Hindunet: The Hindu Universe: Genocide of women

In Hinduism Women hold a very high position. Before I begin I would like to answer why there is genocide as seen in last 400 or more years. The village I belong to is a very small village in Rajasthan. My father told me that before his generations girl child was killed. It was shocking but happy that I was saved. The reason he gave was that when muslims came to India they literally took whoever girl or women they wanted. Poor and humble man on the street cannot fight them. To save from humiliation when the girl grows up ,the father used to take the girl and kill it. Not that they never felt any pain. But just the thought that tommorow my daughter might have to face humiliation,why show her this kind of pain. Remeber women were held high and their honour was supposed to be protected by any means.
About sati,there not much mention of sati either in vedas and gita. Sati in India also started when the moghuls came to India.The Hindu women of India, in order to save their honour, used to jump into the fire after their husbands were brutally murdered by Muslim invaders. The question that arises from this is why did they jump into the fire and kill themselves? Why didn't they just poison themselves? The reason for this is that the lecherous necrophiliac muslim invaders did not even leave the dead bodies alone. Yes, they had sex even with the dead bodies! How disappointing it must have been for them to find nothing, but ashes.
You must know that Hindu India has been under foriegn rule for more then 700 years.That is a long time.And the muslims who came to India restricted the religion to home only. Forceful conversions were done,women were humiliated,thats a long time of atrocities to forget your culture.Somehow it was still there but not in the same spirit.People could not preach,women were not able to move around freely,no practice of religion as such and the sudden transition from that phase to modern India has also ill effects. I wish being a woman that the position of woman in India becomes the same as was in ancient India.
Vedic prayers also indicate that the women had considerable say in selecting their marriage partners, and were espoused to live in monogamous relationships while enjoying same rights as their husbands. in the Vedas there is little evidence of child marriages, dowry system and the practice of suttee or sati (self-immolation of a woman upon her husband's death). Similarly, there is no indication of any stigma relating to widowhood or the remarriage of a widow. Note also that the well-educated, scholarly and charismatic women of yore, who also participated in many philosophical debates with men, included Gargi (the daughter of Vachaknu - from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad) and Vidyottama (wife of the famed poet and writer, Kaalidasa, who started his life as a humble and menial worker in the woods). It is clear that the women or the lowly and humble in the society were neither ignored nor abandoned.
In the Chandogya Upanishad, Satyakama (the illegitimate, varnasankra, son of a Shudra woman who did not even remember who her son's father was) went on to be accepted and educated for Brahmin work (the Gita: Ch. 18 - verse 42). This shows that the people (including the Shudra and of unknown lineage) had the choice of pursuing any occupation (even that of a Brahmin).
In the Mahabharata, Satyavati (a Shudra-girl whose father was a fisherman), when presented with a marriage proposal from king Shantanu, married him only after he accepted her pre-nuptial agreement. Her own children, in stead of another older heir to the throne, went on to inherit the Kshatriya kingdom as was demanded in the pre-nuptial agreement. This indicates that the intercaste marriages and exchanges were quite prevalent; and that the women and Shudras could make free choices even when there was royalty involved.
Yatra Naryatu Poojayante, Ramante tatra Devta" There where women are worshiped, gods live there. or in other words where women is respected God lives there.
This is enough ,in one sentence everything has been said.
It is a culture whose only words for strength and power are feminine -"Shakti'' means "power'' and "strength.'' All male power comes from the feminine. Literary evidence suggests that kings and towns were destroyed because a single woman was wronged by the state. For example, Valmiki's Ramayana teaches us that Ravana and his entire clan was wiped out because he abducted Sita. Veda Vyasa's Mahabharatha teaches us that all the Kauravas were killed because they humiliated Draupadi in public. Elango Adigal's Sillapathigaram teaches us Madurai, the capital of the Pandyas was burnt because Pandyan Nedunchezhiyan mistakenly killed her husband on theft charges.
In Vedic times women and men were equal as far as education and religion was concerned. Women participated in the public sacrifices alongside men. One text mentions a female rishi Visvara. Some Vedic hymns, are attributed to women such as Apala, the daughter of Atri, Ghosa, the daughter of Kaksivant or Indrani, the wife of Indra. Apparently in early Vedic times women also received the sacred thread and could study the Vedas. The Haritasmrti mentions a class of women called brahmavadinis who remained unmarried and spent their lives in study and ritual. Panini's distinction between arcarya (a lady teacher) and acaryani (a teacher's wife), and upadhyaya (a woman preceptor) and upadhyayani ( a preceptor's wife) indicates that women at that time could not only be students but also teachers of sacred lore. He mentions the names of several noteworthy women scholars of the past such as Kathi, Kalapi, and Bahvici. The Upanishads refer to several women philosophers, who disputed with their male colleagues such as Vacaknavi, who challenged Yajnavalkya. The Rig Veda also refers to women engaged in warfare. One queen Bispala is mentioned, and even as late a witness as Megasthenes (fifth century B.C. E.) mentions heavily armed women guards protecting Chandragupta's palace.

