Caste as woman

By Aruti Nayar

THE Women’s Reservation Bill has been put yet again on the backburner. Strangely enough, its fate reminds one of a hapless woman who has a desire to step out of the cocoon of the periphery and move into the arc-lights centrestage. Somehow she musters support and strength and elbows her way up. Each time she is "almost" there but is either pushed back, ignored, manipulated or shouted down. Gradually all the supporters (seemingly so) review their support and leave her stranded high and dry.

Time and again the Bill that sought to redraw the electoral map was either stalled through ambivalence and double speak or thwarted in an unabashedly sexist manner. This time the thwarting was much more "masculine". The manner in which the Bill was crumpled, torn and its pieces thrown as pellets was a pointer towards the way in which we treat our women.

We can bandy about words on the equality of sexes with panache, use gender to garner votes and cash in on an emotive "women’s issues" during electoral rallies. But when it comes to affirmative action to redress an imbalance, we either hedge or backtrack.

Somewhere behind this resistance is the embedded notion that politics is essentially male-oriented and male-centred. This issue is derived from a political philosophy that confines women to the private domain while the active and more public domain is the man’s prerogative.

The Constitution gives women equal rights because there is equality of sexes. They too are human beings as are men and deserve the same kind of opportunities. There is to be no discrimination on the basis of gender. However, at the same time, the approach towards women was based on the issue that they were "different" from men. This approach was coloured by the welfare orientation. The assumption, thus, was that women — owing to low social status and being oppressed for centuries — are not quite equal. The approach towards women and women’s issues has been coloured by these contradictions of being same as and different to men.

The welfare orientation ensured that women never became "subjects". They remained objects of state munificence rather than becoming participants in the process of development. Anomalies between constitutional rights and social practice will remain, as will the contradiction between women as subjects and architects of their own destinies (political or otherwise) or objects who need intervention of men to initiate legal reform, structural changes and the right to rule themselves.

This contradiction was emphasised because we in India never really had a "movement" for equality. Which, as some would say, is indeed positive. Indian women got on a platter what others the world over had to agitate for and acquire the arduous way. This was really a detriment.

Had there been a movement based on our own context, issues would have been thrashed out and the private and personal would have become political. Now instead of being made political it is merely being "politicised". Making an issue political would be to bring it into the arena of politics where it can be debated, set up for legislation and consequently legalised. Politicisation is what makes women’s issue cannon fodder for various political parties to be used and discarded. Hence, it is being exploited by this politicisation. However, did not the Indian women step into the political arena during the national movement?

Casting all inhibitions and role specifications aside, Indian women had joined the national movement in large numbers. Gandhji played an active role in mobilising them and involving them in large numbers in the political process. According to him, women as companions of men are gifted with equal capacities. They had the right to participate in the activities of men and enjoy the same right to freedom. Gandhiji liberally used religious concepts and terminology to mobilise women’s participation in the national movement. This was an integral part of the women’s dharma, he felt. Political activity was desh seva. Instead of being the weaker sex, women were (according to Gandhi) immeasurably superior to men. Not only did they have greater intuition and courage but were also more self-sacrificing. In his discussion with women, mythical figures of Sita and Damayanti, idealised as symbols of women suffering but devoted to their dharma, kept recurring. These mythical prototypes were hardly "active" as political participation required, but "passive" — trapped in the world of tradition.

Gandhiji’s approach sought progressive changes but resisted radical changes at the structural and institutional level. The status of women needed to be improved but the institutions which impinged upon and curtailed this freedom (of women) were to be retained. It was not clearly spelt out how with Independence the change in the position was to be accomplished.

The greater failure of this approach was the inability to expose the nature of oppression that affected women in different layers of our society.

As a consequence, no goals that could be meaningful to all women and those who believe in their cause, were set. Feudal inequalities still control the levers of power in India. This is underscored by the fact that we do not have in India a linear flow of history. History is perceived as flowing together of layers of past and present unlike in the West where past, present and future are causally linked. The Indian past has a living presence which serves contemporary needs. Indira Gandhi was the symbol of Nari Shakti. Her being Prime Minister was supposedly a major shot in the arm for Indian women. This fact, however, meant very little in terms of Indian female reality.

It is a flawed perspective and a misconception about the role of a process of social change that makes us view the "individual as history." Symbols can never be satisfactory representatives of the complex reality of women’s lives, just as the mere presence of a large number of women in government, bureaucratic machinery and positions of authority does not mean that the Indian woman has never had it so good. The fallacy in such a conclusion (as in the case of Indira Gandhi) is to project individual success stories as evidence of sweeping changes in the socio-cultural milieu. Blinkered representation projects these success stories to proclaim how the Indian woman has arrived even though she might be caught in the dilemma of conservatism at a personal level. Arrived, where? One would like to quiz the proponents of this willing suspension of disbelief.

Visualised in the context of tradition, the approach towards women is broadly negative. This tradition cuts across class barriers. Stri-jati, it would appear, had over the centuries acquired a kind of common denomination which retained "the margin-centre" dialectic within its unity of experience.

Scholars appear to agree that most women-related structures (the age at which a girl was supposed to be married off, inter-marriage etc.) initially applied to the Brahmins alone. The practice was therefore casteist and sexist.

However, this would appear to have been diluted over the centuries, so that caste factor was replaced in its entirety by the sex to create a new jati altogether--the female-jati. Very few other ancient Hindu practices have been allowed to blur caste difference so wholly without arousing any protest.

The patriarchal thrust alone seems to have universal sanction.

For women in India at any rate, gender has become a curious equalizer. The gender paradox lies in this, that while it is at the lowest common denominator at virtually every level in the social structure, the conventional caste factor has not diminished its hold on social operations. Thus, in India, the discrimination against women is by and large three-fold. Sex- based (stri-jati), caste-based (jati) and class- based. As Varinder Nabar says in her book of the same title Caste as Women, "To be caste as woman in India is to live out this triple- layered existence."

Sharad Yadav had contemptuously referred to parkati mahilayen who would benefit as a result of reservation. He is not alone. Traditionally women have been berated. Folk wisdom portrays female sex as lacking both sexual morality and intelligence. Punjabis and Gujaratis are one of mind that "the intelligence of a woman is in her heels" (stri akkal edi ma) Tamils maintain that no matter how educated a woman is, her intelligence is always of the lowest order. Malayalis warn that "one who heeds the advice of a woman will be reduced to beggary." Folk sayings in the northern languages place greater emphasis on the use of force and physical chastisement to correct female shortcomings. So, were the happenings in Parliamant an extension of this ?