Fracas of Free Speech 

The irony of the alleged lack of free speech in Modi India lies in the absolute freedom of its uninhibited propagation in its subsidiary media. In so far as the right-wing blowback in the social media, the left-libs fall short on the idiom that ‘people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’. When it comes to the ‘agencies’ knocking at free speakers’ doors, the legal dictum paraphrased as ‘one must go to town with clean hands’ has to be borne in mind by one and all. Be that as it may, it’s not as if it was all hunky-dory in the Nehruvian order of yore that nurtured the Modi-aggrieved of the day, and this is not an essay of its dark shades but an attempt to reach the roots of the self-defeating Hindu mindset, passing through my life and times. 

I was born on 27 Aug 1948 and that means I was conceived after India became free but yet in colonial hangover for by then, the century-old Macaulay method to divest the Hindus from their “false history, false astronomy, false medicine, in company with their false religion” with the right western education so as to ‘form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ worked well enough though the Musalmans avoided his ‘Indian education’ like a plague for the fear of Islamic pollution. But let me at the outset vouch for Macaulay’s success for somehow I feel embarrassed to sport tilak, and on occasion when it becomes obligatory, I would be itching to erase it from my forehead as soon as I possibly could. Surely, I should alter my mindset for it is my restrained Hindu rearing in it that makes India’s constrained story.

It’s thus at the dawn of independence, India’s politically dispirited and culturally disoriented Hindus needed a leadership to raise their ancestral spirits in the wake of the calamitous partition of their ancient nation. Sadly though, their continuing ill-fate had ensured that the Gandhi-Nehru duo was at the helm of the transition process to their eternal hurt. Gandhi, who managed to become a false messiah of the Hindus, had professed that “they should not harbour anger in their hearts against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them. Even if the Muslims want to kill us all we should face death bravely. If they established their rule after killing Hindus we would be ushering in a new world by sacrificing our lives.” So, as if to politically finish off the Hindus, he bestowed the power of the Indian State upon Nehru, who unabashedly claimed “I’m English by education, a Muslim by culture, just born a Hindu by accident” but also conducted himself accordingly.  It’s no wonder then that he anointed Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as India’s education minister as if to redress his fears that post-partition, the Muslim minority in the Hindu majority India would be disadvantaged. Sadly, as Sardar Patel too failed to see the dichotomy of a Muslim education minister in the predominantly Hindu India that too after millennia of alien order, Azad had a decade at his disposal to add on the Muslim modules to the Macaulay minutes to further enervate the Hindu psyche. And that speaks for the naivety of the then Hindu intellect and that which followed for four more Musalmans were given a free rein for nine more years to continue where the wily Maulana had left that is to mould the Hindu minds in the Islamic moulds!  

Thus, what with the plethora of Sultanates not to speak of the Mogul era, it was as if the roller coaster of Indian history was no more than the Islamic rule over medieval India. So as not to make the Hindu kids privy to Islam’s idol-braking ways, the destruction of the Hindu temples by the Ghaznis and the Ghoris was pictured as a case of looting for their riches. When it came to the beginning of the end of the Muslim dominance in the Battle of Plassey, the fall of Siraj ud-Daulah was attributed to the perfidy of Mir Jaffar but not sourced to the revenge of Jagat Seth, whom the brash Nawab had insulted, for that would have made Hindus feel good for having avenged the Musalmans. Well, as for the British Raj, it was all about railways, ports etc. with no word on how it had ruined India’s economy and looted its wealth. It’s thus was drummed into the impressionable Hindu heads that they should not begrudge their Islamic and Christian rulers but must feel beholden to them.

