India: Sabarimala's deeply ironic lesson / Now What? After the Betrayal of Women at Sabarimala

1.

The Telegraph

Sabarimala's deeply ironic lesson

With 2019 round the corner, the political parties’ concern is understandable, although not laudable

By The Editorial Board

• Published 22.10.18, 6:50 AM

The sensitiveness of deities remains unknown; it is the sensitiveness of their devotees that is the stuff of politics. It is awkward for a country, any country, in 2018 that women should take to the streets to stop the entry of other women into a temple because it goes against tradition, even though the highest court in the land has lifted the ban and ruled in accordance with the constitutional principle of equality. But such awkwardness is nothing but grist to the election mill for political parties. The Left Democratic Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), being in government in Kerala, was bound to implement the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Sabarimala temple. But why does it give the impression that it was caught unawares by the scale of the protests against the ruling? The ban on the entry of women between 10 and 50 years into the temple of Ayyappa seems to have been lifted without preparing the ground for change, perhaps without adequate attention or patience. The issue had been hanging fire long enough for it to have been discussed extensively in different fora.
Now the CPI(M)-led government is willing to let the Travancore Devaswom Board that manages the temple to place a review petition, although the TDB seems happy to be part of the other petitions that have been filed. The CPI(M)’s present position is being seen as a climb-down by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who have been eyeing the state hungrily for a step-in. The Sabarimala protests, by bringing conservative Hindus together, offer fertile soil to the BJP-RSS, although they have denied charges that their leaders organised the protests. The Opposition Congress is in a bit of a fix, and trying frantically to seem coherent. Opposing the LDF — the Congress was never officially in favour of going against tradition in this case — puts it on the same side as the BJP. It is trying to suggest that the BJP’s encouragement of divisiveness will extend from gender to caste, but that sounds distinctly thin. Numerically strong backward classes, however, have not joined the protests. With 2019 round the corner, the political parties’ concern is understandable, although not laudable. Maybe the concern is always electoral, ignoring the need to address regressive patterns in popular thinking through education or cultural exposure. The lesson of Sabarimala is deeply ironic.

2.

kafila.org

Now What? After the Betrayal of Women at Sabarimala

On 22/10/2018 By jdevika

 

