(The writer Bharatiyar (C.Subrahmanya Bharati) is the greatest of the modern Tamil poets. He died in 1921. He wrote articles in English in addition to his most famous Tamil poems. Following are his views on women:-swami)
Compiled by London swaminathan
Post No.918 dated 19th March 2014.
In the mystic symbolism of the Hindus, Shiva wears his divine consort, who is also his mother, as part of his body; Vishnu wears the Goddess of Wealth on his chest and the Four Faced Father of the Worlds holds the soul of Learning on his tongue. Christianity, in its earlier form of Roman Catholicism, attributed a partially (but not wholly) divine status to Mary, mother of God. But Protestantism has dethroned her from the position and rendered her merely human. Islam, some allege, — I hope it is wanton slander – denies a soul to woman.
XXX
Civilisation is the taming down of man by woman. Men, indeed, have till now been trying, with scant success to civilise one another by means of the sword and the bullet, the prison cell, the gibbet and the rack. But it has been the lot of woman to have no other weapon than fables, parables and symbols in her work of civilising man.
XXX
I don’t mean to say that man had not the major part in the making of spiritual symbols and creeds. But I do mean to say that everywhere those symbols and creeds are upheld and preserved more devoutly by woman than man. I have read a European free thinker pathetically complaining that it is woman’s firm adhesion to the church that has saved it and still maintains it as a potent force, notwithstanding the mighty strides of rationalistic science. And in India, we know, but for the adamantine stand made by our women, all our temples and images would have become mere powder and dust by this time before the terrific onslaughts of European Christianity and European Materialism.
The mere historic personalities of Rama and Krishna, Buddha and Christ – which, by the way, have been seriously doubted, everyone of them – do not. Even among the faithful, count for so much as the mythological or spiritual examples. A Krishna or a Buddha, who was once a great man or an incarnation or what you will, but who, since, has become as dead as Alexander the great, ought not to mean much for anyone. The object of men in adoring these is examples is that they also must try to live like those heroes. And it is towards this realisation that woman has been striving far more strenuously than man.
XXX
Where woman comes, comes Art. And what is Art, if not the effort of humanity towards divinity?
‘‘Grihini Griham Uchyate’’
There is a saying in Sanskrit ‘‘Grihini Griham Uchyate’’ (Home is a synonym for wife.)*
Nor is it without significance that the country of spiritual liberation, India, should, at this hour of her mighty awakening, have adopted as her most potent spell, the words “Vande Mataram”, i.e. “I salute the mother”. That means that the first work of a regenerated india will be to place the Mother, i.e., womankind, on the pedestal of spiritual superiority. Others speak of their Fatherlands. To us the nation is represented by the word “Mata”.
XXX
But if woman has always been the civiliser and, therefore, the spiritual superior of man, why did ever get enslaved at all? For it is not only among Indians but also among the Europeans and the Chinese and the Japanese and the Hottentots as, indeed among all brutes and birds and insects, that the female has been content, till now, to occupy an enslaved, or if you please, a subordinate position to male. Why is this? I reply: it is because the female loved the male too well to think of slaying the latter. For it is the masculine habit – advocated by an Anglo _ Indian journal, only a few years back – to slay those who do not desire to be enslaved by you. At any rate, that is the principle on which all masculine governments have till now been based. Woman, I say, could not think of slaying you under any circumstances. She loved you too well for that. And therefore, she consented first to be your slave with a view in civilising you gradually and finding her superior eventually.
XXX
Nations are made of homes and so long as you do not have justice and equality fully practised at home, you cannot expect to see them practised in your public life. Because it is the home life that is the basis of public life. And a man who is a villain at home cannot find himself transformed in to a saint the moment he gets to the Councils or to “Courts of Justice”.
XXX
And the spirit of Hinduism, pre-eminently among the religions of the world, has ever been to help woman in rising to her true positions in human society. It has been a long and painful struggle. He progress has been tragically slow here, as elsewhere. But at this hour, when the sages of india have stepped forth to guide the soul of mankind, the ascent of woman to her proper place in society has become imminent and inevitable.
Source: AGNI and other Poems and Translations & Essays and Other Prose Fragments, C.Subrahmanya Bharati, Madras, Year 1980, First Edition 1937.
My comments:
*‘‘Grihini Griham Uchyate’’. In Tamil also, we have a similar word. Wife is called ‘Illaal’. Famous Tamil speaker Sri Kripananda Wariar used to tell us a joke about this word:– “ It is woman who gets all the respect at home. If I use the masculine form of this word ‘ILLAAN’, that will mean one who has nothing!”
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