In so far as the freedom struggle went, it was Gandhi all the way with Nehru in tow, never mind, as it transpired later, that it was the prospective rebellion by the Indian men-in-arms, courtesy Netaji’s legacy that made the British retreat in haste. While Azad’s Muslim agenda augmented Nehru’s cynical opposition to Hindu resurgence that both saw as detrimental to the interests of the Indian umma, it was Godse’s foolhardy in slaying the spent force of a Gandhi that gave the latter the political stick to beat Savarkar’s Hindutva with. That my grandfather forewarned me not to be enamoured of the rashtriya swayam-sevak sangh in our remote small town as that would hamper my later-day career prospects would exemplify the Nehruvian hurdles the Hindu nationalism had to contend with.

In juxtaposition, the Muslim galaxy in the cine field and the musical world not to speak of the worthies in the public life created a communal euphoria, evocatively but falsely called as ganga jamuna tehjeeb, in the rarified Hindu intellectual zone. So, it was a given that the Good Samaritans in the Indian cinema had to be either a Christian or a Musalman and never a Hindu. If the finesses of the Muslim Nawabs graced the silver screen it was the crudity of the Hindu loan sharks that was on show. While the long-buried Hindu social evils got resurrected on the celluloid, the umma’s live religious ills were deliberately kept away from the arc lights. So on and so forth and what with Indira Gandhi too walking in her father’s ideological footsteps, India’s political culture came to be pegged to the Islamapologic pole endorsed by the intellectual class, and that reduced the Hindu right to the electoral fringe.

Nevertheless, madrasas were allowed to take care of the Muslim minds with Allah’s ayats and Muhammad’s exploits to sustain their exclusivist credo that, on and off, had erupted in communal riots. Well the Muslim clerics who hold sway over the umma wouldn’t complain much for it’s a small price to pay to uphold their Islamic exclusivity. At the same time, while the secular politicians felt no need to bridge the communal divide that sustained its Muslim vote-bank, the intelligentsia, as well as the media, Islam-naïve both, were bereft of an idea to address the national debility. So, it’s but natural that the Hindu masses too saw nothing amiss in this secular mess, and thus an all-round silence became the norm amidst the periodic communal mayhem.

But the vexatious rama-janmabhoomi movement picked up momentum to  eventually bring down the Babri structure that 6 Dec 1992, and that brought about a tectonic shift in India’s electoral dynamics to the hurt of the Nehruvian politics. But it was the Godhra-Gujarat communal flare-up that changed things in the long-run, in more ways than one, once and for all. Sensing another Godse moment to push back the surging Hindutva political tide, Sonia’s Congress pulled all stops to castigate the Hindu right and cajole the sulking Musalmans back into its electoral fold, of course aided and abetted by a compromised media that amplified the Muslim victimhood and falsified the Hindu culpability. Besides, notwithstanding the unprovoked Godhra train carnage by the Musalmans (never mind the secular narrative of accidental fire in that S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express on that fateful 27 Feb 2002) as the maulanas took the floor to proclaim that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ and indeed it is Bhagavad-Gita that incites violence, it became apparent that the Hindu intelligentsia had no clue on either count to confront.

So, I set out to find out the role religions play in fomenting human discord and came up with Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A critical Appraisal of Islamic Faith, Indian Polity ‘n More) that I submitted to Popular Prakashan for its perusal. And its rejection slip of 03 Feb 2003 - I enjoyed reading the book. But I suggest you read Dr. Zakaria’s ‘Communal Rage in Secular India’. Your book is a bit Strident and could prove dangerous in the wrong hands (Hindu fundamentalist) – sums up Nehruvian India’s allergy to any Hindu critique of Islam. It’s another matter though that the book has been in the public domain as free e-book ever since, and whether or not it could help Hindus develop an Islamic grasp, its intended purpose, it certainly did not set the fundamentalist Hindus at Muslim throats as feared by the publishers. But come to think of it, though Islam was around in India for over millennia, save Chamupati’s 1924 pamphlet Rangila Rasool and Sita Ram Goel’s 1986 book The Calcutta Quran Petition, which is about Chandmal Chopra’s petition to ban Quran, earlier there were no other Hindu works on and about Islam! And that’s about the Hindu intellectual apathy in free India.  

