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| Sunday, 7 December 2003 |
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Features |  |
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The 'hidden feminine' in Asian religions
With social and religious movements in parts of south and south-east Asia targeting women more brazenly than ever to promote extremist agendas, this collection of essays could not have appeared at a more timely moment. They capstone a project on women and religion sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Foundation between 1996 and 2000. Striking a high note in critical thinking, Gendering the Spirit charts the course of women's vital but for the most part unacknowledged contributions to religious traditions as far afield as Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. Uncompromising in exposing the self-serving and sterile, male dominated view of religion in general and spirituality in particular, the volume will undoubtedly touch some raw nerves. But the lucidity and sharpness of its counter-narrative and the firmly grounded inter-disciplinary research of the five women authors drawn from fields like psychology, anthropology, gender studies, theology and political activism will also elicit praise and admiration. The essays are organised around three thematic clusters. Part I on alternative perspectives, introduced by Durre S. Ahmed, sets the agenda. The stated aim of the volume is to energise the emergent global narratives on women and spirituality by providing an alternative to male literalist thinking on religion for which 'fundamentalism' has become a useful, if inadequate, euphemism. One might quibble with Ahmed's critique of the academy for its disengagement with real life issues, not least on account of the reliance of the contributors on works produced by those who inhabit the proverbial ivory towers. But it is difficult to deny that the subject of women and spirituality has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Rejecting the homogenising and exclusionary idioms of the male discourse on religion, Ahmed lauds heretics as 'cross-pollinators of civilisations'. Describing the subject matter of the volume as the final frontier of post-coloniality, she calls for a thorough decolonisation of male interpretations and meanings of women and religion. In an interesting conceptual essay on women, psychology and religion, her main argument is that the diversities inherent in earlier religious traditions were overwhelmed by the ascent of an archetypal male heroic consciousness which saw conquest and subjugation, not persuasion and accommodation, as the only meritorious goal. It is a thesis which resonates well with Madhu Khanna's theoretical essay on the goddess-woman equation in Sakta Tantra tradition of Hinduism and Mary John Mananzan's analysis of the Catholic Church's teachings on women with special reference to the Philippines. Both point to the ways in which religious Orthodoxy, Brahmanical and Catholic, have perpetuated patriarchal social structures and notions of women's passivity and subordination. Khanna demonstrates how the Sakta Tantra strand in Hinduism has resisted and subverted Brahmanical discourse both in theory and in fact. Part II of the volume illuminates the role of hidden women, past and present, who challenged male constructions of spirituality to secure their rightful place in their respective religious traditions. Hema Goonetilleka looks at the forgotten women of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka who, faced with unstinting hostility from the Buddhist male hierarchy, took the initiative of recording their own spiritual and intellectual experiences for posterity in the ancient, 4th century AC chronicle Dipavamsa. The Dipavamsa contains an altogether rare account of the efforts made by the Buddhist nuns to set up an order. Significantly, there is no mention of this early, if not the earliest, instance of a feminist historiography in the later Mahavamsa, which attributes the accomplishments of Buddhism in Sri Lanka exclusively to the monks. The four remaining essays in this section reveal that whether silenced, marginalised or appropriated by the purveyors of male discourses on religion, women have never failed to create their own spiritual space. Binding them together is the ubiquitous archetype of the Great Mother in different religious traditions. The two pieces on the Philippines by Grace P Odal and Mary John Mananzan detail the role of women, as symbols and agents in their own right, in the spiritual consciousness and social development of their communities. Shifting the geographical focus to India, Madhu Khanna provides a richly textured narrative of her encounters with the incredible Madhobi Ma. Deploying a Jungian framework for her analysis, Durre Ahmed recounts the amazingly bold exploits of Lal Ded in defiance of all authority, religious and temporal, in the quest of giving expression to her unique spirituality. Part III probes the causes of what the authors call 'religiously inspired violence' and ways of resisting and overcoming it by restoring and strengthening the feminine dimensions in the different religious traditions. Khanna, Mananzan and Ahmed convincingly argue that it is the suppression of the gentler and more compassionate side in Hinduism, Christianity and Islam respectively, which they equate with mysticism and women's spirituality that generates socially unaccommodating attitudes and aggression. The final essay by Durre Ahmed bemoans the effects of sidelining the feminine in Islam with an analysis of the minority Zikri sect in Pakistan. From being largely invisible in the past, the Zikris have in more recent years attracted the attention of Orthodox elements in socially conservative and mainly tribal Baluchistan. With a wealth of depth and originality, this volume of essays deserves to be read and absorbed widely