For a nation with one of the lowest sex ratios in the world, we have managed to deify woman qiute successfully.
Traditionally, the ‘feminine’ has been the nurturer, fertile and life-giving. She is the earth form, denoting denotes life and energy. All gods in the Indian pantheon have a female countepart goddess (except the confirmed bachelors, of course) and no Indian ceremony is complete without the presence of the woman of the household. In fact, Indian culture has given women the highest status of ardhangini – the other half – without whom no man is complete.
Yet, the woman in India remains an object – to be deified or defiled depending entirely on the curent mood of the country. With Navratri around the corner, I want to think about the idea of the woman as object – a concept by no means unique to India, but worth thinking about in any case. For few other countries have so easily and fully linked womanhood with the key ideas that drive popular thought and discourse – religion and nationalism.
In Life and Times of Bharat Mata, discusses the icon of Bharat Mata and traces its path and changes through recent Indian history. Quoting, there has always been a celebration of the nation’s female body – and of her citizens’ male gaze – beneath the seeming veneration is the need for possession and dominance.
M.F.Husain for ToI’s special issue for the fiftieth year of Indian independence (ridden with symbols of prosperity, veneration, religion – the feminine form is free-flowing yet trapped within the physical boundaries of what represents ‘India’ on the map)
Martha C. Nussbaum discusses here the idea of woman as the nation, in an attempt to understand and explain (if that is ever possible) the sexual tortures inflicted on women (who suffered most in the carnage) during the Gujarat pogrom, and even before, during the partition. This widespread image of the female body as the nation helps to explain why, during the waves of communal violence at the time of independence, possession of women was such an important issue to the contending sides…
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(More on this later, maybe)