But the moot point is, even though the Husains, the Aamirs et al, have all along been abusing their artistic freedom to denigrate Hinduism, Popular Prakashan chose to deny me my literary liberty for a critical appraisal of Islam. However, to the chagrin of the Musalmans all that has changed in the Modi era what with the Sanjay Dixits, the Ranganathans of the Hindu world with a Nupur Sharma or two in tow have been quoting the inimical Quranic ayats and reciting the embarrassing Hadithian anecdotes through the electronic media. All the same, as the saying goes, “To understand Islam is to understand Muhammad” the Hindu intellectuals may look around for a book or two so as to acquaint themselves with the character of the man whom every Musalman seeks to imitate, which by the way, is far easier and more fetching than emulating Rama, the Hindu Maryada Purushottama.  

Be that as it may, what’s the intellectual fracas of free speech in Modi era all about? It can be expected that the politicians who lost power and their hangers on their pelf would cry hoarse. It’s also understandable that Musalmans too would be sore over losing their political veto and what’s worse have to bear the ignominy of having to live in a Hindu Raj. It’s also okay for the Christian world to resent their hitherto unhindered evangelical drive has to navigate the anti-conversion hurdle. So, for whatever the Hindu intelligentsia is cribbing about, the Hindu masses, at long last, have begun to feel proud being Hindus. If that’s an objection for those who have no issues with the Islamic republics and the Christian democracies that abound world over, then so be it.

 

 

 

 

 

Underbellies of Indian Polity

Winston Churchill felt that the Indian polity was not ripe enough for independence but Mahatma Gandhi pressed for swarajya nevertheless. Some fifty-five years after Atlee freed India off the British colonial yoke, what is the bottom line of the world’s largest democracy? Barring the brief aberration that was the internal emergency imposed on it by Indira Gandhi, India, has been cruising on the path of democracy. That is about the physicality of going through electoral motions but what about the cerebral quality of the Indian democratic output? The cheerleaders of the Indian democracy cite the shining examples of its electoral maturity in avenging Indira for her emergency and dumping the Janata Party for its insipid rule. Oh, how the wonderful Indian voters routinely dump the haughty in the dustbins of anti-incumbency and where else on earth does democracy shine ever so bright, and such, tend to shape the grand narrative.

Was Winston wrong then? No for doubts arose soon as the electorate tended to vote on caste lines and communal contours only to be cemented as voters, in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, swayed by emotion, swamped its 8^th Lok Sabha with Congressmen. But the clinching evidence that Churchill was doubly right came a little later. The first real test Indian democracy faced was when PV Narasimha Rao (in the picture) sought a mandate from his electorate for a second term in office. That is after he, in an amazing turnaround, ably assisted by Dr. Manmohan Singh, had not only retrieved the Nehruvian India from its License- Raj mess but also laid a new economic keel for India’s prosperous sail. That apart, with the view to be seen as the crusader against India’s entrenched corruption in the public life, he went all the way to prosecute the accursed politicos across the board political spectrum, albeit at the directive of the country’s top judiciary. But how did the Indian electorate that cries hoarse against political corruption in the higher echelons respond to his willingness to tackle it? Simply put, it paid him a deaf ear. And that was about the rank ingratitude of the Indian voters to their leader who had unshackled them from the prolonged permit period to alter India’s economic face forever for good.

By their mindless rejection of a known performer, what the Indians gave to themselves and their country was the ineffective rule of a Deve Gowda on the one hand and on the other the ugly phenomenon of Sitaram Kesari that inevitably led to the repossession of the congress party again by its dynasty-in-the-retreat, by then headed by the Italian Sonia Gandhi nee Antonia Maino. It was another matter though that Rao’s failed gambit earned him a lot of bad blood in his own party that made him run around Delhi’s courts, to clear himself of the charges of misdemeanors leveled against him; and it was a matter of satisfaction to his tormented soul that he got a clean chit before life ended it all for him in his forlorn state.

