“Few societies have been so tamasic, so full of inertia and contentment in increasing narrowness as Indian society in later times; few have been so eager to preserve themselves in inertia. Few therefore have attached so great an importance to authority. ... The result of this well-meaning bondage has been an increasing impoverishment of the Indian intellect, once the most gigantic and original in the world. Hence a certain incapacity, atrophy, impotence have marked our later activities even at their best. The most striking instance is our continued helplessness in the face of the new conditions and new knowledge imposed on us by recent European contact. We have tried to assimilate, we have tried to reject, we have tried to select; but we have not been able to do any of these things successfully.”
This is what Sri Aurobindo wrote a hundred years ago in his essay, “On Original Thinking”. India is now confronting yet another Euro-American movement, that of feminism. This is an attempt to evaluate Hindu anthropology in comparison to radical feminism.
* * *
Regardless of what international surveys suggest, it
is obvious enough that women in India today experience pain, deception and
helplessness. The causes include of course social, historical, economic and
logistical reasons, but the main culprit is often held to be [the ‘mindset’ of]
the Indian male citizen, especially the ‘upper-caste’ Hindu man.
Since this man is held to adhere to tradition
(consciously or otherwise), it is supposed that the roots of oppression of
women lie in the texts that define/describe the traditions. Gender in Hindu
society is considered a polarising factor because of tradition that is imposed
on them, thereby obstructing women’s well-being. The young, well-educated,
financially independent, socially self-defining, sexually autonomous and
consciously modern woman is held to be the epitome of women’s liberation, and
women who fail to, do not have the means to or do not desire to achieve any of
these are considered to be suppressed, oppressed or repressed. Manifest features
of the traditional lifestyle are considered to be symptomatic of the
unenlightened woman: joint family structure, being a homemaker, subservience to
the husband etc.
There are three assertions
of misogyny made in connection with the traditional Hindu perspective on women.
Firstly, that the tradition has an incorrect view of the nature of women, that
they consider women a major source of pain, danger, risk, conflict or evil tout
court, that their intellectual and spiritual capacities are considered to be
significantly lesser than those of men and that women are to be respected only
as virtuous mothers. Secondly, that the norms that it imposes on women are
rooted in men’s own interests to maintain domination over women, and that even
when there are concessions (property rights for instance) made it is out of a
paternalistic concern. Thirdly, that traditional thinking is unwilling to
consider women as individuals who have inalienable natural rights and who are
equal to men.
A
man is always looking to violate what his woman expects from him -- men can be
a real pain!
Men
are like the most disgusting people around. In fact they're the real problem
with society. I’m sure you know what I'm talking about. They may have beautiful
wives, well-respected and accomplished, wives who keep their promises and never
even think of betraying the man in their life, but these men are ready to do
away with them if they get the chance.
This
is a serious problem with men. Not having any sense of shame, they go on from
one woman to another, even if she is a total loser. They'll entertain any woman
who’s nice to them, who'll serve them even a tiny little bit. It's usually only
if they don't get any attention from women or if they're afraid of social
consequences that they stay put in monogamy mode. Men can't control themselves,
that's just how they are.
This is not exactly written
by a woman, but it is not too far off from what women do in fact publicly complain about these days. These are the words of the Apsarā Pañcacūḍā
except that “women” and “husbands” are changed to “men” and “wives”. Now how
many voices of modernity will resist the temptation to take the original
dialogue (from the Anuśāsana Parva) as suggestive of a misogynist culture while
wryly writing off the passage above as a woman’s personal lament?
Several such assertions, by
both men and women, of women’s weakness of mind (due to being especially prone
to the vagaries of desire), of their dubious intentions and unreasonable
ambitions and of their lack of hesitation in deserting or causing pain to men,
can be found in the epic literature. These are rants of men who have, if we
take their word, experienced disappointment in their interactions with women,
quite possibly due to their own error. In addition, they are seen to complain
that women cannot be controlled and that their behaviour is unintelligible to
them such that even Brahma seems not to be able to figure it out. (In one such
curious dialogue, an embittered Yudhiṣṭhira
even claims political science to have evolved from the observations of feminine
behaviour.)
