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September 14, 2023
Muslim invasions subjugated Hindu women?
Did Muslim Invasions Subjugate Hindu Women?
Ram Puniyani
The rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its opposition to demands for caste and gender equality raised during the freedom movement went hand in hand. When India was a ‘nation in the making’, it sought to grant equality to all, which undermined the older feudal hierarchies. While Indian nationhood sought equality for all, irrespective of caste, class and gender, those who upheld the traditional order asserted themselves, too. Muslim and Hindu conservatives often couched their backwardness in the language of religion.
The Hindu-nationalist RSS created a narrative about a golden past, an age when Manu and his word were law. It also claimed that “Hindu values” meant equal status for all castes, and women had a respectable position in Hindu society. They still claim that Muslim invaders and plunderers caused a decline in these glorious values and that evil invaders cost Hindu women their prominent place in society. They even blame the cruel practice of Sati on Muslim invasions. Such ideas and claims form the core of Hindu nationalist “myth creation” about why Hindu women were restrained.
The RSS sahkaryavah, or general secretary, Krishna Gopal, repeated all such claims on 4 September when he addressed a gathering on women’s empowerment organised by an outfit called Naari Shakti Sangam. He said, “Prior to the 12th century, women were reasonably free to a great extent, but in the middle ages [India’s medieval era], a very difficult time came. The entire country was struggling with subjugation. Women were in danger. Lakhs of women were kidnapped and sold in international markets. [Ahmed Shah’ Abdali, [Mohammed] Ghori and [Mahmood of] Ghazni took women from here and sold them. It was an era of great humiliation. So, to protect our women, our society put multiple restrictions on them.”
Gopal would have his listeners not just believe his justification to repress women but also that the plunder of wealth of rival kingdoms and enslavement of the conquered were restricted to Muslim invaders. Both, however, run through kingdoms and history. The Chola kings brought innumerable slaves from Sri Lanka. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s army plundered Kalyan, and Kalyan’s governor’s Muslim daughter-in-law was taken captive.
The restrictions on Hindu women that Gopal refers to prevailed long before any Muslim kings set foot in South Asia—including Sati, the immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.
Women were deprived of property and education due to the social norms prevailing in early India. In the Mahabharata, there are accounts of Pandu’s wife Madri and Lord Krishna’s father Vasudev’s four wives burning themselves to death after their husbands died.
The subordination of women was due to patriarchy, influenced by sentiments such as clan superiority, and both factors had a crucial role in Sati. As per the historian Romila Thapar, the significant factors in the rise of Sati were the subordination of women in patriarchal society, the changing “systems of kinship”, and the desire to exert “control over female sexuality”. According to most historians of repute, Sati originated within the Kshatriya aristocracy and remained limited mainly to the so-called warrior classes among Hindus.
The decline of trade and commerce in the post-Gupta period in Indian history is among the critical reasons for the decline in the status of women. They were prohibited from education; child marriage increasingly became the norm; widow remarriage was prohibited; occurrences of the dreadful practice of Sati grew, too. Before this period, Sati was an occasional phenomenon.
How does RSS deal with the issue? An exclusively male organisation, it promoted the Rashtra Sevika Samiti as a subordinate outfit. Its very name reflects the Hindu nationalist outlook on gender, for the word swayam (being, self) is missing from its name, and the word sevika—service—is included instead.
The Rashtra Sevika Samiti has been preaching to its women followers total support of the subordinate position of women. Vijaya Raje Scindia, vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the political offshoot of the RSS, took out a morcha to Parliament to support Sati in the aftermath of the Roopkawar sati case. That was when Parliament was discussing a new law to curb this practice. Scindia believed committing Sati was a “glorious” tradition and the right of Hindu women. In April 1994, Mridula Sinha, a top leader of the Samiti, who later became the Governor of Goa, advised Hindu women in an interview with Savvy magazine to “adjust” if her husband beats her—for she could have “provoked” the assault. She also defended dowry—“my father bought me a husband in just Rs 5,000”—and said women must not work outside the home unless it is a dire necessity.
