Discovering Hindu feminism

Every summer since I was 8 years old, I have competed in the Federation of Gujarati Association of North America (FOGANA) Indian dance competition. Every year, the daylong event induced a vomit-worthy mix of anxiety, exhaustion, and excitement within me and my teammates as we performed gleeful folk dances about gathering water from a river or attending a village fair.

This past year, however, in addition to our nerves, we also felt a strong sense of pride and satisfaction. Instead of telling mild tales of village life, our team told the story of the Hindu goddess Sita — specifically a story from the epic Ramayana in which Sita fights the demon Raavan after he tries and fails to rape her.

Gold stage lights blinded me as I spun onto the floor and contorted into an expression of agony. Twirling my hands above my head, heaving my chest, and furrowing my eyebrows, I channeled Sita’s strength in my performance. I felt gratified to be able to tell a powerful Hindu story with feminist values — one that challenges ongoing Indian cultural norms as it honors a story that serves as a foundation of Indian culture.

As a young girl growing up in McKinney, Texas, I always viewed Hinduism as an open-minded and accepting, kind and forgiving religion. I attended religious classes that taught me to love God, to treat others as I wanted to be treated, and to fulfill my responsibilities.

Yet, as I grew older, I noticed these religious values were often lost in the culture surrounding modern Hinduism; instead, this culture often seemed to neglect women. I watched beloved Bollywood movies like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge equate harassment with romance, and I read about the continuation of dowry exchange, female fetus abortion, and justified rape among Hindu families in India. When my AP World History teacher taught us about Hinduism, they simply said, “India is a patriarchy and Hinduism is a patriarchal religion. Sati is the Hindu practice of a widow committing suicide by jumping onto her husband’s funeral pyre.” And a 2018 Thomson Reuters study proclaimed India, a nation in which about 80 percent of the population is Hindu, as “the world’s most dangerous country for women.”

Each revelation about patriarchal acts committed in the name of Hinduism made me wonder how this religion I grew up believing in had contributed to such a misogynistic culture. More than that, I didn’t know how to reconcile my love for my faith with my belief in gender equality.

The weeks of practicing this dance leading up to this competition helped me realize all those modern misconceptions conflating Hinduism with patriarchy were wrong. I listened to the lyrics of the song to which we were dancing, and which told Sita’s story, over and over. “Maara ram tame sitaji ni tole na avo,” it sings, which translates to mean that Sita overcomes much more adversity than Ram, the main character of the Ramayana. This celebration of Sita’s strength shows ancient Hinduism understood, and even respected, women’s strength. This realization is supported by the way women’s authority is again represented in other stories in the Ramayana, stories in the Mahabharata, in prayer lyrics, and in core beliefs of Vedic scriptures.

Upon further research, though, I realized that Hinduism’s commitment to female strength was muddled over time due to the influence of patriarchal cultures. The Ramayana was shared orally until it was written down by a man named Valmiki in the fifth century and then rewritten by a poet named Tulsidas in the 17th century. The eras in which these retellings were shared — namely ones dominated by patriarchal concepts — influenced the details included in them. This is probably why Sita’s strength is contradicted by men prizing women’s beauty and chastity as their most important qualities elsewhere in the Ramayana. What’s more, British colonization of India influenced the very concept of Hinduism, which, as a synthesis of different Indian cultures and traditions and religious beliefs founded in the Vedas, did not formally exist until the British classified it in that way when they first occupied India and contributed to a dilution of original Vedic practice.

Rediscovering the feminism in Hinduism, therefore, has been a modern pursuit — and my pursuit took the form of dance. While dancing, I craved to represent every woman sentenced to an unfulfilled life, every woman suffering because of her lack of control over her circumstances, every woman who has simply vanished as the victim of an unreported crime. Sita lived thousands of years ago, but her story is still repeated relentlessly today — and most women don’t have the chance to ever escape their attackers.

Applause replaced the song as its last notes dwindled away. We later found out that our message, in all its strength, did not break into the judge’s box. We lost that dance competition, to a team that performed a cheery folk dance about women harvesting rice. And before my team could look to next year’s competition as a chance at redemption — for both Sita’s story and our hard work in telling it —we received the news that next year’s FOGANA dance competition had been canceled.

Even though we didn’t win the competition, we celebrated our victory in finding the courage to confront our faith. In doing so, we discovered that, beneath the culture of misogyny that now pervades parts of Hindu practice and culture, the religion itself honors women’s power. As Indian, Hindu women continue to face sexist obstacles — whether it’s punishment for entering a “men-only” temple or difficulty finding justice in a corrupted and convoluted court system — they can find comfort in knowing their religion isn’t on the side of their oppressor. They are not fighting alone.