalytic theory which investigates sexual distinctiveness. Unique to feminist hypothesis is its insistence on the inextricable link between theory and practice and between the communal and private. Theory and experience have a very singular relationship within feminism encapsulated in its slogan ‘the personal in political’. Certain terms in contemporary theory are used to sum up what appear to be the key experiences of women. Among these are ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘sexuality’. These concepts reflect feminism’s effort to reveal nucleus social processes and to find what constantly reappears in various guises in the itinerary of women’s account. An elementary goal of feminist theory is to comprehend women’s oppression in terms of race, sex, class and sexual preference and how to revolutionize it. Feminist theory reveals the magnitude of women’s individual and collective experiences and their struggles. It analyses how sexual divergence is constructed within any intellectual and common word and builds accounts of experiences from these differences.
Feminism will always need an agenda within which it can travel around diversity. Feminist theory represents that prospective for a broader politics. Its vision and forms of practice constitute a major break with traditional definitions. The issues of feminist theory – ecological feminism, pacifism, anti-pornography, Third World affairs, sexuality debates – all focus on women’s specificity grounded in the sexual division of labor and reproduction. Most reservations are really misgivings about traditional theory and not about feminism. As Edward Said and others argue, the cult of this theory reduces continuation to elements in a self-confirming, intellectual maneuver. Feminist theory, on the other hand, enables women to recognize their interests and standing as historical agents. Feminism actively refuses the arrogant mystification involved in traditional theory which is often incomprehensible or abstract and has a inclination for losing contact with the world. Traditional theories have been applied in ways that make it complicated to understand women’s involvement in social life. Feminist theory is instantaneous, and urgently about the world of women.
As the goals of the women’s movement diversified, so too did its ideological underpinnings. Liberal ideals of political and educational equality, along with socialist principles of redistributing economic wealth, remained influential, but by the end of the nineteenth century, the rhetoric of maternalism was being deployed with increasing frequency. Maternal, also called domestic or social, feminism celebrated women’s superior morality as the justification for female participation in public affairs and for improved state services for mothers and children. Although some non-European women used similar rhetoric, maternalism often relied upon radicalized images and arguments to marshal support and to legitimate white women’s special ‘civilizing’ role in reform and missionary work. The fledging women’s right movement that emerged in the 1850s through 1870s advocated a single sexual standard for men and women, (primarily within marriage), dress reform, equal property and other legal rights, and higher education for women, especially in professions such as medicine and law. With the movement’s dramatic growth after 1880, concerns over the conditions and wages of working-class women gained prominence, as did a revitalized interest in temperance and a new commitment to social purity – protecting women from sexual ‘vice’. In the process, feminism became allied with numerous other social reform movements. By 1900, ideological differences were over-shadowed by the growing agreement amongst activities that success on key legal, educational and economic issues could not be gained without grater political leverage, and thus the vote emerged as a unifying objective for feminists of all persuasions and in many nations.
Adrienne Rich is an American poet and critic who, in Of Woman Born (1976), On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1980), creates a feminist theory which she calls her ‘Re-vision’ or rewriting of patriarchal customs. The term refers to a new feminist perspective which could link women’s culture to the realities of our past and existing history. Rich uses the technique in her own work to mix study and personal experience. Making a major contribution to feminism with her accounts of education, sexual politics, reproduction and ethnic identity, Rich argues that the English language and the intellectual tradition have been used as weapons of colonialisation and describes how a woman’s university and female-identified education could provide a substitute to this tradition. Rich rediscovers the concept of motherhood by distinguishing between a patriarchal institutionalization of motherhood and the joy and experience of motherhood. Similarly Rich redefined the concept of ‘lesbian’ and greatly expanded the boundaries of lesbian history and experience by distinguishing the historical existence of lesbian from lesbian ethnicity and Jewish identity. In all her writings, and in her gynocentric view of world history, Rich creates a new tradition of feminist scholarship. In this regard, some typical and very important phrases related to feminism, coined by Rich and other feminists, may be discussed in detail.
If we go on to give a historical sketch of Feminist theories, we have to discuss the origins of the ‘second wave.’ British feminist Juliet Mitchell characterizes feminism as “an ideological offspring of certain economic and social conditions”.8 Its radicalism reflects the fact that it comes to prominence at points of decisive change and envisages it with an imagination that goes beyond it. One of Freud’s most articulate pre-second wave feminist critics is Simone de Beauvoir, whose observation, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”,8 gives subsequent analyses of patriarchally constituted psychological and sexual femininity. Feminism itself, feminist film theory, feminist epistemology, the body, gender, feminist history, queer theory, women’s studies, black feminism, Chicano feminism, feminist theology--these are just some of the entries whose very headwords give evidence to the mark that feminist theory and practice have made on the shape and content of academic curricula.
Anarchist feminism is a theory that female subordination is determined as much by a system of sexual and familial relationships as by State controls, and that legal change cannot in itself provide equality without full psychological autonomy. Anarchist feminism would eliminate all social restraints and replace these with decentralized, organic communities of women. Early feminist anarchists, for example Emma Gldman and Voltarinine de Cleyre, believed that communal attitudes would grow organically into sexual and psychological freedom. Anarchist feminists argue that the State and patriarchy are twin irregularities. To obliterate the State is to destroy the major instrument of institutionalized patriarchy; to abolish patriarchy is to put an end to the State.
This theory is more avant-garde than radical feminism because it believes that any State is always illicit. Perhaps for this rationale, many feminist science fiction writers are anarchists. Anarchist feminists also believe that the means used to revolutionize the society must be the models of the future society in themselves. Therefore, women’s cooperatives and consciousness-raising groups can make a more momentous social and ideological input than their numbers or financial status might entail. Anarchist feminism refers to the inspiration feminists have gained from the concept of anarchy from the Greek word , literally, non-rule.
The foremother of anarchist feminism, Emma Goldman (1869-1940), opined that political ideas were meaningless unless they were acted on, and she was arrested numerous times for speaking out and advocating such action. As a nihilist, she knew that men and women are oppressed by authoritarian social structures, but she also saw that women are oppressed specifically as women. The convergence of feminist concerns with anarchism meant that no mere reform of hierarchical institutions would be adequate to the task of allowing women to live full lives. Thus, she spoke out against women’s suffrage because she saw it as merely a way to gain women’s cooperation in the maintenance of an essentially unchanged organization. Goldman was outstanding because she was able to draw one theory without being lured by it; while inspired by communism and anarchism, she insisted that their appliance should be elastic and adaptable, resisting any urge toward rigidity, uniformity, or essentialism.
Abolitionist Feminism is one of the main theories of nineteenth-century feminism. It takes the view that woman’s subjugation and liberation paralleled the struggle for Black liberation from slavery. The nineteenth-century faction to eliminate slavery in the USA preceded, and provided strategies for the development of feminism. The notion of alienation is vital to feminist theory. Women’s alienation has so many different elements and the feminists argue that a new theoretical framework can be used, but it must go past Marxism. It must connect women’s intimidation in the home, in culture and in sexuality, with our knowledge in wage labor. Even within wage labor, the sexualisation of women’s work and the sexual persecution of women generate a gender-specific form of women’s isolation. Socialist and Marxist feminists consent that the first stride is to eliminate the sexual allotment of labor in every area of life because while alienation reduces the woman to an appliance of labor within industry, it reduces the woman to an instrument for man’s sexual contentment within the family. Women are alienated from skill and scholarship, which presents a male-biased model of human nature and collective reality. These forms are interrelated. For example, the form taken by woman’s sexual estrangement results in an even more damaging alienation from her intellectual capacities. In addition, women’s participation in male-dominated opinionated activity might also be described as alienated.
The term Body Politics refers both to physical power relations and to the resistance against all forms of tortuous violence against women. Nancy M. Henley argues that the body language of existing culture is inherently sexist. Other feminists use the commencement of body politics to illustrate aggression against women embedded in other controlling and domineering relations like class and imperialism, as well as in the patriarchal institutions of family, medicine or education. Feminists writing about body politics share one main theme that there is the doggedness on the human essence of women, on our dignity, integrity and purity as human beings and a denunciation of women’s objectification.
