Firstpost
Oct
19, 2018
Part
III
At a time when the #MeToo campaign on
social media has claimed its most high profile person, a minister in the
Narendra Modi government – something few expected, especially after the
minister MJ Akbar brushed aside allegations of sexual misconduct by saying that
“lies don’t have legs” and filed a criminal defamation case against journalist
Priya Ramani – the #HappyToBleed campaign against the denial of entry of women
of menstrual age into the Sabarimala temple is inscrutably silent.
This is more intriguing now since the women
have the Supreme Court and the state government on their side and a pitched
battle is being fought in and around the Sabarimala temple to deny women their
agency (the head priest threatening to close down the temple if women attempt
to enter it and the faithful indulging in arson and physical assault on women).
The #HappyToBleed became quite a rage in
2015 in response to a rather tame statement of the then president of the Travancore
Devaswom Board (TDB) Prayar Gopalakrishnan, who had said in November that year
that women would be allowed entry only “when a machine is invented to scan if
it is right time for women to enter the temple”, it evoked a huge outrage from
young women on the social media. Women were “to hold placards/sanitary
napkins/charts saying Happy To Bleed” and post the pictures on their profiles
or the campaign page “to oppose the shame game played by patriarchal society
since ages”. Nikita Azad, a college student of Patiala, turned overnight into a
celebrity for her write up, ‘#HappyToBleed: An Initiative Against Sexism’, in
countercurrents.org. Soon #HappyToBleed went viral on Facebook with the
conventional media jumping in.
But now there is a virtual silence on that
front. The last posting on the Facebook page ‘Happy To Bleed’, hosted by Nikita
Azad and four others, was on 11 August (a month-and-half before the Supreme
Court verdict) which simply read: “Entry of women to Sabarimala. There is no
bar for young women to go to Sabarimala, because there is the Goddess
Malikaprathamma sitting close to Ayyappa at Sabarimala. If women are prohibited
a Goddess would not have been there at Sabarimala." There is just one
‘like’ to this post.
There is another page ‘HAPPYTOBLEED’ which
carries nothing more than a quote from Justice DY Chandrachud’s observations in
the Sabarimala case: “The social exclusion of women, based on menstrual status,
is a form of untouchability which is an anathema to constitutional values.
Notions of “purity and pollution”, which stigmatise individuals, have no place
in a constitutional order.” This post
has been liked by six. A Twitter handle ‘happytobleed’ too records very little
activity – with only two of the four posts of this year making a passing
reference to the temple, but not on the issue as such.
This silence may be because, as Azad wrote
in her original article, this was “not a temple-entry campaign. This campaign
is an initiative against sexism, and the taboos it uphold since ages”. Her
concerns were, as she added, “The class structure has created various forms of
patriarchy like locking women in kitchens, reducing her contribution in
production processes, considering her a reproductive machine, attaching the
'honour' tag, objectifying her as an object of sexual pleasure, impurity during
menses etc.”
Indeed, isolating menstruating women is
quite pandemic in India. Many authors and commentators have explained that this
is because Indian traditions have viewed menstrual blood as “polluting,
powerful, and therefore dangerous”. In his 2003 book Kiss of the Yogini:Tantric
Sex in its South Asian Context, David Gordon White of the University of
California traces its origin to Rig Veda and Atharva Veda and explains how it
brought about certain strange rituals. For example, he writes that Rig Veda
“enjoin the husband – who wishes to avoid the immediate destruction of his
person from the lethal power of the virginal bloodshed on his wedding night –
to give the bloodstained cloth of defloration to a Brahmin priest...” In
Atharva Veda, he writes, “the defiling power of virginal blood requires that a
second complete marriage ritual be held in the husband’s home, following the consummation
of the actual marriage. Here a “scapegoat” Brahmin priest absorbs and purifies
the bride’s virginal blood of its magical dangers…”
Closer home, mythologist and author
Devdutta Pattanaik, who had also joined the women’s-entry-into-Sabarimala debate
in 2015, explained in his article, Scanners for Menstrual Blood: “The practice
of restricting access to menstruating women is rooted in the pre-modern belief
that links purity and power to bodily fluids. Not spilling male genital fluid
(semen) makes men powerful and pure. Inability to hold back female genital
fluid (menstruation) makes women weak and impure. This is why many babas and
gurus of India insist they are celibate. That is why Jain munis rejected family
life. This is why Buddha’s enlightenment is closely linked to his rejection of
his wife. The red-tilak of Hindu men and the red-bindi of Hindu women have
close links to blood and its links to life. Menstrual blood is particularly
feared as it came to be associated with ‘death’ as it marked the failure of
conception.” In fact, as Pattanaik pointed out in the same article, the taboo
relating to celibacy and menstruation exists in other religions and many
cultures, except in the tantrik traditions.
As for the entry into the Sabarimala
temple, TDB had explained in its deposition before the Supreme Court that the
traditional ban on menstruating women was “attributable to the manifestation of
the deity at the Sabarimala Temple which is in the form of a ‘Naishtik
Bramhachari’ (an eternal celibate), who practises strict penance, and the
severest form of celibacy”. It said there were about 1,000 more temples
dedicated to the same deity, Lord Ayyappa, which don’t ban menstruating women
because the deity in those temples was not in the form of a ‘Naishtik Brahmachari’.
Religious faith has its own logic, beyond
rationality and science. It also runs very deep in individuals and society. The
day the Supreme Court verdict came, one of the firsts to react was
Gopalakrishnan who sparked the rage in 2015. (He has been replaced by A
Padmakumar, former CPM legislator, as the TDB president since then.) He said,
“I am unhappy... A constitutional authority cannot interfere in religious
matters”, adding that his family, mainly his daughters, would not enter the
shrine, come what may. When asked whether it was their decision, he replied:
“They are my daughters, it is my decision. I think my daughter's decision must
be my decision.”
No wonder, in the pitched battle between
orthodoxy and constitutionalism – the Supreme Court talked about constitutional
morality and values to justify entry of the menstruating women into the temple
– women’s agency has become a casualty.
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