In yet another showdown, the government’s saffron agenda tried to overpower education as BJP leader Ma Foi K Pandiarajan stepped in to prevent an international seminar on ‘Harassment Of Women As Recorded In Tamil Literature’ calling it ‘slanderous.’
On November 25 2018, St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchi, where the event was to be conducted on December 6-7, postponed the seminar, citing relief work in Tamil Nadu’s cyclone affected areas as an excuse.
Certainly, there is more to this news than meets the eye, as it summarises almost all major threats to equality, freedom, and its effect on our education.
Initially, BJP leader H Raja had called for a ban on the event by tweeting, “It is a war on Tamil language and Hindu religion declared by the Christian St Joseph’s College. Let’s be prepared to face it.”
He also stated that, the event was a way to malign classical texts and epics in order to evoke communal tension, which honestly is quite ironic considering the fact that it was his own tweet, which openly accused one religion of declaring war against the other through an educational institute that had more potential of evoking communal tension than an academic seminar on the matters of gender.
H Raja also went as far as to say that, “A minority community could not be allowed to denigrate the majority community and our Tamil literary works.”
This is alarming because it sounds as if a majority community is in some way stronger and higher than a minority community and therefore the latter should not be allowed to express its opinion if the former is not happy with it. This is as good as feeding the minds of people with unnecessary doubts and fears and then blaming the college for communal clashes; it is the curbing of the right to freedom of expression, and altering and censoring of education leading to false scholarship. And all of this portrayed in the form of just one incident.
It is also important to note that the seminar was academic, with the objective of understanding the issue of violence against women through the study of the classics and literature, and the organisers had made it clear that they were accepting academic articles regarding the same. Naturally, an attempt to prevent such scholarly deliberations has left artists and activists infuriated.
“Tamil culture and literature is very strong and powerful. By preventing discourses on it, they are only making it look weak,” said VCK leader Ravikumar.
“Classic Tamil literature is unique because it reflects all aspects of society and people take pride in this. It is very dangerous to strangulate literary research. Censorship is bad for society,” he added.
Even more interesting is the instant attention and response H Raja’s tweet got, as the minister K Pandiarajan came forward to ensure that the “TN government will intervene with the college concerned and ensure this derogatory and slanderous seminar does not happen. When there were numerous Tamil literary books that glorify women and Tamil culture, a poisonous idea that Tamil literature demeaned women should not be allowed to be sown.”
One cannot help but disagree with Mr. Pandiarajan, because no matter which religion, community or culture, women were, and are suppressed, harassed and controlled in one way or the other. This knowledge is as common as the fact that the sun rises in the east.
Have we forgotten Panchali who was dragged into the court of men to be stripped after her husband lost her in a game of gambling like an object? Have we forgotten how Sita had to ‘prove’ her chastity? Or the fact that she was abandoned after Ram heard someone doubting her virtue? Did we not have sati for centuries with women being forced to burn along with their dead husbands?
Do we not have the contentious issue of triple talaq? Or the whole concept of how virginity is something so pious that it needs to be preserved in Catholic traditions?
Which ethnic group did not regulate the life of women, or treat them like a means to only procreate and please the patriarchs, or solely bear countless heirs for lineage? All of them did and still do. We do not even need to go back to archaic times of classics to see it, when this is very much true even in the 21st century. Women are beaten up if they try to enter the Sabarimala temple.
Literature may not be as authentic as facts and dates, but it is a reflection of the society in which it was written. It represents the mentality, thought process and the ideology of its time and space, as well as provides an insight into the reader and the author. So yes, even if feminism is a relatively new concept and equality was not discussed in the classics, it does not mean that the ill treatment of women was shadowed. It simply means that in that literature, women being objectified was seen as normal and as acceptable as the caste system was at one point.
For example, the Mahabharata openly shows caste segregation and discrimination and at the time it was written, the caste system was strictly followed. It was normal for people to kill if one showed signs of rejecting the same.
Even if they are only read and studied for theological aspects, it still does not mean that people were equal, or represented equally in Hindu classical texts. It simply means that the text was more concerned about the question of lineage, and the whole caste system went along with it because it was reality.
These webs of social hierarchies have always existed in our history and our culture, and so it reflects in our literature too. The only difference is that when written, concepts like democracy and feminism were not actually shaped and so they were not the centre of the text, but the discrimination did and hence it is represented.
And, even if one might argue that women were cherished, respected and glorified in the classics, one has to understand that this respect always came with the undertone of subjugation.
To elaborate, women were divided into categories such as ‘good women’ and ‘bad women’ – this notion of a good woman was heavily based on things such as chastity, obedience and attractiveness in the eyes of her husband. Everyone else was shoved into the other category, which was obviously not respected.
Therefore, it is safe to say that a woman’s virtues were not based on the traits of the person as a whole, but on her sexual status and her obedience towards patriarchy.
No present social realities or vices have jumped out of the blue; we can trace their roots to the past. Filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar rightly asks, “Mythology becomes a basis for lifestyle and one always has to go back to history to understand roots. If we don’t question or challenge what we learnt, what is the point of education?”