Navaratri Lens: Why India’s little Goddesses (daughters) should lead the world for Progress?
- In Religion
- 06:31 PM, Oct 09, 2016
- Dr. Bal Ram Singh
“Feminine force is that inner strength, that power, that will to face down any negative circumstances in life and defeat them.” -Georgette Mosbacher
"Brain networks show increased connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males (upper) and left to right in females (lower). Credit: Ragini Verma, PhD, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences"
It is Navaratri time, so we must talk about goddess Durga, a word that comes from durg or fort. Durga is a symbol of fortitude, which comes to women naturally but men need to seek. Fortitude is a mental power, not necessarily the physical one. In a recent study, scientists found women’s brain is more resilient – “Women are able to carry higher levels of genetic defects without getting brain development disorders such as autism, supporting the possibility of a 'female protective effect’, according to the study as per a news in Australian Broadcasting News (February 28, 2014).The study published in The American Journal of Human Genetics gives clues as to why fifty per cent more males typically have an intellectual disability than females, and why boys are four times more likely to have autism than girls.
India as a culture faces most negative attention, especially from the Western media and intellectuals, including political leaders who unceremoniously lecture India on things they need to learn from this ancient civilization.
There is always a hue and cry over women in India for one reason or the other, be it political leaders like Indira Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Smriti Irani, Mayawati, Mamta Banerjee, Jayalalitha, etc., object of atrocities like Nirbhaya, Phoolan Devi, and many other rape victims throughout the country, activists like Vandana Shiva, Medha Patkar, Teesta Setalavad, etc., the spiritual leaders like Ma Amritanandamayi in Kerala, Anandamurti Guruma in Haryana, the Brahmakumaris in Rajasthan, Mother Teresa in Kolkata, Dr. Niruben Amin in Gujarat, and Didi Ma Ritambhara, who have millions of followers throughout the world.
Traditionally, women in India under ideal conditions have high place in the society – Durga, Saraswati, and Laxmi, the goddesses of strength, knowledge, and wealth, respectively. Even 30-40 years ago, at least in eastern Uttar Pradesh, the place where Nirbhaya’s parents come from, girls names had Devi added as a suffix. It reflects what society perceived and professed for women’s high place. Kanya puja is still common throughout the country. The points reflect that women in general reflect the sattvic thoughts and action. And, society prospers when that sanctity is maintained.
Manusmriti, an ancient book of memoir, states that yatra nariyasya pujyante ramante tatra devta. This is wrongly translated as - where women are worshipped that becomes god’s abode. The real translation would be that where women raise themselves to the level of being worshipped, gods make that place as their abode. The onus here is on the women to raise their level with their knowledge, practice, management, and caring of the society.
Women in Sanskrit are known as stree, which means they can possess satva, rajas, and tamasic gunas at the same time in their role of mother, sister/daughter, and marriage partners. They are capable of performing these functions concurrently, as in multi-tasking today. Multitasking is women’s second nature, and neuroscientific studies will be enriched by such analysis.
According a recent report published in CBC News (March 03, 2016) quoting Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos, the director of the Brain Science Centre at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center "What we have found is that women, in many different tasks, process information about five times faster than men, and use much less of their brain to do identical cognitive performance."
Man, on the other hand, is known as purusha (someone who pursues), because what women can accomplish/understand innately with their intuitive and perceptive power, men need to toil through learning, experiencing, and serving.
How is this difference possible? Women are right brain dominating individuals, whereas men are generally left brain dominated persons. Right brain performs intuitive functions such as art, literature, music, etc. whereas left brain is more analytical and performs math, language, technology type of operations. Right brain believed to operate faster due to its parallel processing, and provides women with intuitive power much better than men. In India queens always sat along with kings to provide management to the kingdom, and in fact ruled their kingdoms in the absence of kings, and did well, including in battlefields.
There are scientific evidences of males having some advantage in the physical arena. "Women seem to use certain parts of their brain much more efficiently, but if these are hit they're in big trouble," Apostolos said, suggesting that men's brains may be better able to compensate for damage. (CBC News). That may explain why men can take risk in physical fights, and also why Durga was provided weapons by devas (gods) for use in her fight with asuras (demons).
In today’s intellectual world India as the rest of the world with few exceptions are considered as patriarchical as opposed to matriarchical society. This is not correct historically or practically, although men may have been assigned to manage the society more due to the foreign attacks the society faced in the past thousand years or so. Over five years ago, Tulsi Ramayan stated that mother’s place is higher than that of the father. In Ayodhyakand Kaushalya says – jav kewal pitu aayashu tata tav jini jav jani badi maata, which means if only father had given orders to Ram, then he did not need to go to the forest, since as a mother she holds higher position.
In Indian tradition a child is considered the most fortunate whose father is dharmatma (righteous) and whose mother is pativrata (devoted to the husband). So, it is not easy to be an ideal mother and father. One has to work hard to reach that level, and ideal traits come from the sanskars (values) of the family and society.
For women and men there are three natural relationships – daughter-father, sister-brother, and mother-son. These are given at birth. The fourth one is one’s own effort through husband-wife relationship. Motherhood is the highest position biologically (evolution) a woman occupies, and it cannot be that high unless the one relationship that is socially made (husband-wife), and is responsible for motherhood, is carried out with utmost tapasya (penance).
A wife in India is known as dharampatni, which is an apabhransa (corruption) of dharampathini, meaning the one who shows the path of dharma to her husband. The husband is known as pati, which means honor. A husband must be an honor to the wife, meaning she should marry only an honorable man, and for that reason a married woman is considered as srimati or the one with higher wisdom.
Many times modern feminists and intellectuals comment that Indian women are oppressed as they get to eat last. But consider this, those who are generous like mothers secrete a hormone called oxytocin which keeps them happier and long living. It is heavily secreted when they nurse their babies. Being generous is in women’s nature, but men can also benefit from this.
In a study we conducted a few years ago (New England Indic restaurants business and culture: an exploratory empirical study. International J. Indian Culture and Business Management, 2013) it was found that in the United States in Indian restaurants while women work as owners and managers but nearly no woman worked as cook or waitresses, something very common for girls in the US for a job. Such is not the case for other jobs, including information technology and engineering. This shows that Indian culture places women and girls at higher pedestal.
The recent controversy over the BBC documentary, India’s Daughter (banned by the government of India) , which depicts Indian society engrossed in rape culture is perhaps stereotyping a society at best, and a disingenuous effort to malign a whole country at worst. The documentary presents a wrong narrative of the unprecedented outrage India showed in the December 12 rape and murder case. Outrage of was a reflection of how the society viewed such heinous crime, and other countries (UK and US included) of orders of magnitude higher rate of rapes should learn and ape such an outrage rather than malign it using illegal and unethical plots.
India’s daughters make majority of female graduate students in most US engineering graduate schools. That shows the true treatment of the daughters by a society, nearly half of the Indian banks are headed by women, and have not defaulted unlike western banks. India’s housewives contribute most to the Indian economy, and Indian space programs, including its mission to Mars, is full of Indian women engineers. These are the true cultural reflections of India’s daughters, something Western world could easily learn.
In summary, women are naturally empowered, and have been accepted in Indian society as such, but it is a hard work to maintain the empowered state. They need to realize both their empowered state and the cost to maintain it. It will not come from government or modern feminist movements, which are based on ego, control, and division of a society.
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