Under Christian feminism, the Feminist theories of Christianity fall into three categories: those that challenge the theological view of women and the androcentricity of customary theology; those that challenge the theological laws that that bar women from ordination; those that weigh up the church as an organization and aim to promote the certified status of woman in the church. Feminist theologians clash the recurrent use of masculine terms to refer to God or the Holy Ghost. In research about the descriptions of women in the church and in Christian history, theologians reveal that there are only two images of women – the transgressor (Eve) or the virgin (Mary), which includes motherhood and obedience. They argue that this dualism, by creating a sense of the other, is inherently racist, sexist and could lead to the destruction of the planet. Feminist Christians are not antichristian but argue instead that Christianity has excluded transcendental biblical themes in favor of anti-women images.
Domestic labor is the way in which women regenerate labor power for capitalism by servicing the domicile and socializing their families. The scrutiny of domestic labor is a central hub of feminist theory has been the domestic labor dispute, in which feminist ideas confront the political concepts and theoretical positions of the traditional left. The domestic labor debate was initiated in 1969 by Margaret Benston in ‘The Political Economy of Women’. She drew awareness to the fact that housework must be taken seriously in many analysis of the workings of the economy, and not relegated to a marginal or non-existent status . Housework could be recognized both as productive labor and, simultaneously, as a locale of exploitation and a source for capital growth. At the centre of the debate is the issue of whether Marx’s theory of value could be applied to domestic labor or not. It is only within capitalism that men are able to exclude and marginalize household labor.
Escritoire feminine is the term for women’s writing in French feminist theory. It describes how women’s writing is a specific dissertation closer to the body and to emotions both of which are repressed by the social treaty. Writing and literature are crucial areas because literature reveals the introverted, the clandestine and unsaid and, in a force of the imagination, can be a space of aspiration and pleasure. Most feminists are actively creating a new women’s language while concurrently critiquing the old one. Black feminism is related to the theory of Black-defined women’s struggles. Black feminism has built on a tradition of leftist activism, adapting models of socialist feminism. Initially, Black feminism argued that meaningful change in a social order which represses both men and women could be accomplished by building a federation between women of color and progressive movements. Black feminists like Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Gloria I. Joseph, Gloria Hull or Alice Walker have created theories which meet the needs of Black women by helping Black women to stimulate issues that they perceive to have direct impact on the overall value of life. Black feminist theory examines the margin of sisterhood with white feminists in order to transact fully with the contradictions intrinsic in gender, race and class within the context of a racist society. Black feminists argue that all feminist theories must grasp imperialism and challenge it.
Essentialism refers to the succinct in unique female nature. Feminists defy assumptions that women are essentially weaker, whether biologically, emotionally, than men since these assumptions underline misogyny and favoritism against women. For example feminist historians show how discrimination against women in medicine and science is often based on a mythical essentialism. Alternatively, radical feminism believes that there are essential feminine modes of perception which can communicate female creativity and culture. This sometimes leads radical feminism to idealization which often underlies essentialist views of women. For example women are described as “finer pacifist beings”8 by some peace groups. But it is impossible to distinguish between ‘authentic’ and ‘obligatory’ feminine essentials. All feminists recognize that this theory should be thoroughly genderized and that women do have preoccupations which are essentially female ─ for example motherhood and female bonding ─ even if all women do not wish to mother or to affiliate with other women.
Female consciousness defines women’s recognition of how a particular class, culture and historical period create definitions of female. Female consciousness is not necessarily feminist but is an unconscious feminism, particularly when it occurs in women’s groups. Female consciousness promotes a shared vision embodying fundamental opinionated implications that feminist theory needs to address. Female ethic has three main features. It includes a critique of notion and a principle that female thinking is more tangible. It stresses that the values of compassion, nurturance and care are values of women. It stresses too that choices are in reality the hassle of situations. Female eunuch is a phrase coined by Germaine Greer in her book of the same name to describe the ‘castration’ of women by aspects of patriarchy such as ‘romantic love’ and by male antagonism. Greer used de Beauvoir’s concept of woman in order to squabble that women’s providence is to befall deformed and incapacitated by the disparaging action of male domination in existing society which deprives women of getting in touch with peripheral reality. Greer suggests that its significance is to make women inner-directed. Sexism is a phrase to define a social relationship in which males denigrate females. Contemporary feminism argues that sexist social beliefs and practices not only limit the activities of women, but are an impertinent way of making distinctions between the sexes, because they are not founded on evidence. A sizeable body of feminist research has documented sexism in the media. For example, it criticizes the use of sex-role stereotyping where women are always mothers and household workers. Feminist psychoanalysis argues that sexism stems from the configuration of gender identity as well as from contemporary culture.
Sisterhood, sometimes called sorority, includes the idea and experience of female bonding, and the self-affirmation and identity discovered in a woman-centered vision and definition of womanhood. Because sisterhood is based on a clear awareness that all women, irrespective of class, race, or nation have a common problem – patriarchy-- the term which is an important part of contemporary feminism. Radical feminism argues sisterhood is not at all symmetrical with brotherhood or male comradeship. Sisterhood has at its core the affirmation of freedom and is radically self-affirming. There are other definitions of sisterhood, for example Catherine Beecher’s idea of separate spheres for women. Sisterhood is also implied in the maternalists’ affirmation and celebration of the unique qualities of female experience as well as in Mary Daly’s vision of women-centered separatism. Bell Hooks and other Black feminists prefer the term ‘solidarity’ to sisterhood because sisterhood implies the erasing of difference. They argue that political solidarity must be the main feminist agenda.
Spiritual feminism, sometimes called myth feminism, is a growing area of feminist theory. The ecology of myth described by critics such as Carol Christ, Mary Daly and Charlene Spretnak involves the construction of cultural archetypes of power useful to women and psychological tools which can facilitate women to articulate desire through symbols and rituals. Defining Jewish feminism is difficult for feminists both because the language available to describe Jews as a racial group is insufficient. Characterizing Jewish feminism as a narrow version of identity politics has margins because anti-Semitism is not only an attack on identity, nor does it only affect Jewish women. Women stand in a particular relationship to Jewish culture. Adrienne Rich points out how Jewish women suffer a double disadvantage by being both a target of biological determinism and also invisible in Jewish history.
Gay liberation is a movement (which began in America in the late 1960s) for political, social and cultural rights for homosexual men and women. Critics argue that the women’s movement shares with gay liberation a common goal: a society free from defining and categorizing people by virtue of gender and/or sexual inclination. Lesbian feminism is rather epigrammatic that women-identified women, committed together for political, sexual and economic support, provide an alternative model to male/female relations which lesbians see as tyrannical. The theorists Charlotte Bunch, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Adrienne Rich argue that lesbian feminism involves both a sexual preference and a political preference because it rejects male definitions of women’s lives. In statements like “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice”9 the Furies and others made lesbian feminism a primary force in a radical women’s culture. Lesbian feminism attacks both the institution and the ideology of heterosexuality as being the centre of patriarchy. Radical lesbians were the first lesbian feminists to suggest that the concept lesbian should be reconstructed, but theories of lesbian feminism differ in their prominence on sexual or on political goals.
Feminist theory defines rape as an act and a social institution which perpetuates patriarchal domination and which is based on sadism, rather than specifically as a crime of violence. This definition is a major contribution to social theory. Feminist analysis proves that rape is the consistent conclusion of sexism. It is one of the most alarming forms of social duress because rape is a steady reminder to all women of their susceptible and vulnerable condition. Radical feminists like Susan Brownmiller, Susan Griffin and Andrea Dworkin, argue that patriarchy legitimizes rape by defining rape as ‘normal’. Under patriarchy, not only are women defined as sexual objects but men are thought to have ‘drives’ towards heterosexual intercourse. Because patriarchal culture defines women as being sexually passive and receptive. Adrienne Rich suggests that rape is one of the main means of reinforcing enforced heterosexuality. Consciousness raising groups reveal that women’s understanding of rape is not an isolated individual event but a symptom of a society-wide structure of power and powerlessness. Currently, feminist theory takes the observation that rape is a political act of terror against an exploited group.