This discourse of blame and
banter can also be found in the case of Brahma-Kṣatra citizens who fail to
fulfill their obligations to the state and instead waste themselves away to
vice or misuse their power to serve vested interests. It is quite likely that
this discourse reflects the commission of such violations on the part of the
accused. It is evident that they had the freedom to commit these acts in the
first place and also that they frequently got away with them – although there
are many punitive measures laid down in codified law, there is less evidence
that such measures were taken, thence the resort to tactics of shame and
slander. It is thus likelier that women had ‘too much’ freedom and were not
treated harshly upon failing to satisfy what men expected of them than that
these judgmental remarks of fear (of the ‘mantra-like charm’ of women, for
instance) and disdain (of the power they wield by their ‘beauty, blessedness
and youth’) indicate harassment of women who chose not to conform.
The idea of weakness of mind
and intellect on the part of women also finds expression in similar dialogues,
although most of the tradition’s well-known women are anything but weak. According
to many of the men in the great epic, woman, declared beforehand by Bhīṣma to
be at the ‘root of all evil’, is said to be undeserving of independence and to
be born due to demerit. She is said to be barred from studying the Śruti, such
that the Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature is advertised as a Veda composed expressly
for the instruction and leisure of citizens other than the male Brahma-Kṣatra
citizenry. It is opined that women should occupy themselves with duties of the
household and be devoted to their husbands and that their well-being comprises
only and exactly this, just as that of the student is in academic pursuits and
devotion to the teacher.
These duties and obligations
are identified as socially constructed. They are created, as Umā tells her
husband (in Nārada’s account), just when a
woman commits to marriage. There have been, moreover, two creations of women.
The first woman is said to be virtuous, while it is in the second creation that
sensuality and weakness was implanted into women. This is consistently
explicated by two accounts, the older one of Indra managing the backlash of
Brahminicide by getting Apsarā-s (symbolising feminine sexuality) to accept a
share, and that of Prajāpati stirring troublesome passions in the ‘new’ women
after being pleaded by the deities together to stop humanity from ascending to
their greatness.
In the context of law, Yama,
a Dharmaśāstra authority of greater antiquity, mentions that in a former age
women and men were together educated in the same manner. Hārita, a later
author, describes two types of contemporary women: Sadyovadhu-s and Brahmavādinī-s.
The latter pursue the same path of education as do men and may choose not to
marry and pursue asceticism. This is evidence of women’s intellectual and
spiritual abilities being considered equal to those of men in a not greater
measure than expression of contempt is considered to amount to proof of
misogyny. There has of course also been a utilitarian strain in the advocacy of
women’s education: the contradiction inherent in the bracketing together of
women and Śūdra-s is recognized and women are recommended academic training and
ritual praxis so as to create better Savarṇa citizens. Elsewhere, these ideas
were more explicitly developed by Gaius Musonius Rufus of the Stoic
tradition.
A narrative in the epic
describes the historical emergence of patriarchy. A young Śvetaketu is outraged
after his mother is lured by a Brahmin to elope with him. His father attempts
to pacify him, saying that women are, according to the eternal Dharma, completely
free in their behaviour, and that he should not, therefore, upset the norm. He
likens this eternal Dharma (which is “agreeable to women”) to the gender
relations among animals. But Śvetaketu proceeds to impose that women shall henceforth
be subservient to their husbands and that seducing a willfully married woman be
a criminal offence. Pāṇḍu, who narrates this to Kuntī, asserts that patriarchy
was thus instituted forcibly by Śvetaketu. Here patriarchy is not justified on
grounds of women’s frailty (as Hamlet famously proclaimed), potentially
dangerous sexuality (as proposed by Arti Dhand in her Woman as Sage, Woman as Fire) or on grounds of it being necessary
to ‘civilisation’ (argued for by Camille Paglia in her Sexual Personae). Au contraire, patriarchy may be said to have emerged
more by force of the jealousies and insecurities of men and their incapacity to
thwart offending men. Bhīṣma argues to this effect when he says in the Śānti
that it is men who are stained with faults and that women cannot have faults at
all.
Most of the speculation and
commentary in the Mokṣadharmaparva, and also the genre of Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣad-s
is self-professedly from a male ascetic’s point of view and does not reflect
the methods and practices of female ascetics. It is, however, categorically
asserted that the path of renunciation can and needs to be pursued by women
equally as men, for enlightenment cannot be gendered. At the time of the Mahābhārata,
women are mostly mentioned as wives and mothers and sometimes as ascetics.
