Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (56 page)

Poddar accused those who were in favour of getting her remarried of indulging in a grave sin to fulfil their own selfish motives. Remarriage was akin to throwing her in hell, he said, citing
Manusmriti
. Poddar described the future of the widow’s son in case she got married again: ‘When he is grown up, his mother’s misdeed would deprive him of all respect.’ Poddar’s reply was a reinforcement of the larger argument that a Hindu marriage did not end with the death of the husband and the woman had to remain a pativrata nari even after becoming a widow.

Much of Poddar’s advice to the young widow in 1949 is contained in his earlier
Stri Dharma Prashnottari
. There, Savitri sings the praises of widows whose supreme sacrifice brings laurels to the Hindu religion. She asks, if they cannot be revered who else should be? She ascribes cases of failure to follow vidhva dharma (duties of widows) to the lack of religious education, ill treatment of widows and in general lustful tendencies among men. Savitri recommends that girls be married to boys not younger than eighteen and men not older than thirty-five, which will bring down the number of widows substantially. And then she spells out the twelve rules that comprise vidhva dharma:
⁷³

1. A woman should become sati after her husband’s death. This is considered illegal today, but dying on her husband’s pyre is not the sole way of becoming sati. A widow should consider God as her husband and immerse herself in worship, suppressing her inner desire. This is how one becomes sati.
   
2. A widow should detach herself from worldly pleasures and study texts like the Gita and Ramayana that inculcate the virtues of gyan (knowledge), vairagya (renunciation) and bhakti (devotion).
   
3. A widow should not participate in festivities. She should avoid listening to conversations of young girls and married women, discard jewels, stop braiding her hair, eating paan (betel leaf) or using any aromatic product. (As an afterthought, or probably to keep up the pretence of being a reformist,
   Stri Dharma Prashnottari
   explains why widows should shun festivities—it is not, as popularly believed, that the shadow of a widow is inauspicious, but that a woman has uncontrollable sexual urges that need to be kept in check. ‘They are advised not to attend festivities so that the pomp and glitter do not cause deterioration of mind.’)
   
4. To the maximum possible extent, a widow should sleep on the floor, avoid a soft bed, eat food that does not provoke desire and wear hand-spun thick clothes and not colourful garments.
   
5. Widows should resist eight kinds of sexual union (maithuna). These are: seeing a man; touching a man or woman; enjoying the company of another in a lonely place; talking to others; reading or talking about a man or woman; playing together; thinking about a man or woman; and actual sexual intercourse.
   
6. A widow should undertake fasts without water or food.
   
7. A widow must not sit idle, but immerse herself in household work.
   
8. A widow should attend religious and moral lectures, and completely give up bad company.
   
9. A widow must remain within the control of rakshaks (protectors) like her mother-in-law, father-in-law, jeth (husband’s elder brother), devar (husband’s younger brother), father, mother or brother. She should not do anything without the permission of the rakshak.
   
10. A widow is advised not to talk too much or express anger; to stay happy by remaining helpless; to believe in religion and never let the heart be led astray.
    
11. A widow must not sit in the company of young women, but always be with elderly women who strictly follow dharma. As regards immoral women, widows should not even glimpse them.
    
12. If a widow has money, it should be spent on the impoverished, orphans and other widows. If a widow does not have enough money, she should earn to survive and never ask anyone for monetary help.
    

Goyandka further advised widows to eat a simple vegetarian meal once a day and shun items like ghee, milk, sugar and spices since these enhanced the sexual urge. His argument against widow remarriage was entirely based on Manu’s prescription. He argued that a woman could be given away (kanyadan) in marriage only once and she had the right to have her father bear the expense of only one marriage.
⁷⁴
It is interesting to note how, while citing the dharmashastras, Goyandka did not forget to highlight the subtext against widow remarriage—namely the cost her family would have to incur again, and its consequences for the male inheritance. This position was articulated sharply during the agitation against Nehru’s Hindu Code Bill in the early 1950s.