Louis Jaccoliot, the celebrated French author of the Bible in India: Hindoo Origin of Hebrew and Christian Revelation said: "India of the Vedas entertained a respect for women amounting to worship; a fact which we seem little to suspect in Europe when we accuse the extreme East of having denied the dignity of woman, and of having only made her an instrument of pleasure and of passive obedience." He also said: "What! here is a civilization, which you cannot deny to be older than your own, which places the woman on a level with the man and gives her an equal place in the family and in society."

Recent incidents of sati and rash of "dowry murders" have made headlines not only in India, but all around the world, and have focused attention to women's issues in India. In the wake of the discussion it emerged that Indian women's problems are not only problems of Hindu women or problems caused by traditional Hinduism. Media paints India as a dangerous place. But if statistics can be trusted, a study by Hindus Against the Abuse of Women presented at the Second International Conference on Bride Burning and Dowry Deaths in India puts USA in the lead of familial femicide. It says USA murders of women committed by "intimate relations" are 15 per year per million population. The rate in Pakistan is 6.44 per million. India's is 6.25 per million. The study says excessive need for control and greed may be the underlying causes, not cultural or religious factors. India recently passed a law making husbands and in-laws guilty until proven otherwise if a bride dies within the first year of marriage. Since then, the rate of women killed by intimate relations dropped by more than 50%. Tiny Switzerland is home to a mere 7.2 million people. It is extremely rich, modern, industrialised and democratic with excellent health care and a 100 per cent literacy rate. So why has this proud nation with its fiercely democratic traditions failed to curb violence against women? Which is why the statistics for wife beating are about the same in the developed and the developing world. It is fallacious to think that there is a link between democracy, prosperity, education levels and domestic violence," counters Elizabeth Rod-Grangé, a Swiss sociologist and activist with Solidarité Femme, a women's rights group that runs shelters for battered women in Geneva. According to the report, one in every three women suffers violence in her lifetime. The statistics in Europe are as appalling as anywhere else. In France, six women die each month at the hands of men who profess to love them. In Britain, one woman is killed by a partner every three days, one woman in four experiences domestic violence and attacks on partners account for a quarter of all violent crime. Despite media campaigns and shocking statistics, domestic violence continues to be one of Europe's most under-reported crimes.

Ashish Nandy, an Indian Christian, and author of the book Sati, The Blessing and The Curse, recommends Ananda Coomaraswamy spirited defence of sati: “to shallow, pompous progressives and feminists who believe that one ought only to immolate oneself for secular causes like revolution and nationalism, not for old fashioned religious or cultural causes.”

Nandy informs us: “The last “large-scale epidemic of sati” (in Westernizing Bengal of the early 19th century, where new British inheritance laws turned a surviving daughter-in-law into a pecuniary rival) was a “logical culmination of rational, secular cost-calculation against the background in traditional values….if anything, modern values, not traditional ones, were to blame.” Indeed, “the epidemic was a feature of exactly the part of the society – the Westernizing, culturally uprooted, urban and semi-urban Indians – that was most dismissive towards the rest of society as a bastion of superstition and activism.”

In the Pre-Colonial period, dowry was an institution managed by women, for women, to enable them to establish their status and have recourse in an emergency. As a consequence of the massive economic and societal upheaval brought on by muslim and British rule, women's entitlements to the precious resources obtained from land were erased and their control of the system diminished, ultimately resulting in a devaluing of their very lives.
The British, publicized their "civilizing mission" and blamed the caste system in order to cover up the devastation their own agrarian policies had wrought on the Indian countryside.
Uma Narayan writes:

"Most Americans that I have talked to about dowry-murder know that many US women are killed by their partners as a result of domestic violence. Given that many members of the US public know that domestic violence has fatal forms, why is it that they make no connection between the "foreign" phenomenon of dowry-murder and the "familiar" phenomenon of domestic violence?

A friend who participated in my search for the numbers of US women annually killed by their partners commented that she was surprised at the difference between the "disappearing dead women" in US accounts of domestic violence and the "spectacular visibility" of women murdered over dowry in India" (p. 89).

I can keep on writing about life of Indian women in ancient Indian amd modern India but my conclusion is that I would have been better off if I was still in ancient India.

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