To be a woman is a disadvantage; to be a Dalit woman is a double disadvantage. Her sex is her great disadvantage. This is a patriarchal world. Sociology openly demeans her gender and her caste; theology openly deifies her but secretly undermines her dignity and security as a human being. No religion has ever come to her help or help to empower her. Religions have only deified her. but never humanized her. In the Bible very subtly she is called by her generic name woman at the birth, only after her fall she is called Eve.
HINDUISM IS ANTI-WOMAN
There was a time, that too, a long time, during which Hinduism was the only religion in our country. Its rituals, and scriptures nurtured and glorified superstitions of all types which encompassed not only its theology but they also enveloped the sociology of the subcontinent. Its superstitions oppressed the inferior castes but specially oppressed the women.
LONG HAIR
The worst sufferings of the women were not only that they were kept under a kind of unannounced house-arrest but they were even pushed to a sub-human condition of existence. Their souls were shrouded and their bodies given prominence and were thereby exploited. Their lives were cheapened and they were involved in the practice of pleasurable arts like natana and natya and music. In their private and public lives they were merely toys in the hands of their menfolk.
Even their dress were designed by men. Their ornaments and external decorations though declared only to improve their physical appeal, they even cluttered their movements. Long hair on their heads has no functional value; it only consumed their time in the upkeep. The flowers they wore on their hair and their dress prevented their quick movement.
They were tied to delicate and effeminate gestures which incapacitated them from public participation in social activities. Their flowers and face-wash and their flowing hair were all dove-tailed to the presence or absence of their consorts and became symbols of their marital or windowed state of existence in their family and society. Even their lives were contingent on those of their husbands that sati became not only a practice but a sacred ritual. Killing the female fetus or the newborn female baby became an ingredient of the Hindu culture.
LOWEST LITERACY
All these were the fate of women in India. They were worse compounded in the case of the Dalit women. Women’s literacy rate was low enough, Dalit women’s literacy was the lowest imaginable-97% of Dalits come under poverty-line depending on daily wages. When men folk go to their daily chore, women and girls become baby sitters or field-workers.
PLIGHT OF EDUCATED DALIT WOMEN
In the urbanized context young Dalit girls some times at the age of 10 years or so are employed as full-time maid-servants where both the couple is employed. Hence they are denied education. Their alienation from education and financial poverty
and dependence nurture their backwardness and superstitions.
Their religion and caste lead to illiteracy and financial dependence which together go to entangle the Indian Dalit woman in her sociological trap. Added to all these her sex has also been constructed into a gender by the ignoble patriarchal philosopher. Genderisation has been the concerted work of not only the conspiratorial patriarch but also the dedicated contribution of the matriarchs in our households.
WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE
The small percent of women who were educated and employed and hence have attained a certain level of liberation are refusing to come forward to liberate the still unliberated Dalit woman. They even refuse to participate in public life leave alone Dalit movements and activities. A majority of these liberated working Dalit women do not have the freedom and time to spend their salaries for any pro-Dalit activities. Their lives are controlled by their men, who in most cases are unemployable, unemployed men who try to live in the earnings of their spouses and daughters.
Dalit oppression has not merely been social, economical and political, it has, at its roots, been psychological.
It has killed in the minds of the Dalits even the desire to be self-respecting and dignified. Long-time mental bleaching has made them and kept them as vagabonds and drunkards. It has nurtured their irresponsibility almost as a counter-value. Because of this most of the Dalit families hang round the neck of the Dalit woman. Man has developed the negative capacity to abandon the family’s interest while woman cannot shirk her responsibility as a mother. She plays, tragically, a mother even to her husband
There is another danger the Dalit women have to face. If they overcome all hurdles and become Dalit activists and participate in public programs they are easily mistaken for being light-hearted and men try to exploit them. Such women become easy prey to the evil designs and desires of men. It is also a general opinion of a majority of men that a woman in public life is a sign for her willingness to drink and have a free sexual affair with any man. A woman on a public stage is not held in high regard as a sweet-stay-at-home is. A solo woman has not been able to win respect from
the menfolk in our country. Even other women don’t respect her.
A highly professional woman is accused of violating traditional norms and a highly traditional woman is to an equal extent accused of being old fashioned. This is a dilemma for the Indian Dalit woman. She knows not what to do because a liberated woman is easily considered exploitable-socially, physically and sexually.
Women, given the opportunities, have not only proved equal to men, they have even surpassed them in public and professional lives.
One can reel out names from all over the world. Hence patriarchy has skillfully kept women out of many areas of human activity, especially
from society-forming. Child-bearing, a natural biological activity, has been ritualized into a religions drama to insulate the woman from dynamic social involvement.
The British women got their voting rights through street fights. Later and because of that when India got her “freedom at midnight” our women got their voting right even without asking for it. Our Dalit women too got it that way. But it was like a penalty corner, they have failed to convert it because they have gone on trying to get this goal through converting men which has proved impossible. Therefore, if men cannot be converted, there is only one alternative: they have to be conquered. Only a conquest will end the woman’s quests for a space in the sun.
