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The essays in this volume are directly
confrontational, accusing men of creating a patriarchal set-up fortified
by the Dharma Shastras, Smritis and Puranas. A complete epistemology has
been created where woman is "prakriti" or the regenerating
force and, as such, is required to have the necessary values of
motherhood, patience, endurance etc. Those who are not so virtuous will
be fickle, sensuous, timid and weak, thus making it incumbent upon men
to protect them and reinstate them within the former view. As spake
Manu, so spoke Freud: women who did not conform to these stereotypes
were called neurotics or hysterical. In short, they were deviant women
or aberrations.
Yet the common man will
talk about the "golden age" of women — Gargi, Maitreyi,
Apala, Lopamudra and fourteen others, all known as the Brahmavadinis.
These special Hindu women are known to have performed religious
ceremonies and were permitted into traditional male forms of worship,
yet only 10 among the thousand hymns which have come down to us from the
Vedas were authored by them. These hymns, significantly, are about
prayers for fertility rather than the metaphysical issues. Even the
religious activities that they were allowed to participate in pertain to
household sacrifices. There have been other saintly figures like Lal Ded
of Kashmir, who discarded even her clothes when giving up worldly
trappings, and Meera Bai, who gave up the veil and danced through Mewar
with anklets on her feet, but these women largely exist outside
mainstream worship.
Other icons exist like the
Rani of Jhansi or Razia Sultan. Whereas the former is legitimised as
"Mardani", the latter is always believed to be handicapped by
her sex. If Lakshmibai is turned into a male figure according to the
popular song, she is sure not to overreach the specific political
imperatives of the 1857 struggle for which she has been appropriated.
The iconisation of women
is not restricted to literary or religious representations alone. Art,
too, has its icons: Raja Ravi Verma’s role models such as Sita,
Yashoda, Draupadi, Damyanti and Shakuntala is an attempt to find
"perfect" icons of womanhood. Verma later became interested in
providing ideals for all sorts of Indian women — Tamil, Maharashtrian
and Bengali. His ideal Indian woman was to contain the beauty of
Damyanti, the patience of Shakuntala and the loyalty of Draupadi. A
subversive painting of M.F. Husain’s nude Saraswati, however, was
enough to agitate the Hindus. However, Husain created his own icons,
notably that of Madhuri Dixit. As Vijaya Ramaswamy puts it: "Iconisation
has taken place constantly only to go through transformations,
transmutations and`85 transcreations."
The existence of icons
necessarily includes their breakdown also. The bandit queen is one
example of the terrorising woman, but then we have Kali and Durga to
frame and limit her vengeance. Feminist Studies since the 1970s have
been busy recovering the real woman by writing her back into
male-centric histories. Shohini Ghosh’s essay on Fire is
clearly an attempt to locate women outside the ambit of marriage.
The dominant themes of
becoming the "good wife" are interrogated by Patricia Uberoi
when she examines the stereotypes in the popular magazine Women’s
Era. Rajol Sogani looks at alternative lives for widows in a rigidly
defined society by examining both male and female representations.
Uma Chakravarty explores
Dalit women’s identity, which has always been excluded from the
accounts of British orientalists, Indian nationalists, Hindu orthodoxy
and Western feminists because of the upsurge of studies focussing on the
upper-caste Hindu woman. Other contributions are about
"lustful" women in folk songs, women in labour unions and the
indifference to their gender issues during agitation for equal rights,
the urban displacement of the non-iconic midwife whose expertise in
alternative medical wisdom is phenomenal, and women in theatre who
performed iconic roles, but were regarded as prostitute figures by
society. Re-searching Indian Women is surely among a different genre of
women’s writing investigating hitherto unexplored themes.
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THE
plethora of festivities in October has set me thinking how many of them
revolve around the discourse relating to women. That a majority of women
play their roles to the hilt, in cinema, television and in real life
despite the many theories about exploitation, oppression and
marginalisation only goes to show that there is a real world out there
outside and prior to the discourse. Yet theory agitates tirelessly and
has, at least, succeeded in roping the so-called "thinking"
woman into its fold. The gap between fashionable theory and the world of
real events has recently produced a virtual library of edited feminist
texts which sit on my table. One of these is Vijaya Ramaswamy’s
collection of papers which locate the politics of female iconisation.