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Her master's voice?
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It is for women to propose and men to dispose off. It is for women to want, for men to accomplish, for women to have have a will, and men to have their way. After all, women are just `Ardhangini' of men! Shocked? Well, this disparity runs across religions and region. What is `Ardhangini' for us, is just `better half' for Westerners. ANJANA RAJAN reveals a few quaint traits of gender politics... .
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THE BETTER OR THE BATTERED HALF: Women do their bit at a construction site in Delhi. Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar.
OH! WHAT a tangled web we weave, when conditioning clashes with reality!
Life with its complicated relationships and hierarchies is often described as a great web. And when generations of conditioning are confronted with a changing modern world, the web gets sticky indeed. This question of feminism and feminity, for example, is fraught with confusion. When a girl climbs trees and spends more time playing cricket than with her dolls, she is labelled a tomboy, but when a grown- up woman roams the forest in search of firewood, climbs through holes in a compound wall to cut grass from an empty plot of land, or single-handedly runs a labour-intensive farming enterprise, then she is only doing her duty. A man is traditionally known as the provider and head of the family. Yet society finds no paradox in the inability or unwillingness of a great majority of such providers to make a cup of tea, leave alone cook a meal. The food and beverages department of the home is definitely considered a woman's domain, and whether she is a corporate CEO or a police officer, her headquarters are never considered far from the kitchen.
Once at an ice-breaking exercise during a meeting of a large IT company, employees were asked to converse in pairs and then tell their colleagues about their partner's hobbies. The hobby, of one popular young men known for his technical know-how, was described as "downloading recipes from the Internet for his wife''. Everyone laughed at this harmless joke, which passed off as one of the livelier moments of the meeting.
No one found the remark irrelevant or belittling to a wife who was employed in the same IT job in the same company as her husband, and could have, if she wanted, downloaded her own recipes! Yet, no matter how much a woman's identity is linked to cooking and serving, if we went to a restaurant and called for the Chef to express our appreciation for the mouth-watering delicacies on offer, we would be surprised if we found a woman instead of a man under that tall white cap.
Literature through the ages reinforces the idea that womankind is the weaker sex. But anyone who has experienced or even observed the birth of a baby knows that pregnancy and delivery are no weakling's job. Of course, dancers know that to make the body look light like a feather requires a great deal of power. Delicate postures and flying leaps are performed by muscles of steel. But a woman is "Abalaa'' -- the weak one. Ancient Hindu thought resolves the superiority issue with examples of the duality of all existence. One cannot do without the other. The male and the female are two inseparable sides of the same concept, as exemplified in the Ardhanareshwara, where Shiva and Shakti -- the male and female life principals -- are represented as the right and left halves of the same body in classical sculpture and dance. In less exalted mortal circles, we refer to a man's wife as his ardhangini or half of his body. Western tradition has been more generous to the wife, calling her not just the other, but the better half.
In reality, however there is a fixed social impression that an unmarried daughter is incomplete. Because she has not found her other half? Perhaps. Therefore, a woman is referred to as Sowbhaagyavati -- one blessed with good fortune -- when she gets married. Till then, presumably, her fortunes are of dubious nature. The groom is referred to as Chiranjeev -- the long lived or immortal one. Now he may be fondly referred to as immortal even on his birthday or other major milestone even into a crusty old confirmed bachelorhood. But she does not receive the epithet Sowbhaagyavati till her fate is linked with his. Add to this notion the belief that those parents never get absolution that die with unmarried daughters on their unaccomplished to-do list, and we have an explanation for the long queues of potential sowbhaagyavatis at the proverbial doors of the chiranjeevis. Perhaps this also explains why the son-in-law is exalted as Maha Vishnu, the Lord Himself come calling, and his every whim is catered to. By default, however, his consort is Mahalakshmi herself. But when the nuptials are on the cards -- both literally and figuratively -- a fascinating "maya'' of transliteration takes place. The wedding card bears the names of the bride and groom to be, prefixed with the appropriate titles, but space and designing factors combine to abbreviate Sowbhaagyavati to Sow, and Chiranjeev to Chi. English readers don't need to be told the meaning of the first. As for the second abbreviation, punctuate it with an exclamation mark, and think in Hindi, Tamil or a number of other Indian languages. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when tradition rams into modernity!
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