prasad1
Active member
“Patriarchy in religion cannot be permitted to trump over...the freedom to practice and profess one’s religion.”
With these words and many other significant proclamations, the Supreme Court opened the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala temple to all women, irrespective of age, on Friday. In a 4:1 majority judgement, the court ruled that the temple, devoted to Lord Ayyappa, could not discriminate against women of menstruating age – between age 10 and 50 – by prohibiting their entry into a public place of worship.
Four of the five judges on the bench ruled that Sabarimala temple’s exclusion of women of child-bearing age was unconstitutional because it discriminated against women based on biological factors, and was against the spirit of equal rights and individual dignity guaranteed by the Constitution. The only dissenting view was of Justice Indu Malhotra, who argued that the Court should not interfere in matters of deep religious faith.
Malhotra’s minority judgement, however, contains one noteworthy observation: the Sabarimala petition has far-reaching ramifications and implications for all places of worship of various religions in the country, because they have their own beliefs and customs that might be considered exclusionary.
Despite Malhotra’s reservations, perhaps it is time to say that the Sabarimala verdict should indeed have ramifications for all places of worship. Perhaps it is time for all institutions perpetuating menstrual taboos, in blatant or invisible ways, to be held accountable for stigmatising women’s natural biological cycles.
But menstrual discrimination is a many-faced beast that continues to thrive with impunity, taking on multiple different forms in women’s religious and domestic lives. Amongst Hindus and Jains, an unspoken rule forbids women from entering temples on the three or five days of menstruation. Shia mosques and Parsi fire temples follow the same norm. (Most Sunni mosques in India completely ban the entry of women on the grounds that Islam demands gender segregation – another tradition in desperate need of reform).
Outside public places of worship, deep-rooted notions of women’s impurity during menstruation take the shape of myriad restrictions in different homes: no touching religious books and objects, avoiding certain prayers, no cooking or entering the kitchen. No signboards are needed to keep bleeding women out of temples or away from sacred texts – girls are socialised into period rules from a very young age.
The exclusion does not end with the duration of a woman’s period – her supposedly inherent impurity becomes a convenient reason to deny women the roles of priests, pandits, qazis, imams and a range of other positions of power and leadership in a community.
https://scroll.in/article/896400/wh...card-menstrual-taboos-in-all-religious-spaces
With these words and many other significant proclamations, the Supreme Court opened the doors of Kerala’s Sabarimala temple to all women, irrespective of age, on Friday. In a 4:1 majority judgement, the court ruled that the temple, devoted to Lord Ayyappa, could not discriminate against women of menstruating age – between age 10 and 50 – by prohibiting their entry into a public place of worship.
Four of the five judges on the bench ruled that Sabarimala temple’s exclusion of women of child-bearing age was unconstitutional because it discriminated against women based on biological factors, and was against the spirit of equal rights and individual dignity guaranteed by the Constitution. The only dissenting view was of Justice Indu Malhotra, who argued that the Court should not interfere in matters of deep religious faith.
Malhotra’s minority judgement, however, contains one noteworthy observation: the Sabarimala petition has far-reaching ramifications and implications for all places of worship of various religions in the country, because they have their own beliefs and customs that might be considered exclusionary.
Despite Malhotra’s reservations, perhaps it is time to say that the Sabarimala verdict should indeed have ramifications for all places of worship. Perhaps it is time for all institutions perpetuating menstrual taboos, in blatant or invisible ways, to be held accountable for stigmatising women’s natural biological cycles.
But menstrual discrimination is a many-faced beast that continues to thrive with impunity, taking on multiple different forms in women’s religious and domestic lives. Amongst Hindus and Jains, an unspoken rule forbids women from entering temples on the three or five days of menstruation. Shia mosques and Parsi fire temples follow the same norm. (Most Sunni mosques in India completely ban the entry of women on the grounds that Islam demands gender segregation – another tradition in desperate need of reform).
Outside public places of worship, deep-rooted notions of women’s impurity during menstruation take the shape of myriad restrictions in different homes: no touching religious books and objects, avoiding certain prayers, no cooking or entering the kitchen. No signboards are needed to keep bleeding women out of temples or away from sacred texts – girls are socialised into period rules from a very young age.
The exclusion does not end with the duration of a woman’s period – her supposedly inherent impurity becomes a convenient reason to deny women the roles of priests, pandits, qazis, imams and a range of other positions of power and leadership in a community.
https://scroll.in/article/896400/wh...card-menstrual-taboos-in-all-religious-spaces