Since the origin of humanity, male domination has been an accepted fact. Genesis symbolizes this by depicting Eve as made from a “Supernumerary bone of Adam”.10 Aristole believed “a female is a female by virtue of certain lack of qualities: We should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.”9 Plato thanked god that he was created a man, not a woman. St. Thomas considered a woman to be an “imperfect man”, an “incidental being.”9 St. Augustine declared, “Woman is a creature neither decisive nor constant.” The morning prayers of the Jews, “Blessed be God… that He did not make me a woman, “reflect the status of a woman as compared to a man. In the Bible it has been written that both Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, both faced the fall. But God distinguished between their punishments. Adam was condemned to labor, and it is the male toil that results in the building of the civilization. Eve was relegated to the inferior, vulnerable, sexual status, as God said to her, “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. And thy desire shall be to the husband. And he shall rule over thee.”10
Femmenism which means men in feminism was introduced in a ground-breaking compilation edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (1987) and refers to the rethinking of masculinity by male academics who have begun to absorb aspects of feminist politics and theory into their thinking, sometimes to the extent that they assert themselves feminists. While some of these male feminists have limited themselves to an admission of the complicity of men in perpetuating patriarchy and beg women to understand that not all men are oppressors, others explore what it means to be a man and the practices and discourses which shape masculinity in various social, cultural and historical contexts. At its best, ‘femmenism’ situates the study of masculinity in a gender/power framework, linking it to relations of power between men and women as well as among men.
Androcentrism means male centeredness, which is the assessment set of our prevailing customs based on male norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman first used this term to draw attention to male favoritism . Any explanation which characterizes aspects of women’s lives as nonstandard is andocentric. Androcentrism affects the hypothesis, not only because universities and research institutions are largely male domains but more subtly in the preference of areas of research, research policies, theoretical concepts and research methods. Feminist literature establishes the idea that artistic creativity is a masculine quality.
Phallocentric is a term in feminist theory used to describe the way the society regards the phallus or penis as a symbol of power, and believes that attributes of masculinity are the norm for cultural definitions. The phallocentric fallacy in disciplines is the assumption that the term ‘person’ stands for male and therefore women’s experience has made no contribution to disciplinary methods or content. This perspective –also sometimes known as androcentric-- makes women unknowable. Some feminists argue that phallocentricism is a source of women’s oppression in education.
The main goal of feminism is to redefine, and change this age old dogma by discovering the subtle causes of woman’s subjugation. It is a way to making the entire culture conscious of the natural rights of women relating to unequal labor, unequal pay for equal work, marriage and divorce laws that make man the supreme authority, economic independence, division of labor inside the family, to think a woman’s income as extra rather than a support, and then to introduce reforms in the traditional social structures. Feminism conceives of a utopian world free of male privilege, chauvinism, hierarchy, authority. It is a movement to bring about a sociopolitical change to condemn the subordination of any sex, to rebalance the social, economic, political power between man and woman. It raises a voice against man’s claim to define what is good for a woman and what is not keeping in view his own selfish motives.
Feminists believe woman to be a mature decision maker. Protesting against the social institutions that denied women any other identity except that which they acquired through their men – that of a daughter, sister, wife, mother. Feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton dreamt of a world which guaranteed individual identity to a woman. In India there are many female writers/poets like Amirita Pritam, Meena Alexander, Mamata Kalia, Kamala Das, Anita Desai, Sashi Despande, Mrinal Pandey, Deepti Khandelwal and many more in whose writings a voice for woman’s identity can be assessed. Feminists intend to deconstruct all the indefinite identities of women opposing the binary oppositions between the male and the female. The society has cut a straight line between good and bad, black and white, dark and light, man and woman – feminism is a movement against this distinction, this binary opposition.
Feminism is a vital area in contemporary intellectual literary discourse. This paper aims at an analysis of the impact of this theory that has given rise to issues like ‘men in feminism’, ‘feminism without women’, ‘the origin and the types of feminism’, keeping in view its fundamental significance and impact on literary studies during the second half of the twentieth century. Also, the paper discusses several major theories related to feminism as a whole, their origin and development across the years. Feminist theory can be compared with some major conceptual developments like Marxism and psychoanalysis. This theory helps one analyze and understand the major factors through which the two genders – male and female – have been constructed with specific languages and ideas in literature.
Chronologically, 1960s and 1970s helped theorize a woman’s discourse; in 1980s, feminism concentrated on changing the intellectual fields for women; and in 1990s it began and reached its culmination in playing a major role in directing women’s feeling of themselves as the other sex.
The word ‘feminism’ has so many meanings and directions in the current century that it is hardly possible to attribute it some precise definition. Janet Radcliff Richards observes: “women suffer from systematic social injustice because of their sex,”1 and a voice against this social injustice is the ideal of feminism. It is a common belief that feminism is a movement of women and men are not allowed into it which is rather a narrow definition. In fact, feminism is not concerned with a limited group of people to benefit their demands, rather it wants to eliminate social injustice, works in favor of the oppressed. Lisa Tuttle defines feminism thus: “the term feminism, taken from the Latin word ‘femina’ (woman), originally meant having the qualities of females. It originated in the perception that there is something wrong with the treatment of the females by the society.”2 The feminists attempt to analyze the reasons, dimensions of women’s oppression, and the remedies. Feminism incorporates both a principle of equal rights for woman (the organized movement to attain women’s rights) and philosophy of social renovation aiming to create a world for women beyond uncomplicated social equality. But feminism must distinguish for itself between women’s rights and women’s emancipation. Coming to the Feminist ,like feminism, there is not a single definition of feminist since feminists have many differing affinities – of sexual preference, class and race. In short a feminist is a woman who recognizes herself, and is recognized by others, as a feminist, as the one who has the awareness and knowledge of women’s oppression, and has a recognition of women’s differences and commonalities. Some feminists argue for a classification that is future oriented – that a feminist must have a notion of social change.
Some sources say that Viking women were the first feminists. Broka Aubur, one of Iceland’s legendary Viking heroines, attacked her unfaithful husband with a sword 10 centuries ago and defied social tradition by wearing trousers. Another Icelandic woman, Gudrid Porbjamadottir, helped lead the third Viking expedition to America early in the 11th century and gave birth to the first European child on the new continent. Since the origin of the American civilization, women were assigned a subordinate role within the family irrespective of wealth or talent and were denied the political and civil rights enjoyed by men; the feminine world was basically alienated from the masculine world. By 1870, American women challenged this restrictive view of family. Higher education gave women their most important opportunity to reject the traditional claims of male-female distinctions. During 1870s, Mrion Talbot and her mother Emily Talbot persuaded the Harvard University premises to open the doors for women. Dr. Edward Clarke, a former medical school professor and a Harvard overseer, opined that higher education would destroy women’s health, beauty and reproductive ability which the Talbot mother and daughter proved false with research and survey. This seems to be the first recorded attempts of the feminists to challenge male supremacy. Sam Shephard has said “The real mystery of American life lies between men, not between men and women.” 3 “Women’s movement and thinking has emanated from the urgency of the age,”3 says Helen Cixous, one of the pioneering feminists in France. Her writings challenge the male hegemony that exists in opposition to the prevailing ideology. She says, “When I started writing I instinctively felt an ethical obligation towards women and decided to take up cudgels on behalf of them. When I say ‘women’ I’m speaking of women in their inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal women subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history… we don’t need to be apart of men, we stand as entities by ourselves.” 3 She warns against the danger of confusing the sex of the author with the sex of the writing a man or a woman produces.
In an essay entitled ‘Women and Fiction’ (1929), Virginia Woolf speculated on the new colors and shadows in women’s writing after the English woman was transformed from a weak, fluctuating, vague character to a voter, wage-earner, a responsible citizen. Woolf considered that the relations of the new woman with the society will not only be emotional, but also intellectual and political. She described the woman’s world of cooking, child bearing as intangible, vague, anonymous, as if that were a dark country, which could be compared to Mary Wollstonecraft’s view in a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (1722) that women were immured in their families, groping in the dark. The second wave feminists were just the followers defining women’s oppression as her imprisonment in the bourgeois household as a mother and unpaid servant. First-wave/second-wave feminism has been a long tradition of writers and thinkers who have criticized the position of women in western societies, but not until the nineteenth century did that critique inspire a mass movement. Between approximately 1880 and 1920, and beginning again in the 1960s, questions of women’s social, economic and political rights generated substantial popular support and public discussion, initially in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand and then, in the twentieth century on all continents .