by scholars and students alike. Courtesy: Economic & Political Weekly, Mumbai/Delhi ###### Banned Books Online : Unfit for schools and minors? The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth or King Lear. The teacher's school board had pulled the books from class reading lists, citing "adult language" and references to sex and violence. Many students and parents protested the school's board's policy, which also included the outright banning of three other books. Shakespeare is no stranger to censorship: the Associated Press reported in March 1996 that Merrimack, NH schools had pulled Shakespeare's Twelfth Night from the curriculum after the school board passed a "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction" act. (Twelfth Night includes a number of romantic entanglements including a young woman who disguises herself as a boy.) Readers from Merrimack informed me in 1999 that school board members who had passed the act had been voted out, after the uproar resulting from the act's passage, and that the play is now used again in Merrimack classrooms. Govind has a page with more information about the censorship of Shakespeare through history. John T. Scopes was convicted in 1925 of teaching the evolutionary theory of Darwin's Origin of Species in his high school class. The Tennessee law prohibiting teaching evolution theory was finally repealed in 1967, but further laws intended to stifle the teaching of evolution in science classes have been proposed in the Tennesee legislature as recently as 1996. An illustrated edition of "Little Red Riding Hood" was banned in two California school districts in 1989. Following the Little Red-Cap story from Grimm's Fairy Tales, the book shows the heroine taking food and wine to her grandmother. The school districts cited concerns about the use of alcohol in the story. In Mark Twain's lifetime, his books Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were excluded from the juvenile sections of the Brooklyn Public library (among other libraries), and banned from the library in Concord, MA, home of Henry Thoreau. In recent years, some high schools have dropped Huckleberry Finn from their reading lists, or have been sued by parents who want the book dropped. In Tempe, Arizona, a parent's lawsuit that attempted to get the local high school to remove the book from a required reading list went as far as a federal appeals court in 1998. (The court's decision in the case, which affirmed Tempe High's right to teach the book, has some interesting comments about education and racial tensions.) The Tempe suit, and other recent incidents, have often been concerned with the use of the word "nigger", a word that also got Uncle Tom's Cabin challenged in Waukegan, Illinois. For a comprehensive web site describing attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn and other Twain works, see the site Huckleberry Finn Debated, by Jim Zwick. Many "classics" (and their authors) were regarded as scandalous when they were first published, but after the author was safely dead they were relegated to high school English classes and largely forgotten by most people. However, in 1978 the Anaheim (California) Union High School District woke up to the danger of George Eliot's Silas Marner and banned it. I would be gratified (and not at all surprised) if there was a sudden surge of interest in Eliot among Anaheim students afterwards. Also banned there, according to the Anaheim Secondary Teachers Association, and as reported in Dawn Soya's Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, was Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, for its depiction of the behaviour of Scarlett O'Hara and the freed slaves in the novel. (While Mitchell may no longer be living, though, her copyright lives on in the US, so Americans will have to read a print copy instead of the online version.) John Locke's philosophical Essay Concerning Human Understanding was expressly forbidden to be taught at Oxford University in 1701. The French translation was also placed on the Index. Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice was banned from classrooms in Midland, Michigan in 1980, due to its portrayal of the Jewish character Shylock. It has been similarly banned in the past in Buffalo and Manchester, NY. Shakespeare's plays have also often been "cleansed" of crude words and phrases. Thomas Bowdler's efforts in his 1818 "Family Shakespeare" gave rise to the word "bowdlerize". Bowdlerism still exists today, but nowadays cleaning up sexual references is waning in popularity, and cleaning up racial references is growing in popularity. Case in point: This version of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, from the 1960s, was silently "cleaned up" from the 1920 original, in which Polynesia the parrot occasionally used some impolite terms to refer to blacks. In 1988, after the book had fallen from favour enough to have dropped out of print, the publishers issued a new edition that removed nearly all references to race from the book (and cut out a plotline involving Prince Bumpo's desire to become white). In contrast, the Newbery-winning Voyages of Dr. Dolittle has been available in its original form (impolite words and all) for a long time, in part because the Newbery awarders forbade their medal to be displayed on altered texts. Similar concerns about the handling of race apparently caused The Story of Little Black Sambo to be banned from Toronto public schools in 1956, according to a book by Daniel Braithwaite. (Much of the fuss over Sambo has been over the illustrations rather than the text; some illustrations from various editions can be found here.) Is The Bible banned in US public schools? Some claim it is, though most of the claims I've received in email have either not contained specifics or referred to cases that weren't bans, but instead cases where a state school had to stop advocacy or special