India- the land of believers and the believed; the land of mysticism and mystery and the land of some of the most remarkable ironies human society has to exhibit. This land of the faithful has a noteworthy section of people (mostly from the majority Hindu population) devoted to the idea of the divine they have named-the Goddess and even amongst those who do not ‘worship’ this divinity, there is a considerable veneration for the feminine. The Indian culture, in general, talks about a respected position for the womenfolk, elevating them to the position of divinities, but the same culture in practice shows a different picture for the real life goddesses of India. We come across reports of violence against women almost regularly, be it at their own homes or outside, some of them heinous enough to mobilise entire cities and towns to demand justice for the victim and punishment for the culprit; but how many times have we actually paused to contemplate the real reason behind people acting in such vicious manner? Mostly we satisfy ourselves with the information regarding the crime committed and focus our energies to either criticising the event or if we are a tad more active, we engage in mobilising popular support in seeking justice; but seldom do we attempt to unearth the cause of such behaviour. In one opinion, the reason is embedded deep in our culture itself. The culture that seeks to deify women has at the same time laid down stringent norms to cripple the very females in their freedoms, their capacities and their lives. This stringency stems from the ancient conflict for assertion and the idea to regulate the role of women, to control births and hence, their sexuality and confine them to the households while men or rather, the masculine assert their utility and position. But this stringency does not work merely through the establishment of such norms but through their active enforcement over time by using a variety of sanctions and punishments for compliance or otherwise. Acute socialisation that commands the compliance from even the suppressed sections has been well employed for centuries and even millennia to control, if not directly suppress the females. Violence against women has erupted mostly when they have raised their voice against the unjust nature of the norms that govern their lives and when they have tried to live on terms which the mainstream patriarchal society viewed as a threat to their structure. Such acts of ‘assumed defiance’ need not necessarily be ones of revolutionary nature but acts as trivial as wearing clothes that are termed ‘culturally unsuitable’, although calling something culturally unsuitable demands deliberation on the very basic tenets of the culture and the diameters it draws for whichever purposes. The violence against women has proved itself to be persistent enough to withstand the forces of modernisation and education. Generally it would occur to us that with the growth of literacy rates in our country and the spread of a modern outlook across all sections, such savagery should experience a downward trend. But the misfortune is that many a time, highly educated individuals engage in such heinous acts which render their entire education worthless and on being confronted with the cause; they shift the blame to societal norms. But what they, we and most interrogators fail to understand in this situation are two dual aspects of the same condition-firstly, we form the society and it’s flaws are our creation and secondly, the resolution to such a deeply rooted evil lies only in the spreading of the ideas of equality of the two genders and making people aware of the daftness of many of the differences upon which the patriarchal norms are established; not mere literacy. In an environment where males realise the importance and value of the females around them, be it at home or outside, will the real goddesses of India recover from their condemnable situation. - Suvayu Sengupta ([email protected])
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AuthorAditya Nayak Archives
February 2017
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