IS THE COURT RULING THAT ALLOWS WOMEN TO PRAY IN TEMPLES THAT WERE OUT OF BOUNDS FOR THEM UNTIL NOW A PROGRESSIVE MOVE, OR DOES IT MEAN PLAYING WITH THE ENERGIES OF THE UNIVERSE?
In our country, human spit is tolerated anywhere — virtually every road and public wall is “purified” with spit. But a woman’s menstrual blood is taboo. Never mind the fact that menstruating women take enough care of their own and public hygiene. There are various taboos attached to menstruation and women have accepted them over centuries. Be it the kitchen or the temple, they are not supposed to enter the premises during menstruation lest they mar the purity of the place. And when it comes to a celibate god, Ayyappa in Sabarimala, the entry is a nono for women.
As for the right to pray in a public temple, Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees it to women as much as it does to men. The Constitution, as also God(s) in any religion, looks at men and women as part of the same species with different chromosomal combinations ordained by nature to perform different but complementary roles in life. In Hinduism, there are as many female gods as there are male ones. Crucial portfolios such as wealth (Lakshmi), education (Saraswati), Earth (personified by a goddess in various cultures worldwide), rivers (Ganga, Yamuna), and so on are under goddesses. Division of labour among gods knows no gender bias.
Menstruation is a normal and natural phenomenon that indicates, among other things, that the woman concerned has the potential to give birth to younger ones of the species — males and females. Everything that goes with the marvelous fact of procreation should ideally evoke joy and not disgust! We Indians must seriously consider stopping spitting in public places rather than stopping menstruating women from entering public places. Human saliva is much more unhygienic than women’s blood, for God’s sake.
Shani Shingnapur, a village in Maharashtra, is famous for the fact that no house in the village has doors. But the popular temple of Shani has doors, which were closed for women for 400 years, until April 8, 2016, when the temple trust allowed women devotees to enter the sanctum. There are other places of worship where women face restrictions on their entry. Haji Ali Dargah in Maharashtra keeps women off the shrine because of sharia law. Padmanabhaswamy Temple does not allow women devotees to enter the vault of riches. Kartikeya Temple in Pehowa, Haryana, prohibits women’s entry as Lord Kartikeya was a celibate (brahmachari). Patbausi Satras (institutional centres) in Assam forbid women from temples. There are some other places of worship that consider women’s presence denigrating their sanctity, too.
Although there are no restrictions around menstruation in modern Christianity, menstruating women are still not allowed to take communion in conservative Orthodox Catholic churches (sometimes they are not even allowed to enter the church). The idea still exists that menstruation makes women “unclean” and this has been used as a reason why women shouldn’t be ordained as priests.
It would make sense to organise three-way meetings among religious, social and political leaders and peacefully remove this anomaly from our system. Like every mature society, we should have the grace to admit there could be something in our traditions that are not compatible with common sense and need to be brought in line with contemporary rationale.
HARI WARRIER// So Trupti Desai and her Bhumata Brigade activists have offered prayers at Trimbakeshwar temple in Nashik. Good for them. One must admire Desai’s tenacity in challenging the male hegemony over divinity, but one should also pause a moment and ask, why are some temples off limits for women anyway? Most temples welcome women devotees, so why these exceptions?
One would like to think that god does not differentiate among his children regardless of gender, age, wealth or any other factor. So why can’t we, his children, do likewise?
It may have something to do with energy. Everything is made of vibrating particles, science tells us, and that particles are made up of atoms, which consist of an electron (negative), proton (positive) and nucleus (neutral), around which the first two orbit. The positive and negative are also called Yang and Yin.
Now, that atom exists because there is an “integrating” factor, otherwise the electron and proton would go their different ways. We can call that integrating factor god, generator, or creator. God, the operator, keeps it alive, and when it is time to die, god the destroyer takes it away.
In a family, the father is the equivalent of the proton, and the electron is the mother. Children, of course, are the nucleus around which the two orbit.
A temple is a congregation of devotees. The idol in itself is nothing without the devotees. It is just a conduit for the energies of God to reach devotees. The devotees call these energies “blessing”. Different temples have different kinds of “blessings”. Tirupati, for instance, is known for increasing one’s prosperity. There are temples that remove devotees’ obstacles or heal sickness or help childless couples conceive. When a devotee prays at a temple, he absorbs some of the energies that flow through the deity.
The question is, why would women be kept out of some of these temples? Could it have something to do with the energies at these temples?
Probably yes.
In Shani Shingnapur and Trimbakeshwar, the energies that emanate through the deities are clearly male. So what would happen to a woman praying here? She would be “blessed” with a booster dose of Yang or male energies. She would likely return home in a combative frame of being. Instead of a proton and an electron, we would probably end up with two protons in a home!
In the interest of harmony in the homestead, the power structure that laid down rules for temples hundreds of years ago, decided that women, who represent the yin aspect in a home, should not enter the presence of these deities. There are likely to be dozens of similar temples in other parts of the country that have not yet gained limelight.
Have you not noticed that Shiva temples invariably have a Devi temple in the vicinity? That the devotee is supposed to visit both temples, else the pilgrimage is considered incomplete? Even Tirupati has a Lakshmi temple. The purpose is to balance the energies.
Sabarimala is different, but it too is fairly straightforward — men who go to Sabarimala are supposed to abstain from “family life”, including sex, for weeks before they set out on the pilgrimage. Introducing a “fertile” woman in the middle of thousands of such pilgrims would be asking for trouble. Sure, people should behave themselves, but why take the risk? The official excuse is that Lord Ayyappa was a brahmachari, but if you consider that he was born of Lord Shiva and Vishnu in Mohini form, we get into grey areas where there is no wiggleroom. Without getting into an argument of whether this approach is right or not, one feels that we should not get into a fight for just the sake of fighting. Sure, everyone does not know energy. But it can be taught to anyone, and experienced by anyone. It is better to cultivate the God within us, than fight over temple etiquettes.