Why the Shani Temple Row doesn't Stir Me As a Feminist?

I believe firmly in the idea of gender-equality. Yet I am not too exercised by the latest row between the Shani Shingnapur temple authorities and a group of female activists that go by the name of Bhumata Ranragini Brigade (BRB). In order to defy the centuries old convention that prohibits women to enter the inner sanctum of the temple, members of this group tried to march into the temple on 26^th January. The group had to be hemmed in by the police.

Ideally, as a feminist, this regressive practice should have me outraged. But, leaving politically correctness aside for a bit, it doesn’t. Because this ostensible discrimination isn’t universal. It isn’t as though all the Hindu temples disallow entry to women. Only a very few temples do. There are also temples and rituals which are meant only for the women-folk, and men are disallowed to participate in them. For every temple where a woman isn’t allowed, there are fifty where she is.

The idea of gender-based discrimination on the basis of allowing/disallowing entry in the area of worship is complicated by the polytheistic nature of Hinduism. Unlike other monotheistic religions that believe in concept of only one God, Hinduism has an assortment of Gods and Goddesses. There are sthal-devtas, gram-devtas, kul-devtas etc. and corresponding devis (demigoddesses). And like us, these gods and goddesses have their own set of idiosyncrasies and preferences. Shiva is offered Bel-patra, while Vishnu is offered Tulsi. To say that in a Shiv temple Tulsi is being discriminated against, because Tulsi is feminine, may sound a bit odd. Many of the temples are centuries old and have legends and myths associated with their respective deities and their origins, owing to which there are different rituals and traditions, some of which may favour men while others may favour women.

This is not to shy away from the fact that religion is been historically used as tool by the dominant sections of the society force the rest into submission. Many of the religious practices are blatantly patriarchal and utterly regressive (say, Karwa-chauth). And they must be questioned and fought against, by all means. But to squabble over such issues as trying to gain entry into an area which is not designed for one’s gender may actually seem like a waste of one’s energy. Why should you as a girl demand a right to enter an all-boy’s school? This by no means should sound like a defense of gender-specific institutions. My submission is that we must try to channelize our energies in trying to build and promote gender-neutral institutions, rather than trying to demolish the few antiquated ones that exist. But let us not take away the right of people to engage with a gender-specific institution. They are as much entitled to be part of one as you are entitled to build and promote a gender-neutral one.

And if this issue were actually about barring of women in a school, or any other institution (say, the parliament or the judiciary) that could really empower them, I would have fervently denounced such a practice. But does entering a temple whose God isn’t too fond of you (as the priests would have you believe) really empower you? We need to step back and reassess the whole argument. If it’s about the right to pray, then I would ask: why do you even want to pray to a God that isn’t willing to grant you an audience because of your gender? Aren’t there other more inclusive and friendlier Gods? We are Hindus—we have no dearth of variety of Gods to choose from. If my God/Goddess doesn’t like me, I don’t like them too. I go to the one that likes me. As simple as that! If you say that it’s not the God who is disfavouring you but the priests (who are almost always men) and that you want to explore the spiritual connect you feel with that God, then I would say, that’s how religion has always worked. What your Gods wants will always be told to you by someone acting as an interface. You will always get mediated and filtered responses/commands from your Gods(/Goddesses).

 And in such case there’s little point in seeking an entry in such a system to become a part of it. You will instead be better off questioning the very system and breaking away from it. You don’t have to physically enter a place to explore your spiritual connection— if you believe in such a thing, and if you don’t, then why fuss? 

Can we, as feminists, not focus our energies on educating our daughters and instilling a rational temperament in them, if they are not killed in the wombs, that is?

My Bookish Woes(3): Of Literature Festivals and Book Launches

My Bookish Woes(1)

My Bookish Woes (2)

It’s the time of the year when there are literature festivals galore. These festivals bring writers face-to-face with their readers or, sometimes, just readers. You have your favourite writer sitting right before you, reading out his/her own work or talking about it. Not only their own work, writers could also be asked to pontificate about a wide range of literary issues (say, the future of novel) and non-literary issues (say, the rise of ISIS). We expect them to have an opinion about all these matters, and all that matters.  How well a book does now does not necessarily depend on how well-written the book is, but on how well-marketed it is. The publishing industry is not any longer untouched by (the much aggressively) rising consumerism. 

Books, too, like movies, are now released and launched with much fanfare. There is a great deal of emphasis on visibility. The writers have to be visible to be able to sell. To sell well, at any rate. The writers are now accessible through Twitter, Facebook, their own websites—which could be run by the writers themselves if they are not well established or by a professional if they can afford to hire one—and the literary events too. They write articles on popular web-platforms, and in return their latest or upcoming work gets a precious mention.   

