A Lady Writing. Johannes Vermeer.Courtesy: Wikipedia
Ajeet Cour
THE bottomline is that writings, and for that matter any other creative effort should not be categorised on the bases of gender, caste, colour of the skin, ethnicity, or the economic status of the country where a writer lives.
Writing is either excellent, or mediocre, or just trash, same is true for other creative activities too.
But I must admit that the same subjects treated by women writers or painters or film makers or theatre directors acquire an additional dimension. A dimension that is very powerful and very subtle !
But my only objection is that when my readers and critics read the writings of a woman writer, they expect stories or poems of love-lorn and tear-soaked girls, of domestic atrocities and insensitive parents, wayward husbands and cruel in-laws ! Precisely, all the problems which a woman faces in the context of being a woman.
That is where the real trouble starts for a woman writer who transcends these concerns and views herself as an intense part of half of the population of this country and as a citizen of the world which is fast changing, and translates her political and socio-economic concerns in her writings. In other words, when she steps out from her allotted and allocated space and expands her concerns in her writings, when she steps out from the usually accepted nuances and norms of women’s writingsshe confronts that strange tribe of male writers and critics with their inflated egos. Members of this tribe actually believe that it is within their power to establish, obliterate or extinguish a writer from the history of literature of any language. They try with all their mighty jargon to sweep that writing under the carpet.
Women writers can write about ways in which we are subjecting our women as our main targets. About the literacy rate which is so low, and so much more lower for the girl child ? About the 7-8 year old little mothers who look after their little sisters and brothers while their mother is working as a domestic help or a construction labourer ? And those 7-8-10 year olds who are raped and the culprits get away with the crime so easily ?
A wall of strange questions and stranger paradoxes face me, a stone wall that my voice tries to penetrate in my writings and reach across. There is an abrupt realisation that our so-called democracy is so appallingly one-sided as far as its application to women and minorities and lower castes and Dalits is concerned. Their world comprises a whole black area, an area of darkness where every hope is forbidden.
I am face to face with a whole heap absurdities of our political, economic and social system, of personal tragedies of outrageous proportions, of the enormity of inequalities meted out to not only half of the population of this country but also to lower castes and landless labourers and all the have-nots, of mass starvations and gang rapes, of mass uprootings and mass fears, of mass killings and senseless terror which stalks every street and peeps into every home, particularly those streets which are unlighted, and those homes which have low walls made of mud and provide easy access to the brutality of the intruders, and which have roofs made of dry straw which can be easily ignited.
I know that our history is a long saga of savage wars and terrible massacres in which the worst sufferers have always been women. But in today’s India, with the sudden spurt of fundamentalist forces which tear the country limb from limb on the basis of gender, religion, caste and class discriminations, the senseless destruction of human beings and particularly of women – the destruction not for territories or for land, not for gold or for tribal revenge, not for power or for slaves, only sheer and stark destruction of human lives and human dignity of which women are the main victims : either directly by rape and violence, or indirectly by losing the bread-winner of the family, or losing sons and husbands and fathers and brothers which open wounds in the heart that don’t heal – all this senseless destruction is now at a pitch which can be comparable only to mass exterminations in Hitler’s gas chambers.
I realise, and so all of us should, that every gang rape and every act of violence against women and the poor and Harijans and Dalits diminishes me, and diminishes you. No need to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for me, and for you too.
We are great ones in mythifying things, Nehru was the Great Visionery, the Builder of the Nation, the beloved ‘Chacha Nehru’; Indira Gandhi was ‘Mataji’ and ‘Goddess Durga’. All on godly pedestals! And the Constitution? – A plaything, merely a toy you can toss across any way you like! A little twist in the Constitution and you can take away all rights of liberty and equality from human beings, and also their dignity through black laws. A little twist, and you can undo a small relief which came the way of Muslim women for example – as in the Shah Bano case – through the Supreme Court, and push the women back to Middle Ages where they have no equality and no rights. Constitutional promises be damned!
The rise of fundamentalism that we have seen in recent years is so enormous in proportion that we find people rationalizing it or putting their conscience to sleep. Anybody who dares talk against these fundamentalists is chewed and devoured without needing a toothpick even.
If you want to judge whether any society is civilized or not, you can judge it by what it thinks of its women. All social changes are reflected in relationships between genders and classes. As long as we keep on with our policy of apartheid towards the have nots, the Harijans and Dalits, and women, and keep on with our discriminations on the basis of gender or class or caste or religion our social system will remain rotten and the political changes, if any, will remain meaningless. The paradox is that all this brutality is perpetrated in the name of religion, in the name of nationalism and patriotism. All these gilt edged notions need to be redefined.
