Chapter: 2 Voices of Pioneer Indian Women Memoirists: an Outline
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CHAPTER: 2 VOICES OF PIONEER INDIAN WOMEN MEMOIRISTS: AN OUTLINE Who to wed? Who to revere? Couldn’t comprehend the male fear Why to bow? How to conduct? At each corner, obstacles erupt. How to write? When to procreate? What for the world is most appropriate? I ask and get no replies…………………… Moments come, century flies But the quest of female never dies!!!! (Monika Choudhry’s Poem Quest) 2.1 Introduction: Jai Shankar Prassad, the pioneer literary personality of Hindi literature is known for strong portrayals of women. A popular verse from one of his most widely read poems Kamyani (Part: II ‘Lajja’) reads, “नारी! तुम केवल श्र饍धा हो वव�वास-रजत-नग पगतल मᴂ। पीयूष-स्रोत-सी बहा करो जीवन के सुԂदर समतल मᴂ।” Nari! Tum keval shraddha ho, vishwas-rajal-nag-pal-tal mein. Piyush strot si baha karo, Jivan ki sundar samtal mein. [Oh woman! You are honour personified, under the silver mountain of faith flow you, like a river of ambrosia, on this beautiful earth.] The woman is a beautiful creation of God on this beautiful earth. She is a living embodiment of affection, love, compassion, tenderness and so on. In Indian culture and literature, the aesthetic beauty of women represented extraordinarily. Millions of people of the world appreciate Vatsayana’s Kamsutra and Bhartuhari’s Shrungarshatak. Mahakavi Kalidas exceptionally represents the aesthetic beauty of women in his epics. In Meghdoot, the protagonist Yaksha sends messages to his beloved wife by rainy clouds, he narrates aesthetically the beauty of his wife. He appreciates the physical beauty of his wife by these words: तन्वी श्यामा, शिखरिदषणा, प啍वबिम्िोधिोष्टि, मध्यक्षमा, चि啍तहरिनोप्रेक्षना, ननम्ननाभीही, श्रोक्षीभिा, हलसगमाना, स्तोकनमा, स्तनाभया車 etc. In Vedvyas Ramayan, Shri Rama narrates Sita who lost in the forest and Shankuntla’s narration in Abhigyan Sakuntlam is wonderful. Whether the great poet Bhash, Ban, Shudrak or Jagannath all of them make immortal the female characters in their great works. The female characters of the all renowned Sanskrit scholars were emancipated and evolving modern female. In Manusmruti (around 1250 BCE and 1000 BCE respectively) of course, it is a controversial religious book, though it appreciates women in Adhyay-3. Sloka-56: यत्र नायस्य तु पू煍यन्ते िमन्ते तत्र देवता:। यत्रैतास्तु न पू煍यन्ते सवायस्तत्राफला: क्रिया:। [Where women are honoured, divinity blossoms there, and where ever women are dishonoured, all action no matter how noble it may remain unfruitful.] During the Vedic period, there was no gender discrimination. Women were respected and secured a higher position in society. Women were worshipped as a Shakti means power and strength. Shatapatha Brhamana associated with the Sukla Yajurveda, the wife is often said to be the completion of the husband: he becomes complete ‘Self’ only when he is married: ardho ha va esa atmano yaj jaya tamad yavaj jayam….. “A full half, surely, of one’s self is one’s wife. As long as one does not obtain a wife, therefore one can never be reborn, for he then remains incomplete. As soon as he obtains a wife, however, he is reborn, for then he becomes complete.” (Patrick 106) Women of this period were actively participating in cultivation, cattle rearing, weaving, dyeing, war type of equipment and materials manufacturing etc. In the education field women were progressive. They were not inferior to men. As far as education and religion is concerned, women and men were equal. They could study Vedas and also received religious teaching. In later-Vedic civilization, women like Gargi and Maiteyi were considered to be highly intellectual. “Women enjoyed far greater freedom in the Vedic period than later in India. She had more to say in the choice of her mate than the forms of marriage might suggest. She appeared freely at feasts and dances and joined with men in religious sacrifices. She could study, and like Gargi, engage in philosophical disputation. If she was left a widow there was no restriction upon her marriage.” (Will 401) The degradation of women had started from the post-Vedic period. The renowned sociologist Prabhati Mukherji has noted some important factors for the low status of women. These factors are Brahamanical austerities on the whole society, caste system widespread, joint family system, women deprived of education and foreign invasions. The status of women gradually declines in Dharmashastras and Purans. The girls were deprived of formal education and restricted from learning and preaching Vedas. Sons were given more importance than daughters. Some new evils like child marriage, widow burning or Sati, Jauhar and Devadasi were prevalent in those days. During the Buddhist period the status of women was somewhat improved, however, no drastic change could found. During the Mughal period, the condition of women became the worst. The Mughal invaders