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Religion, Society and Women’s Subversion


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1 Centre for Women’s Studies, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India
     

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Religion as an institution strongly influences the ordering of a society. It cuts across the dichotomy of private and public life. Private and public lives are believed to be connected through three media channels – language, institutions and narratives; and religion binds all the three. The religion moves out of the private realm and spreads deeply into the public sphere. It creates two kinds of struggles; one between private and public and the other between culture and higher spiritual attainment. To understand the disparity or scope of individual choice within a society, it is imperative to analyse the cultural component of religion, which falls at the margin of public and private sphere. This brings us to the question of disparity in a society in terms of its gender-based population. Religion is believed to be a common possession with collective ownership in terms of its beliefs, customs, traditions, stories, emotions, etc. With this backdrop, this paper primarily attempts to examine the position of women in terms of the collective ownership of religion and culture, and the scope of subverting the rules of this collective ownership. This paper addresses the above issues through the analysis of lived experiences of the women from the Khap regions of western Uttar Pradesh, as well as certain religious scriptures.
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  • Religion, Society and Women’s Subversion

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Authors

Tarushikha Sarvesh
Centre for Women’s Studies, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract


Religion as an institution strongly influences the ordering of a society. It cuts across the dichotomy of private and public life. Private and public lives are believed to be connected through three media channels – language, institutions and narratives; and religion binds all the three. The religion moves out of the private realm and spreads deeply into the public sphere. It creates two kinds of struggles; one between private and public and the other between culture and higher spiritual attainment. To understand the disparity or scope of individual choice within a society, it is imperative to analyse the cultural component of religion, which falls at the margin of public and private sphere. This brings us to the question of disparity in a society in terms of its gender-based population. Religion is believed to be a common possession with collective ownership in terms of its beliefs, customs, traditions, stories, emotions, etc. With this backdrop, this paper primarily attempts to examine the position of women in terms of the collective ownership of religion and culture, and the scope of subverting the rules of this collective ownership. This paper addresses the above issues through the analysis of lived experiences of the women from the Khap regions of western Uttar Pradesh, as well as certain religious scriptures.

References