We routinely kill women; the women who while asserting their right to choose their partners, defy parental authority stamped by tradition with legitimacy. Tradition and authority both are thinly veiled coercion that has assumed almost a sacred social and cultural character in our society.
The former sanctions human inequality and the later condones the practice of gender bias as if it’s natural. It seems natural because of the physiology specific difference in terms of physical power that apparently exists between male and female.
The consequent male dominance is an outcome of this crucial fact that defines the asymmetrical relationship between man and woman that hangs round our neck like an albatross. That man appears to be physically stronger that woman is taken as natural.
But it is worth-remembering that what is considered natural may not be human or humanly acceptable as a result of our long and complex evolutionary process. Why do we condemn the law of jungle? We condemn it because we no longer live in jungle, our original habitat, where naturally gifted might or strength defines the conduct of all living beings.
We as humans while being an inseparable part of nature have transcended the confines within which it forced us to live for a very long period of time. While still retaining the alluring vestiges of hunger for power, we strive for a society where reason and compassion rule our individual and collective life. Such an ideal though yet partly realized is the motive force that helped us build what we proudly call civilization.
Pouncing at the weak may be quite natural for the predators but patently inhuman for human beings because of our species specific moral orientation underpinned by human consciousness.
‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ is a notion deeply embedded in the male psyche that still retains all sorts of flotsam and jetsam of ‘natural’ jungle consciousness.
It subconsciously and consciously ignores the vital contribution made by woman in building human society. If she is physically not as strong as man, her reproductive power has the unique quality of ensuring the continued human survival that is irreplaceable.
Besides, her work in the fields and at home largely remains unaccounted for, particularly in a patriarchic socio-economic structure. She is commoditized and taken as little more than a baby making machine. Where ever there is patriarchy, there is female subjugation. Punjabi society is no exception. It not only defends patriarchy but also flaunts what flows from it, the male domination as a highly prized socio-cultural value.
In the fast changing socio-economic landscape, the expression of unrestrained male chauvinism being abominable is now defended in the name of family culture which derives its strength from ill-conceived religious concepts and tribal hang-over. The most egregious example of such a practice is found in denying woman her right to choose her partner. Falling in love is the sin of the sins. Considerations of caste, class, creed and family prestige creep in ‘like a tedious argument of insidious intent’ when woman dares to stand on her own feet.
Even the religious requirement of consent of both individuals contracting marriage is totally disregarded when it comes to clash with the patriarch’s view on the question. Most of the women in our society out of fear or stodgy pragmatism silently accept in the matters of marriage what they have been trained to accept; the dictate of the patriarch. But some ‘gifted with ferocity’ refuse and that’s precisely what opens the gates of the hell. Refusing to live with someone woman doesn’t want to leave her with an extremely unenviable option; elopement; an action which is bound to have fatal consequences.
The incidents of elopement though nothing new in our society, are on the rise due to myriad reasons such as increased women education, awareness of women rights, consumer market and globalization, to name a few.
Woman and the man she elopes with are relentlessly hounded and when found with help of male dominated state machinery are brutally killed or mercilessly persecuted.
Elopement is the last refuge of woman caught in a situation where she has to choose between her family and her man in a perilous state of divided loyalties. It could be any woman; from peasantry, landed aristocracy or urban middle class.
The classic example in our literary and cultural tradition is that of legendry aristocratic Sahiban, the daughter of a powerful chief in the medieval Punjab. She is born in a tribal/agrarian society where patriarchy rules supreme and socially accepted more allows the patriarch to dispose of any woman of his family in the manner he deems fit.
So marriage is not a matter of individual choice. ‘In such a society marriage is not a matter of union of two individuals but of two families, two clans, and it is particularly a means of enhancing power by making alliances with other powerful clans’, writes Pankaj K. Singh lucidly in his ‘Representing Women: Tradition, Legend and Punjabi Drama’.
When forced to marry a man of another powerful clan, Sahiban elopes with a dashing young man Mirza, her love, when the marriage ceremonies are in full swing. The formidable horsemen of her tribe capture both lovers in the wild of ‘Sandal Bar’ (area between river Chenab and Ravi). They kill indomitable Mirza and set his dead body ablaze. Sahiban’s argument ‘what sin did I commit? I only exercised my right of choice’ evokes nothing but silence. Arguing with such a woman is a taboo. Her kinsmen simply hang her.
Though much has changed, the Punjab remains medieval for lovers especially for women. Feudal family doesn’t allow her young woman to marry the man of her choice because along with other intangibles she can take away a part of the family property.
Peasant family denies right to its woman because of practice of ‘watta satta’ i.e. ‘two families having matrimonial tie by giving girls to each other’. Urban middle class obsessed with the puritanical sense of traditional propriety ‘loses face’ if woman makes a choice independent of it.
If we wish to grasp the nettle of reforms in the family structure, we will have to expose the surfeit of certainty found among all the classes regarding the relevance of traditional culture.
Our gaggle of traditionalists uses the garble of family values as a ruse to perpetuate the gender inequality to the so-called natural advantage of male which has already resulted in the stymied growth of half the population.
The choice is between being ‘natural’ and being human. To be exact, we have to be humanly natural if we want to have a society ‘in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. — soofi01@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, May 16th, 2014
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