The God of Male Things

WESTERN FEMINIST movements in the early 1970s confronted an uncomfortable truth: the notion that God was male dominated every aspect of religion. As feminist philosopher Mary Daly summed up, “If God is male, then the male is God.” The question of gender, religion and faith has been a very contentious one. Feminists have looked into [...]

In Conversation: Dr Gail Omvedt

DR GAIL OMVEDT (1941) is an American-born Indian sociologist and human rights activist. Some of her notable books are: We Shall Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle (1979), Gender and Technology: Emerging Asian Visions (1994), Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994), and Dalit Visions: the Anticaste movement and Indian Cultural Identity (1994).
In this [...]

Balancing Work and Womanhood

I CONFESS, I AM reading Dr. John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: Together Forever. His insights are valuable, in a generalising “men are like this and women are like that” kind of way (though he does make disclaimers that not everything he says fits with everyone, just like different outfits may [...]

What Happened to All The Women?

THERE IS A STORY about a Sufi saint who used to wander the city streets and people around him called him a madman. One day, he was wandering the streets near the palace on a donkey. He suddenly got off and walked up to a board in front of the palace. The board said: ‘This [...]

The Woman, the Witch and the Goddess

THIS STORY is both old and new, traditional and modern. The scapegoating, finger-pointing and name-calling of those who are different, those who threaten the social order, those who happen to have a female face. In the past two months, there have been at least two instances of witch lynching in India reported in the mainstream [...]