Fearless Freedom Read online

  Pedestal or Prison?

  Gorakh Pandey’s poem, with which this chapter begins, starkly underlines the contrast between our society’s worship of woman as Mother and Motherland, and the fact that women in the same society are violently confined by locked windows in their homes. As an anonymous African American feminist said, ‘A pedestal is as much a prison as any other small, confined space.’

  By ‘worshipping’ women as mothers or as goddesses, we disguise that we are denying them recognition as equal human beings. Divinity erases their humanity, confining them to the roles and ideals for which they are ‘worshipped’. Satyajit Ray’s haunting and disturbing film Devi is the story of a girl for whom the pedestal of worship becomes a nightmare. She loses her mind when she is overnight drawn up from the role of a flesh-and-blood woman, wife and daughter-in-law to being worshipped as a mother goddess.

  Tanika Sarkar, writing about gender ideology in Bengal, observed, ‘Motherhood and nurture are, indeed, figures and ideals worth celebrating. The problem lies partly with the gendering of nurture and the collapsing of womanhood entirely and exclusively within this single frame.’4 Surely we can love our mothers—and appreciate motherhood and nurture—without insisting that nurture is women’s work alone, and equating womanhood with nothing but motherhood and nurture?

  Indian cinema and literature revere the ‘mother’ as a figure of sacrifice, suffering without complaint, and as a source of moral affirmation. ‘Mere paas Ma hai’ or ‘I have Mother’ is the iconic retort of Shashi Kapoor in Deewar to his brother’s boasts about his ill-gotten ‘buildings, property, bank balance, car and bungalow’. The same popular culture that reveres the mother-figure, however, caricatures the modern young woman who demands equality or freedom as being responsible for breaking up homes and mistreating old parents-in-law. Tanika Sarkar writes, ‘The woman to be protected, respected, adored is then the mother-woman. The more she is adored, the more socially sanctioned and legitimized is the hostility and the distrust against the non-mother.’5

  Did Our Foremothers Never Yearn for Freedom?

  Over and over, in popular culture, we are told that the mother-figure, silent and self-sacrificing, performing her labours of love for her family without complaint is the ‘authentic’ Indian woman, and the woman who demands equality and chafes at confinement to domestic roles is infected by ‘Western’ values. In 1994, as a JNU student, a friend and I had given a short talk on gender and feminism at a workshop hosted by my student organization. After our talk, a young man—a first-year MA student who was a new entrant to JNU—asked me (and other young women in the room): ‘My grandmother was satisfied and happy being a wife and mother, why, then are you women dissatisfied and unhappy?’

  Is it really true that our grandmothers were ‘happy’ being confined to domestic roles and did not yearn for freedom? That figure of the silent, self-sacrificing woman who loves her endless household labours is a myth. The yearning for freedom is no modern, foreign import: it is a human urge that women have shared across the world. Here is Sumangalamata, a Buddhist nun writing in 600 bc, celebrating her freedom from ‘kitchen drudgery’ and her ‘unscrupulous’ husband:

  A woman well set free! How free I am,

  How wonderfully free, from kitchen drudgery.

  Free from the harsh grip of hunger,

  And from empty cooking pots,

  Free too of that unscrupulous man,

  The weaver of sunshades.

  (Translated by historians Uma Chakravarti and Kum Kum Roy.)6

  Another Buddhist nun, Mutta, writing in the same period, rejoiced, ‘So free am I/ So gloriously free/ Free from three petty things—From mortar, from pestle and from my twisted lord . . .’ (Translated by historians Uma Chakravarti and Kum Kum Roy).7

  Our grandmothers, we are told, were perfectly content and happy performing the duties of wife and mother, feeding and nurturing their families, being the icon—in every home—of the bountiful motherland, and seeing the mangalsutra/thali/sindur as a woman’s ultimate goal. Did they never desire to be free from this image and its burdens?

  During the nationalist movement, many prominent nationalists too told us that even if colonial power ruled India, Indian mothers remained safe repositories of an essentially unsullied Indianness. For many nationalists, freedom for such mothers meant the freedom to be happy and content in the role of wives and mothers, without colonial meddling—not the freedom to go to school or demand equality with men. Even if India were not free, such nationalists argued, the sanctity of the Indian family and home must at least remain free from any colonial interference—and for this, it was important that Indian women remained ‘free’ from any desires or experiences that might make them dissatisfied with their lives.

  A Caged Bird

  Rashsundari Debi, a devout nineteenth-century Bengali woman who secretly taught herself to write from a devotional book, wrote the first autobiography in the Bengali language. A child bride and a wife and mother in a conservative upper-caste landlord family that disapproved of education for girls and women, did she see the tasks of nurturing assigned to her as emotionally fulfilling?

  We began this book with a discussion of the prison walls of patriarchy. Rashsundari repeatedly used the metaphor of prison to describe her own life as a daughter-in-law, wife and mother.

  She wrote about her identity in her marital home: ‘The name that I had brought from my father’s home has been lost. Here I am just the mother.’8 The generic, abstract role of ‘mother’ swallowed up her individual identity and even her name.