Women are glorified as mothers but except for discourse appertaining to
universal aspects of life (speculations on desire, suffering, rebirth,
causality etc.), every individual enters the narrative in a particular capacity
and is praised or censured in that capacity. In law, although increasing
specificity in instruction is evident (depending on the intersections of class
an individual stands on), there is the idea of degrees of generality of moral
prescriptions such that truth, compassion, generosity etc. are held to be Sāmānya
Dharma that cannot be overridden by any exceptional instruction whatsoever.
The objective here is not to
make an apologia for tradition, for if it were so, one would, for instance, be
asked to imagine Manu’s indictment as merely an attempt to optimise the
‘natural’ functions of men and women so as to better sustain society, or worse,
defend the Strīdharmapaddhatī. Although one can make several more citations of
benevolent views on women within the tradition (for which see AS Altekar’s The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization),
it is quite obvious that Hindu society was and is still far from being favourable
to women. It will prove imperative, for the idea of India to survive and
flourish, for Hindu scholars to propose an ‘indigenous’ system of social organization
(Pandharinath Prabhu made an early attempt in his Hindu Social Organization) that is conversant with developments in
sociobiology, and also to make it appear friendly-to-all (as ‘secular humanism’
and sundry Western imports do) so as to not be impeded by scandalizing on the
part of its opponents. The Hindu woman of today has the resources to
confidently assert women’s emancipation within the framework of tradition – the
intelligent and strong-willed women of the epics will prove to better inspire
her than the accusatory theorising of already-privileged Western feminists.
The central point here is
that the picture that radical socialist feminism portrays, that of tradition
being opposed to women’s emancipation, is an illusion. The suspicions it has
regarding tradition are ill-founded and its hope of radical revolution into
modernity – which is arguably a religious aspiration -- betrays its
misunderstanding of what any tradition is. It has engendered all manner of
absurd ideas surrounding gender such as ‘sex wars’.
The overarching question,
when it comes to women’s emancipation, seems to be that of identifying the
defining characteristics of men and women. It should not be controversial that,
on average, men reportedly tend to be systematisers, and women, empathisers, as
the research of Simon Baron-Cohen shows. Even if his methodology be flawed,
there is enough anecdotal evidence to support the view. It would be more
astonishing and more offensive to suggest that women have precisely the same
capacities and defects as men do but do not have the achievements that men have
to their credit so far because men were oppressing them, for it then leads to
the question of why women have been so weak so long.
To posit that it is because
of the nature of their physique – whether by inherent weakness of structure or
because of the necessity of child-bearing – will give men a major excuse to
continue oppressing women. The military has been a starting point for
gender-based occupational differentiation, because it is easier to bring a
medium-strength male to military fitness level than a high-strength woman who
has vowed not to bear children, in turn because the man is less likely to face
sexual harassment or socioeconomic pressure to reproduce or to get involved in
a relationship with a man in the same troop.
Regardless of which side
biostatistics is on (i.e. whether human males and females have the same
(dis)abilities on average or not), patriarchy or feminism can still win the
day, because neither is especially interested in finding out facts; they are normatively
tied to the interests of a particular social group all the while entertaining suspicions
regarding its Other. Just as misogynists of bygone eras did not consider it
necessary to thoroughly investigate whether or not women were in reality
intellectually feeble, feminists today need not concern themselves with
empirical studies on gender and sex. Except a few notable promoters of women’s
emancipation (e.g. Madhu Kishwar in our times), feminist activism has tended to
march from sanity to satiny.
That humans can and
willfully do act against what well-established wisdom or even their own
personal experience would suggest is nothing new. Now this wisdom usually does
not offer any guarantees regarding the future – if feminists today can manage
to convince women that they need to be moulded to become what men have been (reducing
women to an imitation of men, as Marguerite Yourcenar wrote in Les Yeux ouverts), regardless of how
women have been so far and of what they currently desire, then feminism will emerge
as victor.
Relations between genders
and other social groups are in a constant flux in response to various forces.
Intention, good or bad, strong or weak, overt or covert, is itself shaped and
directed by these forces. It will prove more productive to concentrate on
increasing well-being of women (and of society at large) than to use grouse and
guilt to goad the gullible.
Kāla and Śakti dance
together but decide their own movements.
