Kerala: Misogynistic Punctuation Of Our Collective Conscience
By C. V. Sukumaran
04 March, 2013
Countercurrents.org
A college professor wrote the sentence—A woman without her man is nothing—on the blackboard and asked the students to punctuate it. Almost all the students, males and females, punctuated the sentence as: A woman, without her man, is nothing. Only one of the students, a female one, punctuated it as: A woman: without her, man is nothing.
Most of the students depended on the accepted wisdom of the patriarchal society to punctuate the sentence, but the girl revolted against the accepted and traditional male chauvinistic wisdom of the society and made the very sentence which is misogynistic in nature into an empowered one for the female. Using the same words in their given order, she altered the sentence into an altogether different one which is beyond the reach of the conventional wisdom by which every one of us is constructed.
It seems that the general conscience of the highly literate Keralite society is punctuated with the traditional misogynistic notions. Three recent incidents show the terrible rot within.
Sixteen years ago, a minor girl from Suryanelli in the Idukki district was seduced by a man and was trafficked throughout the state offering the girl to more than forty people. The case is known as the Suryanelli case. The special court convicted 36 persons to rigorous imprisonment in the case. But a division bench of the Kerala High court acquitted all the 35 accused and mitigated the punishment of the remaining one.
Recently, one of the two judges who acquitted the culprits was caught on video as saying that the Suryanelli girl had been deviant, immoral and it was a case of child prostitution, not abuse.
It means that the misogynistic punctuation of his mind played a prominent part on delivering the judgment. It means that the judgment was a biased one. It means that the judge wrote the judgment with a bias against the victim—gender bias! It means that we have still ‘a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view’.
(As the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who wrote the epoch-making play A Doll's House, which came as a thunderbolt to the male-centric social and moral ethos of Europe, says: "A woman cannot be herself in the society of present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view." It should be remembered that Ibsen wrote the above quoted sentence in the notes he made for the play in 1878. How contemporaneous the sentence seems in the present day Indian socio-cultural background!)
Immediately after the judge was caught on expressing his gender bias, we heard an aged doctor, who was the captain of a state wide govt. sponsored value awareness trip (Moolyabodhana Jaadha) speaking to the girls of the Govt. Women’s College in the state capital that “only ten minutes is needed for men including me to make women pregnant. If the girls become active as the boys, their uterus will be damaged. Therefore, they should not try to be as active as the boys are. They should be calm and quiet. They should not run and jump as the boys do."
The retrogressive sermon continued: "Boys can easily seduce girls. Most of the girls (90%) lie to their parents to wander around with their lovers. In hell you can see more women than men. Of all the good people, 80% are men. There are only 20% good women. Therefore women should always allow men to stand in front of them. Women have to live in the protection of men.”
And then we heard that Amrita Mohan, an undergraduate student at All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuarm was verbally abused by some men and she being a martial art expert, handled them physically. The culprits filed private petition in the First Class Judicial Magistrate Court and the magistrate ordered the police to register case against Amrita. And the police registered a case against her under Sections 341, 323, 325, 332, and 334 for wrongful restraint and voluntarily causing grievous hurt!! The magistrate ordered the police to register one more case against her!
“I was out after 10.30 p.m., but why should that prompt these men to talk to me that way? Moreover, I was with my family and a friend’s family. This is the city that I was born and raised in, and it is sad how I cannot be outside my home at night,” says Amrita. (The Hindu, Feb. 20. 2013)
When the female asserts herself, our male chauvinistic mindset is upset and is not ready to accept it. We are not ready to punctuate our conscience in a way that enables us to see the female as an individual just like a male is, with equal rights, equal space, and equal dignity.
We desperately try to intimidate the female in order to dissuade her from asserting herself. It means that male chauvinism acts like the stray dogs that bark at the rising moon. Let the stray dogs bark, the moon will certainly rise.
C. V. Sukumaran is a writer based in Kerala. His is an occasional Op-Ed writer for The Hindu . He can be reached at [email protected]
Comments are moderated
