Woman – Surviving Male Barbarism through the Ages

Guess which of the species living on earth is the most abused, tortured, raped, burnt and murdered species in the world? You’ve guessed it right – it’s the woman, the female species of homo sapiens. And the perpetrators of all manner of ghastly crimes against women are men. The irony of it all is that women suffer the birth pangs to give birth to baby boys, some of whom grow up to be men who go about committing all manner of inhuman crimes against girls and women.

But it’s not just individual males who commit barbaric crimes such as torture, rape and murder of women. Men have used religion as an instrument to commit such crimes against women on a mass scale. Human history is a witness to such ghastly crimes against women on a mass scale. The custom of sati was one such barbaric and inhuman crime against women in India. Sati was a religiously sanctified, glorified and institutionalised form of cruelty against Hindu women. This barbaric custom not only denied a widow the right to her deceased husband’s property, but more sinisterly even deprived her of the right to live after her husband’s death. For hundreds of years, thousands of widows perished alive on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands. It is difficult to understand how such a terrible, cruel and inhuman ritual against Indian women could have come to be practiced in India, and it is beyond our imagination to even think of what it means to be burnt alive on a pyre raging with fire. The custom of sati was one was of the darkest and bloodiest blots (apart from untouchability) on Indian culture and it should make all right-thinking Indian men hang their heads in shame. We needed a firangi Lord William Bentinck to abolish sati and wash the guilt of our blood-soaked conscience.

But medieval Europe was not far behind India when it came to cruelty against women. In fact, the infamous ‘witch-hunt’ against women in Europe is a historical testimony to the brutality of men against women. The witch-hunt was launched under the aegis of the church to hunt down women who were accused of witchcraft. Any woman suspected of practising witchcraft was mercilessly tortured and killed, many a times by burning her alive at the stake. So, if there was an outbreak of some disease in a village or if a cow or a bull died of some disease or some calamity befell on a family, some hapless and helpless woman would be blamed for all the misfortunes of the village or the family and branded as a ‘witch’, after which the local priest would order the torture and killing of the accused woman. The procedure and the manner of trial and punishment were elaborately prescribed in Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger’s infamous and diabolic witch-hunt manual Malleus Maleficarum (meaning: The Witch Hammer). This witch-hunt resulted in the torture and murder of an estimated 5-9 million (50 lakh to 90 lakh) women all over Europe over a period of about 300 years (Source: Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’). In fact, under the pretext of hunting down alleged witches, the church clergy also eliminated thousands of women who were intelligent, independent-minded and talented in arts and crafts. This was done to instil fear in the minds of women and discourage women from raising doubts about any of the church’s doctrine so that the authority of the male-dominated church remained unchallenged. However, even after such religion-sanctioned brutality, oppression and suppression, the European women managed to secure equal rights after a long struggle. But the agonising cries and spilled blood of millions of innocent women will always haunt the souls of the European church and European men.

These historical facts are just two among the countless other examples of the gender-based discrimination and injustices women had to go through the ages. The discrimination and injustices against women have not stopped, except maybe in some enlightened sections of large cities and towns. Women will continue to face injustices in our country and in other parts of the world till they are completely empowered and liberated from the shackles of the traditions laid down by the male-dominated society. Such empowerment and liberation of women would happen only through education and financial independence. More importantly, things will change for the better only when males radically change their mindset and consider girls and women as their equal partners and companions in life and treat them as such. A change in the male mindset would also necessitate a radical review of traditional gender roles in the family and the society at large.