Although the term feminism did not come into popular use until the 1910s, commentators since have termed the two movements ‘first’ and ‘second-wave’ feminism, likening the ebb and flow of the movements’ mass appeal to that of a cresting wave. The origins of nineteenth-century feminism lie in the changes that altered western societies in the early part of the twentieth century. Foremost was industrialization which undermined household production and established a hierarchy between the male-dominated public sphere and the female-dominated private one. At the same time, liberal-democratic ideologies, socialism, evangelical Protestant Christianity, and social reform movements, especially abolitionism and temperance, propelled a wide spectrum of women to challenge their exclusion from the public realm. The relative importance of each factor depended on the specific national or even regional circumstances, as historian Chiristine Bolt has observed, the story of first-wave feminism ‘is one of national distinctiveness within an international cause’. Feminist criticism is just one aspect of the cultural revolution in America in 1960s. In 1970s that was categorized as Black feminist criticism, Lesbian feminist criticism with women as the reader as well as woman as the writer. Some such books are Alice Jordine’s Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Noami Schor’s Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987), Tania Modeleski’s Study of Hitchcock: The Women Who Knew Too Much (1988) and Elaine Showalter’s Towards a Feminist Poetics (1979), where she coins a new world, ‘gynocritics’, making women conscious of “only what men have thought women should be”.4
Feminism has been classified under certain categories keeping in view its characteristics and dimensions. Liberal feminism refers to the tradition defined by John Stuart Mill in his book, The Subjugation of Women. It argues in favor of the basic liberty of women to determine their social role and to walk equal to man. Liberal Feminism confers upon the state the duty to ensure that every individual, both man and woman, has got the right to engage himself/herself in the competition to gain his/her self-interest. The state must ensure and enforce equality of opportunity. Liberal Feminism is the theory of individual freedom for women. Liberal feminism is one of the main streams of feminist political and social theory and has the most long-term history. Liberal feminism argues for individual fulfillment free from the strictures of highly defined sex roles. It limits itself to reformism, seeking to improve the status of women within the system but not fundamentally contesting either the system’s operation or its authenticity.
Contemporary liberal feminists espouse women’s rights in terms of welfare needs, worldwide education, and health services. For example, liberal critics point to unfair employment practices rather than attacking the society as a whole. The Classical Marxist Feminism states that women’s oppression is a result of our larger socioeconomic system. Man’s traditional responsibility to provide woman with the means of living makes him look down upon her. Women’s traditional position excludes her from participating in public production, confines her only to domestic works in the private world of the family. Thus, even if she takes maximum responsibility of the family, still she is not recognized by the society. This domestic slavery of the wife can come to an end only under socialism, in the Marxist feminists’ view. Because now the state will undertake food preparation, childcare, nursery and other major female activities within the sphere of public production by providing public sector services like childcare centers, hotels, hospitals etc. specially for women. After this man will no longer be the bourgeois and woman the proletariat. To the feminists, a woman should be provided with her basic rights in her own individual world. Elizabeth Cady Stanton has written, “In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider first what belongs to her as an individual is a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe, with his woman… on a solitary island.”5
Radical Feminism is a rather recent concept that argues in favor of the sexual liberty of women. The different forms of social oppression upon women are basically the outcome of the sexual oppression. Woman is generally accepted as the weaker sex, the second sex. It is a neo-Freudian theory; Fred believed that “The crucial problem of modern life is sexuality.”6 The heart of women’s oppression is her role as a child bearer and rearer. Writers as Ti Grace and Alkinson and Shulamith Firestone do not believe that woman’s oppression consists in her lack of political or civil rights. Neither do they support Marxists who classify women in the society in a lower class. Rather the radical feminists require a biological revolution for women, a liberation form fundamental inequalities in sex through developed technology and artificial reproduction. The prototype role of woman as a child production machine should be challenged, renovated by the state making her equal with the male. “The situation of a woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world, where men compel her to assume the status of the other.”7
Radical feminism argues that woman’s oppression comes from her categorization as an inferior class. Radical feminism aims to destroy this sex-class system. What makes this feminism radical is that it focuses on the roots of male domination and claims this all forms of oppression are extensions of male superiority. Radical feminism argues that patriarchy is the defining characteristic of our society. The other central hypothesis of radical feminism is the belief that the personal is political and that woman-centeredness can be the basis of an upcoming society. Cultural feminism is an approach to feminism thinking and action which claims that either by nature and/or through nurture, women have developed what society refers to as ‘feminine’ or ‘female’ characteristics. This set of characteristics, say cultural feminists, is to be compared and contrasted with the set of ‘masculine’ or ‘male’ characteristics which men have developed, also through nature and/or nurture. Cultural feminists fault western thought for its tendency to privilege ‘male’ ways of being, thinking, and doing over ‘female’ ones. Specifically, they argue that the traits typically associated with men – ‘independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domination, culture, transcendence, product, asceticism, war and death, - are no better, and perhaps worse, than the traits typically associated with women – ‘interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace and life’. Existentialist feminism draws inspiration from existentialists including Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. They see women’s and men’s lives as concretely situated and highlight concepts like freedom, interpersonal relations, and experience of lived body. They value the competence for fundamental change, but recognize that various factors limit it, such as self-deception, and anxiety raised by change and self-responsibility.
Feminism as a theory has very recently given rise to a new area in criticism, known as Feminist Literary Criticism. The motto of this literary criticism is to search for underlying, powerful female tradition in literature. The feminist literary critics attempt to uncover and interpret women’s writing from a symbolic point of view and to rediscover the lost works of women in the past. They aim at interpreting the works of the male writers from a feminist standpoint and to distinguish between the politics, style and language of the male and female writers. Feminist theory is a locale of writing which represents a critical and original contribution to current thinking. With increasing acts of physical belligerence towards women, there is an even greater need for feminist psychoanalytic theory which investigates sexual distinctiveness. Unique to feminist hypothesis is its insistence on the inextricable link between theory and practice and between the communal and private. Theory and experience have a very singular relationship within feminism encapsulated in its slogan ‘the personal in political’. Certain terms in contemporary theory are used to sum up what appear to be the key experiences of women. Among these are ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘sexuality’. These concepts reflect feminism’s effort to reveal nucleus social processes and to find what constantly reappears in various guises in the itinerary of women’s account. An elementary goal of feminist theory is to comprehend women’s oppression in terms of race, sex, class and sexual preference and how to revolutionize it. Feminist theory reveals the magnitude of women’s individual and collective experiences and their struggles. It analyses how sexual divergence is constructed within any intellectual and common word and builds accounts of experiences from these differences.
Feminism will always need an agenda within which it can travel around diversity. Feminist theory represents that prospective for a broader politics. Its vision and forms of practice constitute a major break with traditional definitions. The issues of feminist theory – ecological feminism, pacifism, anti-pornography, Third World affairs, sexuality debates – all focus on women’s specificity grounded in the sexual division of labor and reproduction. Most reservations are really misgivings about traditional theory and not about feminism. As Edward Said and others argue, the cult of this theory reduces continuation to elements in a self-confirming, intellectual maneuver. Feminist theory, on the other hand, enables women to recognize their interests and standing as historical agents. Feminism actively refuses the arrogant mystification involved in traditional theory which is often incomprehensible or abstract and has a inclination for losing contact with the world. Traditional theories have been applied in ways that make it complicated to understand women’s involvement in social life. Feminist theory is instantaneous, and urgently about the world of women.
As the goals of the women’s movement diversified, so too did its ideological underpinnings. Liberal ideals of political and educational equality, along with socialist principles of redistributing economic wealth, remained influential, but by the end of the nineteenth century, the rhetoric of maternalism was being deployed with increasing frequency. Maternal, also called domestic or social, feminism celebrated women’s superior morality as the justification for female participation in public affairs and for improved state services for mothers and children. Although some non-European women used similar rhetoric, maternalism often relied upon radicalized images and arguments to marshal support and to legitimate white women’s special ‘civilizing’ role in reform and missionary work. The fledging women’s right movement that emerged in the 1850s through 1870s advocated a single sexual standard for men and women, (primarily within marriage), dress reform, equal property and other legal rights, and higher education for women, especially in professions such as medicine and law. With the movement’s dramatic growth after 1880, concerns over the conditions and wages of working-class women gained prominence, as did a revitalized interest in temperance and a new commitment to social purity – protecting women from sexual ‘vice’. In the process, feminism became allied with numerous other social reform movements. By 1900, ideological differences were over-shadowed by the growing agreement amongst activities that success on key legal, educational and economic issues could not be gained without grater political leverage, and thus the vote emerged as a unifying objective for feminists of all persuasions and in many nations.