treatment favouring the religious messages of the Bible. (Such preferential treatment by state-run schools conflicts with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.) However, sometimes schools may err in the other direction, restricting student's individual speech because of its religious nature (in conflict with the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment). In New Jersey, for instance, a student selected by his teacher to choose a story to read to the class was told that he could not read the story he chose, once he announced that he had chosen the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau. Earlier, the school had also removed from display a poster he had drawn as a Thanksgiving assignment, where he depicted being thankful for Jesus. In August 2000, as reported in an AP article at Freedom Forum, a federal appeals court came to a split decision in a lawsuit raised on these issues. The US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the student's family on the story-reading incident. A list of books have been the targets of recent school censorship attempts in the United States and a list of Challenged and Banned Books of 2002 from the American Library Association. (Number 1 was the Harry Potter series which was banned for a time in Zeeland, Michigan schools). The ALA also has a similar list covering the entire 1990s. This 1998 list published by the Christian Science Monitor also includes reasons cited for recent challenges. (Internet-contd. from Nov. 23) ###### Storehouse of important info
Reviewed by Sirancee Gunawardena Being a wife of a doctor, I was used to reading many medical books and medical journals strewn about by my husband, an avid reader, who was keen on the latest medical information. But reading through those vast tomes was tiresome and not easy as they were specifically written for doctors. They were full of medical jargon and technical terms, and left me with a bewildering array of medical facts which I was not capable of digesting. It was therefore with fear and trepidation and much coaxing that I agreed to read the book "Your Child Your Family" - a guide to Health and Nutrition - and to review it. I was pleasantly surprised when I read the book which is now in its third edition. I found it lucid, easy to read, and most informative. I find this book to be a comprehensive guide book and reference book not just for the medical sector, but even more so for young mothers, regarding parenting and care of their infants and family. It is invaluable to parents and aging grandparents, and to virile young men in their manhood, who need to know about heredity, chromosomes, genes and safe sex; also to bulging old men with heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes, and doe-eyed ladies who need a good understanding of nutrition to keep themselves slim and beautiful, and to teachers and schoolchildren. As a former principal of a school, I would advise all schoolchildren, especially the girls, to "read, mark and inwardly digest" the contents of this book, before and after leaving school. It is a must for all school libraries. This book is a storehouse of important information on the prevention of disease, thus extending our horizons of healthy living. It provides knowledge of antibiotics, the reproductive system, mood change, love and sex, and the prevention of 'disposable' marriages. What a range, what wealth of information this book holds! Prof. Herbert Aponso.Prof. Harendra and Dr. Dennis Aloysius have to be congratulated for bringing out such a voluminous book for disseminating information on Health, Disease and Nutrition for the general public. I found that the many quotations from literature, ranging from Shakespeare, T. S. Elliot, Kipling, Bernard Shaw, Longfellow and such others, and philosophical sayings and anecdotes from the 'Dhammapada', the Holy Bible, Prophet Mohamed, Kahlil Gibran and such others, which were interspersed with sections on medical themes, spice and philosophical breath to the prosaic medical presentations. I am delighted to recommend this immensely practical guide to good health and well-being to all who consider health a priority. Even if you indulge yourself in lustful, dangerous living, burning the candle at both ends, you will find this book a solace to fall back on. When blood pressure rises and chronic heart diseases assail you or peptic ulcer and respiratory attacks engulf you, if you have this book by your bedside, or on your bookshelf, you need have no fear of how to cope with medical emergencies. ###### Is development economic growth or humane quality
It is a matter of deep satisfaction for those connected in one way or another with the Centre for Plantation Studies at Satyodaya Centre, Kandy that our colleague, Sangaran Vijesandiran, has by this publication brought to a successful conclusion Research Study No. 3 in the series envisaged by the Centre. Readers may remember the 1995 Study No. 1 on the reasons adduced by the then Government for the re-privatisation of the plantations of Sri Lanka in 1992 and on its initial effects. That study was, we might now rightly say, even prophetic about the effects of privatization over the past ten years. That privatization benefited the privatisers is not a matter of any doubt. That, on the whole, it has only deepened the secular sense of alienation of the thousands of workers who were privatised has been equally for us at the Centre not a matter of doubt. That the 1972 and 1975 nationalization of the larger plantations was not without certain serious defects was true. But privatization was not the cure that the doctors should have prescribed. Child labour has continued to be another blot on the plantation scenario since the earliest times. In Research Study No. 2 of 1999, Sangaran Vijesandiran, the co-author of Study No. 1 and the author of Study No. 3, dealt with the subject of child labour on the