Every girl gets to hear from her parents, “It was never like this in our generation. We were not supposed to wear jeans, nor talk to any guy other than our own brothers. If we did, we would be beaten up and also jailed at home. No more school, no play, no work!” As a young child, every girl is endowed with a long list of rules and regulations to follow, right from the way she dresses to whom she speaks to, everywhere she goes. A wide disparity exists in the way a girl is being treated since ages. The phenomenon of creating moral boundaries for women has taken on both new and familiar ways. The familiar ways continue – surveillance over where women go, what they wear, how they speak, who they speak to, and so on. Newer forms have also emerged: legislative force (such as the closure of dance bars in Mumbai) or coercive violence (like the Shiv Sena on a rampage separating men and women sitting together on Valentines’ Day), or institutional alarm (dress codes for girls in colleges and universities), or a nebulous and unwritten moral social force – which condones harmful traditional and cultural practices like sati and the marginalisation of widows, sometimes in the name of protecting our traditions against Westernisation or in the name of ‘Indian tradition’.
People around the country believe that they live in a society formed under patriarchal guidelines, and a woman has no say in it. But, actually, the woman has lost her control over the community she had built out of her own hands. And so now, when the woman feels suffocated and wants to break the walls she is enclosed within, the man – now powerful – does not let the woman take a stand, giving rise to Feminism and Male Chauvinism. But when you look around, you will find the world was made for the woman. The third verse of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount by the Lord Jesus quoted from Matthew 5:5 says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Here, ‘meek’ being the female species, which are meant to be delicate and humble. That doesn’t stop the woman from doing the work she has been doing these days, nor does that allow a man to set the limits of what the woman has to do.
Most people are unaware of the fact that morality differs from place to place. If a girl in the North India is not allowed to leave home with a ‘dupatta’ wrapped around her chest, a girl in parts of South India may be without the ‘dupatta’, only with the blouse and skirt. Similarly, morality issues have changed over a period of time. Now women are not only allowed to leave home and go out seeking for work men specialised in, but also go out for late night parties at a pub, dancing, drinking, smoking, and so on. For the urban youth, this is seen as any other normality but for the still rural and backward crowd in India, it is a matter of shame and ill manners.
Who sets the limits and norms of morality is yet unknown, though everyone wants to push her/his standards on each other in the society, in the presumption that she/he can think the best. If people start respecting each other, the recent cases like the Assam Molestation Case or the Mangalore Home Stay Incident would never have had taken place. Everyone needs to understand that if they are trying to uphold the Indian Tradition by taking up adverse measures against Westernisation that will only lead to the formation of more rebels in the society who will be termed as ‘Bachchallan’, meaning immoral woman.
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