“For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain.
But was a woman’s heart any purer, in the end?
That was the final truth I learned. All this time I’d thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I’d thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn’t resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed
Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions
Sita was also another woman expected to pass agniparikhsa not once, but at every step in her life, only to be scorned at and doubted repeatedly. She had the ability to bear every consequence, and the men use it as an excuse to pile upon her every misdeed they did.
The Agnipariksha was not a test of Sita’s character, it testified Ram as a husband, and the people of Ayodhya. Sita symbolizes the plight of every woman, and how in a patriarchal world, women knowingly or unknowingly are subjected to dominance and oppression. Sita and many other women even today live on the fringes of society, reminding people constantly of what is wrong with our society as a whole.
At this point or any other, any woman should refuse to be Sita and bear the brunt of some other man’s faults.
TODAY AND TOMORROW
In the ever shifting Wonderland of women today, men are the alices stepping around potential landmines with little idea of which one may blow up on them. But step into the shoes of women to look at the world from that vantage viewpoint.
Centuries of suppression of her voice has taught a woman not to be too forthcoming with her desires- emotional, material, spiritual or physical. That is the area both sexes need to work on. A more open and accepting environment needs to be created where women are encouraged to express their desires without fear of being typecast as “too forward”. Men and women in both need to nurture such an environment so that the grey area is cleared up and no scope for misunderstandings exist. And a man takes a woman seriously when she says “no” and respectfully when she says “yes”.
Sadly enough ,In the world where exchanging bawdy jokes is an integral part of male bonding, sharing, lewd pictures acceptable, and where the worst possible abuses include mention of mothers and sisters , can possibly except men to be deeply sensitized to women and their issues.
The process has to indeed start very early, at the mother’s knee and in schools during a child’s formative years. Our stories fables and school texts need to be re-examined to weed out gender biases and references emanating from traditional patriarchal mindsets.