The results of the second test the Indian democracy faced are just out. Though the question was repeated, ironically, the answer remained the same, proving that the Indians did not become any wiser during the worrisome interregnum. Prime Minister Vajpayee not only stemmed the tide of the political instability at the center that the earlier electoral exercises occasioned but also broke the barriers in the hitherto neglected infrastructure development in the country. If in Narasimha Rao the country perchance found the right man for the right job at the tight time, Vajpayee worked his way to the top post by cultivating the political sagacity to handle the onerous task of coalition management in a fractured polity. Yet, the electorate thought it fit to cold-shoulder him.

What then is the truth, really? Wouldn’t the past testify to the fact that the Indian voter is more of an emotional kind than the thinking type? Take away the anger against an emergency, the jingoism of a victory, the sympathy of an assassination or the apathy against incumbency, what one gets to see that which governs the Indian voters’ ballot mind – nuclear thought. It can be said without any contradiction that the Indian voter has the ability to identify himself only with his caste, region, and religion without an iota of a notion about the notional interest. Blame it on Nehru for he only put paid to Indian nationalism perceiving it as a threat to Muslim minority’s religious-identity. And he lived long and ruled enough to stall a pan-Indian electoral chemistry to the good of the Indian democracy. The Nehruvian perversion to nurse Islamist separateness in the bosom of the residual India forever ensured its Hindu-Muslim electoral divide. Besides, he had allowed the precipitation of the electoral division of the Hindu majority, on the basis of caste and creed, for his party’s perpetual political gain. It is thus, the unsophisticated Indian voter forever fails to unhinge his franchise from the communal and casteist calculus. Also, Nehru’s inculcation of radical secular ethos in the Indian intelligentsia, nursed by wooly liberal leanings, ensured that the Hindu majority’s impulses were seen reprehensible to his idea of India.

Alternately, Hegdewar’s vision of India with Hindutva as the binding material to hold the Hindu social edifice, built with deviant caste bricks, from sundering, though impeccable, was faulty in its positioning for his concept of the Hindu social reengineering was postulated as a means to counter the perceived Muslim communal threat. Though one would have expected the Indian intelligentsia to fine-tune Hegdewar’s laudable unity of the caste-ridden Hindu society per se, the wooly intellectuals, not known for doing their homework properly, badmouthed a good idea and sought to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It would have given them an idea as how to go about it if only they had contemplated on what Swami Vivekananda had advocated - the Hindu soul in an Islamic body -  to bring about an Indianness in the hopelessly divided polity on the fracturing lines of caste, region, ethnicity, language etc. But yet, India’s shortsighted intelligentsia exploits this postural flaw (since rectified by the sangh parivar) to brand Hindutva as the communal agenda of the Hindu far right, inimical to the country’s minorities, has only steeled the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Indians. It’s thus the vacuum created by the un-nationalism occasioned by Nehruvian idea of India has come to be filled by communalism, regionalism, casteism, favouritism, nepotism, corruption etc. to hurt Bharat but to benefit of mediocre.

While Nehru, blinded by his own sophism, failed to foresee the true merit in Indianness to bring about a political cohesiveness in the majority population to further the national good, neither Hegdewar nor those that subscribe to his ideology failed to dispel the misgivings of the minorities, and the majority alike, about the true intent and character of Hindutva. Be that as it may, though a well-meaning Hindutva would be beneficial to India as a whole, unfortunately, the opportunistic political class that sees electoral benefits in feeding upon the caste and communal susceptibilities of the polity pooh-poohs it, that is even after it acquired a secular tag from India’s Supreme Court. But then that suits a Lalu in Bihar and a Muluyam in U.P to ride on the Hindutva bogie in the Muslim mohallas all the while stitching their caste votes together to own 1/10^th or so of the Lok Sabha. What if more such characters emerge all over India to dominate the sub-regions of its vast terrain by caste combinations? Would ever a national policy be possible with each regional satrap catering to the interests of the caste groups of his own narrow constituency? As if the politicians are not doing enough damage, the so-called spiritual leaders like Chinna Jeeyar are spreading sectarian sentiment amongst the Hindu majority with impunity! Indeed, the British did divide India much less!