At the end of the five-day worship in the month of Tulam, it is clear that women have been betrayed. The right wing which promised not to violently stop women devotees did precisely that ; their leader also hurled vicious insults are transpeople. The dominant left which foamed Ayyankali and Sree Narayana Guru at the mouth ended up reinforcing the ‘good woman’/’bad woman’ division, saying first that only the former would be allowed to proceed, made the term ‘activist’ into a code word for ‘bad woman’, and then finally threw up its hands saying that it was impossible to implement the court order. The government and the CPM had obviously not done enough to make sure that women would indeed enter the shrine. Clearly they are reluctant to touch the savarna moral majority. 
Now that the pain from the blatant insult is beginning to wear off, I am wondering why, after the experience of fighting with Hadiya, we ever thought that the right or left would dare to challenge the moral majority. Let us remember that calling this a BJP-CPM confrontation, or seeing it as a struggle primarily in the field of organized, formal politics, is very superficial. Actually, the struggle is squarely in the field of the social — between the moral majority, at the centre of which are those who have coalesced since long around the savarna ideology at the heart of United Kerala since the 1960s, and the vocal and determined moral minority determined to challenge the stranglehold of the former. This is of course why the savarna moral minority is so ardently supported by the Catholic Church and most Muslim groups (with the exception, please note, of the much-maligned Popular Front!). We also know only too well that the moral majority serves elite community-caste interests and services global capitalism, given Kerala’s peculiar integration into it as a labour-sending society dependent heavily on migration.
I am also wondering why members of this moral majority are lamenting that Malayalis have become ‘culturally backward’ because of the Hindutvavaadi presence here. I wonder if they were deaf all this while to the carefully-researched critiques of the experience of modernisation of Malayali society advanced by feminist historians from the 1980s itself. Again and again, these scholars had sought to show that neither ‘tradition’ nor what came to be identified as modernity allowed gender equality; many times have they demonstrated that women’s voices were muffled, forgotten, or ignored; that the attempts to challenge masculinism in even progressive movements were never encouraged seriously. So by this reckoning we were never ‘forward’ but it appears that the intelligentsia listens to us but does continues to live in denial. If neither the left nor the right have any history of serious action on establishing gender equality on the cultural front, why I wonder were we so hopeful about the CPM? I understand that hope may not be rational, yet?
If the CPM were serious about establishing the equality of women in the Hindu faith, it would have acknowledged the fact that many of its women supporters are indeed believers and they should lead a social revolution. But they too don’t want a social revolution that would upset the balance between men and women anymore. Their support for transpeople and non-binary sexualities comes from their (mis)perception that these are merely additive moves. They don’t want to risk unintended revolutionary consequences any more, and among women for sure. Definitely, the moral majority will produce no revolution and why we were under that illusion, I do not know.
I also wonder why we were dismayed that women did not arrive at Sabarimala in droves. I mean, why did we forget the reams and reams of social research we have produced which clearly show how powerless, how utterly cornered, the average ‘respectable’ woman living in savarna culture-dominated circles is. In Kerala, women get sterilized by around 27, after delivering twice. Once the husband’s genetic pool is reproduced the wife’s body can be shifted from procreative labour into domestic labour. Research shows that few women in the lower middle class and the poorer sections of Malayali society return to studies or skill acquisition after this age; therefore Kudumbashree becomes the default option. Few of these women have stable incomes; few of them are beyond the reach of family, caste, and community authorities. The research on depression and suicidal tendencies among Malayali women of the 15-50 age group is alarming indeed. So how did we expect them to come to Sabarimala? How come we expected them to even have their own understanding of bhakti, when bhakti is completely, totally alien and inimical to the ways in which these women are integrated into the circuits of global capitalist production as producers of labour power to be sold in global markets?
I have been talking with some friends, young women believers who wanted to go, simply because of their intense curiosity about the effect of the pilgrimage … but I instantly realized why we are not seeing a surge of young women wanting to go. In fact, how dumb it is to expect it.  Clearly, not one of these women can risk it, I can see. First of all, they are all young — or middle-aged, and, importantly, with young children/teenagers who are used to their care all day and night. They are dependent on in-laws or parents for substitute care, and most of these senior people are wedded to the savarna complexes that even members of the middle castes hold on to. Secondly, they are mostly unemployed. They have no money to go. Thirdly, those above 40 are caring for senior members of the family. They do not want to upset them; some are worried that if they go, the local Karayogam or its equivalent will not cooperate in the death rituals of these seniors! And finally, for many, agreeing with the utterly violent, misogynistic vomit spewed by their relatives is really, really the only option to get noticed. And of course, the only ones who can go, therefore, are the ‘activists’ who have been thrown out of the category ‘women’ by both the Hindutvavaadis and the Kerala government!
Jocelyn Chua, in her book on suicide in Kerala, says that women ‘accumulate death’ – through random threats, fantasizing etc. and that this is a way they may present themselves as moral subjects and draw attention to themselves. I say, in the silence or the raucous braying of many women who support the nauseating Hindutva violence, we see them ‘accumulating self-erasure’, as yet another way of presenting themselves as moral subjects and gaining some attention, and offering care to other members etc. Both strategies arise from sheer powerlessness of the ‘respectable woman’. I am so glad I am not one.
And also interesting is the complexity of the left version of Kerala’s moral majority. It ranges from the Minister Kadakampally Surendran’s crude Hindutva-laced ire towards ‘activists’ to the sophisticated, neoliberal self represented by the Facebook activist Resmi Nair. The first is of course familiar, but the second is to watch out for. In my reckoning it is more damaging than the anti-feminism of women on the right or left who blindly follow their leaders. Resmi Nair represents a highly mobile subject of neoliberalism who can appear to be everywhere at the same time. Her performance on Facebook calls for close analysis: she draws on the discourse of market-centred liberation centred upon consumable images of female bodies, and on radical left democratic politics simultaneously; she performs the subversion of social restrictions on women but also appears very proximate to the state and the moral majority, endorsing their idea of the ‘dissolute woman’. I have encountered such mobile subjects among women in my fieldwork of women engaging with public welfare in Kerala seeking to simultaneously inhabit state identities but resist confinement in them. But when such a strategy is adopted by privileged women, it seems to me that it reinforces the privilege and further strengthens the moral majority. Resmi Nair, for all her bikini photos, may not upset savarna power even a jot, even if she created some storms in teacups. There are many who would regard such mobility as aesthetic, and the aesthetic as ultimately political, but I do not buy that anymore. In a context in which such mobility is valuable to the capitalist market, the long term subersiveness of such strategies is indeed questionable.
Indeed, the task for feminist researchers now I think, is to focus our critical attention on the moral majority, from Kadakampally Surendran to Resmi Nair.

India: Editorial comment on Maharashtra govt's ordinance against superstition and black magic

The Hindu, August 28, 2013

Editorial: Faithful to a cause

Public outrage over the brutal slaying of renowned rationalist Narendra Dabholkar finally forced the Maharashtra government’s hand in clearing an ordinance against superstition and black magic. Based on a bill that Dabholkar championed for almost 20 years, it could be the first such legislation in India. The ordinance is a path-breaking one in a country which lionises godmen and is steeped in obscurantism. It seeks to curtail superstitious practices which are “misused to exploit people” or cause them “financial or physical harm.” Dabholkar did not target religion and concerned himself only with the misuse of faith to victimise innocents. The law he drafted — which faced years of opposition from political and religious groups — follows this impulse. The ordinance, which will have to be ratified by the State Assembly, seeks to ban a range of superstitious practices including “black magic,” displaying so-called miracles to earn money, or insisting that mantras, not medicines, will cure critical injuries like snakebites. Also, assaulting and humiliating people under the guise of exorcising ghosts, and the sexual exploitation of women after claiming supernatural powers will also be banned. Complaints are to be probed by trained policemen and can even be lodged by third parties not involved in an exploitative ritual.

