I remember reading professor Nivedita Menon’s work, wherein she points out that the maintenance of the social order is quite similar to that of nude makeup. The whole point of nude make up is to make your skin look fresh and dewy without looking like you’re wearing any makeup.
The point is to spend hours painting your face to make it look like you had not touched it at all. The maintenance of the social order is like that. It requires faithful performance of similar rituals over and over again throughout one’s lifetime. Networks of cultural reproduction are dedicated to this purpose, but the whole point is to produce the effect of untouched naturalness.
What happens in the reputed Hindu College, every year on February 14 is nothing different from it. Since its establishment, Hindu College has been following a legacy of worshipping the very special Virgin Tree or V-Tree. It’s argued in the legend that whosoever worships the tree, is likely to lose their virginity within six months or a year.
The tree that day, is decorated with water-filled condoms and a poster of a leading actress is put up who is commonly referred to as Damdami Mata. A male priest who is the Mr Fresher of the year is supposed to sing the aarti, do a puja and pray to the lady to make the guys lose their virginity.
Boys climb up on the tree and burst the condoms; the water that comes out of it is regarded as holy water and whoever receives it is regarded as lucky and he leaves the celebration thinking that he will soon lose his virginity.
While people who are involved in organising this argue that they celebrate sexuality through the aforementioned rituals, with the condom-laced-tree preaching the message of safe sex, the contradiction is that they promote safe sex without consent.
People dance to dhols, take off their shirts, imitate the Holi celebration with gulaal all around the campus air. In response to the highly sexist celebration, women students have been raising their voices against this pathetic practice, but the organisers heed very little attention, perhaps due to the obviously dominant framework of society where women have to be not taken seriously.
With only some people claiming this practice as exclusionary of non-male entities, religious minorities and a replica of Brahmanical practices followed in the society, there is very little scope of recognising how regressive the practice is.
In past years, leading newspapers have covered the event as a celebration successfully concealing the part which is problematic, exposing people to only one kind of an opinion, thereby making students who are not Hinduites unaware of what the reality is. While many Hinduites claim it to be a celebration of sexuality, there’s hardly any space for expressing every kind of sexual orientation and identity, which includes asexuality as well.
It’s very likely that there can be people who identify themselves as asexual and can find themselves isolated among hyper celebrators like this. There isn’t any space within the college where we can talk about all kinds of sexuality because there’s no space for any kind of conversation. There’s only space for hyper celebration with all the dhols, gulaal and water. And mind you, it’s a public-funded college.
It’s a public-funded college, wherein every year we over sexualise a leading woman from the film industry. We sing to her, “Teri 36-24-36 ki kaaya.” We indulge in all forms of misogyny that we as students should be condemning. But we do it because it’s fun to do it. Doesn’t matter how uncomfortable our peers might be.
Every year, stringent demands of conducted the puja comes from the boys’ hostel. Doesn’t this show you how sexist the environment is?
Women are made to shut their opinions by being told to put up the poster of an actor, call him the Love Guru and being asked to do the same as the boys do for Damdami Mata. This, after all, is equality for men!
What they fail to recognise that we as women do not hold institutional and social power as much as they do and hence we cannot dive into objectifying men as naturally as they do with women.
The entire concept of puja in the public sphere of a campus is exclusionary of people who hail from other religious communities. It’s a classic example of much talked of Brahmanical notions of society because the entire idea of organising society on caste and gender hierarchy is Brahmanical.
The ritualistic display of women in an inferior position is inherently Brahmanical. Here, when you replicate the practice of a puja with an aarti, chanting pathetic words that which damage the dignity of women without any repair, you coldly and blatantly present them as objects of male desire. It is the social exclusion of women in a ritualistic manner and thus is Brahmanical in oppression.
So, it is loud and clear that this is the cultural dominance of a community which has been the stakeholder of discrimination for millennia. It’s continued patriarchy supported by Brahmanical notions and thus needs to be called out soon.
As students of public-funded institutions, our duty is to overturn everything which normalises sexism in university spaces. But what we end up doing is preserving the cultural frameworks we have been bestowed upon faithfully over generations, so that everything seems fair and equal when in reality it is sexist and misogynist.
Dynamite Hinduites, there’s nothing dynamite about cold open sexism, nothing dynamite about patriarchal culture and nothing dynamite about excluding people who do not conform to the majoritarian view. It’s high time you put an end to this legacy otherwise, the college known for having a history of people’s movements will soon be called out for acting as stakeholders of patriarchy.