The male Feminist !

Dr. Shalini

On the occasion of International Women’s Day (the 8th of March), let’s remember and thank all those determined feminists who made women’s liberation a reality, purely by dint of their perseverance and activism. Most of these feminists were women, no wonder, they were the sufferers, so they took up their own cause. But one of the finest feminists that this country has even seen is a man named Ramaswamy. The masses known him by his nom de plume, Thanthai Periyar.
Though it was his principles of atheism that made him popular around the world, Periyar was also a vociferous feminist of the previous century.
Women’s woes
Those were times when women were not allowed to study. They got married during their infancy. Should a woman face the misforture of losing her husband, she was burnt along with his corpse or was left to spend the rest of her life in austere, punishing spinsterhood. Remarriage of a widow was unthinkable, sacrilegious. Talk of rights for a woman was tantamount to blasphemy.
Married women’s lives were no better either. They had a thousand restrictions and were treated much like slaves. With no rights and no separate identity, wives of yore were always forced to depend on males - the father, husband, brother or son.
Social Scientist
In the midst of this extreme male chauvinism was the towering figure of Periyar, an independent thinker unsullied by religious trappings, who believed in the equality of all human beings. Although he himself was raised in a family steeped in Vaishnavite culture, he could not tolerate the hypocrisy of the religious belief that speaks of all souls being made of the same Paramaathma at one end, while snobbishly discriminating against them on the other, in the name of caste, religion and sex.
Periyar was a social scientist, whose thoughts were ahead of his time. In an age when the entire nation considered the woman as subordinate, Periyar treated her as equal to a man, in every aspect.
Steps to make them free
During his time, the ideal woman was valued for her body, her beauty, her baby making ability, her obedience, her culinary skills and her chastity. He defied them all. He believed that a woman did not have to display her body all decked up and decorated, hoping for the male’s approval. Periyar urged women to give up their beauty restraints like long hair, big pottu (dot) and long-winding sarees. He even urged his wife Nagammal to upgrade to trousers and shirts. Here was a progressive man, who had no patience for silly traditions.
He saw women as intelligent minds and encouraged them to study just like the men did. In his book “Why Women Became Slaves?” Periyar noted that ignorance makes women dependant on men, while knowledge could give them power. He encouraged women to think logically with a sense of discretion (Pagutharivu) rather than just blindly hanging on to senseless gender stereotypes. He explained that subjugating the female was only a weak man’s attempt to feel stronger than he actually was.
Periyar strongly believed that women should give up cooking altogether and families should dine communally from a centralised kitchen. This took away the burden of cooking from women and gave them more time for intellectual pursuits.
He was against the concept of “Thaali’ too, as he considered it a clever ploy to put a leash around
The woman’s neck and keep her subdued all her life. He propagated the “Self Respect Marriage”, in which the girl would not be given away to the groom like a slave. She could very well choose her own partner and marry him in a simple and dignified ceremony, without any hypocritical vows which no one understood or intended to follow anyway!
He wondered why men didn’t wear a Thaali like their wives did. So he suggested either both tie chords around each other’s neck or simply did not insist on it at all. Today, even without the Thaali, the mantras, and the other traditional rituals, such Self Respect Weddings are considered legal and binding in Tamilnadu, thanks to Periyar and his political proteges including our present Chief Minister, Kalaignar M.Karunanidhi.
He felt that if the woman did not like her partner, she had every right to walk out of the marriage and live on her own or seek another companion. Periyar even protested against the use of the terms “husband and wife”. He felt that they demeaned women. He thought that the Tamil term for a wife, ‘Manaivi’, implying “the one who manages the house” had a subordinate flavour to it. Therefore he preferred to use the term ‘Thunaivar’ meaning companion and spouse and ‘Inaivar’ meaning equal partner.
He made sure that women could take up studies and employment, hold property in their name and earn a separate income. He opposed atrocities such as culturally sanctioned prostitution, sexual abuse against women and oppression of women’s rights. Most of the congnoscenti looked up to him as the ultimate rational thinker and eagerly embraced his principles. There even came a time when it became highly fashionable to treat women as equals and it was considered extremely uncouth to discriminate against them.
It was in a women’s conference in 1938 that the Tamil scholar Neelambigai honoured him with the title of ‘Periyar’. Since that day, the sobriquet stuck.
He, in turn, proved that he deserved that title by bequeathing his foundation, the Dravida Kazhagam, a non-political social reformist organization, to his life-partner, Maniammai.
The world sure has a great deal to learn from him.
(Courtesy: RITZ -March, 2008)