By Deepa Majumdar
According to the Mayan calendar the world was supposed to end on December 21, 2012 … but it did not. No celestial body shattered Earth, no volcano wiped out civilization, no tsunami devoured a continent. Why not? Because the apocalypse foretold did not mean the literal end of the world … but the cusp of two cycles … the end of the thirteenth “b’aktun” (cycle) and the start of the fourteenth. December 21, 2012 therefore hosted an auspicious juncture … the cusp of two civilizations … On this fateful day a new era is said to have begun. One does not have to be superstitious to believe this prophecy.
The world has not ended, but it has, in the last few weeks, been visited with apocalyptic crimes … first the gun violence in Newtown Connecticut, then the horrific gang rape and murder in Delhi. Add the rash of rapes across the country … many aimed at minors … many happening in small towns. And if we go back a few months and extend our vision to the subcontinent, we can add the shocking violence ordered by Mullah Fazlullah, the Swat Valley Taliban commander, against little Malala Yousafzai, shot on October 9, for having the temerity to support women’s rights to education. A young woman and a young girl … both from the Indian subcontinent …one has died after a brutal rape that has shocked the world … the other lies injured … both harmed by deranged patriarchal men, who may represent extremes … but not aberrations. To some extent their pathologies are shared by the dregs of culture in both nations. One can only hope that a new age has begun … one which promises an end to violence … a basic prerequisite for peace on Earth.
For India a new age must begin … If this nation we love is to live up to its teleological promise, violence against women must stop. At least some of the founding fathers and some European admirers saw India as the Temple of the World. Indeed, this keen insight into India’s teleological principles was uttered by a luminary no less than the great Swami Vivekananda, who abhorred blind superstition and blind nationalism. Along with Swamiji, the founding fathers of the modern nation state of India urged the upliftment of Indian women as a basic prerequisite for the upliftment of the nation. No nation can fly on one wing, they asserted. “Why is it that our country is the weakest and the most backward of all the countries? Because Shakti … [inner power … the essence of femininity in enlightened Hinduism] is held in dishonour there (i.e. in India)” … these were the burning words of Swami Vivekananda, written from America. The history of Indian feminism is unique in the world because India’s first feminists were men … ardent, articulate men.
India has been conquered from time immemorial … Colonialism is the last in a long litany of humiliating conquests. This influx interrupted India’s creed of near autarky (the taboo of kala pani). Clearly not noteworthy for self defense, India is nevertheless unique for her essential response to modernity and colonialism … a response drawn from deep roots in her teleological history. India answered Europe, by yielding … not only political heroes, powerful statesmen, industrialists, and great intellectuals … but spiritual luminaries …. India’s deep and unique response to colonialism lay not only in heroes like Mahatma Gandhi, but in the birth of multiple Avataras or Incarnations of God. Among these hallowed beings, the most significant for the freedom of women was the Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi (1853-1920), wife and consort of Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886). About the Holy Mother, Swami Vivekananda had this to say … “Mother has been born to revive that wonderful Shakti in India; and making her the nucleus, once more will Gargis and Maitreyis be born into the world.” In short, the Indian civilization appears to have rooted its epochal historical changes in the metaphysical and the mystical. When in crisis, Indian history yields Avataras. Indeed, this is a lot to be proud of … but only a blind nationalist would miss the sad irony that today, less than a century after independence, this same India is deemed the “worst” nation in the world for women. We may not possess an American style gun culture … but our guns lie in the minds of those who persecute women, the poor, the insane, members of the lower castes, indigenous communities … all who are dispossessed. They lie in our everyday cruelties towards animals. They mock the Upanishadic mahavakya (great saying) … “That thou art” … and the great Advaitic assertion that the One Divinity parades as the many. Of all forms of violence, sexual violence against women is the most egregious … Archived in the depths of the violent psyche of some unredeemed Indian men and women, this sadism flares up in Taliban style puritanical violence … all the more when these contortionists of true asceticism confront the sweet romance of innocent young couples. India is also unique in the world in the cruelty perpetrated by Indian women towards each other. This last is not always the horizontal violence to be expected in an oppressed group.
Of all forms of human injustices, the stigma attached to the rape survivor in puritanical cultures, is the worst injustice ever in the history of the world. India is tainted by its share of a most dishonorable “honor” based culture. This rapist notion of “honor” is vested in a woman’s body. When she is violated, the “honor” (ergo ego) of the family is violated. As an op-ed article in The Hindu concludes, “India’s society rails against rape, in the main, not out of concern for victims but because of the despicable notion that a woman’s body is the repository of family honour. It is this honour our society seeks to protect, not individual women.” Part of righteous feminism, which I believe deeply, is the first step towards true chastity, is to erase this stigma forever. Sadly … this stigma still flourishes … it is more than alive … It is therefore all the more refreshing that the nation-as-a-whole was outraged and anguished over the heinous gang rape and murder in Delhi … that people (not just women’s groups), en masse, cried out for punishment of the rapists … that they offered to donate blood, money and other support for the injured lying in Safdarjung Hospital, traumatized in body and mind. This response by a whole nation and the collective grief that ensued after the death of our precious Unknown Indian … all this is unprecedented in the history of feminism worldwide. In no other nation has this ever happened … that a feminist cause has been embraced by a nation-as-a-whole, that men have joined en masse to protest this outrage, some saying they were ashamed of being Indian men. All of this is unprecedented, especially in India, where usually a rape is hidden … the victim is shamed … nobody marries into her family … her parents and siblings are ostracized … while the rapist goes free and the police ask obscene questions of the rape survivor. Unlike governments in India and Pakistan, which have borne the expenses of hospital treatment of this young woman and young girl, respectively, no western government has ever done the same. Thus in the middle of our deep shame for the nation … a shame before the whole world … we can find a glimmer of hope, that the unique teleological principles that shape the unique destiny of this land are still alive … that it is not up to man to destroy these principles. Today, our founding fathers and mothers must be turning in their graves. The Holy Mother, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda must be speechless with horror, as must be the great Ramana Maharshi. All the saints and savants in the illustrious history of Indian mysticism must be turning in their graves. The Gargis and Maitreyis must be weeping for us. As for the great goddesses of the Hindu pantheon … especially Goddess Kali … they are … I am sure, unleashing holy wrath upon Earth … to cleanse forever all violence against women … for each woman possesses a trace of their divinity. How do we explain such grim evil, in the same land held to be the Temple of the World … for no less than the glory of its ascetic virtues? My only explanation is this … As Swami Vivekananda declared, the sum total of good and evil is always the same … therefore the greater the good, the greater will be the evil. Great evil rushes wherever there is great good. As a civilization, India must therefore garner enough good to exhaust evil and rise beyond good and evil.