Women of India by Mukul Roy
Women of India is a photo book by award winning photo journalist Mukul Roy. Portraits of women in the luminescent hues of subdued shades and shadows. The book directs our gaze at women who remain involved in their daily lives, unassuming about their appearance in photographs in the book.
Languages are histories of ourselves, narratives about ourselves and our past, loans from our memories to make sense of living the anticipation of our future.
How the stratification works within her caste and most of all the privileged position boys have in her caste, in the rituals and practices and the secondary role played by women, the stigmatism related to the non-male physiology, and the absence of women priests in temples.
Caste stratification is just an extension of this patriarchy in the name of a metaphysical ethics, the ontology of which is codified.
And so we need supermen and heroes in our narrative, movies about caste emancipation, when the entire mythology is rigged without a way to see beyond it.
Patrilocality, Endogamy and the commodification of the mitochondrial DNA entrenches patriarchy as the fundamental cultural gaze.
In evolutionary biology, females are accorded the more important role by the genes of all animals, including humans. Only in human society, the male is able to set up a panopticon to regulate female behaviour, indeed reproduction and desire itself.
The female travels to the groom’s village in patrilocal societies and where the caste system is entrenched endogamy is the norm, women are married in the boundary of the caste, the mitochondrial DNA (inherited DNA from the mother) are sent to a male within the caste.
When we are empowered by technology but crippled by race, religion and class – the very divisions that have made humans – inhuman. The contours of politics are drawn by identity, class, and religion, it’s who you think you are that makes you support a particular idea and not a ideology or vision of happiness and well being for all.
Wrap this with the patriarchal culture of theistic religion, and we find how phallic and masculine – gendering and stereotyping of our progeny is.
Theistic religion is the root of patriarchy and social stratification, not just class and capital.
