The glory, decline and revival of Vedic age women!

BOOK EXTRACT

A question that has puzzled many who have studied India is the dazzling array of paradoxes that co-exist in this country. Many have predicted the balkanisation of India due to the constant pulls and pressures of various paradoxes that seem to be ever present.

Maria Misra, the author of this book and a lecturer in modern history at Oxford University, tries to give a new interpretation to this old problem. The author says that India rests on an unusual foundation of traditional philosophies along with modern ideas like democracy.

Soon India was awash with books, societies and speakers trumpeting 'pure' vedic Hinduism as the most elevated civilization on earth; all modern science and technology, it seemed, had been prefigured in the civilization of the Vedic golden age.

Young men assiduously adopted the paraphernalia of 'traditional' Hindu identity; fasting, growing pig-tails and ostentatiously displaying the sacred thread of high-caste Hinduness. There was, however, a gloomy denouement to this tale of ancient glory "" decline.

The Vedic age had passed, apparently, because the pure Aryans had intermarried with lower races, weakened the stock and now India was a subject race. To recover former glory meant exercising proper control over reproduction, so that only 'manly' types were bred.

Women were clearly central to this project and so the fashioning and preservation of the ideal 'high-caste Hindu woman' came to preoccupy cultural revivalists just as much as the alleged problem of Hindu men's effeminacy. For the revivalists the greatest threat to the virtue of the high-caste Hindu woman, and thus to the destiny of the race, was westernization and social reform.

The westernized founders of Congress were among the greatest proponents of the 'up-lift' of women. They wanted to see them educated and they challenged traditional high-caste practices such as child marriage and the ban on the remarriage of widows (many Indian women were widowed in their teens). But this kind of reform, many revivalists claimed, was the high road to immorality and decadence.

A worrying example of the dangers of the educated woman was Tara-bhai Shinde, who had mastered Sanskrit and produced A Comparison between Men and Women (1882), in which she criticized what she saw as the gross accretion of male power under colonial rule, men's poor treatment of women, their vanity and their religious hypocrisy.

While revivalists were willing to countenance some education for women, particularly if it would make them more effective mothers of manly sons, it seemed that the education proffered by social reformers was actually undermining 'proper' womanly duties.

Bankim, having once been a proponent of equal treatment of women, performed a complete U-turn after he noticed a new menace to Hindu well-being""the westernized or babu-woman:

[Her] foremost vice is laziness. The old-type of woman was very hardworking and was highly skilled at housework; the new woman is a great babu... The whole burden of housework is left to hired maids... A woman who comes to earth to loll in bed and read novels... may be marginally superior to an animal, but her womanhood is worthless. We counsel such women to rid the earth of their useless weight by applying ropes to their necks.

Like Bankim, many feared that high-caste women, infected with the consumerism and materialism of the west, had turned into lax and greedy harridans, bullying their 'effeminate' husbands into ever more humiliating employment in pursuit of money to feed their debased desires. To many men this was unbearable. Surely it was enough that one was humiliated by the British without being rendered impotent in one's own home.

It is in this context that the extraordinary politicization of gender in the 1890s becomes comprehensible. The issue which most notoriously exercised revivalist passions was that of child marriage and early consummation.

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VISHNU'S CROWDED TEMPLE
India Since The Great Rebellion
Author: Maria Misra
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 535
Price: Rs 570