We also recall former RSS prachark Pramod Muthalik, members of whose outfit, the Sri Ram Sene, were recorded on camera beating girls leaving a pub in Mangalore, Karnataka, in 2009. The outfit was later acquitted, and the police investigation came under the scanner. Thrashing young couples on St Valentine’s Day is a regular feature of the Bajrang Dal, another RSS-related outfit. On 10 November 2020, Goa Police registered an FIR against Shilpa Singh, an assistant professor at a law college, for allegedly “outraging religious sentiments” by comparing the mangalsutra worn by married women to a dog’s chain. The RSS’s student outfit, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, complained to the college authorities.
The BJP government recently honoured the Gita Press with the Gandhi Peace Prize, but it, too, peddled values parallel to the RSS’s beliefs. The Gita Press has been rehashing the Manusmriti’s values on caste and gender issues for decades. Many books from this press advise Hindu women to remain subordinated to men, and give women a litany of advice. Some of these books are Nari Shiksha [Education of Women] by Hanuman Prasad Poddar, Grahsth Mein Kaise Rahen [How to Lead a Household Life] by Swami Ramsukhdas, Striyon ke Liye Kartawya Shiksha [Education on the Duties of Women] and Nari Dharm [Duties of Women] by Jai Dayal Goyandka are few of them.
To top it, the RSS and its affiliate outfits aggressively campaign against their own make-believe’ love Jihad’. It is nothing but an effort to control Hindu women by targeting Muslims. On the pretext of love Jihad, these organisations go house to house advising the Hindu parents and male relatives to “keep an eye on girls”. The historian Charu Gupta wrote in 2009, “Whether it is 1920 or 2009, Hindu patriarchal notions appear deeply entrenched. In both campaigns, images of passive victimised Hindu women at the hands of inscrutable Muslims abound, and any possibility of women exercising their legitimate right to love and their right to choice is ignored.”
The latest from the RSS leadership is yet another reiteration of their unshakable faith in patriarchy. That is why they blame all ills of Hindu society on external factors and hide behind the social structures and the scriptures that promote these problems.
September 13, 2023
India: Minister Shekhawat in the Modi Govt threatens to violently attack Tamil leader over remark on religion
Will pull out tongue, gouge out eyes: Union Minister Shekhawat on Udhayanidhi's Sanatan Dharma remark
September 07, 2023
Caste Eradication- What does Udaynidhi Stalin Say
https://www.newsclick.in/udhayanidhis-eradicate-sanatan-dharma-call-what-periyar-ambedkar-sought
Udhayanidhi’s ‘Eradicate Sanatan Dharma’ Call is What Periyar, Ambedkar Sought
Ram Puniyani
Hinduism is not a prophet-based religion, neither does it have a single book, nor is the word Hindu part of holy scriptures. This gives enough leeway to different interpreters and reformers to attribute diverse meanings to what Hindu religion stands for, even to the extent of defining it as not a religion but “way of life”. As such, it is a collation of diverse tendencies which can broadly be grouped under Brahmanic (Vedic, Manusmriti, with caste and gender hierarchy at the base) and the Shramanic (Nath, Tantra, Bhakti, Shaiva, Siddhanta) traditions.
The word Sanatan has been in use for “eternal religions”. The word Dharma is also supposed to be not easy to translate into English. It broadly stands for many things, the chief being religiously ordained duty. It also stands for spiritual order, sacred laws, the totality of social, ethical and spiritual harmony. In his book Why I am a Hindu, Shashi Tharoor points out that Dharma can also be defined as “that by which we live”.
Intricacies apart, the word Sanatan Dharma has been used for Hinduism, particularly its Brahmanical version, which upholds caste and gender hierarchy. This is what BR Ambedkar meant when he said that Hinduism is Brahmanical theology. Hinduism is the root of Hindutva or Hinduness, which has manifested as Hindu nationalist politics. It, too, upholds Manusmriti and thereby the traditional caste hierarchy. In a way, Sanatan Dharma today stands for the caste hierarchy.