  On being sent to her in-laws’ house as a child bride, she spoke bitterly of being ‘caged for life’, ‘given a life sentence’, but said that ‘since I had to spend my life with these people, I eventually became a tamed bird’.9

  The contrast between that abstract role of ‘ma’ and the painfully loving bond between mother and child is most striking when Rashsundari writes of her anguish at lacking the freedom, as a mere daughter, to go and be with her own mother at the latter’s deathbed. That passage in her autobiography reminds us that even if her marital home was free of any violence, it was no less a prison and she was no less a slave, with her humanity being subservient to the household duties assigned to her.

  Writing of her mother, she said, ‘She always missed me bitterly, she tried hard to get me to visit her. But I have been locked up in a prison ever since I came here. I could never be allowed to visit her because household chores here would suffer. If ever I had to go to her on some ceremonial occasion, I was like a prisoner let out on parole, I had to be back within a couple of days. At least ten to fifteen people, two guards, two maidservants accompanied me on the boat-ride.’10

  Rashsundari’s lifelong sorrow was that she was not allowed to visit her dying mother one last time. She rails at God, asking why he created her a woman:

  Why was I born a woman? Shame on my life! Who in all this world is as loving as the mother? It is hardly an exaggeration to call her the representative of the Great Lord. I did have this priceless treasure in my mother, but I could not look after her. Is there anything in the world to match this sorrow? Had I been her son, I would fly like a bird to reach her side when I got news of her end. What was I to do, I was behind bars, I was shut up in a cage.11

  Single-handedly cooking two meals a day for twenty-five people and caring for her blind mother-in-law, Rashsundari compared herself to a blind, dumb beast of burden: ‘I spoke to no one, I could hardly see anyone beyond my veil. My eyes were covered, like the eyes of the oil-presser’s bullock. . . . This was how young married women were supposed to work.’12 This is a very far cry from the language of the nationalists who romanticized the mother-figure as the very epitome of joy and contentment for women.

  Forbidden Desires

  For Rashsundari, education was very much an affair of the heart, a forbidden desire, a ‘yearning’, thwarted—as was Radha’s desire for Krishna—by vigilant in-laws and endless chores. She wrote of people’s claims
that education for women ‘leads to disaster, women should not even touch pen and paper’. And yet, she observed: ‘But my heart would not accept this, it was forever yearning.’13

  Tanika Sarkar observes, ‘It is interesting that orthodox critics of women’s education were convinced of an equation between the woman’s intellectual desires and her sexual immorality . . . If a woman was educated, she must be immoral.’14

  Even today, in the twenty-first century, we have a politics that cannot speak about adult women students without painting them as sexually ‘immoral’, and fantasizing about their sex lives in images that disguise titillation with shock and disgust! BJP MLA Gyan Dev Ahuja said ‘3000 used condoms’15 were found every day on the JNU campus; BJP MP Subramanian Swamy likes to say that ‘modern girls’ and feminist and left activists, especially those educated in universities, are ‘ Naxalites’ who have ‘free sex’;16 a ‘dossier’ prepared by a JNU faculty member and BJP supporter Hari Ram Mishra described the university as a ‘den of organized sex racket’.17

  Patriarchy codes all desires of women—sexual, intellectual and (feminist/revolutionary) political—as dangerous. No surprise, since these desires are indeed dangerous for patriarchy!

  Blessed Kaliyug

  As we have seen in the very first chapter of this book, the spectre of the autonomous woman who marries of her own choice, talks back to her husband and in-laws, dictates terms to them and is sexually promiscuous is seen as the very embodiment of the horror of the degenerate Kaliyug, posing a dire threat to the whole social order.

  But for Rashsundari, Kaliyug is welcome, because now girls are allowed education:

  Blessed, blessed be this Kaliyug . . . it is deplorable that I was not allowed to educate myself because I was a woman. How very lucky are girls of this generation! These days many try to educate their daughters. Whatever others may say, I think this is a most positive development.18

  Rashsundari, then, was no ‘content’ foremother of ours, saying ‘ghor Kaliyug aa gaya’ (the terrible Kaliyug has arrived) about modern girls craving freedom—she was a woman who craved freedom herself, and rejoiced at Kaliyug because of the possibility that girls and women could finally be free and spared a caged and confined existence that she had endured, in which she had had to learn in secrecy.

  Rashsundari’s enthusiasm for a Kaliyug that could not open the doors of learning to women is in sharp contrast to some prominent nationalists of her time who saw the spectre of a disastrous Kaliyug in the attempts to educate women and persons of oppressed castes. If Rashsundari loved reading and writing, so did another nineteenth-century child bride, Rakhmabai of Maharashtra, whose story offers us a way to see how education for women and oppressed castes was virulently opposed as a threat to the social order—i.e., the caste-patriarchal hierarchy—by some of the stalwarts of India’s freedom struggle.