While inculcating a scientific temper is one of the Constitution’s Fundamental Duties vide. Article 51 A (h), seeking to regulate personal faith and beliefs is always tricky. The Bill underwent as many as 29 drafts and was introduced several times without success. Many saw it as an impediment to the freedom of religion and feared it would even ban poojas where the priest was paid for his services. Or painful, self-inflicted religious practices. Pontiffs felt vulnerable to complaints by motivated individuals. There were concerns that religious pilgrimages would be monitored, even stopped. But Dabholkar had argued these fears were unfounded. The ordinance targets forced and exploitative practices, not those that are voluntary or that do not take a physical or financial toll on people. Chanting mantras on a personal level to ward off evil spirits will not constitute an offence. But forcing an expensive, exorcism ritual could attract a complaint.

Weeding out motivated complaints and distinguishing a forced ritual from a voluntary one will be a serious challenge. Yet, ensuring that a law which opposes a society’s entrenched beliefs is actually enforced is perhaps the greater challenge. The law will gain greater meaning when there is a parallel process of social reform and education against superstition, the very tradition that Dabholkar himself epitomised.

India: a complete underestimation of the power of orthodoxy in society

Source: The Hindu, August 20, 2013

Disinherited daughters

Tanika Sarkar/Sumit Sarkar

Eminent historians trace the early history of gender reforms in India in a conversation with Pamela Philipose

Most studies of the 19th and pre-19th centuries make two general assumptions about Indian women. First, the language of women having lost their rights is invariably used while looking at the limits of social reforms of those times. The presumption is that women had definite rights that they lost because of reformist interventions. Second, there is a complete underestimation of the power of orthodoxy in society.

So when reformers are talked about, they are taken to be conservatives because they were not thinking of women in the way that we feminists now perceive them. They were in favour of the family, in favour of chastity, monogamy, and so on, and we take that to be a mark of their conservatism, forgetting that the society of that era – whether Hindu, Muslim or any other – was dominantly ruled by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, in fact, was hegemonic and still is. So if we bring orthodoxy back into the picture, then what the reformers were trying to do and say makes a lot more sense.

Let us start with Raja Rammohun Roy. There are different critiques of Roy, including one that maintains that he infantilised the way of the “willing satis”. Another saw him as a westernised, de-racinated person who stigmatised Indian tradition, scripture and religion as something anti-modern and that this was western reason speaking through a pseudo-Indian.

But

what is forgotten is that the colonial government had promised – and by and large that pledge was kept – to give complete autonomy to religious traditions of all communities. This meant that any attempt to articulate the need for a change in gender relations had to be spoken about in the language of the scriptures. Therefore, if Roy had wanted an abolition of sati, he had to prove somehow that sati was non-scriptural.

If we look at the orthodox discourse, whether it was to do with the education of women, sati, widow re-marriage or the age of consent, we come across a whole host of scriptural sanctions and prohibitions, especially for upper caste and sharif (high-born) women. Here one could note that poor, lower caste women had some mobility and a certain amount of economic independence that was denied to their upper caste counterparts, primarily because they had to go out of the home to earn a living.

The scriptural argument for sati was that the woman wanted to commit sati in order to gain heaven for her husband for three million years. Seven generations of ancestors – maternal, paternal and matrimonial – would also immediately be freed from all sins and they too will gain heaven. This was believed in very firmly, and the ritual promise created an incentive for sati. In testimonies of satis collected by the colonial state, the common claim the women made was that they were going to heaven and that they cannot live without their husbands.

Interestingly, this argument was also an argument against widow remarriage. The view of marriage was that it was a sacrament. Once performed it was indissoluble – even with the death of the husband. This meant that no woman could have more than one husband. Even if her husband died, even if the marriage had remained unconsummated, even if the husband had abandoned her at the inception of the marriage, the woman was still considered attached to him and could not enter into any other relationship even after his death because that would constitute adultery.

We need to also remember that marriage was monogamous for women but not for men. By the early 19th century, men could, and did, have innumerable wives – and all their wives were burnt as satis in the process. The traditional argument for child marriage was that the best kind of marriage was the pre-pubertal union, preferably before the girl turned eight. However, there was no limit to the bridegroom’s age. A man of 90 could, and very often did, marry a child of a few years.

Scriptures did not have to give reasons - they just laid down the law. All this made for a regime of extremely severe injunctions against women. Mobility was not just frowned upon, it was absolutely proscribed. Sometimes education – a kind of oral education – was imparted. But as historian Uma Chakravarti pointed out in ‘Whatever Happened To The Vedic Dasi?’, if women became too involved in the quest for knowledge, they would invite a backlash. Maitreyi was killed because of her curiosity as a thinking, questioning woman. The woman had to follow her husband and look after his domestic life and the ‘good woman’ was to be worshipped. This perspective remained more or less intact throughout the 19th and well into the 20th centuries.

The first questioning of this treatment of women began in the early 19th century, largely because of the new technologies of communication. Literature, newspapers, the spread of education – in particular, the spread of vernacular education – and translations of the scriptures, all resulted in the unleashing of questions over what was the more authentic spiritual perspective, especially with regard to women.

