December 13, 2014
THE HUFFINGTON POST
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE TIMES OF INDIA GROUP
http://www.huffingtonpost.in/rita-banerji-/what-sanskrit-taught-me-a_b_6313504.html?utm_hp_ref=india
Writer, photographer and gender
activist
What
Sanskrit Taught Me About Being an Indian Woman
Posted: 12/13/2014 7:54 am IST Updated: 2 hours
ago
I'll say upfront, that in
the debate that's rocking
India, about the imposition of the near dead and
defunct Sanskrit language on students, I stand with the Yes camp. Though
probably, not for the same reasons.
Sanskrit was compulsory for me through school, but frankly I
never really took to it. I found the learning by rote, dull and tedious.
However, much later, I
found it was the key to many of my questions about Indian womanhood. That
moment came when I began researching for my book Sex and Power. As I
began to dig through India's centuries old literary archives, I was astonished
by how women's cultural and sexual identities and their social position, even
today, made perfect sense in context of the past. It was quite shocking, because it was as if the basic
logic of their (indeed, my!) existence had not changed in three thousand years!
The customary
sex-trafficking of women by families in India prevalent in communities like the
Bedia, or in the Devdasi tradition, or in
'bride-trafficking,' has
its logic in the Vedic cataloging of life and
things. Men are life and women are 'things'(orcheeze as the
colloquial phrase goes). Women, along with land, cattle etc. were classified as
men's property and the equivalent means for material transactions. They could
be traded as placatory 'gifts' to invading enemies, or pawned as need be, like Draupadi was.
Indeed the pathological
hankering for sons, and the irrational aversion to daughters, that drive
India's ongoing female genocide, are
irrefutably embedded in our ancestors' ideologies. Vedic texts
are obsessively fixated on the production of sons as a man's "highest
goal" in life, because sons certify his "masculinity" and
"immortality." Likewise, they hold women guilty of cheating men of
this much coveted goal, and indeed being a serious threat to their existence. Vedic
texts speak frenziedly of women as "greedy" and "devious,"
like "wolves" and "jackals," who rob men of semen without
giving them sons. Indeed daughters are seen as a woman's way of getting vicious
with men. The texts regard menstrual blood as evil personified that can harm or
kill a man. And so three thousand years on, menstruating women continue to be treated as pariah, or hauled to court like criminals. And many
women who give to birth to daughters are battered or killed.
Women in fact are seen as
such imminent threats to men's existence that the Vedas actually sanctified the
killing of infant girls and widows in the form of hymns and religious rituals.
Clearly this thinking lives on even today. While female feticide is rampant,
the 2011 census shows that more than 90% of
girls were in fact killed after birth; 7 million in the 1-6 years age group.
And while thousands of women aremurdered for dowry, there
are also "witch lynchings" and "honor killings." The fact
this blood-bath is a continued expression of India's Vedic legacy is evident in
itschilling normalization, in its
casual acceptance by the Indian public. The female genocide evokes no palpable shock or shame. And
that's possible only because what are otherwise "evil" acts, have
been deemed "sacred" in the nation's collective conscience by its
religion.
Probably,
the most worrying aspect of this mirroring of life and ideas, between India's
past and present, is in how oblivious its citizenry is to it. Most
Indians follow customs, rituals and beliefs in a mechanical way, blind to the
ideologies they stem from. Ideologies, which are buried in the past, obscured
by a language unfamiliar to most.
A simple, perhaps amusing
example of this double-blind is a reaction I often get from young Indians who've
read my book. The Lingam-Yoni is a leitmotif in my
book, and I track its social evolution through the ages. A majority of Indian
youth tell me that they had no idea that the Lingam and Yoni, that millions worship,
are not just the iconic representations of the penis and vagina respectively,
but that these are the actual words for these organs. Actually, when I studied
Sanskrit, we were taught the words for eyes, hand, feet, etc. but not for the
penis and vagina. How odd is that,
a language isolates you from your knowledge of your own self?
Sanskrit was always the
language of the upper castes, its access limited to the masses. Its zealous
guardians assumed the privilege of selective transmission and control over the
minds of the masses. Half-truths are thus floated to give convenient
interpretations, such as to the roots of historical misogyny. For instance
select lines from the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad (6.4.3) which describes sex with a woman as a
sacred ritual equating her "lap" to an "altar" and her
"vulva" to "fire" etc., is often presented as evidence of
the high regard for female sexuality. However, when you read the hymn in full,
you find out that it is a clinical prescription given to men for the
procurement of sons, with a warning, that if they don't follow the instructions
to a T, the women will again outwit them and steal their semen without giving
them sons!
Making Sanskrit universal will at least provide the majority
with a direct vision of their past, and the choice of challenging or changing
that which they find unacceptable. I, for my part, have gleeful visions of a
mutinous, in-your-face feminist revolution. Perhaps Sanskrit will yet prove to
be India's Pandora's box.
Image taken and provided
by Rita Banerji.
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