The hour was dusk, the date, February 28, 2010. Holi was raining colours over India. People were pelted by purple, clobbered by claret, riddled with red. Rishi Savle was aching, for the festivity seemed to spare him. He wished his woman was by him, so that he too could play Holi. “There’s no Holi if you are single,” he says. For that matter, “any festival,” the afterthought follows. He couldn’t have been truer.
Indian festivals are a woman’s forte. And so are most Indian cultural traditions. Social anthropologist Susan S Wadley, director of the South Asia Center of Maxwell School, finds the Hindu conception of the female to contain emancipatory qualities. She has been studying popular religion, oral traditions, and public culture in India. In the Hindu thought, “the female principle represents an essential duality: on one hand, gentle, benevolent, the bestower. On the other hand, aggressive, malevolent, the destroyer. It is precisely the combination of Prakriti (nature) and Sakti (energy) that makes women dangerous,” she argues.
“Woman as mother controls others and becomes the Hindu woman in control of herself. As such, she provides an alternative role to that of a dutiful wife,” Wadley writes in Women and the Hindu Tradition.
Leading social, cultural and political critic Ashis Nandy in Women versus Womanliness in India: An essay in social and political psychology writes that the association in Hinduism between femininity and nature, activity and energy suggests that men are dependent on the female principle, for in an agrarian society, nature is omnipotent.
The gender association given to India was always feminine. Eminent sociologist GK Karanth traces it to the female veneration in its religious texts. “In the Hindu pantheon, the superior most god is Sakti. The belief is that when the powers of all gods were unified, it became a woman,” he says.
The cultural iconography, he adds, has always been feminine in nature. Every river, except Brahmaputra, has a feminine name. Even in art and architecture, the female form is reverential, says Dr Gayathri Devi, senior sociologist at the Indian Institute of Social and Economic Change. For all Indian festivals — right from the how and whys of its customs to advance preparations to observing piety — it is women who mastermind it.
“Women not only perpetuate traditions, they are the pillars of our social institutions. Be it in the primary institution of family or the secondary one of the neighbourhood, it is women who carry forward kinship. Interpersonal, intra-caste and intra-kin relationships among all Indian communities rest on its women,” she says.
“Indian women, already having the source of strength and power
in their metatexts and metaphors, used to in a constructive manner, albeit unconsciously, using the fundamental principles of post-structuralism to resolve their existential anomalies in a more aesthetic and an effective way. They fought from within their own sexuality and criticised men more for their lack of masculinity than booking them as wife-batterers as in the West (sic),” writes Susmita Dasgupta in the Economic & Political Weekly.
Social scientist Dr Ram Puniyani finds the masculine-feminine attributes of Indian culture rather complex. “But restricting it to Mother India, Fatherland debate, India is presumed feminine. Fascists have called their lands fatherland (like Germany). Those inspired by fascist ideology also did the same. For instance, Savarkar addressed India as Pitrabhumi. The communalists and fascists have always resorted to patriarchal ideology with primacy given to the male and the upper castes,” he says. Indian culture does have feminine streaks, but there are also many inhibitions sprouting from the ancient texts, he adds.
The idea of women differs in Indian philosophy and mythology, points out Oriya litterateur and feminist Sarojini Sahoo. “Philosophically, women were considered as the all-pervasive Prakriti. But mythologically, Vrihadaranyakopanishad says the genesis began with the sexual intercourse of the creator and a cow. This depicts the female as just an instrument of reproduction. Likewise, the Indian principles and reality does not match,” she says. In the current Indian scenario, she sees no possibility of women translating the active female principle into public power. Feminist writer Ammu Joseph also points at the barriers posed in the context of sexual segregation.
Yet any attempt to accord a gender identity to India, paints it feminine. The abstract image of India spawns the face of a woman, experts say. Ashis Nandy puts it best, “The ultimate authority of Indian mind has always been feminine.”
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