plantations in a concise but comprehensive manner. The study was well received and translations into Sinhala and Tamil are under way. In the present study the author's investigations revolve around the two key concepts of Youth and Development. He examines both concepts as they translate into action in contemporary Sri Lankan Plantation Society. For Vijesandiran "Youth... is not merely a period of life but a state of mind." So is Sri Lankan plantation youth today in a dynamic state of acute dissatisfaction with things as they are today on the plantations, coupled with a determination that tomorrow will not be the same as today. Hence is there a state of restlessness in the thinking of plantation youth and a spirit of search for a new model of plantation society. Sangaran Vijesandiran, is proud of the fact that he himself was once a youth in the plantations of the Uva Province and only too conscious of the other fact that he is one of a very few who beat the dominant plantation system and rose to be a university graduate pledged to a vision of how society may still be constructed in the plantation areas of our country. The Chapters of this book, and the statistical analysis he makes of facts carefully collected, show him to be not merely a bloodless and cold statistician but a social activist with great potential for the evolution of his future life on the one hand and of the whole plantation society on the other. So does Sangaran Vijesandiran steadfastly refuse to see development as a mere matter of economic growth either of the nation or even of the individual. To him the centre around which the whole process of development should revolve is not the economy, money, profit but the human person in the community. For young plantation women and men, therefore, development should take place around youth who are basically self-sustaining, enjoying a sense of personal and group dignity and, above all, around youth who are free - to think and to hope. In any future working on the two topics of this Study, I hope Sangaran Vijesandiran will relate them to the all-important need of justice and equality for all the groups - ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural - in the plural society of our country. I have myself stated on various occasions that I think that the plantation people hold the key to the solution of the "ethnic problem" in Sri Lanka. On the one hand, they tell their Tamil counterparts in the North and East that separation cannot be the answer for the nearly two million people who live in the plantation areas of central and south eastern Lanka. On the other hand, they cry out to the dominant majority group that unless the legitimate demands of the Tamil people are given legitimate redress, youth unrest and despair leading to the advocacy of violence and war will spread to central and south eastern Lanka with consequences that are fearful to consider. (Foreword to the book) Paul Caspersz, sj. ###### Saving Asia's threatened birds BirdLife's new guide, Saving Asia's threatened birds; a guide for government and civil society, sets out the priorities for the conservation of birds and habitats in Asia, based on the comprehensive scientific research published in BirdLife's Red Data Book, Threatened Birds of Asia. The guide is a celebration of the beauty of Asia's birds and the places that they inhabit, with many colourful photographs of birds and the region's forests, grasslands and wetlands. It is designed principally for decision-makers in government and civil society, in whose hands lies the future of the region's spectacular wildlife. Asia has many diverse habitats, ranging from Arctic tundra to tropical forests, and including the highest mountains in the world. But the region is experiencing rapid environmental change as the human population and national economies grow, and many of Asia's habitats and their immensely rich wildlife are under great pressure. Every country in Asia has population of threatened birds, and needs to take conservation action to protect them. The territories with the highest number of bird species facing extinction are: * Indonesia (117 species) * Mainland China (78) * India (73) * Philippines (70) The BirdLife Asia Partnership published Threatened Birds of Asia: the BirdLife International Red Data Book in 2001. It is a monumental work, documenting all that is known about more than 300 Asian threatened bird species. It contains thousands of conservation recommendations, which are further clarified and expounded in the new guide. * Roughly a quarter of all bird species in Asia are of conservation concern. * 324 species, about 12 percent of the Asian avifauna, is already at risk of global extinction. * 41 of these are Critically Endangered - they face an extremely high risk of extinction on the immediate future. Analysis of the distributions and habitat requirements of Asia's threatened birds has identified nine forest, three grassland, and 20 wetland regions as priority areas for conservation. There is also a group of threatened seabird. This focus on the key habitats for the region's threatened birds and other wildlife has several advantages: * It is more efficient to consider the conservation of the 33 regions than to individually cover more than 300 species. * This approach makes it easier to relate bird conservation issues to land-use planning processes. * The habitat regions can be related to other conservation analyses, including Conservation International's Hotspots and Worldwide Fund for Nature's Ecoregions. The guide focuses on the direct pressures facing Asia's birds and how these should be addressed, but ultimately the underlying and indirect causes of biodiversity loss will also need to be tackled. It outlines the fundamental changes in land-use and resource utilisation that are needed, through policy and planning. Birdlife International |
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