Why are women marginalized in Indian scriptures such as the Gita?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Why is it that women are not allowed to take some part in certain rituals and why they are broadly speaking there are certain stereotypes about gender roles marginalization of say women okay broadly I’ll talk about first there is there are conservatives and there are liberals and the way I envision this is if I have four quadrants there is a there is concern for process and there is concern for people so if you have four quadrants no concern for process no concern for people that is just apathetic so if you consider somebody is doing brain surgery now they have to have concern for both say if you go to the second quadrant there is concern for process but no concern for people now this is what has been told in the manual do this do this do this do incision do this cut do this over here but sometimes the patient might have multiple other complications and the standard process may just not work so if you just go in that category concern for process but not people then we may end up with operation successful patient dead because we didn’t consider the complication and the third would be concern for people or high concern for people low concern for process so that is oh this person has got this person has got this so that is also sometimes something can happen so broadly you could say the conservatives are concerned more about process than people the liberals are concerned more about people than process and in the fourth quadrant is concern for both so now in the conservatives you can go towards extreme concern for process and zero concern for people that is fanaticism and in the liberal idea there can be extreme concern for people and no concern for process that goes towards relativism sentimentalism or relativism you could say that means there is no process for brain surgery whatever you feel like you do it so so now both these extremes are unhealthy and the unifying basis for concern for people and concern for process the unifying basis is purpose what is the purpose the purpose of the brain surgery is not just that the patient should not feel pain the purpose of the brain surgery is not just to tick all the cat boxes in the procedure list the purpose is to heal the patient and for healing the patient the process is to be followed to the extent it helps to heal the patient and for healing the patient the sometimes the patient’s pain has to be considered sometimes the patient’s pain has to be neglected because the pain needs to be inflicted so that the healing can take place so broadly this focus so who is right are conservatives right are liberals right it’s difficult because it depends on situation in some situation you have to emphasize the process this is how things have to be done in some cases you cannot neglect people this is how people are feeling so there is there is there are with respect to the tradition itself there are different approaches and depending on whom you ask whom you talk with you will get very different answers now going back to the specific bhagavad-gita verse the bhagavad-gita that verse which often we say categorizes women among the less intelligent or whatever actually it is the stress is entirely opposite that krishna is not saying that they are low born krishna is saying even people who are considered low born they will get elevated by the practice of bhakti so krishna is in scripture there is something which you could say there is a descriptive aspect of scripture there is a prescriptive aspect of scripture descriptive means and this is slightly different from what i was saying earlier that the scripture sometimes describes social conditions at a time when the scripture was spoken now does scripture necessarily endorse those social conditions if you see krishna himself says in the bhagavad-gita that he is speaking this at a time when dharmasya glani has happened that by the power of time that that spiritual knowledge i had given has become lost and now dharma has become imbalanced and now i am giving this knowledge to re-establish dharma that means the society that krishna is describing in the bhagavad-gita or in the mahabharat that is not an ideal society that is a society where dharmasya glani has already happened now which aspect of dharmasya glani we don’t know but broadly speaking when krishna is saying that okay those are low born and women are included in that so is it something which is a part that conception itself is dharmasya glani that conception itself is a misconception which has come over time or that conception is valid but in spite of that conception the point is that bhakti can redeem everyone bhakti can elevate and liberate everyone the stress of the bhagavad-gita is not that women are considered low born the stress of the bhagavad-gita is that everybody even those considered low born can be elevated so in that sense the bhagavad-gita message is inclusive it is not sectarian over there having said that on my website there is an elaborate answer on this there are different acharyas who have given different explanations of this and there are some acharyas who say that papa yonaya i think i have got on 17 acharyas commentaries we have analyzed over there so around eight to nine acharyas say that papa yonaya is a fourth category so papa yonaya is not a describer for sthriya vaisyasura shudras that sthriya vaisya shudra and papa yonaya is a fourth category and prabhupada also a couple of times does that in his lectures so that means now what is going to talk about if we consider the varnashram system was there so in the varnashram system beyond that there are the those are outcastes so krishna is referring to the outcastes as papa yonaya so there are lower caste and there are outcastes i think everybody is elevated everybody can be elevated and liberated by the potency of bhakti that’s also a reasonable interpretation of that having said this with respect to the practice in today’s world the gender roles there is somehow in today’s history and today’s vision of history that idea has come up that women have been exploited for many many for centuries upon centuries and now there is women are being enfranchised and women are being empowered now this is a is a feminist reading of history and it is it is a very limited and even distorted reading of history life throughout history has been very tough for people its existence itself is a big big struggle for people and for most people they have made whatever working arrangements are possible for survival survival