Twinn Swan

Last night, I attended a talk commemorating the 130th Anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago Address at the Parliament of World Religions. The talk was given by Swami Atmashraddhananda, who is the Secretary of the Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama in Kanpur.

As I got ready for the momentous occasion, I put on eyeliner after what has been a really long hiatus. I was also wearing a silvery-grey Punjabi suit. Grey is a colour that I hardly ever wear. Sometimes we just have to breakaway from our experiments with colour and wear something we wouldn’t ordinarily reach for if left to our own devices.

When it comes to religious leaders, one tendency I’ve noticed is the poor and low status that they awarded—and continue to—award to women. Even if the rest of their philosophy and ideas are sound, this is the area where they tend to fall seriously short. They have either dismissed or downplayed the contributions, the achievements and the accolades of half of the population.

But not Swami Vivekananda. He had thoughts that made me think, that made me wonder, and that got me thinking more deeply about how this sorry state of affairs came to be.

I’m currently reading Volume 2 of The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. In it, Swamiji said that in the Arian Race of India, both men and women were priests. They were co-religionists. When it came to tending to the sacrificial fire, men could not pray alone; for it was held that he was only half a being. For this very same reason, unmarried men could not become priests.

Swami Vivekananda even argued that it was the development of an all-male monasticism that led to the degeneration of the status of women in society.

The debate is long and takes us back into history and back into the present. It begins when we started to cast all the blame for the woes and the worries of the world onto women. Even the proverbs and the stories began to warn against them. I am not denying that unholy women exist.

At the same time, holy women have existed in virtually all ages. Their yearning, much like their monastic brothers, has been for God. Men and women don’t necessarily have to have a relationship as a husband and a wife or even a mother and a son. There is another relationship that is equally important and it is the one that blossoms between a brother and a sister.

Raksha Bandhan went by recently and I had the opportunity to tie the rakhi for my cousin-brothers. It is through this ceremony that we remind ourselves and honour this other sacred bond that can exist between men and women.

In a world that increasingly prides itself on inclusivity, secularism and diversity, perhaps there is something that we can do to remind ourselves, not of the divinity of a mother, but of the divinity of the sister.