The Sabarimala protests are a blot on the progressive state whose highest literacy has not translated to good education.
Business
Standard : From the time I can remember my grandmother, only
one image of her comes to my mind – of a widow with a tonsured
head, wrapped on top by a dull brown cotton saree worn in traditional
style, a blank forehead without the usual red vermilion or ‘kumkum’,
bare neck, empty ears and hands unadorned and shorn off all
jewellery. Her ankles and feet were bare too – without the
traditional anklets or silver rings worn on the toes of both feet –
the symbol of married women.
A
very vivid story of my grandmother is etched in my memory. I had gone
to Melkote, the idyllic temple town near Mysore – where she lived
with one of her sons, my maternal uncle – during my school summer
holidays from Gorur, where I studied in the local government Kannada
medium school.
In
those days, a favourite vacation was being taken to your mother’s
birth place to be with your grandmother, carefree and pampered. I
must have been eight or nine. My older sister was by my side. I’m
not sure what triggered this poignant episode that my grandmother
recounted, but it was heart rending. Her eyes had welled up in tears,
and with dreamy eyes into her distant past she narrated this event.
She
was married off as a child-bride of 13 to a boy – also young, just
16 – who was studying to be a Sanskrit pundit and training to
become a purohit (priest) in Melkote, a Srivaishnavite pilgrim centre
founded by Ramanuja a thousand years ago. When she was in her late
thirties her husband took ill and died. She had three children –
two boys and a girl, my mother. They were all in their teens and in
school.
She
was in total shock and grief. But what she remembered with unbearable
pain was the day the various ceremonies and rituals were performed in
public in the presence of relatives and other locals of the village,
the manner her widowhood was formalised and announced. She was seated
on the floor amid two priests, who surrounded by many relatives,
chanted various mantras.(Sabarimala
Temple)
First
they removed all her ornaments, including her mangalasutra – the
holy necklace that her husband had tied around her neck on the day of
her wedding – then they smashed the glass bangles on her wrists
contemptuously, removed the rings in her ear lobes and her toes,
unfastened the anklets, erased her vermillion roughly even as she
shook and sobbed inconsolably and was drowning in her sorrow.
A
village barber was ready and waiting with his sharpened blades who
was ushered in to perform the ritual of tonsuring her head. As she
was bent , broken in sorrow, the barber shaved her and she recalled
with tears how her copious and luxuriant tresses fell to the ground.
The chanting continued. She was dizzy and overwhelmed by the events.
Then she was led to the bath and after her relatives poured water on
her and scrubbed her, she was given a plain brown cotton saree which
became her prison uniform for the rest of her life... Read
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