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THEY should be claiming equal or greater share in political power, in higher education with pivotal jobs, in inheritance and conjugal rights, and other privileges arbitrarily cornered by men. How should we then regard an apparent surge of women seeking equal rights in mosques and temples, which, for better or worse, have been bastions of the male clergy? In fact, the male bit is vestigial, for clergy does usually denote men in common parlance. Would coveting their jobs by women be a progressive move?
My query follows from considerable commotion in India involving the judiciary, the legislature and the executive in recent days over a few Hindu women seeking the right to enter temples in Ahmednagar district in Maharashtra and in Kerala. (And some powerful men have unusually forcefully argued on their behalf.) There has been, not to forget, an older discussion among supposedly liberal Muslim women. They have craved equality with men in access to mosques. Neither the Hindu women nor their Muslim equals seem to accept that gender inequality has formed the mainstay of religion as it is practised.
It is tempting, therefore, to address the problem with two responses – one, inevitably, in a lighter vein, the other zealously serious. Let’s lean on both and question the women who hanker after ranks and ritual monopolised by the deservedly reviled men of unbridled hypocrisy.
An earnest assertion came from Majaz Lucknavi, a serious poet often seen as a self-destructive man with a brilliant mind. Majaz saw women not as beings of uncertain social status but as comrades, rebels and leaders. “Tere maathey pe ye aanchal bahot hi khoob hai lekin/Is aanchal se tu ik parcham bana leti to achha tha,” he told his sweetheart. (Take off the veil from your forehead, though it looks lovely, and turn it into a flag of revolt.)
Akbar chortled that the veil though cast away by the modern woman had found its use with men — to mask their innately softer brains.
Humorist-poet Akbar Ilahabadi penned an acerbic quatrain that poked fun at men, using the women’s veil as a metaphor. “Beparda kal jo aaee’n nazar chand bibiya’n/ Akbar zamee’n mei’n ghairat e qaumi se garh gaya/ Poochhaa jo unse aapka parda wo kya hua/ Kehne lagee’n ki aql pe mardo’n ki parh gaya.” Akbar chortled that the veil though cast away by the modern woman had found its use with men — to mask their innately softer brains.
An observation by the late journalist Khushwant Singh would describe the state of play in the subcontinent. He discovered in a televised India-Pakistan cricket match in Lahore, when sporting ties were newly revived in the Vajpayee era, that the stadium was packed with beautiful and bedecked women — all evidently Pakistanis. Only one wore the burqa, and that was an Indian bowler’s mother. The Taliban, on their part, brought up in hatcheries in Pakistan with fanfare, are clueless about the battles that (the original) Malalai of Maiwand had led, without her veil, in fierce battles with British troops.
In some Indian cultures the veil and the purdah system have been keenly practised as a privilege of upper caste elites. India’s first president Dr Rajendra Prasad found access to his wife only in the pitch dark of her unventilated boudoir. A housemaid in the prosperous Kayastha family of Bihar accompanied him with a lamp to the threshold of the wife’s room. The maid then walked away with the light, leaving the master alone with his wife “without giving me a chance to see her,” he wrote in his autobiography. Custom required him to return to the men’s section of the mansion before daybreak.
The isolation of women from the men’s quarters is believed to be an upper crust tradition from mediaeval India. In Kerala, however, the subjugation of women took a bizarre and opposite form. A custom was enforced on Dalit women to not cover their breasts, and if they did, they would have to pay a tax. Juxtaposed with the upper caste recourse to the purdah, this law became all the more barbaric.
As the law did not allow Dalit women to cover their breasts, the tax was meant to add insult to their injury of being easily identifiable in the most demeaning way. The rulers ensured that the lower castes stayed in debt with laws against the poorest, imposing taxes on things as trivial as the right to wear jewellery and, for men, the right to grow a moustache.
It was then that one woman named Nangeli became the lightening rod for revolution. Her defiance brought about a simple yet far-reaching change that helped abolish the tax. As young women clamour for equal rights with the priestly classes, not many in Kerala seem to remember Nangeli, an Ezhava woman from Cherthala, who belonged to a family that could not afford to pay the prescribed taxes.
In a testing act of rebellion, Nangeli is said to have refused to uncover her breasts whenever it was demanded of her. When the tax collectors of the province came to her home, Nangeli did something unbelievable to defy them with a final blow. She cut them off and presented them to the collectors in a banana leaf. The tax collectors fled in fear as Nangeli bled to death at her doorstep, and the news spread across the state like wildfire.
In a matching act of protest, her husband jumped to his death on her funeral pyre. This was apparently the first recorded instance of a man committing sati instead of a woman.
Following her death, the crown annulled the tax in Travancore. And the land where she lived came to be known as Mulachiparambu, or, land of the breasted woman, in her honour.
Nangeli’s protest stands out in stark contrast with women clamouring to join the male bastions of ritual and tradition. She rejected the unequal system of privilege and abuse whereas they look poised to embrace it.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2016