What then does Indian Verdict - 2004 mean? The claim of the Congress that it was a mandate for Sonia is understandable though the media’s seconding the same is perplexing. In fact, the media’s dubbing the party’s hold on 145 Lok Sabha seats, out of 543 elected ones, as a people’s mandate for her makes it amusing. The Indian media that never gets tired of heaping praises upon the literate Kerala voters, for once, has muted itself as the Congress came a cropper with a cipher. What did the Kerala voters convey after all? Was it not a nay to Sonia? Then, what about the much-touted Karnataka voters that supposedly differentiate an assembly ballot from the parliamentary franchise? They too would not fit in the mandate for Sonia frame for they did not echo to the Congress tune this time. If the Tamil voters were asked to raise their hands for Sonia’s ‘Hand’, how many hands would have risen but yet, all their MPs were all set to help her rule the Indian roost. The Andhra voters, rightly or wrongly, voted out the incumbent CM’s MLA-hopefuls but by turning the applecart of TDP MP’s, were they clamoring to see Sonia anointed as India’s PM? Doubt for while pressing the EVM’s Congress button in the Parliamentary booth, their ire would have been still on their CM. It’s by such hands as these that the great Indian mobocracy, sought to be glorified as the world’s largest democracy, has come to be nursed! Yet, the lengths to which Indian media goes to build the myth of India’s electoral maturity is exemplified by The Hindu’s editorial that tried to reconcile the victory of the left in Kerala and the drubbing of Sonia’s party there in the same vein as the verdict for a Secular arrangement at the centre!

Above all, as the backdoor to 7, Race Course Road was seemingly nudged open to Sonia by a quirk of fate, wonder at the gall of her backers in making bold to proclaim her ‘non-existing mandate’ to rule. It’s another matter that in the electoral arena, they all were shy to project her as the candidate for the top post. In the final analysis, the very fact that Sonia was able to dream of even grabbing India’s premier political post proves that its democratic curry lacks electoral savvy. Coupled to the caste-obsessed and faith-driven electorate, it is the Left’s ideological Hindu-hatred and the regional satraps’ survival instincts that tried to catapult her to the summit. After all, for the Indian Left that swears by Lenin and Mao, an Antonia Maino on the Indian gaddi is no abnormality. Besides, the regional overlords have to guard their own backyards in the nebulous political environment. If Mayawati ties up with Sonia, won’t Mulayam’s political citadel come crashing down in UP, and how to avert that happening but by himself joining the bandwagon, never mind his principled opposition all the while for her foreign origin. Analyse and see as the compulsions of the eager become crystal clear.

Thankfully, in the end, as it was not in independent India’s fate to suffer the ignominy of being reigned by a foreigner, President Abdul Kalam came up with a constitutional hitch to spike Sonia’s ambition to become its Prime Minister. It’s another matter though that India had to endure her decade-long anti-Hindu reign through the proxy regime of a nerve-less man and unscrupulous collaborators.

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This is the revised edition of my “Irony of Indian Polity” published in Triveni, July – Sep 2004. 

Warts in Mahatma's Atma

 “Won’t it remind one of Gandhi’s experiments with truth?”

“I have no quarrel with Gandhi the man but I have problem with the Mahatma of his,” he said and as if to remonstrate his apathy for the Gandhian values, he had an extended sip of that Laphroaic.

