Transgression of suppressed sexuality: Liberating the consciousness of Indian women

    22-Oct-2019
Dr Aniruddha Babar
“Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary, description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman’s erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.”
Peter Brooks
The everlasting battle of devils of darkness with the angels of light has always been fought on the fronts of “morality”.
The questions of good-bad, just-unjust, fair-unfair, right-wrong, moral-immoral have been centred around the sacred fire of certain dynamic truth.
Those who held the societal moralities in high esteem, those who abide by the moral laws of the society often judged as noblemen and those who transgressed were severely condemned.
The battle of devils and angels is an age old battle.
In this battle on the battlefront of ethics, it is women who have been victimized for eternity.
The devils, angels and their ignorant masculinity persistently challenged the sacred femininity.
The philosophy of morality was an outcome of an insecure masculinity that on one hand written the Kamasutra and on the other Manusmriti.
The Story of Adam and Eve is very pertinent. 
In Bible, The Book of Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve, the first man and a woman, contravened the command of God when they ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
According to the Biblical record it was Eve who induced Adam to eat the fruit. It reveals the undercurrents of “sexism” in Bible. Obeying the command of God to not to eat a fruit was an act of morality, however, the moment forbidden fruit was eaten the evil and sin was brought into the world-hence the immorality was introduced.
In this entire story, poor Eve was shown as a villain who by an alleged act of “transgression” gave birth to darkness.
The roots of Anglo-Saxon-Victorian morality can be found in the Book of Genesis that convicted Eve of moral transgression.
The epidemic of the virus of ‘Male Paramountcy’ has spread all over the world since the dawn of human civilization.
Women not only were condemned by the great ancient Indian civilization but also its contemporaries.
The Hindu sage, Manu condemned woman to eternal bondage.
The Greek, in their period of highest culture imprisoned their women within their houses and denied them all rights.
The Spartans often destroyed women who could not give birth to healthy children.
Even the most magnificent and civilized empire of Rome granted its women no legal rights.
In Rome husbands had absolute control over their wives and treated them as slaves.
Aristotle and Rousseau branded qualities like modesty, feminity, sensitivity and meekness as womanly and natural for the female sex.
Plato did concede them an equal status in his Republic but that is stray example which should be further examined in the light of his shocking advocacy for the system of ‘communism of wives’ which shows his utter disregard and contempt for women that reduced the status of ‘wife’ merely to a public commodity.
The socialist thinkers led by Karl Marx, Engels and others believed that women had been transformed from free and equal productive members of the society to subordinate wives and wards when humanity entered into an agrarian age which subsequently gave birth to the concepts, institutions of marriage and family which caused further degradation of status of a woman in society.
No Civilization, No Culture, No Religion, No God had ever spare a women from the wrath of the politics of ‘Phallus of Patriarchy’ that gradually destroy the sanctity of the physical and emotional existence of women in society.
The concept of Moral Transgression is standing on a very slippery ground. Since time immemorial this very idea has been poorly understood by the ignorant, self-cantered, egoistic, sexist mind-set of society. History has taught us, that every civilization that has prospered on Earth attempted to subjugate women by glorifying their feminine nature and inherent strength as well as destructive powers for e.g. various female Deities in Indian religious culture.
The contradiction is visible.
On one hand women have been made the slaves of patriarchy and on the other, the same patriarchy; by granting them the status of deity elevated their religious status.
What mystery, what contradiction is this? How has the sexual objectification of a woman transformed into a religious objectification? The answers to the question lie in an age old conspiracy that made women the sacred object of veneration by declaring them as living goddesses.
The moment living human beings starts to be venerated as a God or Deity they ceased to exist as a human being, as a result, their whole existence gets devoid of the human rights they lawfully claims by virtue of being born as human. God has no rights, isn’t it? Declare woman a Goddess and deprive her of all her Human Rights, individuality and dignity.
Glorification of compulsory suicide of woman after the death of her husband was done by declaring her Sati-Maata.
The dark legacy of the ‘Sati’ tradition is still alive, adored and venerated in the form of various temples built in the memory of ‘Sati Mata’ scattered over different places in northern India. Sati tradition was the best example as to what extent the society could go to degrade the existence of woman.
Another example can be given is of Temple Prostitution or Sacred Prostitution which is also known as Dev-Daasi tradition wherein women who were dedicated to the God by their parents were declared as married to the Deity of the temple and were required to submit and serve ‘MEN’ who would come to take blessings.
The Dev-Dasi tradition was largely prevalent in southern part of India, however, presently the Dev-Dasis are rehabilitated by the efforts of government but the tradition is very much in function.
The example of Yallamma Cult in state of Karnataka can be given; that still glorify the Dev-Dasi tradition.
It has been seen that most of the women dedicated to the temple were of untouchable or lower castes who were not allowed to enter into the temple.
The system that disallowed untouchables to enter the sanctum-sanctorum of the temple, appointed their women to serve the servants of the deities, where else in the world could we find the greatest example of hypocrisy and slavery?
The ideas of morality, the philosophy of chastity and purity are the result of gender conflict, masculine supremacy, sexual insecurity and fear.
The morality can be defined as a set of principles that make distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. The aforesaid simple definition of morality is self-evident of its hollow character.
In Indian society, male species has always had a dominant hand.
The socio-cultural status of women was comparatively lower than their male counterparts (let us not cite the typical examples of Gargi And Maitreyee all the time).
The masculine ignorance mistook delicate feminine body as a sign of weakness and feminine beauty and sexuality always considered as threatening, damaging and challenging to the ‘Tower of Power” of traditional male dominance. What is threatening should either have to be destroyed or brought under the absolute control.
This is exactly what happened with women all over the world.
(To be contd)
The writer is Asst Professor,  Dept. of Political Science,  Tetso College Nagaland, India