Skip to main content

Women Power




There should be no difference whatever between man and woman when it comes to dignity.  Both are the same species.  Both are required to reproduce the species if nature’s rules are respected. They are counterparts of each other.  The concept of Ardhanarishvara in Hinduism eloquently illustrates the quintessentially complementary nature of man and woman.  

Yet women have been suppressed and oppressed in most parts of the world for a very long period of history.  The morning prayer of the Jewish men may be the most blatant outrage perpetrated on women theologically.  “Thank you, Lord, for not making me a woman,” the man prays every morning.  The woman is the cause of the human sinfulness, according to the Old Testament which is sacred to both the Jews and the Christians.  There is no female Rabbi in Judaism and there is no female priest in Christianity, though the discrimination is slowly relenting.

Islam is worse than its two Semitic predecessors when it comes to women’s rights.  Sexism becomes mathematically established in Islam.  “The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females,” says Quran 4:11.  When it comes to bearing witness in the court also, one man is equal to two women in that religion (Quran 2:28).  The Hadith and Al-sira are thoroughly soaked in male chauvinism.

We are very familiar with what Hinduism did with its widows.  The system of Sati was more inhuman than all the sexist oppressions and suppressions perpetrated by the Semitic religions.  Even today the purdah continues to veil many female faces in rural North India.  In spite of such wonderful concepts as Ardhanarishvara and Durga, women were flagrantly oppressed in Hinduism.  Manusmriti, for example, subjugated the woman to the father when she was a girl, to the husband when she was a woman and to the son when might be a widow.  But the same text also very contradictorily suggests that “where women are revered, there the gods rejoice; but where they are not, no sacred rite bears any fruit.”  Hinduism had highly ambivalent attitudes towards women like many other things.

These are just some examples of how religions were highly sexist.  And religions shape people's attitudes to a very great extent. 

Religions took a backseat in the 20th century.  Consequently women began to find emancipation.  Today we speak about empowerment of women, not just emancipation.  It’s a great change.  Women are no less than men in any way.  Given the right opportunities they will perform as well as men in any field.  Women’s empowerment is precisely about giving them equal opportunities and rights.  However, we find India still grappling with obscurantist and obsolete notions regarding women. 

There is a lot of contradictoriness in our attitudes towards women.  Maybe, it’s part of our very culture and tradition.  We should resolve those contradictions and bring about a society which puts women on the same platform as men.  That’s the real empowerment of women.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 168. #womenempowerment


Comments

  1. KalpanaMay 5, 2017 at 8:15 PM

    Every religion misinterprets its scriptures to subjugate women. Sometimes they don't even have to misinterpret - as you have pointed out with your examples. Patriarchy is rampant and insidious.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pranju chakrapaniMay 5, 2017 at 9:05 PM

    Her empowerment will be established when she will be able to walk alone without the fear of getting raped.

    I am happy with the exemplary judgment given by the SC against the nirbhaya case.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 6, 2017 at 7:36 AM

      I too welcomed the judgement. In matters such as this I don't endorse the human rights activists. Harsh actions are necessary sometimes for the sake of humanity.

      Delete
  3. Ravish ManiMay 5, 2017 at 10:41 PM

    The real question is why there's a need to suppress women, and the answer is they are really powerful. In all animal kingdom, if you see, you'll find females are powerful than their male counterparts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 6, 2017 at 7:37 AM

      That's true. Women are suppressed because they are indeed powerful. Perhaps they will outshine men and men don't want that.

      Delete
  4. Durga Prasad DashMay 6, 2017 at 11:14 PM

    Yes, the mindset of people need to change. Women have suffered and been discriminated in all societies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 7, 2017 at 6:10 AM

      Women are coming to the forefront now. But they face serious threats because of certain men's mindsets.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more