As years passed, more restrictions were added, prohibiting widows from watching movies and dramas, reading ‘obscene’ literature and looking at ‘dirty’ pictures.
⁷⁵
Some earlier prohibitions became more pronounced, like the one on seclusion. Widows were asked either to sleep alone or with other women or children. Since widows were considered more vulnerable than girls or married women, they had to maintain a safe distance from men other than those in the immediate family. Those to be particularly abhorred were mendicants and sadhus, though Poddar did not forget to mention ‘alcoholic Muslims who frequent prostitutes’.
⁷⁶

In
Stri Dharma Prashnottari
, Poddar was relatively mute on the practice of sati, though he referred to the law banning it. However, in the 1948
Nari Ank
he celebrated the magic of sati.
⁷⁷
Poddar’s narrative rested on his genuine ‘scientific’ belief that fire could emanate from a distraught widow’s shoulder and heart. Poddar explained that fire existed everywhere including the human body, and could be produced on being rubbed, as in the case of stone or wood. He also gave the instance of high body fever that often resulted in death. Referring to a Parsi journal, Poddar said he had read about ductless glands in the body that played a crucial role in contributing to the physical features and character of a human being. He argued that, just as these glands had an impact on human character, the character also influenced these glands. Drawing from this ‘science’, Poddar said it was difficult to imagine the impact on the glands of a true sati whose body, mind and heart were pure, who had survived only on the love of her husband, who had not given the same place to any other man, who had led a selfless life and who was incapable of suffering the loss. ‘In such a condition of grief for her husband, if some special internal action results in fire, it can hardly be a matter of surprise.’

Taking his scientific argument further, Poddar zeroed in on the thyroid gland whose task he said was to invigorate love and physical desire in human beings. He quoted from the work of one Dr Louis Berman who had said that ‘since the presence of thyroxin (secreted by the thyroid) in tissues determines the rate at which they burn themselves, it is obvious that, if there were no mechanism for retarding its action, the tissues would set fire to themselves’
.
Based on this, Poddar said, if the condition of a woman grieving for her husband reached the extraordinary stage of affecting her thyroid gland, it was possible her body could catch fire. Thus, ‘becoming sati is a completely natural phenomenon and not possible through outside influence’.

Mindful of the fact that many women did not commit sati for a variety of reasons, Poddar praised them too, in fact more than those who immolated themselves. He said it was not easy for a woman to observe brahmacharya (celibacy), take care of children selflessly and make her husband in the ‘other world’ happy.

Celebrating the system of sati and those who had actually committed it, the
Nari Ank
profiled Ramrakhi, wife of Bal Mukund who with three others had thrown a bomb at the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, on 23 December 1912 at Chandni Chowk. All of them were later hanged.
Nari Ank
claimed that Bal Mukund who had been married just a year before the bomb incident had not yet consummated the marriage. It said that when Ramrakhi got to know about the hardship that Bal Mukund was undergoing in jail, she also created jail-like conditions for herself at home. She went on a fast the day Bal Mukund was hanged, and died as a result eighteen days later.
⁷⁸
Nari Ank
profiled more than a hundred such satis from myth, folklore and history, including Sati Parvati, Savitri, Anasuya, Sanyogita, Padmini and Lakshmi Bai.

 

Female Hygine, Health and Sexuality
Gita Press’s overemphasis on women’s hygiene emanated from the premium the Hindu social system laid on ‘purity’. A woman was considered intrinsically ‘impure’, the ostensible reason being her monthly menstrual cycle. But the subtext was deeper—to stress that women were not equal to men physically and thus counter the growing forces of gender equality. In a tone that smacked of patriarchy, women were told that since they personified the nation as mothers and the producers of great sons, they had to take care of their hygiene and health.

Women’s hygiene and health were strangely limited to gynaecological issues, and Gita Press thus not only accentuated the gender distinction but also managed to underscore woman’s vulnerability. This was used as a pretext to control her sexuality that, as we have seen, was already declared to be a patriarchal business since women were believed to be incapable of putting a lid on their sexual urges. Goyandka’s advice to women to avoid ‘father, brother and son’ in a lonely place ‘since the ‘strength of senses can attract even the most intelligent of men’
⁷⁹
loudly proclaimed where Gita Press stood on women.