Adrienne Rich is an American poet and critic who, in Of Woman Born (1976), On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1980), creates a feminist theory which she calls her ‘Re-vision’ or rewriting of patriarchal customs. The term refers to a new feminist perspective which could link women’s culture to the realities of our past and existing history. Rich uses the technique in her own work to mix study and personal experience. Making a major contribution to feminism with her accounts of education, sexual politics, reproduction and ethnic identity, Rich argues that the English language and the intellectual tradition have been used as weapons of colonialisation and describes how a woman’s university and female-identified education could provide a substitute to this tradition. Rich rediscovers the concept of motherhood by distinguishing between a patriarchal institutionalization of motherhood and the joy and experience of motherhood. Similarly Rich redefined the concept of ‘lesbian’ and greatly expanded the boundaries of lesbian history and experience by distinguishing the historical existence of lesbian from lesbian ethnicity and Jewish identity. In all her writings, and in her gynocentric view of world history, Rich creates a new tradition of feminist scholarship. In this regard, some typical and very important phrases related to feminism, coined by Rich and other feminists, may be discussed in detail.
If we go on to give a historical sketch of Feminist theories, we have to discuss the origins of the ‘second wave.’ British feminist Juliet Mitchell characterizes feminism as “an ideological offspring of certain economic and social conditions”.8 Its radicalism reflects the fact that it comes to prominence at points of decisive change and envisages it with an imagination that goes beyond it. One of Freud’s most articulate pre-second wave feminist critics is Simone de Beauvoir, whose observation, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”,8 gives subsequent analyses of patriarchally constituted psychological and sexual femininity. Feminism itself, feminist film theory, feminist epistemology, the body, gender, feminist history, queer theory, women’s studies, black feminism, Chicano feminism, feminist theology--these are just some of the entries whose very headwords give evidence to the mark that feminist theory and practice have made on the shape and content of academic curricula.
Anarchist feminism is a theory that female subordination is determined as much by a system of sexual and familial relationships as by State controls, and that legal change cannot in itself provide equality without full psychological autonomy. Anarchist feminism would eliminate all social restraints and replace these with decentralized, organic communities of women. Early feminist anarchists, for example Emma Gldman and Voltarinine de Cleyre, believed that communal attitudes would grow organically into sexual and psychological freedom. Anarchist feminists argue that the State and patriarchy are twin irregularities. To obliterate the State is to destroy the major instrument of institutionalized patriarchy; to abolish patriarchy is to put an end to the State.
This theory is more avant-garde than radical feminism because it believes that any State is always illicit. Perhaps for this rationale, many feminist science fiction writers are anarchists. Anarchist feminists also believe that the means used to revolutionize the society must be the models of the future society in themselves. Therefore, women’s cooperatives and consciousness-raising groups can make a more momentous social and ideological input than their numbers or financial status might entail. Anarchist feminism refers to the inspiration feminists have gained from the concept of anarchy from the Greek word , literally, non-rule.
The foremother of anarchist feminism, Emma Goldman (1869-1940), opined that political ideas were meaningless unless they were acted on, and she was arrested numerous times for speaking out and advocating such action. As a nihilist, she knew that men and women are oppressed by authoritarian social structures, but she also saw that women are oppressed specifically as women. The convergence of feminist concerns with anarchism meant that no mere reform of hierarchical institutions would be adequate to the task of allowing women to live full lives. Thus, she spoke out against women’s suffrage because she saw it as merely a way to gain women’s cooperation in the maintenance of an essentially unchanged organization. Goldman was outstanding because she was able to draw one theory without being lured by it; while inspired by communism and anarchism, she insisted that their appliance should be elastic and adaptable, resisting any urge toward rigidity, uniformity, or essentialism.
Abolitionist Feminism is one of the main theories of nineteenth-century feminism. It takes the view that woman’s subjugation and liberation paralleled the struggle for Black liberation from slavery. The nineteenth-century faction to eliminate slavery in the USA preceded, and provided strategies for the development of feminism. The notion of alienation is vital to feminist theory. Women’s alienation has so many different elements and the feminists argue that a new theoretical framework can be used, but it must go past Marxism. It must connect women’s intimidation in the home, in culture and in sexuality, with our knowledge in wage labor. Even within wage labor, the sexualisation of women’s work and the sexual persecution of women generate a gender-specific form of women’s isolation. Socialist and Marxist feminists consent that the first stride is to eliminate the sexual allotment of labor in every area of life because while alienation reduces the woman to an appliance of labor within industry, it reduces the woman to an instrument for man’s sexual contentment within the family. Women are alienated from skill and scholarship, which presents a male-biased model of human nature and collective reality. These forms are interrelated. For example, the form taken by woman’s sexual estrangement results in an even more damaging alienation from her intellectual capacities. In addition, women’s participation in male-dominated opinionated activity might also be described as alienated.
The term Body Politics refers both to physical power relations and to the resistance against all forms of tortuous violence against women. Nancy M. Henley argues that the body language of existing culture is inherently sexist. Other feminists use the commencement of body politics to illustrate aggression against women embedded in other controlling and domineering relations like class and imperialism, as well as in the patriarchal institutions of family, medicine or education. Feminists writing about body politics share one main theme that there is the doggedness on the human essence of women, on our dignity, integrity and purity as human beings and a denunciation of women’s objectification.
Under Christian feminism, the Feminist theories of Christianity fall into three categories: those that challenge the theological view of women and the androcentricity of customary theology; those that challenge the theological laws that that bar women from ordination; those that weigh up the church as an organization and aim to promote the certified status of woman in the church. Feminist theologians clash the recurrent use of masculine terms to refer to God or the Holy Ghost. In research about the descriptions of women in the church and in Christian history, theologians reveal that there are only two images of women – the transgressor (Eve) or the virgin (Mary), which includes motherhood and obedience. They argue that this dualism, by creating a sense of the other, is inherently racist, sexist and could lead to the destruction of the planet. Feminist Christians are not antichristian but argue instead that Christianity has excluded transcendental biblical themes in favor of anti-women images.
Domestic labor is the way in which women regenerate labor power for capitalism by servicing the domicile and socializing their families. The scrutiny of domestic labor is a central hub of feminist theory has been the domestic labor dispute, in which feminist ideas confront the political concepts and theoretical positions of the traditional left. The domestic labor debate was initiated in 1969 by Margaret Benston in ‘The Political Economy of Women’. She drew awareness to the fact that housework must be taken seriously in many analysis of the workings of the economy, and not relegated to a marginal or non-existent status . Housework could be recognized both as productive labor and, simultaneously, as a locale of exploitation and a source for capital growth. At the centre of the debate is the issue of whether Marx’s theory of value could be applied to domestic labor or not. It is only within capitalism that men are able to exclude and marginalize household labor.
Escritoire feminine is the term for women’s writing in French feminist theory. It describes how women’s writing is a specific dissertation closer to the body and to emotions both of which are repressed by the social treaty. Writing and literature are crucial areas because literature reveals the introverted, the clandestine and unsaid and, in a force of the imagination, can be a space of aspiration and pleasure. Most feminists are actively creating a new women’s language while concurrently critiquing the old one. Black feminism is related to the theory of Black-defined women’s struggles. Black feminism has built on a tradition of leftist activism, adapting models of socialist feminism. Initially, Black feminism argued that meaningful change in a social order which represses both men and women could be accomplished by building a federation between women of color and progressive movements. Black feminists like Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Gloria I. Joseph, Gloria Hull or Alice Walker have created theories which meet the needs of Black women by helping Black women to stimulate issues that they perceive to have direct impact on the overall value of life. Black feminist theory examines the margin of sisterhood with white feminists in order to transact fully with the contradictions intrinsic in gender, race and class within the context of a racist society. Black feminists argue that all feminist theories must grasp imperialism and challenge it.
Essentialism refers to the succinct in unique female nature. Feminists defy assumptions that women are essentially weaker, whether biologically, emotionally, than men since these assumptions underline misogyny and favoritism against women. For example feminist historians show how discrimination against women in medicine and science is often based on a mythical essentialism. Alternatively, radical feminism believes that there are essential feminine modes of perception which can communicate female creativity and culture. This sometimes leads radical feminism to idealization which often underlies essentialist views of women. For example women are described as “finer pacifist beings”8 by some peace groups. But it is impossible to distinguish between ‘authentic’ and ‘obligatory’ feminine essentials. All feminists recognize that this theory should be thoroughly genderized and that women do have preoccupations which are essentially female ─ for example motherhood and female bonding ─ even if all women do not wish to mother or to affiliate with other women.
