The change that happened, somewhat…!

My mother is a very bullish proponent of liberation of women from the shackles of domestic traditionalism. And on occasion I am fairly positive that the change that drives her hopes and dreams may have actually made the mainstream family re-think and redo the archaic way of life that plagued our society for the longest time; a way that basically treats the women as, very crudely put, ornamentations worthy of shrouding in the dark or be the center of a trophy display.

In her personal and professional life, my mother continues to fight this rather crude and dusty way of life on a day to day basis. Very often looking from the outside in, you would feel her optimism with the number of women who are stepping out of the shadows of domestic walls and making a mark with their contributions across the board. Very recently however, I had the opportunity to get an inside view into what is currently branded as the traditional family structure. And I was very saddened to know that, in spite of the great progresses we have made economically and socially, the expectations from a woman within the household has changed very little.

More often than not, this rigid, coarse and ritualistic structure is aligned with “Indian culture” and justified as the way things have been! If things were to be the way they have been then the barter system is holy and everything that is instrumental in making us civilized is a sinful addition to the quiver. And yet, we enjoy the fruits of modernization looking only from the outside in as long as the waves do not disturb the shores that lead into the inside of the home. Because sitting on the outside, for these grumpy (a better phrasing is against family reading values) men who drive the rules in the rural and semi-urban traditionalistic social structure, it is easy to criticize and get away with it since no one who matters in the real world is not around to challenge the perspectives that gave us the caste system, such mean practices as the Sati and countless other atrocities that have been meted out in the name of religion, tradition or just “the way it has been”. When it needs to be driven inside the boundaries of the house the journey to the modern perspective is one that needs the embracing of a certain set of inconveniences and essentially a spine that can stand straight and rebuke naysayers.

The most cited argument in favor of traditionalism as an enforced value, as against a free choice, is that of cultural roots. Culture can, and has been defined as, the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc. One of the definitions I really like is one presented by Merriam-Webster and goes as “the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.” The dependency upon the “capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge…” is the key of this definition. What we seem to have missed is the capacity for learning which entails the ability to learn from the ambient world and adopt for prosperous survival. We have only stuck to the coat tails of transmitting knowledge, once created and disseminated as per the necessities of the time.

I have always believed that the traditional role of the woman, as it once was, was an outcome of the need to survive and propagate. Driven by the need of evolution in harsh conditions, without the support of modern facilities, medicines and a law & order scenario that ensures the safety and heightened chances of survival of the offspring, it was necessary to have defined gender roles based on physical capability. That was then. We learned and adopted and it seems to me that we have forgotten our capacity to adopt ever since.

There has been change on the outside and yet, here we are standing in the 21^st century, life for women in a traditional family structure continues to be a struggle, battling against the expectations from the traditional definitions that tend to want to push her into the confines of what, we men, so blatantly term as laaj and sharam. In truth, I have never been so ashamed to be a man standing in this theatrical folly that has adopted selectively and stuck on to the threads, based solely on affected conveniences. No wonder our society, and all alike ours, see such high statistics when it comes to violence against women! In this struggle between the ancient past and the beckoning future our sense of morality has warped to shapelessness. We still hang on to the narrow perspectives of ghungats and pardahs and also, to satisfy the need for prosperity, expect our women to earn and supplement incomes. Is this the price we pay, as a society, for a culture that we have only inherited and failed to add and demolish based on ambient times?