brought with them their own culture. For them, a woman was the sole property of her father, brother and husband, and she does not have any will of her own. This ideology spread among Indian society and they have also begun to treat their own women like that. The Mughals were polygamists and kept their wives in Purdah. These evils spread in the Indian society. In the twentieth century, the great reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidhyasagar, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Dhondo Keshav Karve, Swami Dayanand Saraswati and Mahatma Gandhi have struggled a lot to give honourable and prestigious status to Indian women in a society which they deserve. In Muslim society, Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914) and Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah (1905-1982) introduced education for girls. In South India, Rao Bahadur Kandukuri Veerealingam Pantulu (1848-1919) encouraged women’s education and remarriage of widows while Sir Raghupathi Venkataratnam Naidu (1862- 1939) opposed the Devdasi tradition and worked for the eradication of untouchability. Credit goes to Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkarji that the constitution of independent India changed the social, cultural and religious backbone of Indian society by the various acts in favour of women. As a result, today Indian women have equal rights of education, religion, politics, services and wages as men have. Thus, in the Vedic period, the voices of women spread to all directions because they were enjoying the equal status to men. In the post-Vedic period the standard of women decreased so that women’s voices suffocated and muffled and in the present 21st century the voices of women increasingly heard in the parliament, courts and in the streets. 2.2 Voices of the Earliest Indian Women Memoirists: During the pre-colonial time, the contribution of Indian women in the field of self- writing non-fiction literature was trivial but notable and well appreciated in all literary circles. In the mid-sixteenth century, according to the Mughal history, a Mughal princess Gul-Badan Begam had written a historical memoir Ahval-l Humayun on account of her brother Humayun after being persuaded by her nephew Akbar. She was born to the Mughal Emperor Babur and Dildar Begam in 1523 in Afghanistan. In 1898, her written manuscript was translated by a British scholar Annette Beveridge and known as Humayun Nama. This historical memoir deals more with political and administrative matters of the Mughal Empire and less about herself. Susie J. Tharu and K. Lalita writes on the Gul-Badan Begam’s historical memoir, “Such histories commonly gave accounts of the major public events that had taken place, political crises that threatened the state, battles that had been fought, and grants or honours that had been given. Not so Gul-Badan Begam’s. The focus on her unusual account is the everyday life of the royal family. She speaks of anxieties and the pressures as the womenfolk experience, then even the emperor’s travels are charted through the minds of the women in his household. We watch with them from the ramparts as the men ride away to war and anxiously scan the horizon for their return. Gul-Badan Begam’s history is one of life in that large household and of warm enduring friendships.” (Tharu 99) Generally, Indian women were treated as a silent character in Indian history. But the spiritual voices of Maharastra state’s Varkari Sampradaya women saints spread widely in the 17th century. There were many women saints associated with this Varkari Sampradaya - Janabai, Muktabai, Gonai, Rajai, Ladai, Kanhopatra, Soyarabai, Nirmalabai, Banka, Vanka, Bhagu Maharin, Gangabai, Sakhubai, Vithabai and Bahinabai. The contribution of these women in the field of spiritual literature is unexceptional. Bahinabai (c. 1628-1700) was the last great woman saint of Varkari tradition. She was the first Indian woman to write a spiritual memoir Atmanivedana in seventeenth- century later translated by Justin E. Abbott into English Bahinabai Gatha. Bahinabai’s spiritual guide, the saint Ramdas in his Dasabadha refer to Atmanivedana to the surrendering of the self to God. This memoir contains 473 verses among them first 73 verses portraits her early period life. These verses are called abhangas. The Bahinabai Gatha narrates Bahinabai’s or Bahini’s birthplace Devgaon in western Maharastra to Brahman parents. Her father was Audev and mother's name was Janaki Kulkarni. Bahinabai says while other girls wanted to play with toys she was chanting the God’s names. At the age of five, she was married in Shivpur to a Brahman astrologer, Gangadhar Pathak, who was thirty years old and widowed. Bahini and her husband left their home because of a family quarrel. They wandered in Maharastra and finally settled in Kolhapur where a learned brahmin named Hariram Bhatt gave the family shelter in the courtyard of his house.