Celebrating the Bharatiya narrative on feminism

Jijabai recognized that for the welfare of the common people, it was pertinent to raise Shivaji based on the Hindu ideas of swaraj, swabhimaan and swadesh.

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

A 11 of us celebrate 12 January as the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, while very few of us know it is also the birth anniversary of Jijabai, the mother of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and the architect of the Maratha empire along with her son.

There has been enormous negativity in our history textbooks about Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. The textbooks misrepresented Shivaji as an upstart robber, a marauder and even a treacherous murderer, while conveniently skipping or whitewashing the crimes of the invaders such as rape, plunder and genocide, leading to a normalization of such violent and cruel acts.

It is time to reverse this type of narrative, call out for biases and underline these gaps that require correction both at the school and university level textbooks.

Feminism in the Bharatiya narrative is not in opposition to, or the either/ or, but one of harmony and balance. The concept of Ardhanarishwar, of the balance and harmony between the masculine and the feminine has been documented since the pre-Vedic times. The Bharatiya civilization celebrates the Feminine, which is clear even with the portfolios in Indra's cabinet to the Feminine Trinity; the Five Pativratas are those who broke the rules and male Gods known by the names of their spouse, like Sitapati, Lakshmipati, Umapati and many more. Across the villages in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Chief Gramdevatas are Goddesses. This is so different from the binary frameworks used by the West.