The idea that the doors of the house of God open only for some and are barred to others should be deeply offensive to any true believer. And yet those doors, whether they lead to a mosque, a church, a temple, a synagogue, even a Buddhist shrine, are often closed.
In a small village in Jharkhand, 12 Dalit women offered prayers at the local temple last month. The ban on the entrance of Dalits — and especially on Dalit women — has been in force ever since the temple was constructed. The last Dalit woman to enter the temple did so 16 years ago; she was punished by the village Panchayat. One of the women who entered the shrine of the gods said that they had won “real freedom”. But why did it take 16 long years for the rest of the village to get used to the idea that the house of God is for everyone? Then again, in America, many Muslim women are questioning the idea that prayer spaces should exclude women or treat them like inferior worshippers.
The fear of pollution from “unclean” women (menstruating women, women of childbearing age, women who are sexual beings as well) is so deeply rooted in a certain kind of Hinduism that women aren’t allowed into temples, on pilgrimages, into inner sanctums depending on the state of their wombs.
I came across what the writer Manjula Padmanabhan calls “the logic of blood” many years ago when a 13-year-old friend ducked Durga Puja rituals because she was menstruating. It seemed to me that there was something wrong about the idea that a woman goddess, one of our most powerful emblems of femininity, would turn her face away from a worshipper who was undergoing a normal female biological process!
But it’s this peculiar logic—women who are menstruating are “unclean” — that is behind the prohibition that bars women between the ages of 10 to 50 from going on the Sabarimala pilgrimage. I find it hard enough to understand how any woman could willingly worship a deity who saw her as somehow inferior by virtue of her sex. It’s much harder to imagine the depth of the fear that lies behind this kind of thinking: any woman who is even potentially capable of having children, or making love, or menstruating, is automatically defiled, defiling. The only women who are clean in the eyes of this god (and what a very strange god he must be) are those who are sexless — too young or too old to count.
In Bangkok this week, a senator questioned a centuries-old ban against women entering the inner sanctum of temples that house Buddhist relics. The faithful say that the rule is in place to avoid offending the holy remains of the Buddha, and to guard the chastity of male monks. To me, it’s beyond belief that a teacher who saw the light, who spread such wisdom, would find it offensive if women were to pay respect to his relics. As for the sexual abstinence argument — if you think monks and men are so easily distracted, so easily tempted (and by worshippers at that!), you’re being very derogatory to the male gender When it comes to faith, either the doors are open to all, or they are closed for all.
These days, if you pause outside a temple or a mosque or any house of God, you might hear a faint, distant thud. Listen to it. It’s the sound of women, of Dalits, of second-class citizens everywhere, knocking on heaven’s door, willing it to open up and stay open.
