A tribute to Mahatma Gandhji - HIS IDEAS ON WOMEN ;S RIGHTS

[Guest guest]

TODAY is Mahatma Gandhiji's death anniversary. please allow me to

share his views on an important subject.

 

here is an article which describes his views on women and their role

in society.

 

A Tribute to Mahatma Gandhi: His Views on Women and Social Change

 

Sita Kapadia

 

[Dr. Kapadia, Director of the Self-Enhancement Learning Forum in

Houston, Texas, was earlier Associate Professor of English at the

City University of New York]

 

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Mahatma Gandhi's legacy to the world, and to India especially, is

immeasurable; his life and work have left an impact on every aspect

of life in India; he has addressed many personal, social and

political issues; his collected works number nearly one hundred

volumes. From these I have gleaned only a few thoughts about women

and social change.

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In 1940, reviewing his twenty-five years of work in India concerning

women's role in society, he says, "My contribution to the great

problem lies in my presenting for acceptance truth and ahimsa (non-

violence) in every walk of life, whether for individuals or nations.

I have hugged the hope that in this woman will be the unquestioned

leader and, having thus found her place in human evolution, will shed

her inferiority complex… Woman is the incarnation of ahimsa. Ahimsa

means infinite love, which again means infinite capacity for

suffering. And who but woman, the mother of man, shows this capacity

in the largest measure?… Let her translate that love to the whole of

humanity… And she will occupy her proud position by the side of

man .. .She can become the leader in satyagraha…"

----

 

What is significant here is his image of woman and his hope for her,

so radically different from that of any earlier reformer. He was not

the first to address women's issues in India; the great cultural

renaissance, as also the ferment of political agitations for freedom

had already reached a high peak in the late nineteenth century.

Before the advent of Gandhi on the scene, the attitude to women,

though sympathetic, was patronising; leaders and social reform groups

thought in language that made women look helpless. They wanted to

protect, uplift, bring relief to women. No doubt there was value in

all of it. Yet, with Gandhi a new, unique element emerged. Woman to

him was neither man's plaything, nor his competitor, struggling to be

like him.

----

What she needed most was education, the recognition of her birthright

to be free and equal, to steer her own destiny side by side with man.

 

"Therefore," he argues, "ultimately, woman will have to determine

with authority what she needs. My own opinion is that, just as

fundamentally men and women are one, their problem must be one in

essence. The soul in both is the same. The two live the same life,

have the same feelings. Each is a complement of the other. The one

cannot live without the other's active help.

 

But somehow or other man has dominated woman from ages past, and so

woman has developed an inferiority complex. She has believed in the

truth of man's interested teaching that she is inferior to him. But

the seers among men have recognised her equal status."

 

 

 

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Gandhi was no advocate of blind adherence to tradition; its strong

current could help us swim far, or sink us; for him the deciding

question was whether it would takes us closer to God (Truth),

selfless service and love of all human beings. He declared to a

tradition-bound India, "I do not to the superstition that

everything is good because it is ancient. I do not believe either

that anything is good because it is Indian… Any tradition, however

ancient, if inconsistent with morality, is fit to be banished from

the land. Untouchability may be considered an ancient tradition, the

institution of child widowhood and child marriage may be considered

to be an ancient tradition. And even so, many an ancient horrible

belief and superstitious practice. I would sweep them out of

existence if I had the power." And what do ancient books say about

women ? "Her father protects her in her childhood, her husband

protects her in youth, and her sons protect her in old age; a woman

is never fit for independence…" Gandhi saw how wrong that was, how

unjust, how harmful to all; he spoke strongly against child-

marriages, the isolation and subjugation of widows, the cruel

domination of men over women, and women's own subservient mentality.

In Ethical Religion he says, "True morality consists, not in

following the beaten track, but in finding out the true path for

ourselves and in fearlessly following it."

----

IMagine his own pain and regret in his words, "Of all the evils for

which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so

shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity -

to me, the female sex, not the weaker sex. It is the nobler of the

two, for it is even today the embodiment of sacrifice, silent

suffering, humility, faith and knowledge."

----

These qualities he valued highly as indispensable for resistance by

satyagraha, whether in the home or in society. Ancient models of

womanhood - Sita, Savitri, Damayanti, Draupadi - he praised for their

moral strength; they were not passive, weak women. Passive

resistance, he explained, was not the right translation of

satyagraha, which means, "soul force" or "truth force", the power of

enlightened non-violence, neither passive nor timid. The first line

of a favourite Gujarati hymn at the Gandhi ashrams was: Harino maarug

chhe shooraano, nahi kaayarnu kaam jone. (The way of The Lord is for

the brave, not for the faint of heart, you see.)