But there was a time when writers thrived behind the veil of obscurity. Readers rarely had direct access to writers. Historically, we have never really known much about the writers and their world-view. How much do we know about Vyas, Homer, Kalidas, Virgil, Sapho? Very little. And most of it is speculative. Despite the humongous research and scholarship that Shakespeare has invited over the centuries, there are huge gaps in his life story as we know it; and we certainly don’t know what Shakespeare’s views on the subjects he wrote about were or what his politics was. One can venture to make inferences based on the works of these greats, but such an exercise is highly vulnerable to inaccuracies. Not always do the views of the writer and those expressed in a text match. The work produced may not always be an extension of the writer, as we generally tend to believe. T.S. Eliot famously called upon his fellow and future writers to shed the burden of personality in their works and thereby only propagated the cult of impersonal. In the Regency and Victorian era, many women writers took to writing under fictitious names, adding another layer of obscurity.  Even much after trend of using pseudonyms phased out, we had writers who were notorious for being reticent and unapproachable.

Samuel Beckett, for instance, never gave the kind of lengthy interviews that we see/read today. He was always the most evasive about his most evasive character: Godot. He never cared to freely explain away or comment on significance of Godot. Yet the popularity of his work has endured even after half a century. Take another example, the literary sensation, the voice of his age, J. D. Salinger. In his most loved work, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger ascribes the following lines to Holden: ”What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” However, Salinger himself remained quite an inaccessible recluse all his life. He himself would never entertain the kind of phone-call Holden might want to make to his favourite writer.

  I attended the book launch of Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseys Abroad last to last year. After the presenter was done asking her set of questions, the audience were given a chance to shoot questions, as is the custom in such events. When a lady asked Amit what books does he read, she was scandalised to hear the answer. Amit very nonchalantly said that he doesn’t read. After a moment or two of surveying the audience which sat aghast in utter silence, he smiled and said that he meant he doesn’t read fiction anymore, just poetry. Order was restored in the universe. Everybody started breathing normally again.

Whenever I attend such an event I have two major fears in my mind.

First, what if I end up asking the same cliché questions that the writer must be tired of answering? All the other questions that don’t pertain directly to the book being discussed, are attempts to understand the mind of the writer. We want to know how it is done. What books has the writer read? (Could I also read them and write as well?) What do they think of a particular book? (Do their views match mine?) Where did you grow up? (From where does he get his characters?) What was your childhood like? (Did he have a miserable childhood?) Does your spouse read your book? (Is their marital life blissful?) Most of these questions, perhaps unwittingly, aim at undoing the mojo of the writer at one level, and establishing a correspondence between the curious reader and the revered writer, at another level. We believe that the writer is endowed with a kind of insight that we are not, and that they have the remarkable quality of distilling that insight in from of words.

Second, what if there is a huge gap between the person I see on the stage and the image of the writer I have built in my head based on his/her book(s)? Perhaps, the writers too have this fear. J.D Salinger may have known that he could never talk in the same gullible and disarmingly amusing manner as Holden Caulfield.  The phenomenal Chimamanda Adichie confesses that it’s unfair for people to expect that she would fully be able to explain the motives of her much loved character Ifemelu, because her own life hasn’t been half as interesting as Ifemelu’s. In fact, she admits to discovering similarities between herself and Obinze. Perhaps, Beckett did not know any more about Godot than we do. This would mean that writers also can not know. And this thought makes me uneasy.

P S. Around writers, I behave like a gushing fourteen year old—too excited to be around them, and too dumbfounded to ask anything. All I can do is asking for an autograph.

 

Happiness

All that they tell you

about happiness is

shit

it is not found under ancient trees

nor in the caves of lofty mountains

or on the banks of pious rivers

happiness is to be fished

from the filth of your

everyday life

It is to be found in

clean, sun-dried underwear

(and stained too);

in the release

of a painfully full bladder;

in a person

humming the song

you were trying hard

to recall;

in clean and cold

water to drink on a

hot summer afternoon;

in looking at a photograph

in which you’re grinning

into a camera, wide-eyed,

when you’d no clue

what a camera is;

in sleeping, knowing

that the alarm won’t

go off in the morning;

in waking, knowing that

there’s another hour

for alarm to go off;

in a condom

that fits your size

if not your ego’s;

in dreaming about

the house where you’d spent

your childhood;

in seeing someone you love succeed

and someone you hate fail;

in eating first mango of the

summer

and first gazak of the winter;

in finding a comfort in a

a tale that you’ve read/heard

hundreds of time and knowing

its details like you know all

the arbitrary shapes on the

cemented floor and walls

of your old house

that you dream about;

in the shade of gray clouds

that have wafted over

out of nowhere

on a scorching May afternoon;

in thinking about home

when at school/work.

happiness is not an illusion

grandness is

infinity is.