Indi Life, Culture And The Arts

According to Hinduism the female was created by Brahman as part of the duality in creation, to provide company to men and facilitate procreation, progeny and continuation of family linage. The Vedas suggest that a woman’s primary duty is to help her husband in performing obligatory duties and enable him to continue his family tradition. Her primary duty is to give birth to his children and take care of them. Hinduism is a predominantly male dominated religion. Woman play a secondary role. The situation is gradually changing. It is difficult to draw generalizations about the status of present day Hindu women because of society is complex. In general, life in cities is much different from life in the rural areas. Those who live abroad live in different conditions than those who live in the country. Yet, we have ample indications that women are still subject to many restrictions and disabilities in rural area as well as urban areas. The financial independence of woman and the education levels of the family play an important role in this regard. Women in urban areas face numerous challenges in their professions and personal lives. But overall, life is better for them compared to the past. Love marriage outside of the caste or community are scorned and sometimes the couples are killed or excommunicated by the elders in the family or village. Widows can now have a life of their own and even remarry. They draw a lot of sympathy. But

Indian men celebrated women’s roles in food providing and child bearing in religious ceremonies (64). Indian women unlike the English women of the seventeenth century had a voice. She was treated more as an equal. Even though there was still gender separation between Indian men and Indian women, in the responsibilities they share, the women were more respected. Indian women still didn’t have easy lives.

Women in both elites had a busy life doing chores such as agriculture work, however Mali and Delhi treated women variously. Indian parents gave their daughter in marriage before the age of puberty. Nonetheless, the daughter was able to say when she is ready to be married. In India, the women male master such as the father,

Paige Raibmon’s book “Authentic Indians” take a closer look at the concept of authenticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the culturally diverse Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon examines how both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people constructed and used the idea of the authentic Indian to achieve their goals. Drawing examples from three ‘episodes’ or stories about Aboriginal people of the Northwest Coast, Raibmon argues that authenticity is not a set marker that we can use to measure the distance between what an Aboriginal culture looks like today and what “real” Aboriginal culture looks like. Instead, Raibmon says that authenticity is an important and changing set of ideas that were used

Generally, the men believed the sole purpose of the women was to be a helpmate to them and nature had formed them for this particular reason. From childhood, a woman’s purpose was already set meaning that at the time of birth, she already knew her role; to be obedient, express fidelity, frugality, be industrious and her natural function was to bear and nurture the children. Even the ministers had sermonized it, educators elaborated on it, lawmakers codified it and poets versified it. These women had

The book mentions about the mental confusions, insecurities and the effort to understand their spouses. The writer has expressed simple and usual emotions of a womanhood, fidelity and family. A tint of Indian culture is reflected in each chapter indicating how a bridegroom and groom select each other, the nature of an Indian woman and how she takes up challenges in her life, reconciling the roles of a daughter, an ex-wife, a wife and a mother, the strength of the human spirit and their passion to survive and fight for a good life. It also features the distinctive qualities of Indian relatives highlighting their interest in an individual’s marital life and how offensive it is to the society to find a married woman talking to an unknown man. The book also focuses on the pain of a mother to see her unhealthy

In the typical Indian family, gender construction manifests itself especially in the roles of men and women in the household. As Judith Lorber so aptly put, “gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities” which in turn, creates the social differences that define a “man” and “woman” (Lorber). It is these differences that are used to construct and maintain an established gender order within the family. In the conventional Indian family, the order is such that the roles of the women in the household revolve around the roles of the men. This structure was something that I saw from an early age in my parents’ marriage. Though my parents defied the Indian norm of the arranged marriage, they still represented the quintessential model of an Indian couple in many other ways. My mother left her job to become a stay-at-home mom when I was about six years old. However, even before she left her job, she was implicitly expected by my father to shoulder most of the housework including cooking, cleaning, and caring for my older brother

As a consequence of gender discrimination, women as human beings aren 't getting the same respect as men instead they were seen as commodities. Consequently, living with gender expectation causes harm to either one of the gender.

Women have always had a history with oppression and gender role. Traditionally, the female stereotype was to marry young to bear children of the next generation. She was to be completely submissive to her husband; she had to maintain a welcoming home, she had to completely care for their children. Children of which she didn’t even have rights to if her husband died. Domestic duties were her entire world and her sole purpose was to make her husband’s life as

According to the traditional values in a patriarchal society, women should conform to the desires of men. Being submissive and keeping quiet are what men who idealize patriarchism appreciate the most. Such characteristics lead men to have an advantage over the rights of women, making them feel more dominant and superior to women. This male privilege controls women, preventing them from attaining their freedom. There are many ways that men control women, such as intimidation and violence, which guides men to suppress female power. Moreover, reducing female independence causes women to feel fear and hide from possible resilience towards men, as they are left weak in the hands of men. Through the different ways that men control women, there is one major method known as infantilization that portrays how men obtain a pleasure of superiority while diminishing women. Infantilization is to treat someone as a child, which in this case is treating women as children. Being treated as a child, limits the amount of power women have of making their own decisions, which causes them to ignore objecting to men. Women do not realize how they are treated until they have no choice but to comply with men. Infantilizing women creates fear which makes them become inferior in a male dominated society.

Women during this time were severely belittled by men. They were not seen to be on the same level as men and due to this they were treated unequally. There were several advertisements that portrayed women as housewives and if they were not married they were seen to only be capable of jobs such as teachers, nurses, or secretaries. It was a necessity for woman to always look presentable and to quickly have a husband and then have children. There were many limitations on women, because men saw them as not having the same potential as them. Women were expected to take one path, and that is the life as a housewife(Tavaana). Women were spending an average of about fifty-five hours a week doing domestic chores alone. Women were basically becoming

This joint family, like any social organization, must face problems such as acceptable division of work, relationships and specific family roles. These familial relationships are managed on the basis of a secular hierarchical principle. In fact, all Indians owe respect and obedience to the head of the family, who usually is the father or the oldest man of the family community. In The Gift of a Bride: A Tale of Anthropology, Matrimony and Murder by Nanda and Gregg, it is explained that, “females [are] placed under the perpetual guardianship of first their fathers and elder brothers, then their husbands.” (Nanda & Gregg 22) Thus, all the spending decisions, studies and profession, or marriage, are exclusively the responsibility of the father after the possible discussions with the other men of the family. Age and sex are the basic principles of this hierarchical system. The eldest sons enjoy greater unchallenged authority than their cadets. Of course men have more authority than women, but older married women have an important role within the family. In fact, the authority of a woman depends on the rank of her husband inside the group. Traditionally, the wife of the patriarch rules over domestic affairs and has considerable power over the other women in the community, especially her daughters- in-law.

Traditionally, an Indian woman had only four roles and those were; Her role as a daughter, wife, sister, and lastly, a mother. The women in today’s time however are experiencing far reaching changes and are entering into new fields that were unknown to them. They are actively participating in social, economic and political activities. Unlike the older times, women today have received higher education.

Women were always seen as being inferior or “weak” to men; that they couldn’t do the same things men did because they lacked the physical strength to do so. Because women were physically inferior, it became easy to oppress them due to this difference in power.

There was Tamil Brahmin woman named Meenakshi on the bus who is very educated and cultural. She follows a very Orthodox form of Hinduism and is very religious, she meets a Bengali Muslim photographer named