Skip to main content

Sabarimala and Women

Kerala coast: A photo from the year 1900


A century and a quarter ago, Swami Vivekananda called Kerala “a lunatic asylum.”  The prevalent caste system demeaned all but the Brahmins and their associates. The Namboothiri men could have sex with the Nair women of their choice by an arrangement called Sambandam [morganatic marriage]. The upper caste men brazenly exploited the women of the lower castes. Women of the lower castes were forbidden from covering their breasts. Women were treated on the whole as nothing better than goods and chattels.

According to a legend, Kerala was created by Parasuram, an incarnation of God Vishnu. This divine avatar did not hesitate to kill his own mother and brothers just to please the ego of his father. The father’s ego was hurt merely because his wife admired a prince who was bathing in the river along with his women. Marital fidelity is an Indian wife’s bounden duty. No other man should enter even her thoughts though the man could enter any woman’s petticoat.

In most parts of India women were nothing more than possessions of men. Kerala had its own unique ways of commodifying the women.

The Sabarimala Temple forbids the entry of women between the ages of 10 and 50. The presiding deity of the temple, Ayappan, is a perpetual celibate who does not wish to be tempted by women. Did the god make the rule, however?

Who made all the rules for women? For example, who made the rule of Sati? Of purdah? Of restrictions placed on widows? Of temple entry or non-entry?

The world has gone far ahead of regressive regulations and traditions. Why does India bury itself deeper and deeper into obscurantist thinking and practices? Genuine spirituality should liberate people from the darkness of all evils. The current wave of spirituality that is sweeping the country is doing just the opposite: it is enslaving people.

The country stands in great need of another Vivekananda.



Comments

  1. Gowthama RajaveluOctober 20, 2018 at 7:54 PM

    So true. Did the God make the rule? Pathetic to see the condition in Sabarimala. Nowadays everything is political, we are losing humanitarian thinking.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 20, 2018 at 8:01 PM

      Everything has been politicised. Gods must have died laughing at our pettiness and nastiness.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...
12 comments
Read more

Good Life

I introduced A C Grayling’s book, The God Argument , in two earlier posts.   This post presents the professor’s views on good life.   Grayling posits seven characteristics of a good life.   The first characteristic is that a good life is a meaningful one.   Meaning is “a set of values and their associated goals that give a life its shape and direction.”   Having children to look after or achieving success in one’s profession or any other very ordinary goal can make life meaningful.   But Grayling says quoting Oscar Wilde that everyone’s map of the world should have a Utopia on it.   That is, everyone should dream of a better world and strive to materialise that dream, if life is to be truly meaningful.   Ability to form relationships with other people is the second characteristic.   Intimacy with at least one other person is an important feature of a meaningful life.   “Good relationships make better people,” says G...
21 comments
Read more

Georges Lemaitre: The Priest and the Scientist

Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) The Big Bang theory that brought about a new revolution in science was proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges Lamaitre. When this priest-scientist suggested that the universe began from a “primeval atom,” Pope Pius XII was eager to link that primeval entity with God. But Rev Lemaitre told the Pope gently enough that science and religion are two different things and it’d be better to keep them separate.   Both science and religion are valid ways to truth, according to Lemaitre. Science uses the mind and religion uses the heart. Speaking more precisely, science investigates how the universe works, and religion explores why anything exists at all. Lemaitre was very uncomfortable when one tried to invade the other. God is not a filler of the gaps in science, Lemaitre asserted. We should not invoke God to explain what science cannot. Science has its limits precisely because it is absolutely rational. Although intuition and imagination may lead a scient...
6 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more