In organised religion it is a matter of some urgency to put up gender fences. For the noble cause of protection and safety, not to mention chastity, women are cordoned off so that they pose no danger to men and no danger to themselves. On no account should they run amok. The women who tweak the system may do so just like matriarchs do in homesteads—by manipulating the men-folk. In their fight for survival, they may not be able to become feminist icons. It is each woman for herself.
The misogyny so deeply embedded in Kerala’s culture is bound to follow into the most secret clandestine places, into the sanctum sanctorum so to speak. Placed in convents either by the accident of poverty or on an adolescent whim, inmates may see themselves as trapped at some point. As the cheeky nun in TV mini-series Dracula says, she is ‘in a loveless marriage to have a roof over my head’.
Just because some places are cordoned off from public view doesn’t mean everything is hunky dory in those realms—not in a marriage, not in a nunnery. Women are on the run routinely. Rampant criticism outside of context, however, plays a blame game that solves nothing in the practical world. People make the system and the system makes the people. Patriarchy—perpetuated from the time God himself was referred to as a he—is the oxygen that everyone, boy or girl, breathes from birth.
Not a typo that can be fixed easily, by saying womankind for mankind or auto-correcting He to She when it comes to God; these pay pretty lip service only to political correctness. The real damage was done so long ago and so insidiously that most of the time it descends into smart-speak and stops at the tongue. In the recent past, the clergy has been tiring of rebellious insiders. Women within the church were turning whistle-blowers. Nuns wrote their biographies and walked out of the church. Bishop Franco, the first Indian Catholic bishop to be arrested, sharply divided the laity into ‘for’ and ‘against’.
The Abhaya case rips off the blindfold once again. The arrest of Father Thomas Kottoor and Sister Sephy for bumping off a young nun at night just because she chanced upon them with each other has shocked the laity. In that hissing dark corridor over two decades ago, they had a choice. They could have exited office and set up home together. Or gone for confessions and done their penance. Instead, they chose to kill. This was not a crime of passion but a cold-blooded cover-up. Their mistake was not finding solace in each other to circumvent strictures of celibacy imposed upon them. They murdered a fellow human being—that is their sin.
Shinie Antony shinieantony@gmail.com
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