Today is 15th Feb and it's been one day since Valentine Day is over. News channels are full of news showing the moral police (moral or immoral, I sincerely wonder) trying to tame the boys and girls bent on spoiling our Bhartiya Sanskriti (Indian Culture). Well, like millions of other people watching the news even I watched it, surfed channels after channels, grumbled over their acts and moved on to the next channels to see something different. Call it my fortune or something else, I got to see my own culture on some other channels at the same time. On NDTV Imagine, these days they are broadcasting Ramayana. It's almost in the last stage of Ramayana. Ravana has been killed and Lord Ram has saved Sitaji from Lanka. Today's episode had the story showing SitaJi going through the Agni-Pariksha to prove her chastity. I watched it for some time, with, let me be frank, a great surprise, as to what our culture teaches us about women. On another channel (it was some Star channel, I guess), there was Mahabharata being aired. It was the Mahabharata story shown in the form of an animated movie. As it was a movie, it went on very fast. Again there were many parts of the story, e.g. Madri (mother of Nakul and Sahdev) getting Sati (practice of being burnt alive with the dead body of her husband) after the death of Pandu, Gandhari choosing to be blind all over her life after getting married to a blind person, Draupadi marrying to five pandavas without any protest, Pandavas betting their own wife in the game of chausar etc etc, made me wonder, if this is what our Bhartiya Sanskriti teaches us about women!!!
It made me really think and ponder over the position our culture has given to the women in society. When we were kids these stories were taught to us and we learned them most reverently. At that time Sitaji going for Agni Pariksha looked like the most noble thing a woman can do. I must agree that I could not understand much of what was going on and why it was being done. I was a kid and unaware as well as ignorent of many things in life. Now that I have my own conscience and logical power, I can and would ask, why was it necessary for SitaJi to go for the chastity test ? She was in captive by a demon king. She had no power whatsoever to fight with him, otherwise she would not have been in captivity for fourteen long years. If God Ram had the right to ask her to prove her chastity, so had Sitaji from her husband! But that did not happen. It was the woman who had to prover herself, without any protest and only then she was accepted by her husband. we all watched it, and clapped too!!! Moral of the story, Ramayana teaches that between husband and wife, its the wife who should always do the sacrifice, large or small, irrespective of the enormity.
Talking about Mahabharata, I simply shudder describing the way women have been portrayed in this story. Some of the examples I have already given above in the first paragraph. There are plenty of them in Mahabharata which clearly shows that women had no self identity, no individual character without their husband. A woman's husband could make her a Dasi in one moment, just because he had nothing else to bet, and in the next moment someone could take all of her dignity in front of the eyes of hundreds of people. There were many such stories. we all watched it, and clapped too!!! Moral of the story, Mahabharata teaches us even worse, about the status and position a woman in a man's life, than Ramayana.
Now I want to ask Mr Mutalik and to all those countless abc dal and xyz sena people, what kind of culture do they want the girls of today's India to learn ? There was a time when a completely servile wife was looked upon as an epitome of culture and civilization. But at what cost ? She had no freedom in life and was molded into thinking that she should have no wish to have any freedom in life. Do you guys want that kind of culture brought back to today's society ? If today's girl wants to break those shackles and want to have little more freedom and independence for a better life, what's wrong with it ?
There can be pages after pages written on this issue. But I would like to stop it here, hoping that I have been able to make my point clear to the reader of this blog. Having said that, I must add that there are many good examples to emulate in these epics and we must follow them. But as far as the status of women is concerned, we are far better-off now than then.
Jai Hind !