What we find striking about the reformers was their great sense of diffidence, even guilt. There is a Rammohun Roy saying, “When did you test the intelligence of women that you call them foolish?” We have Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar asking why women were born at all in this land. Whether it is Mahadev Govind Ranade in western India or Kandukuri Virasalingam Pantulu of southern India, the reformers were talking about the problems women faced if they wanted to be ‘good women’. In the process, these reformers – always in a minority - had to face severe lampooning, ostracism and social boycott. Although it was true that sati had been legally abolished, Rammohun had to find some scriptural argument for its abolition. Vidyasagar also managed to present some material extracted from the Parashara Smriti and interpreted it as a “must for Kali Yuga”.

Because they had to speak the language of the scriptures, the reformers often ended up tying themselves into knots. Rammohun stated, for example, that since sati was not mentioned by the Manu Smriti, this meant that Manu Smriti did not approve of it, and, therefore, sati was not valid. But when Vidyasagar wanted to legalise widow re-marriage, he was in a quandary because the Manu Smriti was absolutely against widow remarriage. So Vidyasagar had to very strenuously argue that in Kali Yuga, Parashara was the great authority. But that undermined the argument for the age of consent issue, since Parashara certainly recommended infant marriage for women.

First you invent tradition and, when you cannot do this, you defend tradition. For instance, in the years of nationalism there was a kind of glorification of tradition, with early nationalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak stoutly maintaining that Indian social conditions were wonderful in an earlier era.
[. . .]
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/disinherited-daughters/article5038927.ece

India: Right wing and conservative forces take over anti rape protests at Jantar Mantar (9 Jan 2013)

Hunger strike tent of Bhagat Singh Kranti sena at Jantar Mantar 9 Jan 2013 (photo: Harsh Kapoor)

Hindu religious chanting and ritual something at 'Damani' shrine at Jantar Mantar Delhi, 3 Jan 2013 (Photo: Harsh Kapoor)

A shrine like feel, with a grave like thing in place and also a manequin with garlands in place at Jantar Mantar, 3 Jan 2013 (Photo: Harsh Kapoor)

Those who support RSS chief Bhagwat's vision on rape in urban vs rural India

From: The Times of India

Mohan Bhagwat's remark on rape misunderstood, BJP says

PTI | Jan 4, 2013, 06.27 PM IST

NEW DELHI: Pushed on the backfoot by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's comment that rapes happens in cities, BJP on Friday put up a brave defence saying the statement should be seen in the proper context and he was referring to India's culture, tradition and value system.

"The present controversy relating to certain comments of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is totally uncalled for and unnecessary. His comments are required to be seen and understood in entirety. He was referring to India's sanskar, tradition and value system where respect for women occupies a pride of place," BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

Bhagwat had courted controversy when he said in Silchar on Thursday that "crimes against women happen in India and not in Bharat". He maintained that women living in cities follow a western lifestyle which leads to crimes against them.

Backing Bhagwat, Prasad said the RSS chief had also underlined the need for meting out stringent sentences to the guilty.

"At the same time, he also demanded that strong punishment should be given to those who are offenders in relation to crimes against women and that laws should be strengthened to even give capital punishment," Prasad said.

BJP maintained that empowerment of women, and giving them respect and security form the core of RSS ideology.

"There is extraordinary work and achievement made in various RSS-related organizations like Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, Vanvasi Kalyan Kendra, Vidya Bharti and other allied organisations which bear ample testimony to the same," Prasad said.

RSS leader Ram Madhav had defended Bhagwat on the same lines and said it should be seen in the proper perspective.

o o o

From: Tehelka

Ashis Nandy says Bhagwat is right

The social scientist supports RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's remark on rapes and says there is a connection between modernisation, urbanisation and violence against women

Tehelka Bureau

January 4, 2013

Delhi: While Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh supremo Mohan Bhagwat is being criticised for his comment that rapes occur only in cities, not in rural India, prominent public intellectual and social scientist Ashis Nandy has come out in his support. Speaking to Tehelka, Nandy says there is a connection between modernisation, urbanisation and rape.

“It is not only in India but in most of the world. So I don’t think Bhagwat was wrong because in India there are many instances, even in rural India there are many instances of rape. I must tell you that the future is loaded in favour, if I may put it that way, of urban India and modern India. In other words you will hear more instances of rape in cities and metropolitans,” he says.

Bhagwat sparked off a controversy on Friday 4 January with his remark that rapes occurred only in cities and not in rural India. “Such crimes hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occur in India,” he said while addressing a citizens’ meet in Silchar, Assam.



Bhagwat criticised the “western” lifestyle adopted by people in urban areas and blamed it for the increase in crime against women in cities. “You go to villages and forests of the country and there will be no such incidents of gangrape or sex crimes. They are prevalent in some urban belts. Besides new legislations, Indian ethos and attitude towards women should be revisited in the context of ancient Indian values,” he said.

Defending Bhagwat’s remarks, RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav on said, “The statement of RSS chief should be taken in proper perspective. He (Bhagwat) has already demanded strict punishment for rapists and even called for death penalty if required,” Madhav said.

“All that he said is that in Indian tradition we have great respect for women and we should learn to uphold this tradition. If one goes away from this tradition it will result in rise of crime against women,” he added in the RSS chief’s defence.