Goddesses in Indla are ‘mothers’ according to the old traditions. Motherhood leads to a life-long wish-fulfillment of Indian woman and is crucial to her sense of being a complete woman. That is what the patriarchal society has hammered into her head over the centuries, and she has been brain-washed to believe in the myth herself. She is the ‘mother earth’, which the man ploughs and sows his precious seed in. If the earth is not fertile and the precious seed is wasted, she is condemned as ‘waste land’ , infertile, to be discarded like wastepaper.
She, the nurturer of others, is herself like a spiritually orphaned identity.
Germain Greer once said, “You Indians treat your womenfolk like you treat your cow. You worship both and work both to death”.
Though there are some legal rights available to women, they remain mostly ineffectual because of the general apathy towards women. Out of ten thousand cases of atrocities, perhaps only one dares to come forward and demand justice. And even that solitary one is crushed by the system.
Why do the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine suffer silently? Because the upper crust of society is bound by the social taboos and social stigma attached to the woman who seeks justice; and the lower classes are of course either unaware of their rights or are economically weak to go in for legal justice. Moreover, how does a woman produce a ‘witness’ in a rape case, or how does a young girl’s ashes – who was burnt to death by the husband and inlaws-produce a witness to the heinous crime committed in the four walls of a house ?
Apart from the social injustices and domestic violence and social violence in the form of rapes, women are exploited in very conceivable area, be they farm labourers or factory hands, artisans or in public services, office workers or construction labourers, housewives or prostitutes. In fact women are the most oppressed and exploited section of the entire working class. They are the victims of a kind of interior colonialism in a patriarchal society. This is the sort of ‘apartheid’ against which no international forum cries for ‘sanctions’ on the perpetrators of this crime. When we talk of our sense of equality and our marvellous justice in the field of human rights in international fora, we do so quite self-righteously, without feeling an iota of shame.
Status of women in India is a far cry – rather a cry in the wilderness – from the equality and quality of life that the Constitution of this country endorses.
Out of the 340 million female population in India, nearly 150 million suffer material poverty and many more live on its edge. Nearly 90% of female labour force is in the unorganised sector. Nearly 50% of agricultural labour and related activities are dependent on women, yet they are nowhere in the decision-making processes.
A study by Nandita Gandhi revealed that there is wage inequality of 50 to 80% between men and women for the same type of work.
Ela Bhatt once said, “Women are poorer than the men among the poor. They are the worst victims of all socio-economic decay, degradation and distortions”.
In rural areas, the women and even their little daughters, like their sisters in the rest of the developing world, grow most of the food, look after the livestock, till most of the fields, and are on par, as far as their status is concerned, with all the landless labourers of the country.
Besides it is the women who fetch water from great distances, cook all the meals, raise their families and yet have no right over the lands or the house.
What else can you expect from a society whose ethics are based on Manusmriti, on which fundamentalist organisations are already trying to base their strategies and attitudes towards women! And need I remind you what Manusmriti and Tulsidas say ? That the drum, the villager, the ‘shudra’ and women deserve to be beaten to be kept in perpetual subordination. In our mythologies we have created archetypes of women, conditioning the lives of hundreds of generations of women. The archetypes are like steel jackets which condition the attitude of society towards women.
The result is there for all to see. The emergence of a new wave of male chauvinism which prompted the Shankracharya of Puri to stop a woman Sanskrit scholar from reciting the Vedas because the Shankracharya says that the ‘Shastras’ do not permit it. And which Vedas? Can the Shankracharya please enlighten us about the authentic authorship of Vedas ? – Or that no woman ever contributed to them ?
And that reminds us that some years ago Swami Niranjan Dev Tirath strongly defended the practice of ‘sati’, declaring that the practice had the sanctity of ‘vedas’, and whosoever committed sati and burned herself on the funeral pyre of her husband deserved to attain sainthood.
This rise of fundamentalism is broadly based on certain myths. For example, the Aryan myth : that pure Indians are Aryans and pure Indian culture means Aryan Vedic culture. Rise of Nazism was the outcome of such a thought process.