 

 

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"My wife" said Gandhi, "I made the orbit of all women. In her I

studied all women. I came in contact with many European women in

South Africa, and I knew practically every Indian woman there. I

worked with them. I tried to show them they were not slaves either of

their husbands or parents, not only in the political field but in the

domestic as well. But the trouble was that some could not resist

their husbands. The remedy is in the hands of women themselves. The

struggle is difficult for them, and I do not blame them. I blame the

men. Men have legislated against them. Man has regarded woman as his

tool. She has learnt to be his tool and in the end found it easy and

pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall

the descent is easy." These words were spoken to Dr. Margaret Sanger

in 1936 in connection with birth control methods; Gandhi believed men

and women should practice restraint and have sex only for progeny.

Whereas such an austere ideal of celibate life is impossible for all

but a few, the words might well apply to the general scheme of things

between men and women.

 

 

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He spoke of Kasturba as "above" himself, and it is to her moral

strength and example that he says he owed his most unique and potent

idea in personal growth as well as in activist politics. He

acknowledges, "I learned the lesson of non-violence from my wife,

when I tried to bend her to my will. Her determined resistance to my

will on the one hand, and her quiet submission to the suffering of my

stupidity involved on the other, ultimately made me ashamed of myself

and cured me of my stupidity in thinking that I was born to rule her."

 

 

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"The oppressive custom of dowry too came under fire from Gandhi. He

preferred girls to remain unmarried all their lives than to be

humiliated and dishonoured by marrying men who demanded dowry… He

found dowry marriages `heartless.'"

 

Gandhi wished for mutual consent, mutual love, and mutual respect

between husband and wife. He said,

 

"Marriage must cease to be a matter of arrangement made by parents

for money. The system is intimately connected with caste. So long as

the choice is limited to a few hundred young men or young women of a

particular caste, the system will persist, no matter what is said

against it. The girls or boys or their parents will have to break the

bonds of caste if the evil is to be eradicated."

 

 

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It was Kasturba, who had shown him the power of sacrifice by her

readiness to die for justice and for her religious beliefs; she acted

with courage at all times and with hatred toward none. He, the

supreme master of the symbolic motif, made her the model for other

women to emulate. And they did by the hundreds, dropping the veil

like her, picketing like her, going to prison like her, resisting

every injustice like her, and like her, being their own self-

respecting person. He was very pleased that his confidence in women

was borne out by their work in the freedom movement. Again and again

he spoke of women's power to move by suffering, where the law may be

a mere "palliative", occasionally correcting without permanently

curing.

 

 

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****TRADITIONALLY, woman has been called abala. In Sanskrit and many

other Indian languages bala means strength. Abala means one without

strength. If by strength we do not mean brutish strength, but

strength of character, steadfastness, endurance, she should be called

sabala, strong. His message almost six decades ago at the All India

Women's Conference on December 23, 1936 was, "When woman, whom we

call abala becomes sabala, all those who are helpless will become

powerful." Such empowering, he was convinced, may not be bestowed

upon them by legislation or assistance offered by men, or even some

more fortunate women who think of them as weak; they must gather

strength to stand up on their own. Of course, they may be educated in

Gandhi's way, the way of non-violence, which is truth. They may then

follow the teaching of Lord Krishna in The Gita, "Lift the self, by

the self." Then shall the meek inherit the earth. Then shall India

deserve the wisdom of the ancient Upanishads, which she has taken as

her national motto, "Satyam eva jayate", "Truth alone wins!"*******

 

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dear members of this great 'shakta' group , PLEASE JOIN ME IN

HONORING ONE OF THE GREATEST LEADERS OF THE WORLD . a true champion

of women and her rights!

 

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"I am firmly of opinion that India's salvation depends on the

sacrifice and enlightenment of her women."

 

IN fact , the salvation of entire mankind lies in the upliftement of

women! women are shakti ! shakti is power! let us empower ourselves !

 

women of the world unite ; you have nothing to lose but MAN-MADE

SHACKLES!!!!!

[Guest guest]

I listened to Gandhi's abridged autobiography on tape awhile

back, and in that, he said he thought of his wife and children as

possessions. The abridgement did not include his other

thoughts on the topic, and they are wonderful thoughts. I'm not

sure if his autobiography in book form contains further thoughts

on this topic, either, and I wouldn't have had the time to check

into that for awhile, if ever, so I greatly appreciate this tribute post.

 

Namaste,

Mary Ann