Nandy further added that the reason why he sees a rising incidence of rape is “because the kinds of rapes that we hear of now are mostly violent”.

“You can almost call it anomic rape. These are typical characteristic of anonymous cities. Highly individualised, personally thin cultures and it is so not only inIndia, I repeat, but perhaps all over the world from which we have data. So in one sense, Bhagwat is not wrong, but he has absolutised this difference to make a different kind of point to protect India perhaps, its so called pristine purity as it survives outside urban India. In anonymous societies kinship dies and community ties weaken and become superficial. It is in these circumstances that you see the kind of rape that you are seeing today,” Nandy says.

Shoma Chaudhury @ShomaChaudhury

Mohan bhagwat is clearly out of touch with reality if he thinks rapes don't happen in bharat. Dalits, tribals and rural women don't count?

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From: The Times of India

Bhagwat, Vijayvargiya draw flak from activists and academics alike

By Meenakshi Sinha, TNN | Jan 4, 2013, 09.38 PM IST

NEW DELHI: The controversial statements on rape and women by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat and Madhya Pradesh industry minister Kailash Vijayvargiya of the BJP have drawn flak from activists and academics alike.

Social scientist Dipankar Gupta says that both statements stem from untutored mindsets. "Bhagwat seems to say that rapes don't happen in villages. On the contrary, the number of rapes in villages is phenomenal but they largely go unreported," he says.

Gupta further points out that the RSS is strongest in urban India with no or little presence in the villages. ""It only proves that its followers are city products who have a romantic notion of rural India. Bhagwat's statement should not be given any importance," he says.

"It's inexcusable that Bhagwat's statement comes at a time when newspapers are full of reports on rapes in the country. It seems he does not read newspapers and that's inexcusable," Gupta adds.

The RSS chief's Friday statement that "such crimes (read rape) hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occur in India" hinted at western influences in lifestyles and values in Indian cities vis a vis Indian villages as the reason behind increasing cases of rapes. He was addressing a citizens' meet on Tuesday during his four-day visit to Silchar in Assam.

According to women's rights activist Ranjana Kumari, Bhagwat's statement smacks of patriarchy. "He's not saying anything new as the feudal mindset of controlling women hasn't changed," she says.

Kumari maintains that a village is a closed society where a woman cannot afford social shame. "Hence, most cases of rape go unreported there as compared to cities," she adds.

Vijayvargiya's statement too has drawn widespread criticism. Quoting from the Ramayana, the MP industries minister had said that just like Sita was abducted by Ravana for crossing the Lakshman Rekha, a woman will be punished if she crosses her limits.

For sociologist Shiv Visvanathan, such statements underline the problem with the BJP mindset. "The BJP looks at myths without taking into account their historical context. Also, the overemphasis on beauty, morality and tradition against modernity is nothing new. It stems from the fact that such leaders live in an imaginary line dividing India and Bharat," he says.

Kumari proposes a role reversal in the wake of such statements. "It's high time to control men now. We should look at what kinds of controls should be imposed on them so that they let women be," she says.

That apart on Jan 2, a panchayat in Bihar's Siwan district banned use of mobiles and warning clothes like jeans and short dress for school and college girls. Kumari says that such acts are intended to curtail women's freedom. "It is time to look at how society is treating women rather than find ways in which they can be controlled," she says.

The Ramayaana is a continuing, many-sided conversation between cultures and religions (Samhita Arni)

From: The Indian Express

The Many True Kandas

Samhita Arni

Oct 23 2011, 03:30 hrs New Delhi:

The Ramayaana is a continuing, many-sided conversation between cultures and religions. By scrapping AK Ramanujan’s essay from its syllabus, can Delhi University ignore that exchange?

Last fortnight, Delhi University decided to remove AK Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation from its history syllabus, perhaps in response to earlier protests in 2008 over the inclusion of this essay. The decision scares me for many reasons, partly because it suggests that a viewpoint is beginning to prevail which perpetuates the notion of the Ramayana as exclusive, Hindu property, and ignores the fact that the Ramayana has been re-told — and is still being re-told — by Muslims, Buddhists, Jains and people of other faiths.

My own life bears this out. As a child who accompanied a diplomat father on various overseas postings — Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand — the one constant in all the cultures I spent my childhood in was the Ramayana. In Indonesia, a largely Muslim country, we watched Wayang Kulit, the shadow puppet theatre which has plays on stories from the Ramayana. In Pakistan, I was told as a five-year-old that “Lahore” came from Lavapuri, from a legend that Lahore was founded by Ram's son Lava. In Chennai, my birthplace and the city my mother comes from, stories are still told of the founder of the Dravidian movement, EV Ramasamy Naicker, Periyar, who wrote a banned version of the Ramayana casting Ravana as a tragic hero, and, in an inversion of what happens at Dussehra, gathered hordes on the beach to burn images of Ram. In Thailand, one finds the Ramayana in many places, in the names of its kings, in Ayutthaya city (from Ayodhya), and in a beautiful poem inscribed on the walls of a wat (monastery), in which Ravana declares his undying love for Sita. Further afield, traces of the Ramayana linger in Angkor Wat in Buddhist Cambodia and Laos (like Lahore, also supposedly named after Lava.)

