Women In Indian Culture

Woman is man's companion, gifted with equal mental capacities. She has the right to participate in the activities of man to the very minutest detail and she has an equal right to freedom and liberty as him. She is entitled to a supreme place in her own sphere of activity as man is in his. This ought to be the natural condition of things and not just as a result of learning to read and write. By sheer force of a vicious custom, even the most ignorant and worthless men have been enjoying superiority over women which they do not deserve and ought not to have. Many of our movements stop halfway and much of our work does not yield appropriate results because of the condition of our women.

Man and woman are equal in status, but are not identical. They are a peerless pair each being complementary to the other; each helps the other, so that without the one the existence of the other can not be conceived. Therefore it follows as a necessary corollary from these facts, that anything that will impair the status of either of them will involve an equal ruin of both.

Indian tradition has generally respected womanhood. Even God (in Hinduism) is regarded as half man, half woman (ARDHANAAREESHWAR). Manu declares that where women are honored, the Gods are pleased; where they are not honored, all work becomes fruitless. Women are human beings and have as much of a right to development as men have. The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than the physiological peculiarities which distinguish us from one another. In all human beings, irrespective of their sex, the same drama of the flesh and the spirit, of finitude and transcendence, takes place.

Women cannot do some things that men can. Their physiology prevents this. That, however, does not prove any inferiority on their part. We must do the things for which we are made and do them well.

The relation of man and woman is the expression of an urge for duality. Each is a self which requires the other as its complement. The division of the sexes is a biological phenomenon, not a historical event. Male and female constitute ordinarily a fundamental unity.