As Tanika Sarkar argues, subjecting the ‘Hindu woman to community discipline’ was an attempt by Hindu revivalists to preserve the ‘ritual sphere as the source of authentic meaning and value, the site of difference and uniqueness’. The Hindu woman’s body, her sexuality ‘became a deeply politicized matter—it alone could signify past freedom and future autonomy’.
⁸⁰
This was reflected in the patriarchal cultural and social practices that Gita Press advocated.

Goyandka in his
Nari Dharma
claimed that women suffered from special defects of body and character and therefore were unfit to live a life of freedom. These ‘defects’ were a deadly mix of impurity, anger, obstinacy, lack of intelligence, cunningness, defiance, frivolousness, restlessness, harshness, shallowness and false daredevilry. It seems that Goyandka would go to any lengths to deprive women of their liberty, even invoking the damage such freedom could cause to the ‘nation, jati (other women) and society’.
⁸¹

In the appendix of Poddar’s
Stri Dharma Prashnottari
, Sarala asks Savitri for tips about protecting one’s health as well as rearing children. Savitri says sharir-raksha (protecting the body) is part of a woman’s dharma as she bears sons who may one day be great men. She says most of a woman’s ailments emanate from complications related to menstruation that normally starts at the age of twelve or thirteen—once again raising the question of age of consent.

Gita Press waged battle on the right age of marriage for girls till the late 1940s. An article by one Charu Chandra Mitra in
Kalyan
cited passages from accounts as diverse as Havelock Ellis’s
Psychology of Sex
and Anton Vitalivich Nemilov’s
Biological Tragedy of Women
to debunk the Western practice of not marrying girls before the age of sixteen, twenty or twenty-five and to ‘educate the theoretician social reformers’.
⁸²
Mitra extracted a passage from Ellis that is self-explanatory: ‘The first ovulation signifies sexual maturity and is the last link in the chain of important processes which began in her infancy. The sexual apparatus is now ready for service for the benefit of the race.’
⁸³

By reducing a woman’s childbearing capacity to a mechanized process carried out by her ‘sexual apparatus’ from the age of puberty to serve the race, Gita Press was papering over the menarche versus menstruation debate. Mitra’s long essay, serialized over the next two issues of
Kalyan
, ignored the fact that, during the period of menarche, it could be dangerous for a girl to give birth. Instead, he justified the ‘use’ of the ‘organ of maternity’ (matritva ka ang) from the time a girl began menstruating to serve the Aryan race.

Mitra, an attorney-at-law, had a Western education, but supported conservative practices such as the segregation of women during the menstrual cycle. He quoted Nemilov who argued, ‘man, under the domination of the hormones, becomes energetic to the point of audacity, whereas woman, eroticized by the hormones, becomes feeble and passive to a degree of self-abnegation’, and ‘sexual desire weighs down upon woman whose activity normally does not go beyond coquetry’.
⁸⁴
Thus, for a man, fulfilling his sexual desire was seen almost as a right, while a woman exercising her sexuality was overstepping the patriarchal line. This acceptance of the ‘difference between the bodies and sexual urges of women and men accentuated the power of the husband over the wife, whereby the man could escape with many wrongs but the woman could not’
.
⁸⁵

Writers like Mitra and publications like
Kalyan
ignored the changing complexion of gender equations. With his carefully chosen citations from Western works, Mitra was only stressing the centrality of the shastras and
Manusmrit
i
in governing woman’s sexuality.

Returning to Savitri’s prescription for women’s health, there are six primary rules a woman needs to follow during her menstrual cycle: ‘Never sleep with your husband; do not do physical labour; do not sleep on the floor in cold places; do not bathe; do not catch a cold; and avoid lifting heavy objects, climbing stairs or getting on and off vehicles.
⁸⁶

According to Savitri, physical union during the menstrual period can give rise to ‘illness’, pain, physical weakness, hysteria and an irregular menstrual cycle that will cause a lot of problems during childbirth. Sexual union during the menstrual cycle is also considered bad for men, resulting in the weakening of eyes, intelligence and strength, and faster ageing.