Diwali is Sita-Wali: So India Can Atone Its Crimes Against Women
by Rita Banerji
Diwali, India’s glorious festival of lamps, carries not just festive joy into the hearts of people gorging on sweets and bursting fire-crackers, but also cultural sexism in the form of a popular myth associated with this festival, that gets unquestioningly retrenched into people’s mind-sets.
The Diwali story goes as such. Ram, who incidentally was both god and King, had his beautiful wife, Sita, abducted by the Sri Lankan king, Ravana. Interestingly Ravana, who usually is portrayed as an ogre in Indian myths, turns out to be the King and the hero-God who rescued Sita from an unhappy and love-less marriage when this same story is narrated in Sri Lanka! However, in the Indian version, Ram collected an army, crossed the strait to Sri Lanka and battled Ravana, defeating and killing him, and thus rescued his wife. When he returned to India with Sita, the Indians celebrated his victory by lighting thousands of oil lamps. The lamps symbolized the victory of light over dark, i.e. the power of ‘good’ over ‘evil,’ and so continue to be lit during the Diwali festival every year.
Ram’s victory and goodness are not just celebrated during Diwali. Ram is held as the undying role-model for what women in India want in their husbands. Unmarried Indian women are often told in blessing, “May you get a good husband like Ram.” After all wasn’t this the man who went to war for his wife? Doesn’t that make him ideal husband material for any woman?
Sometime back an Indian politician—incidentally also with the first name Ram—Ram Jethmalani, took exception to this notion and said, “Ram was a bad husband.” His remark caused an uproar in the right-wing, conservative circles in India (to which Jethmalani actually belongs!), that for long have nurtured a vision of India’s future as one that would resemble Ram’s kingdom – the Ram rajya.
Jethmalani’s contempt concerns what Ram did after he returned home with Sita. Reportedly Ram overheard a washerman’s conversation where doubt was caste on Sita’s sexual “purity.” During her captivity surely Sita was raped, which in the washerman’s , as indeed probably much of the public’s perception, rendered Sita “impure.” How could a King who resided with an “impure wife” be honored by his people? Eager to restore his exalted status in the public’s eye, Ram decided to banish Sita to the woods, even though she was pregnant at the time.
Sita’s years in exile are paradoxically reflective of the lives of thousands of women in India’s slums and villages today, who are often abandoned by their husbands, and like Sita they live like outcastes, in poverty, struggling to singly raise their children.
Ram’s attempt to have Sita prove her “purity” by stepping into fire (from which she apparently emerged unsinged!) is also evocative of the fate of thousands of young women, in the 21st century India, who are burnt to death for dowry by their husbands and in-laws, the so-called “bride burnings.”
Sita’s life has embedded in it one other tragic element of what it means to be female in India. And that’s female infanticide. Sita was found by her adoptive father, buried alive in a pot beneath the ground, a method still used sometimes for killing female infants. Every year, thousands of girls, within the first year of their birth, continue to be murdered in various ways in India, just because of their gender.
So it turns out that – the myths, the gods, the history, and the traditions, we continue to eulogize and celebrate in India, contain in them the seeds of violence on women and girls.
Does India have the ability to reflect and the social conscience to say – Sorry Ram! But you are no role model for men in India? What you did to Sita is unacceptable! It is cowardly! It is unethical!
I think for starters, we need a major re-haul in the concept of Diwali as it stands. I propose we re-name it “Sita-wali,” and observe it as a day of confession and atonement for the wrongs done by society towards Sita and the women and girls of India.
Unless India learns to do that, it remains a spiritually hypocritical nation, stuck in the lies of misogynistic myths and traditions.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Rita Banerji is an author and gender activist, and the founder of The 50 Million Missing Campaign to end India’s female genocide. Her book ‘Sex and Power: Defining History Shaping Societies,‘ is a historical and social look at how the relationship between gender and power in India has led to the ongoing female gendercide. Her website is www.ritabanerji.com She blogs at Revolutions in my Space and tweets at @Rita_Banerji
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS: The photographers whose pictures appear here are supporting members of The 50 Million Missing Campaign’s Photographers Group on Flickr which is supported by more than 2400 photographers from around the world. To see more of each of their works, please click on the pictures.