Yogi Adityanath and the current Hindu rightwing dispensation in India agitates against Triple Talaq and it is not causing a bigger outrage because in most middle class Hindu families bookended by a child marriage of a grandmother and the postgraduation of a daughter, we have 100 years of zero political awareness.

10th Century theologian Ramanuja (image courtesy: wikipedia.org)

It has been 950 years approximately, since 10th century theologian, Ramanuja converted my community to Sri Vaishnavism and most definitely gave us an elevated status in the villages around the famed Hoysala temples of Belur and Halebid in Karnataka.

In those 950 years, our widows’ heads, like in the rest of India, were tonsured. Remarriage was not allowed and most women did not have a piece of property to their names.

There were, however, seven remarkable years in those 950 years that gave the women of my community and Hindu women in general, all those rights.

So it is time for gratitude. For those years of struggle against Hindu orthodoxy and patriarchy.

Ignoring those seven years between 1949 and 1956, has meant that while the two gentlemen largely responsible for Hindu women’s rights are routinely lampooned, Yogi Adityanath gets to hijack a genuine, indigenous, agitation by Muslim women, to ban Triple Talaq.

Bimrao Ambedkar, an alumnus from Columbia University and architect of the Indian Constitution (image courtesy: columbia.edu)

On the eve of my grandmother’s 100th birthday, I decided it was time. Time to say thank you to India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and the architect of the Indian Constitution, Bhimrao Ambedkar.

We are not Japan, so turning 100 is a big deal.

It is a tribute to good genes and inner grit that my grandmother turns 100 in July and we are all throwing a big birthday party for her in Bengaluru. Born to an educated middle class Brahmin family in 1917, she was married in 1929 just days before the Sharda act, prohibiting marriages below the age of 14, became law. Laden with jewellery and a Kanjeevaram silk trousseau, my 12-year-old grandmother was married in a seven-day lavish ceremony.

She was already a mother many times over by the time she was 26, my older daughter’s current age as she completes her post graduation.

The journey from my grandmother, to my mother, to me, was purely one of political correctness and social expediency. The recipe was the same. Only the period between the menstrual cycle and Kanyadaan was progressively lengthier to allow for that strange animal called ‘women’s education’.

The journey from me to my daughters’ era was an ugly, tell-all phase. Long story short, I was not able to sell the idea of marriage to an Iyengari boy, as the crowning glory of their lives.

They have seamlessly settled into a world where live-in relations, drinking in pubs, girls’ night out and safe sex are the new normal.

Disconcerting.

A still from the Kannada movie “Phaniamma” highlighting the plight of child widows in upper caste Hindu families (image courtesy: Chitraloka.com)

Disconcerting, because we ignored the important bridge years that took us from tonsured heads of widows to the age of consent.

Growing up in the Brahmin cloisters of Bangalore and Mysore in the 1950s and 1960s, my community was largely unaware that the Hindu Code Bill was debated for more than 50 hours in the constituent assembly under BR Ambedkar. After a year, only three of the 55 clauses passed in the Hindu Code Bill that would give women the right to property, divorce and remarriage. Far right opponents such as RSS’ Gowalkar argued that the Manusmriti should be given pre-eminence, a text, that among other things, declares that women must never seek to live independently.

The Hindu Code Bill passed eventually in 1956 thanks largely to the efforts led by Nehru. Nehru has been variously criticized for subverting Hinduism or pursuing reform only for the Hindus. Dealing with Nehru critics requires a cache of migrane-relieving medications and an appetite for twitter trolls that would distract from the essential fact that that bill did get passed. It was a momentous event in the 2,000 or 3,000 years of Hinduism that made women legislatively equal and we carried on like nothing happened.

Indian Muslim women’s groups agitating against Triple Talaq (image courtesy: dnaindia.com)

One of the unintended outcomes of the Hindu Code Bill, is the gifting to Yogi Adityanath of a shamelessly imagined moral high ground to agitate for equality in divorce rights for Muslim women. Inadvertently underscoring his insincere support for Muslim women, he writes, on his website: “Stree shakti (women’s power) is protected by the father when a child, by the husband when an adult and by the son in old age. Women cannot be left independent or free”.

Fast forward now to the era of sickularism, presstitutes and libtards.

It is an era that has multicoloured facebook pages to support gay rights and bearded new age gurus extoling the virtues of a glorious past presumably before the non-Hindus ‘destroyed everything’.

My mother and her sisters watch Lord Venkatesha of Tirupati via television and memorise the Divya Prabandhams, the 4,000 verses composed by Vaishanvite saints. My daughters are alive to every issue there is from Syrian babies to Korean K-Pop.

Within the family WhatsApp groups, Nehru is criticized, Ambedkar is lampooned and Gandhi is studiously ignored. Never mind historians such as Ramchandra Guha who say that these three men did more to modernize Hinduism than “those claiming to be the true defenders of the faith”.

Much like the white women who voted for Trump in the recent US elections, Hindu upper caste women echo the pet peeves of their entitled male counterparts on reservation and imagined marginalization. They have gleefully embraced equal rights to property while glibly dismissing the tonsured heads of grand aunts as minor blips in an otherwise glorious religion.

The new-found gender equality is manifesting in various unexpected ways.

The robust celebrations in 2017, commemorating the millenium since Ramanuja’s birth, spurred me to write this article. Not Yogi Adityanath, not Triple Talaq and certainly not Columbia University. The sight of aged aunts in processions in the villages and towns in the South Indian State of Karnataka got me thinking.

We are not as passive as I thought we were.

For a certain gentleman who lived in the 10th century, and who according to Iyengari lore learnt the Vedas as an eight-day old infant, the women of my community are prepared to step out of the comfort of their homes. In the midst of this religious fervor by mothers and aunts spurred by “how cute grandma” FB comments by largely indifferent millennials, I am calling for a timeout on May 18, 2017.

Ambedkar’s alma mater, Columbia University (image courtesy: Columbia.edu)

May 18 is not too far away. On this day my daughter completes a Post Graduation in Law from Ambedkar’s Alma Mater, Columbia University, New York. On this day, in 1955, the Hindu Marriage Act was passed. I hope to take an awkward selfie and post a “Thank You Ambedkar and Nehru” on my Facebook feed.

While I pose for the selfie in front of whatever memorial there is for Ambedkar in Columbia University, it is important to remember that in just one year, in 1949, as per Guha, Yogi Adityanath’s predecessors in the Sangh burnt effigies of Nehru and Ambedkar no less than 79 times in as many meetings, denouncing the Hindu Code Bill as an atom bomb on Hindu society.