“I’m no Gandhian and I don’t intend to be one,” he continued from where he had left. “But as is being done, I see it’s a disservice to his legacy to deify him; it’s when I approach him as man that I value him as a human being, but in his picture of mahatma, I see many a wart in his atma. Credit him for cleaning up the public toilets but why not condemn him for having forced his spouse to do the same; why laud him for his quixotic abstinence unmindful of his wife’s conjugal plight; was he not an inveterate autocrat in the democratic garb; what about his falling afoul of Prakasam, and how he played favorites with Nehru. Why bother about him as he’d been reduced for long as a political mascot of the slavish-minded of the self-serving Nehru family that hijacked his name to grind its dynastic axe! What an irony it is that his party that sundered the British yoke should have rendered the political reins into Italian hands? Bemoan the congress party.”

The above is excerpted from the author’s Glaring Shadow – A stream of consciousness novel and the following quote is from his prayer meeting on April 6, 1947, New Delhi, cited in the Collective Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 94, Sl. 243, pages 248/249. 

 “We should dispassionately think where we are drifting. Hindus should not harbour anger in their hearts against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them. Even if the Muslims want to kill us all we should face death bravely. If they established their rule after killing Hindus we would be ushering in a new world by sacrificing our lives. None should fear death. Birth and death are inevitable for every human being. Why should we then rejoice or grieve? If we die with a smile we shall enter into a new life, we shall be ushering in a new India. The Concluding verses of the second chapter of the Gita describe how a godfearing man should live. I would exhort you to read and understand those verses and ponder over their meaning. You will then realize what our ideal is and how far short of it we are today. Our independence is at our threshold and it is our duty to ask ourselves whether we are fit to have it and sustain it.”

One may reflect the above sillyness in Ambedkar's intellectual light underneath: 

“Hinduism is said to divide people and in contrast, Islam is said to bind people together. This is only a half truth. For Islam divides as inexorably as it binds. Islam is a close corporation and the distinction that it makes between Muslims and non-Muslims is a very real, very positive and very alienating distinction. The brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. For those who are outside the corporation, there is nothing but contempt and enmity. The second defect of Islam is that it is a system of social self-government and is incompatible with local self-government because the allegiance of a Muslim does not rest on his domicile in the country which is his but on the faith to which he belongs. To the Muslim ibi bene ibi patria is unthinkable. Wherever there is the rule of Islam, there is his own country. In other words, Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as his motherland and regard a Hindu as his kith and kin. That is probably the reason why Maulana Mahomed Ali, a great Indian but a true Muslim, preferred to be buried in Jerusalem rather than in India.”

May also read "Gagging Godse - A Ploy" in Sep 2019 folder https://bulususmurthy.blogspot.com/2019/09/gagging-godse-ploy_3.html?zx=98cb880795c2b011

Rousseau’s Feminist Chains

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set out to determine ‘whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people’s interactions he saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at in the state of nature, even though living in isolation’. Consequently, he had formulated The Social Contract ‘as the best way to establish a political community, in the face of the problems of commercial society’, with the immortal opening line, Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains, that is literally true for over two centuries now.

However, the socio-religious circles of individual freedom came to vary from society to society, in times to times; and the objective of this piece is to take a cursory look at the same. In this context, it should be noted that traditionally, societies world over, for the most part, tended to restrain women in chains that are far too shorter than Rousseau’s Chains that bound men, and that ensues female freedoms are encapsulated within the realms of male constraints. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this exercise, we may examine the changes in female ‘freedom’ circles in the Christian, Islamic and the Hindu societies.

Christian Ultra- feminism

The conservative Christian world, like much of the globe, had always been a man’s world, though not religiously inimical to women, that is till the early twentieth century, when it was shaken, on the legal ground, by the first wave of feminism, seeking the voting and property rights to underscore the gender equality. But it was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex that ushered in The Women’s Liberation Movement, in the middle of that century, which set the course for enabling women to gain equal rights with men in every human activity and social sphere. However, as the impact of the third feminist wave that ushered in ultra-feminism, which in my view, besides being detrimental to femininity, the charm of womanhood, began to uproot the family system, the fulcrum of social stability, a debate about it is bound to abound in its fourth wave, as and when it tends.

