Pratichee Mohapatra

Just like that actress who genuinely seems convinced that India is waiting breathlessly for her next intellectual revelation, I chose to wait a few days before saying this. There is something profoundly vulgar about sitting centuries away, in the safety of hindsight, and reducing the choices of Rajput women to the vocabulary of the body. The Ranis who chose jauhar did not exist merely as bodies waiting to be interpreted through someone else’s politics. Whatever one thinks of the practice today, those women understood their circumstances, made choices within the world they inhabited, and acted upon convictions that were theirs. Their courage, however alien it may seem to a modern mind, cannot simply be stripped of agency and translated into the language of sexual anatomy. Yet here we are - a woman perched comfortably on the high chair of modern enlightenment, dispensing retrospective gyan, while reducing Veeranganas to nothing more sophisticated than vaginas. What an extraordinary poverty of imagination! You do not honour women by denying them the capacity to possess convictions you find uncomfortable. You do not liberate historical women by insisting that their decisions can only be understood through your preferred modern vocabulary. And you certainly do not demonstrate intellectual superiority by replacing their minds with their bodies. Vagina or not, you crass woman, the obscenity is not in what those women chose. It is in your inability to imagine them as anything more than their sex. Those women had minds. They had convictions. They had courage. They had an understanding of dignity shaped by their own time, their own world and their own circumstances. You are entitled to disagree with their choices. But you will be intellectually inoculated in democratic spaces if you erase their agency simply because their conception of dignity does not flatter yours. That is not intellectualism. That is historical arrogance dressed up as enlightenment.