And yet, the Ramayana that is in ascendance in the popular imagination —the one repeated to me by my Hindu family — was stripped of all these delightful cadences and associations. From a story inhabited with magic, sorcerers, demons, talking animals and flying monkeys, it shrunk to a hagiography, a story about an ideal man/God, and his ideal wife. It was a story that prescribed roles for men and women, and was told in such a way that it failed to grasp my imagination as a child.

What could a girl — encouraged to think and question, to want and aspire for more than her mother and grandmother had ever had — admire in the silent, suffering, self-sacrificing Sita of popular imagination?

Five years ago, I rediscovered the Ramayana. I returned to India after almost a decade abroad, and I found a country where the Ramayana is still frequently referred to. (The references still amaze me. Recently, the Supreme Court mentioned the Lakshman rekha in the 2G case. In a school debate which I recently judged, the term Ram Rajya made a frequent appearance. A reality show on a Kannada channel named a line that participants could not cross the Lakshman rekha.) Moreover, the Ramayana was, and still is, a part of discussions about Indian identity and the state.

When I delved into the Ramayana as an adult, I was surprised by what I found.

I was astonished to discover in one version that Janaka found Sita, as a child, playing with Shiva's bow, and watched her lift it. Hence, he devised the test for her Swayamvara: for if Sita could lift the bow as a child, the man who would marry her, must, at least, be able to string the bow. This Sita was physically strong.

Reading Arshia Sattar's masterful translation of Valmiki's Ramayana, I discovered that Valmiki's Sita is one who says that dharma is sukusma — subtle and intangible. This Sita advises Ram, in the forest, to give up his weapons for the duration of exile and live a life in keeping with the peaceful, non-material dharma of the forest and Vanaprastha. This Sita was wise.

I became fascinated by the Ramayana and it's multiplicity of retelling. (This fascination has led to two books — a speculative fiction thriller that's due out next year, and a graphic novel Sita's Ramayana with Patua artist Moyna Chitrakar.)

In the process of creating a text to accompany Moyna's artwork, I explored the folk traditions, where women, singing in Sita's voice, expressed their own problems while describing her suffering. In her voice, they express their own lives.

The Ramayana has been re-told, recast many, many times. This polymorphous tradition is precisely what AK Ramanujan's essay explores. Here is Ramanujan's account of my favorite anecdote:

“To some extent all later Ramayanas play on the knowledge of previous tellings: they are meta-Ramayanas. I cannot resist repeating my favourite example. In several of the later Ramayanas (such as the Adhyatma Ramayana, 16th C.), when Rama is exiled, he does not want Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile, and so on. When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, ‘Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sita doesn’t go with Rama to the forest?’ That clinches the argument, and she goes with him."

What emerges from Ramanujan's essay is not just that the Ramayana is a polymorphous tradition. It's also a many-sided conversation, that spans cultures, languages, centuries and religions. There are Buddhist and Jain versions of the Ramayana. (The Patuas, the itinerant storytelling tribe to which Moyna belongs, are a mixture of Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, who all retell the Ramayana.)

Retelling the Ramayana has been a subversive act, a political act. Molla, a Telegu poetess and a potter's daughter, retold the Ramayana in simple language (in contrast to the ornate, difficult language that Brahmins used) and thus made it accessible to everyone. The Kannada writer Kuvempu, a Ram bhakt, struggled with the treatment of Shambukha (the shudra who Ram beheads in the Uttara Kanda for performing tapasya, which causes the death of a Brahmin's son) and wrote Shudra Tapasvi, which inverts the episode. Michael Madusudhan Dutt pioneered the use of blank verse in Bengali literature in the Meghnad Badh Kabya, a poem on Ravana's son Meghnad (aka Indrajit).

I've been to shadow puppet performances, and watched audiences laugh uproariously at shows that interpolate references to contemporary events (and characters from the Arabian Nights). Scholars speculate that the story of Hanuman, traveling on the Silk Route centuries ago, inspired the tales of the Monkey God, Sun Wukong, the hero of the 16th century Chinese epic Journey to the West.

If we cease to acknowledge these retellings, we will forget the many reasons why the Ramayana is important, and forget how the story has travelled and the new forms it has taken. We will also discourage further retellings — and for the epic to remain alive and relevant to every generation, it must be re-told in a way that reflects the anxieties and issues of that society.

When our society finds the idea of multiple retellings offensive and preserves only one version, we silence inquiry into the epic, we put it on a pedestal. We cease to engage with it, its characters and their dilemmas.

It's in this polymorphous tradition that Ramanujan describes, in the many voices and languages of so many Ramayanas, that I find the best of India — a place of many voices, opinions, cultures, faiths and languages.

(Samhita Arni is a Bangalore-based author)

Defending of the very worst of Hindu obscurantism in the name of choice

ndtv.com
September 30, 2009 , India

Do women always face the brunt of tradition?
24 min 55 sec

In a shocking incident from Tamil Nadu, thousands of women and some small girls were brutally whipped for hours at a temple.

