The ideology of patriarchal oppression

                                 Sukumaran C. V.

The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.    —Paulo Freire
                                                     

                                                              Paulo Freire

The quoted sentences are from the 2^nd chapter of Paulo Freire’s masterpiece—Pedagogy of the Oppressed. If we replace the words oppressors with males and people with females and look at the condition of the females in our country, it will really be a revealing one. It will explain why the incidents like the Guhawati molestation occur in our country and why the number of rapes and kidnapping and abductions of women and girls alarmingly increases every year.(See the table below)

Year	2000	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
Rape	16496	18359	19348	20737	21467	21397	22172	24206
Kidnapping And abduction of women and girls	15023	15750	17414	20416	22939	25741	29795	35565

(Source: NCRB data for 2010 and 2011)

The more we are educated, the more our women are sexually assaulted. The more we ‘progress’, the more insecurity our womenfolk feels in the public space. Our education caters to the needs and wishes of the oppressors and the males and it assiduously entrenches the patriarchal values.

I have recently seen a photograph being widely shared and commented in  Facebook. The subject of the photograph is four or five girls smoking cigarettes. The cigarette between the fingers of each girl is highlighted by bold arrow marks. All the comments are in this tone: “These like girls should be slapped with sandals.” What shocked me was none of those who shared the photograph and made intolerant comments is against smoking or drinking in general. Their ‘morality’ is hurt not by the dirty habit of smoking, but by the ‘immoral’ act of the girls!

I don’t like smoking and I have never used any alcoholic drinks including beer. But if men talk against (only) women’s smoking or drinking, I can’t but defend the women who hurt the so called ‘morality' of the males.

The female is an individual just like the male is. She does have her own likes and dislikes. If she likes smoking she can smoke. You can talk against the social menace of smoking, but have no right to talk against women’s or girls’ smoking alone. You can agitate against alcoholism, but can’t single out the females who enter into a bar and attack them in the name of morality or tradition or culture.

But in our country women are attacked for entering the pubs, for wearing the dress they like, for marrying whom they love. Still the males in this country stand wonderstruck when they see jeans clad women or when they see women driving or when a wife calls her husband by name or when they see a husband shares the kitchen chores.

The basic problem is that we are living in a democratic set up with an exclusively feudal and patriarchal and fascist mindset. As far as Indian psyche is concerned, the female is only a body and it is for the pleasure of the male. We are not ready to see the female as an individual and therefore we are irritated when we see they use their body and mind independent of the male control or escort.

The NCRB data for each year shows a steady increase of crimes against women and the alarming factor is that it is of the crimes in which the victims are girls and women, the percentage change is so glaring that it frightens us. According to the ‘Snapshots (1953-2011)’ of the NCRB’s Crime in India: 2011 Statistics, the percentage change of rape is 873.3 over 1971 (The Bureau ‘started collecting data on rape since 1971 only’) and that of kidnapping and abduction is 749.0 over 1953. The percentage change of no other major crime head goes beyond 300.

The number of rape—the most heinous of all crimes—in Kerala was 634 in 2010; it went up to 1132 in 2011, far ahead of all other major crimes. Kerala is called God's Own Country and we should keep in mind that it is the most literate among the Indian states! Our national capital stands as the number one city in this crime (453); the second place goes to Mumbai (221) and the third place to Bhopal (100). It is a pity that the most heinous crime against women thrives in the capital city of the largest democracy in the world.

The total number of rapes perpetrated in the 28 Indian states in 2011 is 23582. The share of 6 states including Assam accounts for the half of it! (Assam 1700, Madhya pradesh 3406, Maharashtra 1701, Rajasthan 1800, Uttarpradesh 2042, West Bengal 2362.)

It is high time we demolished the ‘culture of silence’ and the patriarchal mindset (from which such abominable atrocities against the females sprout) by cultural intervention and by making our curricula gender-sensitive and gender-friendly. We should not allow our school textbooks to propagate stereotypical gender roles and portray the female as an object meant for the male.

As Paulo Freire says, in the present concept of education, “Knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as process of inquiry.”  Pedagogy of the Oppressed was first published in 1970. All the drawbacks of the established system of education Freire pointed out in 1970 are still with us!! 

Education should make people question the constructed 'knowledge' of male superiority, the culture of objectification of the females and the moral hypocrisy of putting the responsibility of rape or sexual assault on the victims' attire or on their act of entering a pub or on their 'audacity' to travel alone at night.

Education should help the society to do away with the existing gender discrimination by questioning the socially constructed notion and practice of male superiority and domination. It should help us to stop the objectification of the environment and the female sex and to create a gender egalitarian social order and an environmental-friendly lifestyle. But what we witness is that "education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression."