--- On Wed, 11/3/09, ss <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: ss <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] What is "Indian culture"?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Wednesday, 11 March, 2009, 8:00 AM
>
> -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
>
> On Tuesday 10 Mar 2009 11:51:23 pm
> Radhika, Y. wrote:
> > I personally believe that the law in every country
> needs to go from
> > offering protection to offering futures for women.
> Yes, it must protect
> > women from marital rape, domestic abuse and where the
> spouses have
> > irreconciliable differences, they must be allowed to
> seperate. But the law
> > of a country should also not tolerate any
> discrimination - under our
> > fundamental rights no seperate law is needed to ensure
> that women who are
> > divorced or married get equal opportunity and liberty
> to pursue life (the
> > pursuit of happiness i find a bit silly since it seems
> to arrive when we
> > are not looking for it!).
>
> Off topic - but Bonobashi (IG) has sent me a very
> interesting book that I am
> still reading.
>
> The book basically tears down generally accepted dates for
> the development of
> writing, science and math - and uses available arceological
> evidence to push
> back dates to a surprisingly distant past - 40,000 years or
> more.
>
> One of the interesting hypotheses that seems to be emerging
> (I have not yet
> read the whole book) is the establshment of male-dominated
> societies at some
> time in the past from what might possibly have been
> societies that were much
> more fair to the woman.
>
> Here's (slightly vulgar) titbit from the book. There is
> list of very ancient
> words that have possibly been in existence from the
> beginnings of language
> and one of the words happens to be "puti" - referring
> either to a hole or the
> vagina. It appears that the Punjabi word "phuddi" (for
> vagina) is one of the
> oldest words in existence. I got a big kick out of that
> because that Punjabi
> word has been known to me as a curse-word from my
> schoodays.
>
> But the use of the word "phuddi" as a curse word is itself
> an indicator of
> male domination. As is the word "aurat" for woman - with
> "aurat" being
> synonymous with "shame" and "female genitalia". In some
> circles there has
> been a move to relace the word "aurat" with "naari" for
> this reason -
> although that does not mean much for women in any tangible
> sense.
>
> shiv
What I was trying to 'sell' to you, Shiv, as you have spotted, is the idea that
matriarchal society was the accepted norm right through pre-history, with all
the riff-raff (males) sent safely far away from the camp to hunt, while
grown-ups (females) worked on getting on with life, and were allowed back in
with the fruits of this go-out-and-play-now only in the evening or night. This
was a very stable system until patriarchal societies replaced them. The precise
nature and the reasons behind this revolutionary change are far too complex to
discuss even in a book or two hundred.
The wandering of the Indo-Aryans was one of the phenomena which contributed to
this revolution. Think of male domination of society as a disease. The IA
volkswanderueng spread the patriarchal cosmogony and patriarchal social
architecture over a large part of the Northern hemisphere using the very
effective language and its future developed sub-forms as a vector.
Recent developments in the last two thousand years are a particularly squalid
manifestation of this disease - a nauseating sub-type, if you like. We have to
wait for the virus to mutate into harmless forms, or find a ratiocinated cure.
If you look at the way women address daily life versus the way men do, the
analogy might be of a Phalcon on an IL76 platform, versus an SU 30 MKI.
I hope you are enjoying it. It was like a dip in an ice-cold pool for me the
first time I read it.
Add more friends to your messenger and enjoy! Go to
http://messenger.yahoo.com/invite/
