Tradition!

Hi XX,

I read your piece on Karwa Chauth and would like to share my thoughts with you. 

I grew up in Madras where Karwa Chauth is not observed, but there is a similar festival called Varalakshmi Puja observed sometime in August. I am not sure if the women fast, but all married women do the Puja and then invite other women to their house in the evening. My mother never did this Puja and was constantly badgered by my aunts and blamed everything that went wrong in the house on the fact that she didn’t do the Puja. Finally mummy gave in and started. So I am not sure that all the women do it out of choice. 

She told me not to see it as a religious event but as a fun gathering of women – just like you mentioned in your article. That was when I asked about widows. I noticed that no widows were invited for this function – so I asked my mom – and she evaded the question like many other questions that I asked.

She stopped doing the Puja when my dad died. After a couple of years one of her friends invited her over for the Puja and she went over. She came back very upset. While she was invited, she was not included in any of the activities and had to sit in a corner. 

The reason I am explaining all this is this: Hindu festivities involving married women are usually discriminatory. They are not fun for all women. And the women usually don’t have a genuine choice on whether they want to do it or not. If a woman really has a choice and does it, then no one would have a problem with it. However, most women give in to pressure, usually from the in-laws, and do these rituals. 

Tradition is good, but it is not written in stone. We need to have the courage to move with the times and modify our rituals accordingly. Just like we done with our clothes or food. 

The second point is this: India has a sex-ratio of 927. The juvenile sex ratio is even more dismal – 911? This clearly points to a preference for the boy child. I always thought that the West Coast of India was leagues ahead in this and treated girls equally. However, if you look at the juvenile sex ratio on the West Coast, the trends are gloomy and show a downward trend. The fact that the sex ratio reflects how the girl child is treated means that this fact pervades everyone’s household and family – mine and yours. It needs us to change our attitude towards boys and girls and be very careful about the messages we pass on to the next generation. 

A ritual where one spouse prays for the welfare of the other is fine if it were not always the female spouse praying for the male spouse. In that one ritual the message is that the female has no identity without the male. If we need to change for the better, both should observe this ritual – then the message given to their children is that both value each other equally. 

If we look at how these rituals are observed across India, there are a lot of variations across castes. However, that is another debate. The way rituals are observed are also changing with time – this I learnt speaking to my grandfather and my mother’s aunt. I found that surprising initially since the usual response to a question on why a ritual is done a particular way, is “that is how it is”. So for the longest time I thought all this was written down somewhere. However, that does not appear to be the case. Which means that we can also modify rituals to reflect today – like for Diwali a lot of people use candles or electric lights instead of mud lamps with oil and cotton wicks. 

October 2017