Just a thought!

I have often seen that people try and brand the problem of ‘Atrocities on Women’ as a recent phenomenon. Politically motivated rhetoric seems to imply that the concerned problem is a rather modern enigma and hence demands a contemporary approach. Well I would beg to differ there. Atrocities towards women are as old as humanity itself. It probably started the day Cro-Magnon male realized that he is more powerful than his female counterpart. I was reading this Bengali book called Sei Somoy (roughly translatable to ‘Those Times’) penned by the Sahitya Akademy award winning literary stalwart Late Sunil Gangopadhyay. The said book deals with the upper and upper-middle class Calcutta society of the mid and late nineteenth century. The sexual exploits of some of the then scions are horrific and disgusting to say the least. Mind you, it deals with a time when extreme conservatism and social sanctions were the order of the day. There is, however, a significant possibility that a small fraction of the current spate of affairs actually has its roots in the so-called ‘emancipation’ of women and its consequent ‘male backlash’. But the change, as someone mentioned, is too microscopic for anybody’s comfort. In fact, as much as people might disagree with what I theorize, this problem also has its origin in the concept of class. Gender also signifies a class. The traditional relationship between a man and a woman (no matter which country is being referred to) has always been that of an owner and his servant or that of a manager and his employee or that of a landowner and a landless or even that between a Brahmin and a Dalit. This concept of class in turn gives rise to exploitation thus leading to mass social imbalance. Just as Physics prescribes, the only solution lies in redrawing the power equation. Then again, the concept of feasibility buts in! No matter how much we go on talking about it, we have not yet figured out a way that would actually engulf this difference and bring about an egalitarian society, not just in terms of class but in terms of gender as well!!