As happened in other civilizations, India too started discriminating against women since medieval times. Brahmins promulgated that women and supposed low-caste people must not be educated, that a girl must be married and sent to her husband’s home before she begins her menstrual discharge, that she must never enjoy any kind of freedom [but must be kept in the control of either her father, her husband or her grown children], that she, to be controlled, can be thrashed the way a drum, an uneducated man or a beast is thrashed, that she is unclean in her days of menstrual discharge, that she, as a widow, must be physically burnt on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. Also, as long as she is married, she must be kept under veiled cover [Purdah]. To authenticate the idea of universal male supremacy and to perpetuate the discrimination it brings, the argument has been advanced that this world is a man’s world to govern, that all religious founders, divine incarnations and prophets were men, and that God is male. Rishi Dayananda saw the pitiful condition of women and vigorously championed the idea that women too had rights and that they were never meant to be enslaved to anyone, not even to their husbands or in-laws, that their task at home was to collaborate with their partners to ensure welfare for both family and society. Women’s supposed inferiority, thundered the Rishi, was un-Vedic and un-Hindu, and so, he opened the doors for women to be educated in both secular and religious knowledge. He advocated that they be allowed to perform worship and chant the Vedic Mantras – a step which was considered revolutionary at that time. Orthodoxy was up in arms against the Rishi for propounding such a view that, in their view, violated age-old traditional injunctions. Rishi Dayananda countered orthodox leaders by reminding them that Rishis were those to whom the Vedas were revealed and as many as 26 of 228 Rishis of the Rig Veda were women, and they accounted for 200 Mantras.
Rishi Dayananda posited that India could not make herself ready to enter into the modern age of independence if half of her population, made up of women, remained steeped in ignorance, illiteracy, slavery and inequality. And so, reassured by the social crusade initiated by the Rishi’s powerful voice and subsequently promoted by his Arya Samaj, women started shedding the practice of covering their faces with veil [Purdah], attending public meetings and gatherings in large numbers, zealously participating in religious ceremonies and sweetly chanting sacred Vedic verses, including the Gayatri Mantra. The resultant feeling of freedom and equality after centuries of suppression motivated India’s young widows to start getting married again after the unfortunate death of their husbands, rather than being shoved on to funeral pyres to be burnt alive. And, regarding the choice of marriage partners, the Rishi advised people to get married out of their own free will and not be dictated to by fraudulent horoscopes which are nothing but ‘sorrowscopes’ prepared by deceptive astrologers.
Child marriage, too, was always perceived in India as a dreadful social curse. Cruel social traditions caused boys and girls to be married off many times just before, or just after, birth. Early death rate in the case of boys saw many girls left as widows before their teenage years, without them ever knowing who their husbands were. These very young widows were the most unenviable group of people; they were seen in society as symbols of ‘bad luck’, they were not to be associated with in auspicious gatherings, not to wear decent clothing, and not to eat proper food. Side by side with emancipating women, Rishi Dayananda carried on a formidable crusade against child marriage. All children, he firmly said, should be sent to school for a proper and complete education, and no girl should be married before the age of 16, and no boy before the age of 24.
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