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Sunday, Sep 08, 2002

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Where women bear the brunt...

In the case of superstitious practices in India, a reassertion of orthodoxy appears to be, first, exclusively focussed on women, and women of the most vulnerable castes and classes, writes Supriya RoyChowdhury.

Burying reason.

IT IS not at all clear how one should categorise belief systems, and structures of action based on those beliefs. Travelling across the Atlantic this year around the 4th of July was a unique experience. As the anniversary of American independence drew closer, there was heightened expectation of terrorist attacks, and security at international airports in the United States and in Europe was tightened even more than what has been in place after 9/11.

As I went through several airports around this date, it became quite clear that persons of colour were being singled out, for questioning and physical checks. The physical checking took the form of asking us to stand in particular postures, arms spread out, take our shoes off, have the soles of our shoes and our ankles examined closely, take off all jewellery, and finally, in my case, I was asked to take off my dupatta. All this was happening as fellow white passengers were smoothly walking in after casual security checks. The acts of singling out bodies and partial disrobing had all the flavour of an oppressive ritual.

The rationality of tightening security in airports can hardly be contested. When the structure of that arrangement becomes based on an irrational belief system, tied to a racial stereotype, the structure of a highly modernised international transportation system begins to look as ludicrous as an ancient ritual of marking criminals' bodies, or even witch hunting. The instant sense of fear, typically expressed by a white woman if she finds herself alone in an elevator with a black man, the reported experience of a large number of black men, is also a superstition.

Insofar, therefore, as superstitions are necessary to create, justify and sustain unequal social structures, in any context, such belief systems are not the trademarks only of so-called traditional societies. Nevertheless, the tension between modernity and tradition is the most defining element in the discourse on superstitions, whether it emerges from academia or social activists.

The perspective of 19th century social reformers, armed with Western Enlightenment rationality, going about eradicating social superstitions with the objective of bringing about a rationalised social system, is now all but gone. The more nuanced perspective now is that superstitions are embedded deeply in a community's history and psyche, and must be understood in terms of that totality, rather than be made a target of immediate attack and elimination. Implicit in this view, of course, is the critique of modernisation as a universalistic prescription which assumes to ride roughshod over local cultures where these are discordant with modernisation's rationalist premises.

Where does that leave us when looking at such practices as the Devdasi system, or nude worship, or the resurgence of sati? These practices, arguably, are not only rooted in structures of caste and gender inequality, but represent the tightening hold of a world view that defines communities in terms of exclusivist religious identities. Would it then be justifiable to bring the state as well as a modernist intelligentsia, however insensitive to local culture, to bear on the forceful elimination of these practices? The ways in which state agencies, social activists, intellectuals, as well as protagonists of these practices themselves, have interfaced, and in the process, have transformed the domain in which these practices now take place, provide an arena where some of the central tensions of our social system are being played out.

The element of economic need which sustains some of these practices, and which is built into the social structure in which many communities live out their lives, is typically conceived as part of the larger framework of public policy issues, involving questions of education, employment and gender. But the connection between the ritualistic marking of women's bodies and their commodification in the market in a context of economic hardship, can hardly be wished away.

Many social activists feel that as long as the larger issues of poverty remain unaddressed, and in fact are intensified in a period of rapid marketisation, efforts to eradicate superstitious practices such as sati or the Devadasi system are unreal. In Chandragutti, a village in Shimoga district, every year in March men and women offer nude worship to a goddess in fulfilment of a vow. This practice has been banned by a State Government order, but like many similar laws, remains incomplete in implementation. A central objection to this practice, of course, is that the presentation of nude women invariably is a prelude to their enticement into prostitution. NGOs working in the field have, however, questioned the efficacy of law in preventing prostitution in a context where the flesh trade is driven by the economic needs of uneducated, low caste women. A particular NGO, involved for the last 23 years in women's issues in these areas, was of the opinion that both the state and social activists have selectively criminalised specific acts of traditional worship such as nude worship.

While part of the objective of law, and of social activism, is to prevent the initiation of vulnerable young women into prostitution, nothing is being done to criminalise the role of pimps, and other agents, who continue to be able to induct poor rural women into the urban flesh market, regardless of whether nude worship is carried on or not.

A somewhat different perspective on this question emerges from the resurgence of sati, and of the growing popularity of sati shrines and temples in northern India. The recent incident of a poor village woman of Madhya Pradesh burning to death on her husband's funeral pyre has caught much media attention. Interestingly, there are many more cases of widows who would want to commit sati and are prevented from doing so; they then become local deities, living goddesses, with temples or shrines growing around them. While a Supreme Court order has stopped the holding of fairs and festivals in Sati temples, worship at these shrines continues in many parts of Rajasthan. In July of this year, a young woman in Indore was forced by her husband and his family to undergo the ritual of "agni pariksha", whereby she had to walk several paces, holding red hot irons in her fist, to prove her purity and chastity. The sati, as well as the Devdasi, are endowed with a certain mystical power, as also with ritual status, insofar as they transcend the powerlessness of widowhood. This aura of sanctified woman power is being used in the sustained practice of these rituals. The resurgence of these practices may, hypothetically, represent many factors.

One could relate these to the general tendency towards a fundamentalist world view, propelled by a religious/communal definition of majoritarian politics. In such a perspective, traditional representations of religious sanctity can arguably help create and sustain symbols of orthodoxy, which would strongly anchor the actions of communal political groups. At another level, one could see this resurgence of superstitious practices as part, perhaps, of a broader anti-western, anti-modernist movement, of which Islamic fundamentalism could provide a parallel. Islamic fundamentalism, with its highly restrictive overtones for women, is also, pronouncedly a pan-cultural movement involving the rejection, for example, of western patterns of consumerism, of dress, and other modes of behaviour, and has the flavour of a civilisational conflict.

However, in the case of superstitious practices in India, a reassertion of orthodoxy appears to be, first, exclusively focussed on women, and women of the most vulnerable castes and classes, and second, is not obviously connected to any anti-western, anti-modern paradigm or theory. In fact, the attack on women's bodies in these practices is paralleled by a growing incidence of dowry deaths in India's cities, which represent similar attacks in urbanised spaces.

The burning of women for inadequate dowry is generated by a very contemporary, modern and market-driven approach to consumerism, courtesy globalisation. Dowry deaths, of course, do not have the sanctity of scriptures or tradition. But their fast increasing incidence in all parts of the country would seem to indicate that such acts, also, are supported by some kind of a shared belief system in a woman's role and function, and grounded in the reality of women's vulnerability in multiple arenas, economic, legal, political.

The interface of these two domains, the traditional and the modern, in their dual, if not orchestrated, attack on women's bodies, would raise many questions over the appropriate context in which a substantive challenge can be mounted against superstitious practices.

(With inputs from Ravi Reddy in Nizamabad and D. Srinivasulu in Kurnool.)

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