Columnists
Stacked Deck:
War of the Sexes - Part II
by I.J. SINGH & GURMEET KAUR
The following essay, alongwith other pieces over the course of the next seven days, is brought to you to commemorate The International Women's Day - March 8, 2010.
This Great War continues.
Exactly a year ago, on international women's day, the two of us had jointly - in these very pages - cast a critical eye on the abyss that divides men and women; we rued the fact it remains a man's world. For ages, the deck has been so heavily stacked against women that we can't imagine a time when it wasn't so, or that it wasn't God-ordained.
Sikhs know that it shouldn't be so. Just reflect on the larger-than-life contributions of Mata Gujri or Mai Bhago in war, peace and the spiritual realm and you would know that the Gurus preached and practiced equality. Just listen to any sermon in a gurdwara or tune into the morning prayer, Asa-di-Var, and Guru Nanak's words on the equality of men and women would be like a stab in the heart of inequality.
But the hurt doesn't last, the conscience minimally pricked, the reflection barely sinks in and the cultural constraints - our ingrained habits of the hearts - prevail. It is what we might expect in the Stockholm syndrome; woman, the victim, is now also the perpetrator of continued injustice.
In Part I, we had mainly focused on the place of women - often vaguely but harshly defined by custom, where much is expected but all authority is denied to them. We acknowledged that Sikhs have effectively written their women out of Sikh history. This throws out of whack the spiritual future of the House of Nanak.
A reader challenged us to note the fact that if Sikh women now make poor role models, their male counterparts are equally poor. If young women today appear to be poorly cognizant of the defining place of a mother in the preservation and transmission of a heritage, the male of the species is not much better as a Sikh father.
He agreed with the centrality of the mother and her role being far greater than carrying the fetus for the necessary gestational period, but he wondered about the remaining half of the equation: the place of the father in a family beyond his brief contribution as a sperm donor. What is the meaning of responsible parenting?
Parenting is bound to suffer if not fail when the two parents are not equally committed and synergistic in their joint venture of parenting. So we can't really think of mothers and exclude the fathers. If modern Sikh parents are not joined in creating a Sikh family, Sikhi as the foundation of our life will not be.
Sikh reality has become such that one needs only a cursory glance at the "Marriage" columns in any ethnic paper to see that while Sikh men are yearning for Bollywood-style China dolls who need not know anything of Sikhi, their women counterparts may be seeking not men who are connected to Sikhi but partners who are fashionable Bollywoodian hulks. This of, course, is absolutely fair. What's good for the goose ....
It then becomes pointless to rue the absence of Sikhi in the household.
Our traditional, Indian and Punjabi culture expects that men bring home the bacon, while women keep the home-fires burning. However, realities are changing and many more women now work or have careers that are just as demanding as those of their partners. Women's liberation has been a boon but its business remains unfinished; all it has done so far is to increase the burden on women. The expectations from and of men have remained largely unchanged.
As men often say, women are biologically and hormonally uniquely qualified to be the nurturing mothers. Sikhi, we rightly insist, needs to be injected into the child while still an infant, and who but a mother can effectively do that. Certainly not the hapless father.
We offer you a small "for instance" to prove our point. We know a family of Sikhs with grown up children. The father is a keshadhari Sikh who also served as a trustee of a local New York gurdwara for a while. His wife attends to the Guru Granth at home. The father does not because he never learned to read the Gurmukhi script. He doesn't read the Guru Granth in any other language either. He bows to it every day and leaves everything else about Sikhi to his wife. He insists that he is a wonderful Sikh who fulfills his obligations as a Sikh father.
He is, in his own words, too busy with 'work'. His wife, too, works full time outside the home, but reading and teaching gurbani is, as he claims, woman's work. The trouble is that there are many more fathers like him and this behaviour isn't even the tip of the iceberg.
In this, male behavior surpasses failed parenting; it becomes inadequate partnering. It then becomes a major risk factor contributing to instability of the institution of marriage itself.
An empowered woman on her own two feet wants to come home to a partner, not a feudal home-lord. Divorce rate is soaring. What do cases of abandoned brides and children or female infanticide say about our reality?
Does it lessen a man if he contributes in the kitchen, entertains and tends a child, or reads to his children a bed-time saakhi? Does it diminish a man to work alongside men and women in the making of langar in the gurdwara or teach in the Sunday school while, for a change, his equally gifted wife enters committee management?
Would a man freely step up to marry a divorcee or a widow just as our Gurus encouraged us, and walk in the footsteps of the Khalsa that was renowned for the help they offered to resettle kidnapped and abandoned (sometimes by the victrims' own husbands) women that they had rescued? Would a Sikh father raise his daughters with as much care and privilege as his sons and not rue the lack of a son?
