By Prof. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit
We need to rediscover and reinvent our civilisational journey
The journey of India at 75 to India at 100 makes me think of many things. But there are two things in particular that capture my imagination: Making higher education more Indo-centric and reducing the gender gap at the top. Even after 75 years of Independence, women have a long way to go. The journey towards equality and equity with inclusion is still long and tedious and appears to be a pipe dream.
Women’s leadership in higher education and education-related decision-making bodies at the government level is largely absent as these remain boys’ clubs. Only seven of India’s 54 central universities have women vice-chancellors. This is despite girls outnumbering boys in higher education admissions and women constituting more than 50 per cent of the entry-level university teaching positions. The situation is even worse if one is from the reserved categories.
There are several reasons for this: Women need to multitask; marriage and family are still considered women’s responsibilities; despite being qualified, women continue to be hobbled by the ruthless, identity-based politics that plague our higher education institutions. In addition, women must fight entrenched patriarchy and male hegemony. It takes a lot of courage, time and energy to fight these social ills and many women just do not want to, as the fight can get dirty and time-consuming. The few who dare to fight are maligned. A woman’s assertiveness is seen as aggressiveness.
These inequalities are further confirmed by the 2022 World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index. India’s overall score has improved from 0.625 (in 2021) to 0.629, its seventh-highest score in the last 16 years. It will now take 132 years to reach gender parity, with the gap reducing only by four years since 2021. This is a dim prospect for a civilisation state that boasts of the elevation of the feminine.
We need to rediscover and reinvent our civilisational journey. The emancipation and empowerment of the Indian mind is the first step. We are disconnected and colonised in our thinking and scholarship. In the last 75 years, we have moved between self-hatred and self-loathing and just imitating the West without any understanding of ourselves. It is time that we start this intellectual journey towards the creation of knowledge that is original and goes back to our roots. This journey is a must for every Indian who wants India to be a Vishwa Guru. This is my vision for India at 100. Technology and other means are important but they are just instruments and cannot replace the quality of the human mind.
Just take the sad plight that we are in with regard to the status of women, although the present government is doing its best to break the various glass ceilings. For me, the glass ceiling to be broken is the intellectual slavery of the Indian mind where all that is Western is good and anything Indian is seen as being regressive and therefore bad. All events need to be secularised and the invaders humanised.
In history, we often tend to sing of the valour of men who conquered cities with violence and forget the women’s side of the story. Even though women generously populate our civilisational stories, there has hardly been any retelling of these stories from a feminine perspective till recently. We are a civilisation which has always elevated the feminine and celebrated the harmony of the masculine and the feminine in the image of the Ardhanarishwar.
Goddesses represent the humanisation of various abstract values. In the concept of the Tridevi, Parvati represents power, Lakshmi represents fortune and Saraswati represents knowledge. And unlike Parvati, who is the epitome of motherhood, Saraswati is pretty firm that she doesn’t believe in marriage and love. She is trying to say that it is more important to love yourself as an individual and love your own work; unless you do that, you won’t be a positive asset for society and the people around you.
Women characters are misinterpreted. Take Savitri, who outwitted Yama with her determination and argument. Another politically strong person is Tara, Bali and Sugriva’s wife, who is the reason why the vanaras become part of Rama’s army. If one looks at all these women, it is clear that they have been misinterpreted because of social pressure and ignorance. Pativratas are women who broke the rules. Which other tradition has this progressive, even revolutionary, narrative?
In one of the earliest recorded protests against a male-dominated world and society, Draupadi’s fight against injustice reflects one of the first acts of feminism — a fight for one’s rights. In this case, it was the right to avenge the wrongs inflicted on her. She is exemplified as one of the earliest feminists, be it in terms of polyandry — regarded as a matter of censure by society, then and now — or in terms of her thirst for revenge. Why can’t Sita be seen as the first single mother?
Unless and until India becomes a norm-builder we will go nowhere. We will just be imitating the other while losing all that is our own. Institutions of higher education must open themselves up to multiple Indic narratives because they represent the space where true liberation can begin in the mind. The emancipation and empowerment of women need to be fought for first at the level of ideas and narratives. It is at the level of the mind and intellect where the real battle for us lies, from now to India in 2047.
India is a civilisational state that rests on the shoulders of women such as Sita, Draupadi, Kannagi and Manimekalai. They were unconventional, intelligent, strong-willed and capable of taking independent decisions and exercising their autonomy. India at 100 will be where women will be able to reclaim and reconstruct such a strong civilisational heritage by leading the state from the front as leaders across all fields.
Originally published: The Indian Express, August 15, 2022
Posted here with the authorization of Dean,SIS.
Prof. Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice-Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University.