Our Inherited Brutalities

Tehelka

full story with pictures: http://tehelka.com/story_main34.asp?filename=Ne271007

In India, tradition is a mask for tyranny. Collective violence is unleashed upon all those who defy it

S. ANAND
New Delhi

Most people do not realise that society can practice tyranny and oppression against an individual in a far greater degree than a government can. The means and scope that are open to society for oppression are more extensive than those open to the government; also, they are far more effective. What punishment in the penal code is comparable in its magnitude and its severity to excommunication? — BR Ambedkar

A CONSERVATIVE SOCIETY, enforcing its dictates with an iron hand — that is who we are, us Indians. Men and women who do not fall in line are routinely persecuted — and killed — under antiquated norms of honour and right conduct. Each day, violence is unleashed by society in its various manifestations — the family, biradari, caste, village, religion. Governed by unwritten rules, the “world’s largest democracy” seems to be doing little better than a theocratic dictatorship.

A spate of incidents testifies to this. The mysterious death of Rizwanur Rehman in Kolkata for the crime of loving and marrying Priyanka Todi, a Hindu; the September 10 lynching of ten people of the Kureri community in Vaishali, Bihar; the ostracisation of HIV-positive Jayalakshmi Bhovi, a midday-meal worker in Thombattu in Karnataka’s Udupi district; the televised mob attack on August 27 on Salim Ilyas, an unemployed youth in Bhagalpur, Bihar, which inspired a similar attack on a “gypsy” woman and her children in Kerala on October 3; the forced expulsion in September of 62 families of Pardhis — an itinerant tribe — from Chothiya village, 165km from Bhopal, and the razing of their homes built on authorised land; the killing of 30- year-old Natarajan, tied to a coconut tree by mill workers in Salem, Tamil Nadu, on September 23; the regular persecution of men and women who prefer to choose their own partners anywhere in the country. Life in India’s village republics can indeed be nasty, brutish and short. An urban location may offer relative relief, but not necessarily. As popular television actor Aamir Ali, who plays a Hindu protagonist in the serial Woh Rehne Wali Mehelon Ki, would testify. He was recently denied the right to buy a house in Springfield Co-operative Housing Society in the upmarket Andheri suburb of Mumbai — a city that passes for India’s most cosmopolitan even when it nurtures caste and community-specific housing societies.

Ali filed a public interest litigation petition before the Bombay High Court this August, but lawyers are already citing the 2005 Supreme Court judgement by Justices BN Agrawal and PK Balasubramanyan in the Zoroastrian Co-operative Housing Society case. The court upheld “the right of the Society to insist that the property has to be dealt only in terms of the bye-laws of the society, and assigned either wholly or in parts only to persons qualified to be members of the society in terms of its bye-laws.” Meaning, there is nothing illegal if a registered society seeks to restrict membership and exclude the general public. In Chennai, a magazine called Dalit Murasu was denied space and hounded out. Having moved several offices, its editor Punitha Pandian says, “People would receive us well and be nice to us till we mentioned the name of our magazine.”

In India — rural and urban — what passes for tradition and collective wisdom acts as a regulatory mechanism more powerful than the laws of the land. Those who transgress boundaries are either excommunicated or ghettoised, or sometimes simply executed. Everyday societal violence is rendered invisible, for much of it is “constitutive of Indian society, particularly in the maintenance of a hierarchical Hindu society,” ashistorian Dilip Menon sees it. “The State in India is like Dhritarashtra: blind, ineffective, idealistic.”

IN THE HINTERLANDs, women who assert their individuality are paraded naked, branded witches and often killed. In Assam, in the past five years, 59 people have been killed — 22 in 2005 alone — in 47 reported cases of witch-hunting. Six months ago, in the Chennai suburb of Pallavaram, a woman suspected of infidelity was tied to a tree and lynched. In most cases, the police blame it on mob fury and no action is taken. Under the ruse of maintaining law and order, the police, and sometimes the judiciary, invariably take the view that society’s diktats must be respected. In several instances, such as in Kherlanji where a year ago four members of a Dalit family were tortured to death for defying caste rules, the police, even when alerted, took its own time to arrive. When it did, it just pleaded helplessness. Says Menon, who teaches at Delhi University, “Bollywood satirises the police force and exalts the vigilante. As in the Hindi film, justice is not the preserve of the State; it is the right of the people. The police always arriving late in films is a metaphor for the irrelevance of the State apparatus. The perception is that you need to take the law into your own hands, as the Thakur did in Sholay. Of course,such heroism is prohibited for the Dalit and the Muslim.”

In Edappal, Malappuram district, Kerala, a mob at a busy market area descended on 41- year-old Jyoti and her two children when a customer raised an alarm saying her child’s gold anklets had been stolen. Jyoti was a suspect only because she belonged to a denotified nomadic community from Karnataka and was found “loitering” in the area. Public spaces in India are demarcated on such basis: there are legitimate occupants and then there are loiterers.