In what way will the Constitution come to the rescue of women which assures all Indians have a right to equality irrespective of caste, creed, religion or sex when people like Swami Muktananda, known for his support of the Ramjanambhoomi Movement, are bent upon “putting women, lower castes, outcastes and minorities in their proper place”. The stress is on ‘proper’, which tentamounts to subversion and inequality and a kick in the…
What can we expect of our judicial system too? We are fools if we think that the judiciary will come forth to implement the constitution and come to the rescue of women. It was not far back in time when Justice Ranganath Mishra almost ordered that ‘women should all stay home and cook’.
The results of such ideas and apathy towards women are there in broad daylight. In hundreds of cases of barbarity against women – be it parading them naked in the streets, domestic violence, dowry deaths et al – the culprits are either set free or are given such light punishment that it makes a mockery of Justice. Or the court cases drag on for years, the evidence evaporates in thin air, the high and mighty who perpetuate these crimes can afford to buy everything and everyone, and finally the cases are dismissed on the grounds that enough evidence is not available.
In the meanwhile, the helpless victim – one out of ten thousand who dares to raise the issue – dies a thousand deaths. She is stripped a thousand times in the police interrogations, in the courts, because stripping doesn’t involve only the clothes that are stripped off, more importantly it involves the dignity of the victim.
Why was Roop Kanwar allowed to die against her wish ? Why was no action taken against the murderers who pushed her into the funeral pyre of her husband ? Why was the cremation place allowed to be sanctified, with thousands of devotees thronging to it ? Why did the Bengal High Court abstain from passing orders against a procession of devotees to Rani Sati Temple in Kakurgachi, saying the Court was not concerned with the sanctified worship.
That is the state of affairs of our reverend judiciary. It is not surprising that sometime back, activists belonging to 15 women’s organisations burnt the effigy of ‘laws of the land’ outside the Supreme Court to condemn the judgement in the Suman Rani custodial rape case, who was raped by two policemen in Bhiwani Khera Police Station. The policemen were given the sentence of 10 years imprisonment by Session Court and High Court. But the Supreme Court later reversed this decision.
Police-Politicians-Judiciary nexus doesn’t need to be elaborated. And politicians? Less said about them, the better. Because whatever comes into the open, is merely the tip of the iceberg. But to quote only a few instances, in 1989 the Minister for Environment and Forests Z.A. Ansari tried to molest Mukti Dutta, an activist from Almora. The same year Goa Assembly Speaker Navekar attempted to molest Sunita Haldar, an employee in this office. In between these two incidents, the ‘mehant’ of Ramdeo Pirmandir raped a woman in his temple office, and was let off the hook with the help of his political mentors.
All hues and grades of power continue to be misused by men in public offices, in police stations, in schools and hospitals, in rural areas, and even in temples, because of the political backing and political protection, and religious sanctions provided by the fundamentalists.
Women are projected as stereotypes in our religious texts and on the screen. They are brought up in conditioned womanhood, to believe that they should be docile, attentive, nurturing, uncomplaining, devoted. Enforced by Manu’s strictures, myths, and even early educational system in which you learn the alphabets with pictures of ‘M’ for ‘Ma’ cooking and scrubbing, and ‘P’ for ‘Pa’ all dressed up, with a briefcase, going to office, or back home reading a newspaper, looking impressive and in full control of the domestic world of which he is the unquestioned monarch. Women work outside the house and bring home pay packets or daily wages, and then do all the housework as well, cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, washing, looking after the children and the in-laws and the Lord and master of the house who doesn’t move a finger to help the woman in the house. After all he is ‘Krishna’, with his pot of butter and his flute, with hosts of adoring gopis dancing to his tune. And, don’t we worship ‘lingam’ ? The source of all creativity! With an aura of godliness around virility ! So much for the educated, working urban women!
It is not only physical but also cultural subordination of women, reducing them to mere objects or reproductive systems in a patriarchal and male-dominated social structure which finds its reverberations not only in homes and families but also in politics, judiciary, police force, everywhere.
And how many women are there in decision-making places ? One Chokita Ayyar here and there might be an exception.
Has any women even dared to proclaim that she is the Daughter of God ? And how many women have decided the destiny of mankind by manufacturing atom bombs and maneuvering nuclear capacities ?
Unless we become sensitive to the new terror of fundamentalism and realise that the question of women’s oppression is linked to overall oppression against the lower castes, landless labourers, dalits and harijans, and the poor and starving millions, we are party to this crime. If we have to wake up, the time is now ! If we decide to fight the rising fundamentalism, the time is now !
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Ajeet Cour born 1934 writes fiction, short stories and novels in Punjabi and was the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award in 1985 and the Padma Shri in 2006 apart from a clutch of other literary awards.
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