Female consciousness defines women’s recognition of how a particular class, culture and historical period create definitions of female. Female consciousness is not necessarily feminist but is an unconscious feminism, particularly when it occurs in women’s groups. Female consciousness promotes a shared vision embodying fundamental opinionated implications that feminist theory needs to address. Female ethic has three main features. It includes a critique of notion and a principle that female thinking is more tangible. It stresses that the values of compassion, nurturance and care are values of women. It stresses too that choices are in reality the hassle of situations. Female eunuch is a phrase coined by Germaine Greer in her book of the same name to describe the ‘castration’ of women by aspects of patriarchy such as ‘romantic love’ and by male antagonism. Greer used de Beauvoir’s concept of woman in order to squabble that women’s providence is to befall deformed and incapacitated by the disparaging action of male domination in existing society which deprives women of getting in touch with peripheral reality. Greer suggests that its significance is to make women inner-directed. Sexism is a phrase to define a social relationship in which males denigrate females. Contemporary feminism argues that sexist social beliefs and practices not only limit the activities of women, but are an impertinent way of making distinctions between the sexes, because they are not founded on evidence. A sizeable body of feminist research has documented sexism in the media. For example, it criticizes the use of sex-role stereotyping where women are always mothers and household workers. Feminist psychoanalysis argues that sexism stems from the configuration of gender identity as well as from contemporary culture.
Sisterhood, sometimes called sorority, includes the idea and experience of female bonding, and the self-affirmation and identity discovered in a woman-centered vision and definition of womanhood. Because sisterhood is based on a clear awareness that all women, irrespective of class, race, or nation have a common problem – patriarchy-- the term which is an important part of contemporary feminism. Radical feminism argues sisterhood is not at all symmetrical with brotherhood or male comradeship. Sisterhood has at its core the affirmation of freedom and is radically self-affirming. There are other definitions of sisterhood, for example Catherine Beecher’s idea of separate spheres for women. Sisterhood is also implied in the maternalists’ affirmation and celebration of the unique qualities of female experience as well as in Mary Daly’s vision of women-centered separatism. Bell Hooks and other Black feminists prefer the term ‘solidarity’ to sisterhood because sisterhood implies the erasing of difference. They argue that political solidarity must be the main feminist agenda.
Spiritual feminism, sometimes called myth feminism, is a growing area of feminist theory. The ecology of myth described by critics such as Carol Christ, Mary Daly and Charlene Spretnak involves the construction of cultural archetypes of power useful to women and psychological tools which can facilitate women to articulate desire through symbols and rituals. Defining Jewish feminism is difficult for feminists both because the language available to describe Jews as a racial group is insufficient. Characterizing Jewish feminism as a narrow version of identity politics has margins because anti-Semitism is not only an attack on identity, nor does it only affect Jewish women. Women stand in a particular relationship to Jewish culture. Adrienne Rich points out how Jewish women suffer a double disadvantage by being both a target of biological determinism and also invisible in Jewish history.
Gay liberation is a movement (which began in America in the late 1960s) for political, social and cultural rights for homosexual men and women. Critics argue that the women’s movement shares with gay liberation a common goal: a society free from defining and categorizing people by virtue of gender and/or sexual inclination. Lesbian feminism is rather epigrammatic that women-identified women, committed together for political, sexual and economic support, provide an alternative model to male/female relations which lesbians see as tyrannical. The theorists Charlotte Bunch, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Adrienne Rich argue that lesbian feminism involves both a sexual preference and a political preference because it rejects male definitions of women’s lives. In statements like “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice”9 the Furies and others made lesbian feminism a primary force in a radical women’s culture. Lesbian feminism attacks both the institution and the ideology of heterosexuality as being the centre of patriarchy. Radical lesbians were the first lesbian feminists to suggest that the concept lesbian should be reconstructed, but theories of lesbian feminism differ in their prominence on sexual or on political goals.
Feminist theory defines rape as an act and a social institution which perpetuates patriarchal domination and which is based on sadism, rather than specifically as a crime of violence. This definition is a major contribution to social theory. Feminist analysis proves that rape is the consistent conclusion of sexism. It is one of the most alarming forms of social duress because rape is a steady reminder to all women of their susceptible and vulnerable condition. Radical feminists like Susan Brownmiller, Susan Griffin and Andrea Dworkin, argue that patriarchy legitimizes rape by defining rape as ‘normal’. Under patriarchy, not only are women defined as sexual objects but men are thought to have ‘drives’ towards heterosexual intercourse. Because patriarchal culture defines women as being sexually passive and receptive. Adrienne Rich suggests that rape is one of the main means of reinforcing enforced heterosexuality. Consciousness raising groups reveal that women’s understanding of rape is not an isolated individual event but a symptom of a society-wide structure of power and powerlessness. Currently, feminist theory takes the observation that rape is a political act of terror against an exploited group.
Since the origin of humanity, male domination has been an accepted fact. Genesis symbolizes this by depicting Eve as made from a “Supernumerary bone of Adam”.10 Aristole believed “a female is a female by virtue of certain lack of qualities: We should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.”9 Plato thanked god that he was created a man, not a woman. St. Thomas considered a woman to be an “imperfect man”, an “incidental being.”9 St. Augustine declared, “Woman is a creature neither decisive nor constant.” The morning prayers of the Jews, “Blessed be God… that He did not make me a woman, “reflect the status of a woman as compared to a man. In the Bible it has been written that both Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, both faced the fall. But God distinguished between their punishments. Adam was condemned to labor, and it is the male toil that results in the building of the civilization. Eve was relegated to the inferior, vulnerable, sexual status, as God said to her, “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. And thy desire shall be to the husband. And he shall rule over thee.”10
Femmenism which means men in feminism was introduced in a ground-breaking compilation edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (1987) and refers to the rethinking of masculinity by male academics who have begun to absorb aspects of feminist politics and theory into their thinking, sometimes to the extent that they assert themselves feminists. While some of these male feminists have limited themselves to an admission of the complicity of men in perpetuating patriarchy and beg women to understand that not all men are oppressors, others explore what it means to be a man and the practices and discourses which shape masculinity in various social, cultural and historical contexts. At its best, ‘femmenism’ situates the study of masculinity in a gender/power framework, linking it to relations of power between men and women as well as among men.
Androcentrism means male centeredness, which is the assessment set of our prevailing customs based on male norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman first used this term to draw attention to male favoritism . Any explanation which characterizes aspects of women’s lives as nonstandard is andocentric. Androcentrism affects the hypothesis, not only because universities and research institutions are largely male domains but more subtly in the preference of areas of research, research policies, theoretical concepts and research methods. Feminist literature establishes the idea that artistic creativity is a masculine quality.
Phallocentric is a term in feminist theory used to describe the way the society regards the phallus or penis as a symbol of power, and believes that attributes of masculinity are the norm for cultural definitions. The phallocentric fallacy in disciplines is the assumption that the term ‘person’ stands for male and therefore women’s experience has made no contribution to disciplinary methods or content. This perspective –also sometimes known as androcentric-- makes women unknowable. Some feminists argue that phallocentricism is a source of women’s oppression in education.
The main goal of feminism is to redefine, and change this age old dogma by discovering the subtle causes of woman’s subjugation. It is a way to making the entire culture conscious of the natural rights of women relating to unequal labor, unequal pay for equal work, marriage and divorce laws that make man the supreme authority, economic independence, division of labor inside the family, to think a woman’s income as extra rather than a support, and then to introduce reforms in the traditional social structures. Feminism conceives of a utopian world free of male privilege, chauvinism, hierarchy, authority. It is a movement to bring about a sociopolitical change to condemn the subordination of any sex, to rebalance the social, economic, political power between man and woman. It raises a voice against man’s claim to define what is good for a woman and what is not keeping in view his own selfish motives.
Feminists believe woman to be a mature decision maker. Protesting against the social institutions that denied women any other identity except that which they acquired through their men – that of a daughter, sister, wife, mother. Feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton dreamt of a world which guaranteed individual identity to a woman. In India there are many female writers/poets like Amirita Pritam, Meena Alexander, Mamata Kalia, Kamala Das, Anita Desai, Sashi Despande, Mrinal Pandey, Deepti Khandelwal and many more in whose writings a voice for woman’s identity can be assessed. Feminists intend to deconstruct all the indefinite identities of women opposing the binary oppositions between the male and the female. The society has cut a straight line between good and bad, black and white, dark and light, man and woman – feminism is a movement against this distinction, this binary opposition.
Politics of Discourse: Feminism as a Global Epidemic
By M H Ahssan
Talking to a friend that was criticizing someone for being a feminist and becoming friend with men, I glanced at him with an explicit question in my eyes and unintentionally laughed loud- maybe that loud laugh depicted the anger I had internally, not against him but against politicization of feminism as “anti men” which I call “violence against discourse”.
