Unveiling India by Anees Jung

Author:Anees Jung
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351187950
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

6

Mothers and children

‘To be mothers women were created and to be fathers, men. The teacher is ten times more venerable than sub-teacher; the father a hundred times more than the teacher but a mother a thousand times more than a father,’ states Manu, the Hindu law-giver, in one of his laws.

More than a thousand years later, I meet a holy man on a plane. He jets across the country but continues to speak the language of Manu. ‘You are a woman and a mother and I bow to you,’ he begins by way of an introduction, unconcerned with the fact that I am neither married nor a mother. That does not change the principle of being a woman in India. ‘Mother is the earth where things take root and grow,’ he says, weaving out his eulogy as if he has not heard me. ‘Father is the sky who, like an umbrella, protects. Mother is fire and father is rain. The black in one’s eye is mother and the white is the father. The black absorbs, the white throws back. Without the black there is no vision and without the white no protection to the eye. The blood in one’s veins is the mother, the bones are one’s father. Both are important. But without the mother there is no life, no flowering.’

‘Once I had a dream that I was watering the plants on my terrace. From one of the pots a child sprang instead of a flower,’ says Amrita Pritam, the woman who despite fulfilling herself through her work and poetry did not feel complete. She was married at the age of fourteen to a man she did not know. ‘For years I felt as if I was the only one alive in the world. Only when I became a mother did I feel that I had a connection with the earth. Every woman has to become a mother in order to realize her energy, her strength.’

‘To be a mother is a physical fulfillment but not by any means the only one,’ adds Amrita. ‘Mentally I need the understanding of a man, spiritually I need to fulfil myself through work, and physically through bearing children.’

Exploring the daily world of the Hindu family, the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar exphasizes the significance of motherhood in an Indian woman’s life. ‘It is not only the personal fulfillment of an old wish and the biological consummation of a lifelong promise but an event in which the culture confirms her status as a renewer of the race and extends to her a respect and consideration which were not accorded to her as a mere wife.’ ‘Even the unborn child while still in the womb,’ writes Kakar, ‘wins for its mother the love, respect and acceptance of the community. Each child born and safely brought to flower becomes for her a certification and a redemption.’*

Rituals surrounding fertility encompass a range of emotions that through the ages have been revered and recorded in women’s minds. Folk songs across the country reveal its mystique in quick flashes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.