  A Woman Dazzled by the Flame of Learning

  Unlike Rashsundari, Rakhmabai was from the Sutar (carpenter) community, not part of the most rigid and restrictive Brahmin caste. Her mother was a widow who had remarried, and her stepfather (a doctor and reformist) refused to send Rakhmabai to live with her husband when she reached puberty. Instead, he insisted that Rakhmabai be kept at their home till she was older, and till her husband bettered himself by getting an education. As Rakhmabai grew up, she received an education and, through her parents, was exposed to various social reformers.

  At the age of twelve, and supported by her parents, Rakhmabai rejected the marriage that she had been bound to as a child and refused to join her husband. She pointed out that while she was educated, her husband had wasted all efforts to educate himself. She declared that she would like to continue her education, not be shackled to a marriage to which she had not consented. At the age of fifteen, she wrote open letters (anonymously published in the Times of India) arguing against child marriage and expressing her deep desire to continue her education.

  Rakhmabai became the centre of a stormy legal battle between 1884 and 1888. While reformers saw her case as a chance to demand a raising of the age of consent, orthodox nationalists were outraged and enraged at her sheer audacity. Rakhmabai’s husband went to court in 1884, demanding the ‘restitution of his conjugal rights’. In 1885, a British judge, Justice R.H. Pinhey, pointed out that ‘restitution of conjugal rights’ was a provision of English law meant for consenting adults, that would not apply to a marriage under traditional Hindu law. He also added that Rakhmabai had been wed as a child and refused to compel her to cohabitate with her husband.

  In 1886, following loud and sustained opposition to the Pinhey verdict, there was a retrial. In 1887, another British judge, Justice Farran, ordered Rakhmabai (who was now sixteen) to ‘go live with her husband or face six months of imprisonment’. Rakhmabai said she preferred prison to a forced marriage. Eventually, her marriage was dissolved by Queen Victoria, and her husband agreed to a settlement, giving up his claim over Rakhmabai in exchange for Rs 2000. Rakhmabai’s struggle paved the way for raising of the age of consent from ten to twelve years in colonial India.

  In March 1887, even as the debate raged on, none other than Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the towering nationalist figure, brought his censure to weigh in against Rakhmabai. Tilak is famous for his declaration: ‘Swaraj [self-rule] is my birthright and I will have it at all costs.’ But on the basis of what he said about Rakhmabai, it would seem that Tilak did not want women to have swaraj over their own lives. Swaraj for Hindu women, it seemed, would in Tilak’s eyes amount to Hindu men losing swaraj inside their own homes! To Tilak and his supporters, women who demanded swaraj for themselves were evidence of the dangers of giving women a ‘Western’ education. He wrote:

  We agree that the upliftment of our women is necessary. We would, however, like to say to these reformers that this will never be achieved by women like Rakhmabai who is strutting around claiming a tiny piece of turmeric root has turned her yellow [i.e., who is putting on airs on achieving a tiny taste of education]. Today thousands of men are living happily with their underage wives. When that’s the case, is it not a bit much when a woman dazzled by the flame of learning demands in court that she be granted a divorce now that her husband is no longer good enough for her?19

  Tilak’s utter contempt for Rakhmabai’s intellectual aspirations and achievements can be felt in the sting of his words—and his utter disbelief that a woman could dare to challenge her subordination to her husband.

  Caste, Patriarchy and the Spectre of Kaliyug

  Tilak had opposed education for the oppressed castes and for women, on the grounds that it would strip them of the training they needed to do the tasks allotted to them by Brahminical patriarchy, and that it would in fact upend caste and gender hierarchies. The spectre of Kaliyug where the (Brahminical patriarchal) world would turn upside down is very apparent in his writings.

  Tilak wanted a full education to be restricted to those who had a ‘natural inclination’ for it—and he assumed that the non-Brahmin castes, especially the backward castes and Dalits, had no inclination for education. The latter should only be given ‘the education befitting their rank and station in life’.20 He was quite explicit about his anxieties: ‘English education encouraged the people to deny caste restrictions and the spread of English education among the natives will bring down the caste system.’21 He held that reformers like Jyotiba Phule sought, through education, ‘to dispel through the land any reverence that might be felt for the Brahmins’.22

  Tilak made it clear that any education that might encourage a farmer’s, blacksmith’s or cobbler’s child or a sex-worker’s child to become a scholar instead would threaten the social rankings and occupations assigned by the Brahminical order. Likewise, he strongly opposed any education that might encourage girls to see scholarship as their goal, rather than the duties of a wife and mother.

  He wrote, ‘A girl preparing her lessons till 10 a.m. and remaining at school till 5 p.m. will become a regular boy student and is quite likely to forget that t
here are other duties incumbent on her,’ and as a result, education might ‘make them [girls] feel a sense of superiority over their partners’.23

  In Tilak’s worldview, we can easily recognize the ideology of caste- and gender-appropriate ‘innate/natural qualities and duties’ and caste-and-gender hierarchies that we have already encountered in the Mahabharata and the Gita. If a child born in the cobbler caste is assumed to be ‘naturally’ fit to be a cobbler and unfit for education, likewise a girl is assumed to be ‘naturally’ suited for the roles of a wife and mother and unfit for education. Educating ‘lower’ castes and women threatened the Brahminical order, which was claimed to be a ‘natural’ one.