So I asked him what feminism meant for him and without a second thought he said, those who are pro women and hate men and some of them eventually marry women being women themselves because they hate men.
Now hearing such a definition from a development specialist was a bet to digest but rather than criticizing him for having such an idea about feminism, I want to look at the process in which definitely something gone wrong- my definition of wrong here is that “something happened against what was intended unintentionally or by deliberate efforts.
So its important to see where does feminism come from or how it started? Now rather than giving you a history lesson, simply let’s say that the theory was an invention of struggles for women’s rights, struggles for women labors by social activists to integrate women and their existence into state and public spheres. No matter how feminism started, it meant o decrease the deprivation of women to live and contribute as an active member of any society, so that women also enjoy their fundamental human rights. I am sure that scholars and experts of feminism theory would agree with me that feminism epistemologically never meant to discriminate against anyone’s human rights, even not of “men”.
Today feminism has become like the antibiotic pill that its side affects are stronger than the treatment or curing of an illness, especially in the developing or less developed countries. So during the journey of around 40 years, feminism has carried a negative baggage, heavier than the healing it can provide for women in the so called “third world” countries.
Working on women rights and gender equality, I have learned that most of those who created the “agenda” of making feminism as anti men, labeling feminists as lesbians only, have created a more violent attitude of men towards women, which I don’t criticize at all. Feminism theory or its movements were carried out in a way to isolate women and claim independence and authority for women, which is obvious that if women are in the corners not challenging their stereotypes, then they are independent, aren’t they?
However, the main question would be “is it all what feminism wanted to bring to the women of the world?” I do value the significant international movements that brought “women’s issues” to the fore front of the United Nations and other international instruments policies. In additions, I am sure women right activists that are now labeled as feminists; don’t want to create a world only for women, but to have women having the equal rights as men in their societies. It is very important not to overlook the gender power relations among women and men that shape women’s and men’s identity in a society.
So the dilemma exists among the theory versus application that most of the time theories are developed with a certain parameters that may or may not fit properly with contextual feasibilities of any society. No matter how globalized the world has become today, still each society has its own context and characteristics that needs to be understood and recognized, otherwise anything alien to the context and characteristic would make an opposite impact.
So now it’s also important for theorists and academia to understand that no academic doctrine can be effective in addressing global issues unless they aren’t associated with realities of people’s lives not only what they are, but why they are having certain subjectivities. This is very timely that lessons learnt from around the globe are incorporated in global discourses, researching and documenting the harms that are created by such discourses particularly “Feminism” in various parts of the world, so that countries and communities especially women aren’t the escape goat for the global theories that didn’t change their lives but increased their burden and curses.
Talking to a friend that was criticizing someone for being a feminist and becoming friend with men, I glanced at him with an explicit question in my eyes and unintentionally laughed loud- maybe that loud laugh depicted the anger I had internally, not against him but against politicization of feminism as “anti men” which I call “violence against discourse”.
So I asked him what feminism meant for him and without a second thought he said, those who are pro women and hate men and some of them eventually marry women being women themselves because they hate men.
Now hearing such a definition from a development specialist was a bet to digest but rather than criticizing him for having such an idea about feminism, I want to look at the process in which definitely something gone wrong- my definition of wrong here is that “something happened against what was intended unintentionally or by deliberate efforts.
So its important to see where does feminism come from or how it started? Now rather than giving you a history lesson, simply let’s say that the theory was an invention of struggles for women’s rights, struggles for women labors by social activists to integrate women and their existence into state and public spheres. No matter how feminism started, it meant o decrease the deprivation of women to live and contribute as an active member of any society, so that women also enjoy their fundamental human rights. I am sure that scholars and experts of feminism theory would agree with me that feminism epistemologically never meant to discriminate against anyone’s human rights, even not of “men”.
Today feminism has become like the antibiotic pill that its side affects are stronger than the treatment or curing of an illness, especially in the developing or less developed countries. So during the journey of around 40 years, feminism has carried a negative baggage, heavier than the healing it can provide for women in the so called “third world” countries.
Working on women rights and gender equality, I have learned that most of those who created the “agenda” of making feminism as anti men, labeling feminists as lesbians only, have created a more violent attitude of men towards women, which I don’t criticize at all. Feminism theory or its movements were carried out in a way to isolate women and claim independence and authority for women, which is obvious that if women are in the corners not challenging their stereotypes, then they are independent, aren’t they?
However, the main question would be “is it all what feminism wanted to bring to the women of the world?” I do value the significant international movements that brought “women’s issues” to the fore front of the United Nations and other international instruments policies. In additions, I am sure women right activists that are now labeled as feminists; don’t want to create a world only for women, but to have women having the equal rights as men in their societies. It is very important not to overlook the gender power relations among women and men that shape women’s and men’s identity in a society.
So the dilemma exists among the theory versus application that most of the time theories are developed with a certain parameters that may or may not fit properly with contextual feasibilities of any society. No matter how globalized the world has become today, still each society has its own context and characteristics that needs to be understood and recognized, otherwise anything alien to the context and characteristic would make an opposite impact.
So now it’s also important for theorists and academia to understand that no academic doctrine can be effective in addressing global issues unless they aren’t associated with realities of people’s lives not only what they are, but why they are having certain subjectivities. This is very timely that lessons learnt from around the globe are incorporated in global discourses, researching and documenting the harms that are created by such discourses particularly “Feminism” in various parts of the world, so that countries and communities especially women aren’t the escape goat for the global theories that didn’t change their lives but increased their burden and curses.
Opinion: Losing Grounds in India
By M H Ahssan
India and Indians are losing Indianness at a much faster rate in the past sixty years than at any other time in the past. We stood our grounds against all types of imperialism ranging from Greeks, Romans, Mughals, Islamists and Europeans in the never ending series of invasions. But we have never done so badly against the new versions of these evil forces than in recent times viz. since our liberation from the British. True Indians are losing their grip on numerical majority, power and real estate in almost all parts of India.
At all times we could count on Sanatana Dharma which stood like a solid rock of infinite dimensions to provide us with the necessary motivation and inspiration. Be it Alexander, Akbar or Macaulay, the overpowering enigma of Sanatana Dharma always managed to tie them down with its inclusiveness. There was nothing much they could do with their arsenal. From such heights of impenetrable defense during periods of subjugation, the situation has fallen to pathetic depths during the subsequent period as a liberated and separated as a secular Hindu nation.
The situation is deteriorating at a fast pace now. All the lofty ideals of building a truly secular and democratic republic of India has almost evaporated fully. The dreamy architect’s vision of a land of equality in every sense has given way to forces of skewed secularism and fascist ideologies. Western and Arab imperialism are vying with one another to conquer the soul of our entire nation. Religious fascists are going full steam to convert as many as possible to take over the country (mis)using our flawed electoral system. The electoral verdicts do not reflect our majority’s opinion but the majority opinion of those who can vote. Religious fascist forces are attempting a coup d'état by galvanizing as many religious converts as possible by luring or forcibly converting them. If the disease was limited to Christianity earlier, the world’s fastest growing religion is not far behind in their latest games in India. Both are engaged in a race to run over Indian nation and soil.
Gaining Grounds
Followers of the two organized world religions are literally gaining ground in India in all spheres of life. If missionary work is in full swing in Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Orissa, the entire coastal and border areas are reeling under Jihadi forces of enormous dimensions. A lot of international planning and money are going into these operations, and both the competing forces are becoming more and more confident of overrunning India in the 21st century. Other Europeans forces had tried out almost all techniques to destroy our nation from outside before the British unleashed their ultimate weapon of divide and rule as a last resort. As a part of it, they tried out different types of geographical, cultural and religious divides to achieve their objective. Yet when they were forced to retreat, they were literally shocked to see India still with a majority of Hindus carrying the whole nation as one even after their “most unkindest” cut of dividing the country on religious lines. Intensive missionary work for aggressive proselytization aimed at capturing power and weakening India is their latest attempt. If we analyze their performance in the last sixty years, it has been nothing but a tremendous success.
