DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Women and religion in a secular society
BY C.S. LAKSHMI
`We all carry a lot of baggage deep inside. It surfaces when provoked by events, statements or circumstances, and then colours the way we respond.'
WOMEN'S engagement with religion has always been taken as a part of being feminine. Really staunch atheistic women have existed only in the Self-Respect Movement. A woman who decides not to observe the rituals and customs dictated by religion has always been seen as a harbinger of conflict, disorder and pain within a family.
A cultural practice
This is because, for a woman, religion is not just something linked to a god but a cultural practice that she is supposed to preserve. In my younger days, a prize for a girl in a Tamil elocution competition always meant a lamp, steel trays, kumkum holder, a steel water pot (an eternal reminder that she is the fetcher of water for the family from the river, from the roadside tap or from wherever) or a book that showed the path to be a good Tamil woman. Despite the influence of the Self-Respect Movement, one of the important duties of a married woman is to continue the worshipping tradition of the family she is married into.
In the women's movement, it was generally assumed that those who fight for the liberation of women cannot be believers because the rituals that are a part of religion and the meanings attached to the rituals bind women in many ways and degrade women in unacceptable ways. Moreover, engaging with religion also meant accepting the divisions in the society based on caste and religion.
Casual Symbols
But in many of our households, certain symbols of religion casually lay around as cultural objects in the form of a terracotta goddess whose name one had forgotten, bought from a small village temple or a lamp which one's mother had lit all her life, an unusually carved Ganesha, brass Deepavali lamps handed down by the family, a brass candle stand or a rough wooden cross carved by a village sculptor or a Ravi Varma painting of Rama's coronation. One still found it difficult to step on a book. One did enjoy Carnatic music, bhajans, Christmas carols, some festivals like Id, Pongal, regional new year celebrations, Christmas or Deepavali which meant new clothes, tasty food (even if the women had to slog cooking it), the smell of sugar cane and jaggery permeating the house, the fragrance of a cake cooking in the oven, the flavour of spicy mutton and milk pudding with cardamom boiling on the stove and the smell of flowers and fruits which change the atmosphere in the household for a while. Many of us who had discarded the ritualistic part of a festival did enjoy the food that we cooked or the family cooked or the neighbours sent over. Over the years, we understood that while religion and the identity it imposed was not acceptable to us, faith was something deeply personal and that so long as faith did not make you look at the other with hatred, so long as it was not imposed on the other to create hierarchies, it was not harmful. However, we did stay away from groups openly professing a faith or a religion. We were still trying to grapple with the issues religion raised when the demolition of Babri Masjid happened and we realised that what was demolished was not just a religious structure but the very foundation of harmony that had been built over the years. Ochre was no more just a colour. Nor was the trident a wall decoration.
Many questions regarding women's engagement with religion and what faith meant to them have emerged since then and, after the Gujarat riots in 2002, have become questions which need to be tackled urgently. A number of these questions have been raised in personal conversations and some in more open discussions. These questions have been raised in anguish, in confusion and in desperation, seeking clarity and direction. Reflecting the opinions of many women, seeking clarification for herself and many others is Vimal Balasubrahmanyan's book Through A Prism, Brightly: Conversations With Women on Religion, Spirituality and Communalism, published by Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Hyderabad. Vimal says that after the Gujarat riots in 2002, she discussed with an activist friend the efficacy of interfaith meetings and the possible role of religious leaders in healing the rifts between communities. Interfaith platforms are not very comfortable, Vimal says, for, activists are usually non-believers and almost always non-practitioners of religion. "Secular" activists have found it difficult to enlist the support of believers in bringing about communal harmony.
Temperamental divide
Several questions arose from this, which became the basis of this book, according to her. What could be the reason for this lack of rapport between "secular" activists and believers? Are activists temperamentally unable to empathise with believers? Do they assume that women who practise faith are a docile lot, meekly swallowing the built-in injustices in their respective religions? Do they have any idea how women actually "engage" with religion? To explore these questions, Vimal interviewed some 30-odd women in Hyderabad and also wrote a number of articles based on her conversations for the "Impressions" column of Mainstream weekly. The present book is in two parts. The first part contains the individual narratives and the second part is a reprint of the 13 articles written for Mainstream.
Vimal's book is a timely one that records the feelings and anguish of many women (and men) who are eager to create a situation where there is communal harmony. It also shows the complexities of the situation. Take the tailpiece in one of her chapters. An activist in Ahmedabad asks a Jain friend how, being a Jain, he could possibly condone violence and killings. His reply: Please don't bring Jainism into this! Vimal says that her impression from these narratives is that faith and belief can co-exist quite comfortably with an enquiring mind. She says that we all grow up accustomed to certain cultural practices and beliefs that shape our attitudes to other faiths. Like one of her Muslim academic friends points out, we all carry a lot of baggage deep inside. It surfaces when provoked by events, statements or circumstances, and then colours the way we respond. Vimal rightly concludes that before we embark upon effective solutions to the problem we now face, we all have to begin with a lot of soul-searching.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women.
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