Would a man trust his wife as she travels about in the world as much as he would like to be trusted by her? Finally, would a man become an active and equal partner in all the things, glorious and mundane, that make a family?
You see the roles of men and women in Sikhi are not meant to be exclusive; they are, instead, complementary and synergistic. Guru Granth [p 879] tells us: "Purakh mey naar naar mey purakh bujhho brahm giani" - 'The female is in the male, and the male is in the female.' Bhai Gurdas, the Sikh savant of the Guru period, reminds us: "Lok ved gun gyan vich aradh sarreri mokh duari" - 'Both temporally and spiritually, woman is the other half of man and leads to the door of final liberation, [Vaar 5, Pauri 16].
When we look at this disconnect between our desires to see Sikh children connected to Sikhi and our inability to achieve such results except rarely, the first temptation is to lay the blame squarely on Bollywood and hindutva, and then secondarily on our modern existence in a primarily non-Sikh world.
Not that such thinking is without some merit but it is akin to denial and escapism - not wanting to accept one's own responsibility. Isn't it best labeled facile but fallacious?
But how and when did this rot in our thinking come in?
Perhaps, as a feudal society, this is the way people in Punjab always were historically. But the Gurus changed them. The decline may date from Ranjit Singh's much admired reign in the 19th century, when untold numbers of Hindus and Muslims flocked to Sikhi, not because they loved it so but because the Punjabi pragmatic mind saw where political power was. Their conversion of convenience to Sikhi came with unwelcome baggage - many of the practices of the traditional Indian society.
There is little question that before the British came, gurdwaras in Punjab were aplenty. The most educated person in the village, steeped in the teachings of gurbani, was the gurdwara granthi; he was the go-to man for advice on matters affecting life and death.
The ground realities changed with the arrival of the British. The Punjabi mind - pragmatic as always - reckoned that progress lay in mimicking the new masters. The education system was different as were the social mores. But this was the way to prosperity.
So we diminished our traditional Sikh institutions, including our gurdwaras. The keepers of our faith were downgraded and rapidly became irrelevant; their profession a repository of the least talented.
As a result, the larger population lost its moorings to Sikhism. In gender issues, we quickly regressed to the traditional values of a feudal culture from which we had arisen.
A point needs to be made most emphatically, precisely and without an iota of doubt: Blame NOT the British for this downward slide that we have etched above. The onus is ours and so is the responsibility of fixing it. We are not playing the denial game here.
If male power grew in such a milieu, keep in mind that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the spiritual, ethical development came to be largely relegated to their relatively poorly educated womenfolk.
And the women? They were caught in the repressive cultural quagmire, leading a life of subservience to men. What could they pass on to their families but an under-empowered, male-dominant, ethically compromised, spiritually bankrupt framework?
One Sikh lady immigrated to the U.S.A. some four decades ago with her husband and three sons. After the husband's death, she was tossed around from one son to the other; dependent and lonely, she died longing for the open spaces and familiar faces of Punjab. When asked why in the world did she not stand up on her own two feet and live life like most Americans do - after all she was one - She replied, "I grew up a servant to my father and brothers, was married young to be a servant to my husband and aged while serving my sons ... having led most of my life in subservience, how do you expect me to suddenly liberate myself, love life and act like a free woman?"
It takes us back to the Laws of Manu which were the foundations of traditional Indian society and still hold sway.
Three generations of men changed - but her story didn't.
What else would you expect from such a lifestyle if not a disconnect between conception and the reality?
T.S. Eliot reminds us:
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
......This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
If in our earlier essay we asked, "Where are all the women gone?"
Now we must ask "Where are all the men gone?"
We readily admit the many exceptions - wonderful men and women - to this bleak picture. Just as there is an admirable woman behind every good man, perhaps behind every one of the great women is a man - kind, gentle and quiet, letting her be ... a father, a husband, a brother, a friend, a son, a lover, nudging her to love her own spirit as she loves and nurtures his.
Hope, they say, springs eternal. Our Sikh society today is not without some great role models amongst the men. They strive for relationships that produce empowered women, that in turn lead to a conscious Sikhi-centered household. The foundation of these mature males was in their own parenting when they were but boys. They helped their mothers and sisters at home, even in the kitchen. They treat their wives as equals. They invest in their daughters emotionally and spiritually.
Just look around in the diaspora and you will find a handful but inspiring examples of women and men as excellent Sikh role models.
If there is a holy grail to the House of Nanak - this is it.
[To read "War of the Sexes", Part-I, please visit: http://www.sikhchic.com/article-detail.php?id=759&cat=12
March 8, 2010
Conversation about this article
1: Mlle. S. (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.), March 08, 2010, 8:32 AM.