Story of the second aggressor is quite different. Arab aggression was at its zenith when they overran the Persian empire in the seventh century. Even then they could not even dream of a similar success over India. Where the Arabs failed, their Mughal cousins could make some inroads. But the status remained very much the same even after about seven centuries of Muslim rule until the British displaced them. Merciless Mughal emperors could not dent the core of Sanatana Dharma and many of them even struggled to avoid a complete surrender before its unparalleled logic and glory. Unlike Iran where they could achieve cent percent annihilation of the native religion, India was like a black hole that would absorb them fully. It was a very sad story of their sway over India when it ended up with division of the country on religious lines. Resurrection in the form of Arab imperialism is of recent origin which has been triggered by the intention of cash rich oil nations to complete what their predecessor could not. Aggressive religious conversion of plane loads of Nepalese and poor Indians working in the Gulf is only one of their tools to penetrate into Indian heartlands. The world-wide success of Jihadi terrorism is giving them immense opportunity and hope of overrunning India. They have literally gained so much grounds in several states like Kerala.
Holding Grounds
Official policies of liberated India in shunning anything and everything related to our own Dharma has disoriented at least three generations of Indians who are completely confused about Indianness. Irrespective of their religion, all Indians who constituted our nation in 1947 had a much clearer vision about India. Simply put it was Indian first and religion next. Freedom, true secularism and equality were part and parcel of their dreams about an India that was to be made. But vote-bank politics has shattered all those lofty ideals. Subsequent generations have thrown up groups of Indians each with their own ideas about nation building. Nobody in India is now thinking in terms of their national identity first and religious identity next. All the so-called minority groups are breaking away from the national mainstream and trying to look alike and think alike their international cousins than national brothers. Under the guise of secularism each group is building up their own institutions which take orders from masters abroad.
Holding on to whatever is left of a truly secular and egalitarian nation is the least that can be done now. We have reached a state of moribund existence with regard to our religious beliefs. In liberated India everyone expected a complete revival of Sanatana Dharma to its past glory after weeding out its dark shades of untouchability and casteism. Many of us even expected a revival of the streak of continuous reformation and improvement that was always an integral part of our Dharma. But the misguided policies of the first few governments have spoiled everything. More than others, it goes to the discredit of several Hindu leaders for their suicidal efforts in disallowing Sanskrit learning and not initiating proper research & development of India’s own epics and scriptures. It is a shame that we could not put together even an authentic history about ancient India instead of teaching our children the British sponsored bogus theories of Aryan migration.
It is still not too late to retrieve all our lost grounds. All of us have a stake in Indian soil and we must do our bit to achieve this. We can never imagine securing an India of our own if we allow our enemies outside and inside to take over our lands legally or otherwise. As a bare minimum, each individual must hold on to whatever is left of his own properties and as a policy it must not be sold to anyone who is a suspect. European and Arab agencies are pumping in billions of dollars through their surrogates to buy up properties in India. As an example, at least 25% of Kerala’s prime properties have changed hands in the last one decade and most of it is in the hands of those with Gulf connections. And a vast proportion is already with the various Christian denominations under foreign administration and with no control of their own laity in India. If we can start holding on to whatever is left with us, there is definitely a chance for our Dharma to flourish once again and regain all lost grounds.
India and Indians are losing Indianness at a much faster rate in the past sixty years than at any other time in the past. We stood our grounds against all types of imperialism ranging from Greeks, Romans, Mughals, Islamists and Europeans in the never ending series of invasions. But we have never done so badly against the new versions of these evil forces than in recent times viz. since our liberation from the British. True Indians are losing their grip on numerical majority, power and real estate in almost all parts of India.
At all times we could count on Sanatana Dharma which stood like a solid rock of infinite dimensions to provide us with the necessary motivation and inspiration. Be it Alexander, Akbar or Macaulay, the overpowering enigma of Sanatana Dharma always managed to tie them down with its inclusiveness. There was nothing much they could do with their arsenal. From such heights of impenetrable defense during periods of subjugation, the situation has fallen to pathetic depths during the subsequent period as a liberated and separated as a secular Hindu nation.
The situation is deteriorating at a fast pace now. All the lofty ideals of building a truly secular and democratic republic of India has almost evaporated fully. The dreamy architect’s vision of a land of equality in every sense has given way to forces of skewed secularism and fascist ideologies. Western and Arab imperialism are vying with one another to conquer the soul of our entire nation. Religious fascists are going full steam to convert as many as possible to take over the country (mis)using our flawed electoral system. The electoral verdicts do not reflect our majority’s opinion but the majority opinion of those who can vote. Religious fascist forces are attempting a coup d'état by galvanizing as many religious converts as possible by luring or forcibly converting them. If the disease was limited to Christianity earlier, the world’s fastest growing religion is not far behind in their latest games in India. Both are engaged in a race to run over Indian nation and soil.
Gaining Grounds
Followers of the two organized world religions are literally gaining ground in India in all spheres of life. If missionary work is in full swing in Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Orissa, the entire coastal and border areas are reeling under Jihadi forces of enormous dimensions. A lot of international planning and money are going into these operations, and both the competing forces are becoming more and more confident of overrunning India in the 21st century. Other Europeans forces had tried out almost all techniques to destroy our nation from outside before the British unleashed their ultimate weapon of divide and rule as a last resort. As a part of it, they tried out different types of geographical, cultural and religious divides to achieve their objective. Yet when they were forced to retreat, they were literally shocked to see India still with a majority of Hindus carrying the whole nation as one even after their “most unkindest” cut of dividing the country on religious lines. Intensive missionary work for aggressive proselytization aimed at capturing power and weakening India is their latest attempt. If we analyze their performance in the last sixty years, it has been nothing but a tremendous success.
Story of the second aggressor is quite different. Arab aggression was at its zenith when they overran the Persian empire in the seventh century. Even then they could not even dream of a similar success over India. Where the Arabs failed, their Mughal cousins could make some inroads. But the status remained very much the same even after about seven centuries of Muslim rule until the British displaced them. Merciless Mughal emperors could not dent the core of Sanatana Dharma and many of them even struggled to avoid a complete surrender before its unparalleled logic and glory. Unlike Iran where they could achieve cent percent annihilation of the native religion, India was like a black hole that would absorb them fully. It was a very sad story of their sway over India when it ended up with division of the country on religious lines. Resurrection in the form of Arab imperialism is of recent origin which has been triggered by the intention of cash rich oil nations to complete what their predecessor could not. Aggressive religious conversion of plane loads of Nepalese and poor Indians working in the Gulf is only one of their tools to penetrate into Indian heartlands. The world-wide success of Jihadi terrorism is giving them immense opportunity and hope of overrunning India. They have literally gained so much grounds in several states like Kerala.
Holding Grounds
Official policies of liberated India in shunning anything and everything related to our own Dharma has disoriented at least three generations of Indians who are completely confused about Indianness. Irrespective of their religion, all Indians who constituted our nation in 1947 had a much clearer vision about India. Simply put it was Indian first and religion next. Freedom, true secularism and equality were part and parcel of their dreams about an India that was to be made. But vote-bank politics has shattered all those lofty ideals. Subsequent generations have thrown up groups of Indians each with their own ideas about nation building. Nobody in India is now thinking in terms of their national identity first and religious identity next. All the so-called minority groups are breaking away from the national mainstream and trying to look alike and think alike their international cousins than national brothers. Under the guise of secularism each group is building up their own institutions which take orders from masters abroad.
Holding on to whatever is left of a truly secular and egalitarian nation is the least that can be done now. We have reached a state of moribund existence with regard to our religious beliefs. In liberated India everyone expected a complete revival of Sanatana Dharma to its past glory after weeding out its dark shades of untouchability and casteism. Many of us even expected a revival of the streak of continuous reformation and improvement that was always an integral part of our Dharma. But the misguided policies of the first few governments have spoiled everything. More than others, it goes to the discredit of several Hindu leaders for their suicidal efforts in disallowing Sanskrit learning and not initiating proper research & development of India’s own epics and scriptures. It is a shame that we could not put together even an authentic history about ancient India instead of teaching our children the British sponsored bogus theories of Aryan migration.
It is still not too late to retrieve all our lost grounds. All of us have a stake in Indian soil and we must do our bit to achieve this. We can never imagine securing an India of our own if we allow our enemies outside and inside to take over our lands legally or otherwise. As a bare minimum, each individual must hold on to whatever is left of his own properties and as a policy it must not be sold to anyone who is a suspect. European and Arab agencies are pumping in billions of dollars through their surrogates to buy up properties in India. As an example, at least 25% of Kerala’s prime properties have changed hands in the last one decade and most of it is in the hands of those with Gulf connections. And a vast proportion is already with the various Christian denominations under foreign administration and with no control of their own laity in India. If we can start holding on to whatever is left with us, there is definitely a chance for our Dharma to flourish once again and regain all lost grounds.
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