itself is not easy in life so men women come together and deal with the you could say in the catastrophe of existence in the best possible way and in that is it that men have exploited women actually speaking there have been a small minority of those in power who have exploited those who are out of power and historically speaking it is a small minority of men who had power and they have exploited men as well as women rather than seeing it like a systematic history of gender gender exploitation it is power that is being used so there is some king who becomes tyrannical barbaric and exploits everyone ordinary people just trying to live for most people you see relatively speaking at a physical level we live in a much more comfortable situation than say a few hundred years before in terms of getting at least we don’t have to go a long distance to get some drinking water or something like that so we are relatively comfortable in the past physical getting the physical necessities of life itself was very difficult and people didn’t have that energy to exploit and when there were gender roles division if you see at one level you could say that women did not get the privilege of being in leading roles in society it’s true but it’s also that men had to do most of the nasty jobs the people most people who die in wars were men most people who work in mines you know horrible if you read about especially in England George Orwell has written an account of how men you know it’s like they had to they had like eight hour shifts and sometimes they had to burrow like literally crawl for one hour to get to the point where they would also start digging and they had complete dark and that one hour walking one hour crawling literally going one hour going one hour coming they would not be paid for that they paid only for eight hours and on the average at that time by the age of 30 if you lost your teeth you would be considered fortunate because if you had the teeth the teeth would cause so much pain because all the chemicals all the dirt and everything so it is horrible conditions so it is it is some men have also suffered in the war the trench warfare and if you know men would live in the same trenches where they would pass respond to nature there’s nowhere else to go if you come out you’ll be shot and people have lived months and months especially in the war between France and Germany the trenches were there for almost two and a half years the two and a half years people could live in the same trenches and this is just some incidents are well known so the point is that not we’re not saying that men had it bad and women had it good but rather the gender division of the role the division of roles according to gender was what was best done so that people could endure the catastrophe of existence and in that case some exploitation happened but it’s not that this gender division was a systematic plan for deprivation women also had their roles their hierarchies their influences and it was within the home significant now whether those gender roles need to be maintained today or not and especially whether maintaining those gender roles is central to to spiritual growth that is something which is entirely open to debate so some conservatives you could say conservatives going toward fanatics may say that this is how society has to be restructured if we are to grow spiritually but some people say no the purpose is to grow spiritually so do we need to restructure society like that the Shila Prabhupada did make some strong statements about say women being less intelligent or women should always be under the protection of men but he never imposed that as a mandate so if we consider his western disciples they even female disciples they grew up in a culture Prabhupada writes also this in the Chaitanya Charita Amrit Parpot that he says that the western girls are different from Indian girls they have been they’ve grown up in a way that they are they are they’ve grown up to be just equal to their brothers and Prabhupada engaged them accordingly Prabhupada made them they would give classes they would lead kirtans they would go out and distribute books all around they he gives them practically all the services that he gave men so now he did give what the traditions spoke in his books but at the same time he did not impose that so we could say that Prabhupada in his writings is more on the conservative side this is how it has to be done but in his workings he has been on the liberal side that okay this is what works let’s do it in general broadly speaking what I’ve understood is that if a woman has grown up in a traditional society where traditional gender roles were exemplified and were taught then Prabhupada encouraged them to stick to those roles and he appreciated the woman as a homemaker is an extremely important role and especially as a you know taking care of children is vital and we’ve talked about women going out and doing jobs and that is glamorized in today’s society but who is going to take care of children it is not that women in the past where uh they’re just unemployed at home taking care of children can also be a full-time activity it’s demanding and that neglect has its own consequences we may outsource uh child care and we may put our children in child care but uh you know do they get the same kind of affection and attention that’s open to question so the idea was that if somebody has grown in that traditional gender roles Prabhupada encouraged that appreciated that and and this is important this is how it was tradition this is how we can continue it but if somebody did not grow up in those traditional gender roles then Prabhupada did not emphasize that he did not insist on that this is what you have to do said okay you just to uh you serve Krishna in whatever way we can so broadly the purpose is to raise consciousness that everybody’s consciousness should evolve toward Krishna and in today’s world in many ways you just cannot live according to traditional gender roles entirely but at the same time an entire rejection or especially condemnation of traditional gender roles that is a very short-sighted vision of history so if you keep the purpose in mind that so that purpose is that everybody should live in a way that everybody’s consciousness rises upwards the social response the responsibility of family are taken care of and everybody’s consciousness rises towards spirituality then it would be that almost each family each community will have to negotiate and find out how best the gender roles work out in today’s world okay yes thank you thank you