Thank you for bringing these issues out to be discussed openly. Sadly, while the gender divide may be more pronounced in families steeped in Eastern tradition, it still exists in our American culture as well in spite of the 'freedom' of American women. I was just conversing with a family member yesterday about this very topic that while women have become more educated and skilled, and in many cases earn more than their partners, no great parallel progress has been made on the side of bringing men into the fold of raising their children and caring for the household. I know of many husbands who will say, 'I help out with the kids' or 'I help Mary' with the housework.' The point is that the husband and wife should be equal partners. When the husband spends the day with his children, he is not 'helping out' his wife, he is being a good father. When he vacuums, he is not 'helping out' his wife, he is taking some responsibility for the household. In the course of my conversation on this topic, we concluded that much of the problematic behavior stems from early childhood education in the home. While we now encourage little girls to 'be whatever you want to be', no one tells them that they may also have to take the entire responsibility for children and household on their shoulders. This often includes religious instruction, as referenced in the article. Few little boys grow up being told how to be good fathers and caretakers. We need to raise a generation of sons who will be proud to spend time with their children, proud of their working wives (if they choose to work), and proud of their male influence in the household. Men and women need not have exactly the same roles - we are, after all, created differently. But we should stand equal in our homes, in the education of our children, and before God. Great article!
2: M.Gibson (Guelph, Ontario, Canada), March 09, 2010, 2:48 PM.
Great article and I agree with Mlle. S. that we have not made much progress in mainstream America with this. In fact I feel that we are going backward with girls aspiring to look like fashion models or actors at great expense to their health and wellbeing, including their spirituality. But where I would like to see more women is in prominent roles in the gurdwara. I believe that a more egalitarian division of labour in the home will eventually follow the trend of role equality but I rarely see a woman lead a service. Both genders graciously serve me langar but I long to see more women explaining the scripture or serving the Guru Granth Sahib. Sikh history has many stories of great women and many great women are currently working behind the scenes in social services and community activism. But how about right up front where we can see them and connect with their leadership and spirituality?
3: Gurmeet Kaur (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.), March 11, 2010, 12:50 PM.
Michele, you see Sikh women behind the scenes because that's where most of our men like us to be. Community activism and writing are behind-the-desk jobs ... so you will see our creative power manifested there more so than in the gurdwara. But wait! Men alone are not to be blamed! We ourselves like to be tucked in our comfort zones. Why should men care to bring us out? I was unhappy about men not showing interest in the International Women's Week articles at sikhchic.com when I realized that Sikh women too were amiss.
4: Mehtab Kaur (Kanpur, India), March 11, 2010, 3:43 PM.
A mere 2% of the population - the Sikhs of the subcontinent - were able to inspire half-a-billion desis to overthrow the 'great' British Empire. The Blacks of America grappled with the might of White America and wrested away their rights from them. In both these examples, sacrifices needed to be made. But the crux of the matter is that you yourself have to lead the fight to free yourself. If women want equal rights, they'll have to fight for them ... and if they do, nothing in the world can stop them. But to expect the Male establishment, Sikh or otherwise - the perpetrators of inequality against women - to hand us our due on a platter ... well, it's not going to happen that way, sisters! If we want it badly enough, we'll have to go and get it. Remember the Guru ka Bagh morcha? Are we up to it?
5: Kulbir Singh (Sydney, Australia), March 11, 2010, 4:01 PM.
Yes, many Sikh women work behind the scenes, reluctant or unable to perform the role of gurdwara committee members, parcharaks or granthis in gurdwaras. However, we are now seeing more and more women doing kirtan. There are opportunities increasingly available for women to perform key roles in Sikh institutions and hopefully we will see more women in leadership roles in the near future.
6: Amardeep (U.S.A.), March 12, 2010, 3:20 PM.
Happy international Women's Day to all women out there. May you empower yourself! And let's empower each other.
7: B. Shantanu (New Delhi, India), March 13, 2010, 9:15 AM.
Nice article, Gurmeet. I largely agree ... but the "Laws of Manu" that you refer to were never universally acknowledged nor were/ are they sacrosanct. Traditional Indian society had - in fact - a great reverence for the female, for the mother and for the wife. You of course are aware of the numerous female deities in Hinduism - including some very "powerful", all conquering ones such as Durga. Later on, distortions crept in the social organisation ... and what you see today (especially in Northern Hinduism) is a reflection of that.
8: Kartar Singh Bhalla (New Delhi, India), March 15, 2010, 1:40 AM.
God made men and women to be different, but equal nonetheless. Through women, God brought forth kings, leaders, prophets, pastors, and even the so-called son of God. Guru Nanak said: 'So kyon manda aakhiye jit jamme rajaan' - 'How can you call women inferior? They give birth to kings!' Guru Hargobind called women 'the conscience of man'.