A World Of Indras And Akalyas
By Maharathi
15 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Lord Indra sneaks into the hut in the dead of night, enamoured of Akalya’s voluptuously chastised body, in the guise of her husband sage Kouthama Maharishi who is away in the river beyond for morning rituals, tricked by a mock cock’s shrill voice. A sexual assault happened years ago on the soil of Bharat. The sage came and flared up, it was the woman who bore the brunt of his moral anger which should have been more directed towards the culprit. His curse turned her into a stone. It is the vagina that a man’s and his family’s honour revolves around. Only the man is the protector and savior of it. The woman’s redemption happened when another divine man happened to stamp on the stone.
This mythological episode has been part and parcel of the Indian collective unconscious and converted into an indelible archetype that has been infusing the man-woman relationship and social attitude and behavior towards women. With the patriarchal society dictating mores and values, women were confined to kitchen and bedroom.
When the voices for women’s liberation started rending the air, trying to throw off centuries of suppression and subjugation, men psychologically started feeling insecure. Now in India, at a time when women leaders, legislators, administrators and sportspersons have become almost common, men’s suppressed jealousy and feeling of insecurity are now and then finding an outlet in the sexual assault on lower-rung women who are still weighed down by the carry-over of the centuries. While India recorded the Badaun (UP) rape and murder case of two Dalit girls in 2014, hanging its head in shame, after the 2012 Delhi case of Nirpaya’s rape and murder on a running bus, Egypt came out with its answer to India when a 19-year- old student was stripped of her clothes and sexually attacked in a mob frenzy at the inauguration of its new President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in Tahrir Square on the night of June 9, 2014. A video of the incident went viral on social network sites.
The Tahrir Square has been notorious for sexual assault on women, which Egypt has not given priority to till now, for the past three years of anti-government agitations targeted at Hosni Mubarak. Several women including a woman journalist now say that they have been sexually attacked at that place.
New media’s role in highlighting the June 9 night sexual assault on the woman was quite immense. The viral caught all viewers and shocked the women all over the world. The two-minute clipping, though, has reinforced the current allegation that social media sites too are online versions of Tahrir Square where voyeurism and exhibitionism are all targeted at women.
Men who have been on the prowl on the streets for women seem to have shifted tents to social media sites. Women harassment continues there too. At the world summit in London to stop sexual violence in war zone, actress Angelina Jolie said: “We must send a message across the world that there’s no disgrace in being a survivor of sexual violence. The shame is on the aggressor’’. At a time when new media are hailed as yet another outlet for women to express themselves in free terms, uninhibited by the societal inhibitions and taboos, the digital fora too are turning against women, what with men seeming to say, “You might have achieved liberation in so many things. But being a woman, you folks are here only to cater to men’s egoistic instincts and quench our sexual thirst. We follow you wherever you go’’.
A deserted mill, a dilapidated building, a crowded bus, train, market, theatre, temple, beach.... and now social media sites... women are dogged by the archetypal Indras always on the prowl for penetrating into Akalyas.
A report published in The Hindu (Chennai edition, dated June 11, 2014) throws light on how women face in the virtual world what they do in the real world: “Of being sexist in 140 charaters”. This is the headline of the article which says:
“....................one of the hashtags trending on ..................Twitter was #TheMistakenGirlsMake............it generated dozens of tweets......many were sexist, misogyonistic and plain nasty...... ...one tweet said, “A girl being made is itself a mistake’’................’’
The tweet, supposedly from a modern educated man, has revealed the archetypal anti-woman ethos programmed by centuries of his ancestors into him. What is the difference between him and the men who poisoned female kids to death the moment they were born in districts like Dharmapuri, Usilampatti in Tamil Nadu. In the past generation when there was no internet, no cell phone and no social sites, young male students just scribbled messages on the walls in the loo about the lovely limbs of girls and about the juicy scandals of female teachers. Semi- literate men pasted graffiti about the women they targeted.
Now in the name of Confessions on Facebook, young boys have an unbridled run, writing about the girls they love, about the girls who they say are not moral, about the girls they would like to have for a night.....
Gone were days when teenage boys sitting on the last benches in classrooms read obscene books, with four or five pairs of eyes poring into the pages, heads all huddled, in whispers. Now Internet has eliminated the scene and replaced it with the new scene of teenagers browsing the porno visuals and videos in the dead of night, shaping and sharpening their sexy attitude towards women. All sleeping and waking women are just Akalyas for them and they don the mantle of Lord Indra, body converted into a massive cluster of genitals.
(Maharathi is a Tamil poet with a collection of verses titled, “Mazhai Iravukal’’ (Rainy Nights) and also writes articles about social issues)
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