This is the backdrop against which we need to understand Udhayanidhi’s call to “eradicate Sanatan Dharma”. The Youth Welfare and Sports Development Minister of Tamil Nadu, and son of MK Stalin, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and DMK leader, comes from the tradition of Periyar Ramasamy Naicker, the pioneer of the Self Respect Movement, which calls for caste equality and eradication of patriarchy. He was scathingly critical of Brahmanical norms, which dominated society. Just before him, Ambedkar had overseen the burning of Manusmriti by his colleague Bapusaheb Sahastrabuddhe. As per Ambedkar, this text is the repository of caste inequalities. Ambedkar, pained by the hold of Brahmanism over society—now referred to as Sanatan Dharmic values—declared in Yeola, “I was born a Hindu; that was not in my hands, but I will not die a Hindu.”
Udhayanidhi has now said that Sanatan Dharma is a principle that divides people in the name of caste and religion…” He is merely repeating what Periyar and Ambedkar have said in their own ways. On his use of the words Sanatan Dharma, BJP spokesperson Amit Malaviya tweeted, “Udhayanidhi Stalin... has linked Sanatan Dharma to malaria and dengue…In short, he is calling for genocide of 80% population of Bharat who follow Sanatan Dharma.”
Malaviya is not only twisting what Udhayanidhi Stalin has said, he is also confirming that Hinduism is synonymous with Sanatan Dharma today.
Fact is, Udhayanidhi’s call is a call to eradicate caste and not people—and that is the spirit in which his remark has been popularly seen as well. When Ambedkar calls for the annihilation of caste, he does not call for genocide. Therefore, Ambedkar’s intentions and Udhayanidhi’s aspirations are the same. BJP leaders appear to be twisting his statement deliberately, since the DMK is part of the INDIA alliance of Opposition parties.
Home Minister Amit Shah has said in public meetings that the Congress party has disrespected Indian culture and Udhayanidhi’s words amount to “hate speech”. Truth is, talking about the annihilation of a system of inequality cannot be hate speech. What has been said is in tune with what Ambedkar and Periyar said—the main point being that Brahmanical Hinduism is presenting itself as Sanatan Dharma.
When Gandhi struggled to unite the country and worked against the practice of untouchability, he identified himself with Sanatan Dharma and Hinduism. For a few years after 1932, Gandhi made it his primary goal to work against untouchability, and pursue the rights of Dalits to enter temples. The diverse religious traditions of India, such as Buddhism, also identified themselves as Sanatan or everlasting. Today, the dominant tendency pursued by the RSS is to promote the word Sanatan for Hinduism to create a mix of Brahmanism and nationalism. Udhayanidhi, therefore, has deployed strong symbolism to explain the evils of the caste order. The charge of hate speech would not apply to the abolition of values that support caste hierarchy.
BJP leaders and spokespersons are trying to use Udhayanidhi’s statements as a pretext to attack the Congress party and the INDIA alliance without any substantive argument. To say that the Congress party never respected Indian culture is to level an empty charge merely for political mileage. The Congress party was part of a movement that united all Indians under the umbrella of Indian identity, while retaining respect for cultural differences. At the same time, it promoted reforms in society.
Shah has said of late that the Opposition wants power at any cost. “You have been disrespecting Sanatana Dharma and the culture and history of this country,” he said.
Fact is, India’s national movement upheld the best aspects of Indian culture as first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India, “She [India] was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.”
The problem is not with the parties constituting the INDIA alliance. The problem is with the BJP and company, for whom culture is merely a Brahmanical past and everything that comes with it.
Indeed, the caste system has persisted for too long. The struggles of Ambedkar, Periyar and even Gandhi were great beginnings but were arrested halfway through—and some gains were reversed over the last three decades. The time has come to annihilate caste rather than bicker over the terminology used.
Truly, the word Sanatan has had a long journey. Starting with its use in Buddhism, Jainism and finally finding its place in the Manusmriti, it has come to symbolise Brahmanical Hinduism in the present times. Rather than nit-picking and making it a political issue, we need reforms for a society with equality, in tune with the Constitution of India. Besides, to be perfectly clear, Udhayanidhi’s remarks are not those of the INDIA coalition—whether the BJP can make it an election issue remains to be seen. Let us remember it did try to use Bajrang Bali in Karnataka, and fell on its face.
September 04, 2023
September 03, 2023
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