Women are fast storming every male bastion in the country. I remember, as a student, a 14-year-old classmate who was part of an Interact project at school (Interact is the student wing of the Rotary Club) grilling the local Rotary president on why there were no women members in his club. “There aren’t,” was all he could say. “But why?” she persisted.
“Well it is not part of the club charter to admit women.” “But why not? What’s wrong with women?” she wouldn’t let go. “Well, that’s just the way it is,” he said weakly, by now really harangued by this teenager giving him a lesson in gender equality. I was a rookie journalist few years later and it was intimidating to enter a room full of Rotarians in the 1980s, where Maneka Gandhi was scheduled to deliver an address, as the Rotary club still continued to be an all-male preserve.
But just a few years later that male domination was broken and now hundreds of women in India (and I presume in the US where the Rotary club was founded) have ended up as presidents and secretaries of their local chapters. However, temples and mosques in India took longer and have needed the intervention of the courts. The Shani Shingnapur temple in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra was stormed by women recently.
This was fiercely resisted by the administration which then comprised politicians belonging to the NCP which, one would assume, would have been progressive and willing to offer women equal space in any institution. Although Shani Shingnapur needed the intervention of the court, in nearby Pune district women had already quietly invaded the male-dominated priesthood and established themselves as masters of rituals years ago.
Adopting purple sarees as their stated uniform (as against the white or saffron of the male priests), they were second to none in the study of the shastras, scriptures including the Vedas and the Upanishads and chanting of mantras as they performed ceremonies ranging from weddings to just simple havans and poojas. Simultaneously, women began to take to the streets as dholpathaks (beaters of drums) who accompany Ganpati processions all across Maharashtra. It requires a lot of grit and energy, but so far this bachelor God has not let down any of these women in doing this job for him—and doing it equally well as men.
These accomplishments went without much remark, though, like in Shani Shingnapur, there was some resistance when the courts similarly allowed women to go up to the sanctum sanctorum of the Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai. Now, the dargah sits in a small island surrounded by the sea, which is stormy at the best of times, but even during heavy monsoons, there were no reports of it being inundated or Mumbai being punished in any way by the Rain Gods for allowing women to enter the inner precincts.
So why should Lord Ayyappa be less benign to either women or the people of Kerala and flood the state just because the Supreme Court has said women have equal rights for entry into the Sabarimala temple? The convention of not allowing menstruating women into the Ayyappa temple does not hold, er, water when one considers that it is an unspoken rule applicable to all temples and in India to all religions, including Zoroastrianism.
No woman would dare violate it by even entering her puja room while menstruating, a temple is a far cry from that. A friend’s grandmother was a devotee of Lord Ayyappa and believed that he granted her every wish and prayer, including one to keep her son safe as he walked homewards across a jungle full of wild animals at night. So the question begging an answer today is why, if Lord Ayyappa granted a woman her every prayer, should she be barred from worshipping at his temple in Sabarimala instead of just at her private altar at home? And if Lord Ayyappa was not angry with one woman for being his devotee, why should he punish any others for similar devotion? Or inundate a whole state in anger? India has always been a progressive country for women, except in medieval times when their purdah was due to Islamic influences.
The most powerful deities in the Indian pantheon are women—Laxmi, Saraswati and Durga, who personify wealth, knowledge and strength, essentials for the wellbeing of individuals as well as nations. In independent India, women did not have to wait a single day for adult franchise because, unlike the US or even the UK, our suffragette movement was way ahead of theirs. Kiran Bedi was a top officer in the Indian Police Service even before Germany allowed women to start serving as uniformed officers in their police force.
And a woman collector did enter the Sabarimala temple to oversee arrangements long before the Supreme Court observed that everyone should be allowed to enter it. But before all that, we had many women influencing the writing of our Constitution which enshrines gender equality. Members of the Constituent Assembly and Parliament included fiercely independent women who fought for this gender equality—like Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Durgabai Deshmukh, Begum Aizaz Rasul, and more famous ones like Vijaylakshmi Pandit and Ammu Swaminathan, mother of Captain Laxmi Sehgal of the Jhansi Regiment of Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, who fought shoulder to shoulder with men against the British army.
Of course, the temple of democracy, the Parliament, is different from temples to Gods. But India has been put to no peril in allowing women into their precincts, while one is yet to hear of a woman being ordained to a Catholic church anywhere in the world. As recently as 2014, the otherwise seemingly progressive Pope Francis said that door was closed to women. But our democratic institutions are opening our doors to women in even our religious institutions. Let not some misplaced fears of divine retribution slam them shut again.
Sujata Anandan
Senior journalist and political commentator
Email: sujata.anandan@gmail.com