According to J. Devika, historian with the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, when Jyoti was strip-searched and manhandled by a mob, progressive intellectuals and the political class were quick to re-emphasise the difference between (uncivilised) Bihar and (civilised) Kerala. “But the state government and the intelligentsia remain blind to other forms of mob rule that are part of everyday life in Kerala. When sex workers are pushed out of their homes by moral vigilante “mobs”, when HIV infected children are thrown out of school by well-educated parents, when the “Gulf wife” is publicly punished for alleged “straying”, why is Kerala’s enlightened civil society so slow to respond?” asks Devika.

Ravikumar, writer and Dalit Panthers MLA in Tamil Nadu, says universal adult franchise and other ornamental aspects of parliamentary democracy do not ensure social democracy. “Most Indians, especially in rural India, are outside the purview of citizenship. Basic rights that many urban Indians take for granted do not exist for millions. Authoritarianism in Indian society is not vested solely in the centralised authority of the State, it is vested more within society. Hence the urban middle-class’ passive acceptance of the Emergency.”

The increase in the physical manifestation of violence also owes to hitherto-subordinated communities asserting their rights. It is only when subaltern communities seek to transgress boundaries drawn by society that we see erruptions. K. Satyanarayana, who heads the Kula Nirmoolana Porata Samiti (Forum for Annihilation of Caste) in Hyderabad, says the spurt in brutality should not be read merely as collusion between civil society and the State. “The widespread violence inflicted on Dalits across the country, particularly in the North, owes also to their assertion in the public domain — especially in the wake of Mandal and the Ambedkar centenary in 1990. A Dalit who goes to college and falls in love with an upper caste girl would be beaten up or even killed for asserting his humanity,” he says.

BESIDES DALITS, several communities — sub-castes, religious minorities, tribes — are organising themselves as identity movements. “The secular and liberal intellectuals are uncomfortable with such assertions of caste and religious minorities, but these struggles are significantly reshaping democracy in India. The violence we see today is a result of these contestations,” says Satyanarayana.

Even chilling statistics — 13 Dalits murdered every week, 3 Dalit women raped every day — do not evoke a response. “We are inured into thinking India is not racist and fascist even if society murders 2,000 Dalits over a year, witch-hunts 500 women, and kills a few hundreds in mob violence. Our civil society does not seem to react as long as a pogrom like in Gujarat does not happen,” says Ravikumar.

It’s a society that also comes down heavily on marriages which defy the system. A look at matrimonial columns and websites shows how most Indians prefer to find comfort in “arranged” subcaste and denomination-specific marriages. Despite the State providing Rs 50,000 as cash incentive to marriages involving a Dalit partner, there’s widespread persecution of couples who marry out of choice. Says Sharmila Rege, professor of sociology at Pune University, “Denial of the freedom to love a person — who does not belong to the same religious and caste group into which one is born, or a person of the same sex — is so naturalised in our caste-based patriarchal society that it does not even appear as denial until someone is brutally murdered for challenging this denial.” Rege says, “Women are the gateways of the caste system. Endogamy or marriage within sub-caste becomes essential to maintaining hierarchy and caste status in Indian society. Family, community and the State collude to punish young people who transgress these boundaries, for at stake is the reproduction of gender, caste and class inequalities.”

The haemorrhaging in society is historically linked to two perspectives that have dominated views on development in post-Independence India: the Nehruvian liberal State that stood for technocratic governance and which was criticised for oppressive homogenisation of society, and the communitarian perspective represented by Gandhi that has, since the 1980s, resulted in the NGO-led critique of the Nehruvian paradigm. Gandhi put forth the concept of a society based on sanatana (eternal) dharma, emphasising a non-secular, communitarian logic. The performance of duties was prio - ritised over the exercise of individual rights. However, Ambedkar spoke the secular language of rights of individuals, especially of minorities, and championed liberty, equality and fraternity. Reacting to Gandhi’s romance with villages, Ambedkar had told the Constituent Assembly: “I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?”

Such ruination unleashed by a militant society sits surreally juxtaposed to an Incredible India that the Dhritarashtra State prefers to showcase through malls, a soaring Sensex and nuclear muscle.

with inputs from Teresa Rahman in Guwahati, PC Vinoj Kumar in Chennai, Shalini Singh in Mumbai, M. Radhika in Bangalore, KA Shaji in Thiruvananthapuram and Anand ST Das in Patna [For case studies from across India, visit www.tehelka.com]

WRITER’S E-MAIL
sanand@tehelka.com

Pragmatics of the Hindu Right (Tanika Sarkar)

Economic and Political Weekly, No. 31, July 31, 1999

The Rashtrasevika Samiti, the women's wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was in expansive mood during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Now, it has reduced to a small, bounded, non-expansive affair like the good, modest, non-competitive Hindu woman. What is the significance of this new accent? The significance lies in the Samiti's women being the custodians of essential values and ideology of the RSS, which the other front of the latter have diluted and imperilled in their electoral preoccupations. And if at all the electoral battle is won, the Samiti women, being exemplars of purity and domesticity, will share along with their male counterparts of the RSS the bright future of Hindu rashtra as defenders of tradition against the west and partners in internal colonisation of Muslims and Christians.

FOR FULL TEXT SEE: http://www.epw.in/special-articles/pragmatics-hindu-right.html