Muslim Male Chauvinism

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” those were the words of Jesus Christ (John 8.7) when he was asked by a group of men whether the punishment to a woman accused of adultery should be stoning to death as prescribed by the Mosaic Law (of the Jews).

Given that none of them ventured to harm that woman, the New Testament  avers that “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John. 3.17).

Whereas Jesus broke the God’s rule thus, in later days, the Jews, His chosen people, having been driven out of their promised land and dispersed  all over the Christian lands, had no way to stone their adulteresses to death in the alien lands as commanded by Him.

Maybe it was thus, the Jealous God of the Jews, some six hundred years after His Son’s death, sent Muhammad as His Messenger into their cousins’ land to get tougher than ever with the fair sex; so, much so that His ‘brand new’ religion branded women as an inferior species in ways many, whereby, to cite an example, the witness of four Muslim women equals that of one male Muslim that is besides granting the men of the faith the right to take as many women to cohabit with, that too, on a contractual basis, of course, with an unfettered right to beat, and an inalienable right to divorce them, to name only two.

But as time passed by, the wisdom of some modern Muslim rulers, in countries such as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan, set aside the God’s Quranic diktats to grant their women-subjects what the rest of the world gave its womenfolk. But sadly, though not surprisingly, given the intensity of the Islamic belief-system and the ghetto-construct of the Musalmans, the gate-keepers of the faith were outraged for the female modernism began to alter Islam’s patriarchal ethos, the fulcrum of its dogma. So, in time, to the hurt of the Muslim women, by uprooting the progressive rulers and undermining the egalitarian measures, they had ensured that the very character of the faith that afforded them primacy in the scheme of all things Islamic was restored. Intended or otherwise, that Islamic regression gave raise to Wahabism, in turn fuelling Islamic extremism the world over, rendering the golden period of Muslim feminism into a transient rainbow lost in the gathering clouds in the God’s own dark skies.

Hindu Swayamvaram

In the Aryavarta of yore, girls were groomed in gurukulas to become satyavadini by the time they turned fifteen, and some of them pursued higher studies to blossom into scholars such as Maitreyi, Ghosa, Gargi, Lopamudra et al.

Even when India was Bharat, still a bride was entitled to choose her man from among her suitors, known in Sanskrit is swayamvaram, which only proves that the ancient Hindu men were wise enough to realize that woman’s liberation lay in her right over her body to entrust it to the man she coveted; that is proof enough if it were ever required.

The sum and substance of woman’s life in the Hindu ethos was that she was on an equal footing with that of her male counterpart in the social and religious spheres, which more or less held ground till the eleventh century as captured by Al-Biruni in his Indica.

However, slowly but surely, from that feminist pinnacle, women were insensibly and progressively pushed into the abyss of subservience and worse. Though no historical research is in place that delves into this inexplicable Hindu social degradation, exemplified by female-inimical sati, child marriage, illiteracy to name a few, it can be speculated that so as to spare their fair sex from the glad eyes of the Muslim invaders, the Hindu society would have felt the need to protect its women in ways that proved to be inimical to their well-being in the long run. However, as Islam began to spread its male chauvinistic wings, its corruptive influence on the Hindu male propensities could have exacerbated the feminist interests.

If anything, the evangelic thrust in British India, with its accent on sin and tirade against sex, further dented feminism in the Hindu society that was wont to celebrate female sexuality.

Nevertheless, after India gained its independence, it was only a matter of time before the Hindu society began to yearn for its feminist moorings of yore. But brainwashed by the leftist ideology, by then, it had thrown the Hindu baby with the ‘Brahmanical’ bathwater, whereby ensuing a cultural vacuum. And ironically the same is increasingly sough to be filled with the Christian ultra feminist setting, which, given the contrasting social moorings and the sexual ethos, has proved to be a square peg in the round hole.

If only Indian women look back into Vedic times, they would be able to gather enough cultural implements to wriggle themselves out of Rousseau’s Feminist Chains, once and for all.