“239. A Kandala, a village pig, a cock, a dog, a menstruating woman, and a eunuch must not look at the Brahmanas while they eat.” – Manusmriti
The taboo around menstruation is a topic that finds its roots in not only present socio-political structures but also in religious practices. Religion has since long set not only spiritual but also social norms. This article hopes to understand the contributions, both ill and good, of religion in general, and Hinduism in particular, to the stigmatization of periods and menstruating women.
The above-mentioned quote is from Manusmriti, a scripture that has faced a lot of contention lately due to its encouragement of casteism and misogyny. This encouragement of menstrual exclusion is not an anomaly, but in fact, is echoed in many more scriptural writings.
Some people have also pointed out to the contrary that the Vedas and other founding texts do not endorse any barring of menstruating women from the wider society, but encourage their participation. Acharya M.R. Rajesh writes, in an article for The Times of India, that “The four Vedas never state anywhere that a woman’s body is impure or that she cannot do poojas during menstruation. Prohibiting women from entering temples and castigating them as impure is squarely against the teachings of the Vedas… Even hard-core traditionalists didn’t block women from Vedic rituals.”
These contradicting arguments of scholars leave us with little resources to proclaim a unanimity of the opinions of these scriptures, and I find myself incompetent to comment on the validity of either argument. What we can comfortably proclaim is the consequence of religion in the present times, and how the scriptures have translated into ground reality.
A lot has been written on the topic of Brahminical casteism, patriarchy, and their intersections. The issue of religious orthodoxy and tradition in relation to the position of women and menstruators got highlighted last year during the controversial Sabarimala case. When women were granted permission to enter the temple, it was hailed by many as a win for women’s rights and feminism, but is the case really so?
Indian feminism, at least in theory, has long championed the idea of intersectionality, wherein a person’s social stature is not a product of an isolatable identity, instead, it is a product of overlapping axes of relative oppression and privilege.
Unfortunately, this has not translated into the ground reality; this is feminism largely dominated by upper-caste women. The Sabarimala case is a perfect example of this inconsistency. As Asha Kotwal, in an article for The Wire points out, “Clearly, the people celebrating this victory at Sabarimala are predominantly dominant caste Hindu women. No single person is ever representative of the entire community and the same holds true for Dalit women as well. From an anti-caste feminist stand-point, the Savarna-led feminist movement’s pressure to see this as a great victory for women – all the while being caste-blind – is reductionist, self-centred, and hypocritical”.
What we need today are not symbolic appeasements, but tangible changes. We need sex and menstrual hygiene education for children from disadvantaged communities. We need affordable sanitary products. We need representation in mainstream media. We need proper resources for Dalit women. We do not need scraps of progress thrown to keep people silent.
Last year, a feminist man I was talking to said, “When you think about it all women are like Dalits, regarding their social stature”.
This comparison at the time made sense, but I have lately come to realize this couldn’t be far from the truth. We must not conflate these very different spheres of social identity. A cis upper caste woman is unlikely to know the struggles of an Adivasi woman.
Where an urban upper-caste woman is not allowed to enter a temple during her menstruation, a Dalit woman isn’t allowed that for her entire life.
It means periods are regarded as defiling only to an upper-caste woman’s dignity because we never attributed any dignity to a Dalit woman in the first place. It is time we reviewed the systems we have built and the hierarchies we have etched. It is time we listen to voices we have always spoken over. It is time we passed the mic!