Gender Studies: A Trans-Generational Change from the Spinning Wheel to Laptop

SINDH COURIER

Nowadays, computer has taken the place of the spinning wheel. The spinning wheel would have girls young and old, singing songs of love and loss. Computer creates an isolated human being     

Dr. Jernail S. Anand

[Disclaimer: This article is meant to analyze the moral drought in our society. Why the ideas of goodness and godliness have been dropped from our consciousness. The author thinks that family and home should not have been destroyed. And, we still need a strong family and a home, which have gone with the winds of change. The world needs to refocus the idea of gender equality so that in the pursuit of individual freedom, we may not lose what is ‘golden’ in our past.]

Goodness, good thoughts, happiness, joy, peaceful living, co-existence, – all these ideas appear to be old world dreams. Goodness is a training of the mind, which stemmed from the way of living of the people in olden times. In a house, the wooden ceiling would not mind some lizards moving about and bats acrobating in the night. On the unmarbled floor, we could see rats holing here and there and hiding their nuts, while there would be lines of ants wherever something sweet would be dropped down. In the courtyard, there was a tree, on whose branches, birds would come, make love and even hatch new life. They did not need visa, nor papers from the revenue department.  Under the tree, were some buffaloes, goats and sheep, and a few poultry birds flying around, till their day [of sacrifice] came. The woman was managing the kitchen, and the man, the outside. It was a perfect world. Men had the final say and women were born to obey.

Making and Maintaining the Family

Education was scanty. Fathers would train their sons in supremacy of the macho man while mothers would tell their daughters about house-keeping skills, the highest of which was: to keep a low profile. To obey what her husband who is an image of god says. She was taught that in the alien house, she has to cook food not only for her husband, but for the entire family. So, she was given training in homely arts. She was considered the main force to build the home. She was given some dowry also.

Read: Charkha, the device that charged India’s freedom movement

Behind all this training was family which had a rich tradition of old men and women passing on their wisdom to the young. This is how goodness, godliness, happiness, and peace were bedded together in the idea of an agrarian family set up. The wife-to-be was taught the arts of making and maintaining the family with love, understanding, care, and humility.

The Modern Sensibility

However, all these ideas, making and maintaining the family, love, understanding, care and humility are gal to the modern sensibility which has stepped out of the agrarian set up and launched on a new middle class styled living pattern in which the first casualty is the home, the family, and its greatest victim is human society, which is now suspended between the golden past and the ‘diamond’ future of equal opportunities for men and women, a future  whose contours are invisible and indiscernible too. Future is a shapeless intangible mass, moving or driven into which direction?

Read: New spinning wheel may boost India’s hand-woven pashmina business

[Whisper: A man walks a distance in one hour with two legs. If he is given four, how much time he will take? It is possible, he may never cover this distance if the legs have a different gender. Moreover, can an animal, a buffalo, a cow, which has four legs walk faster than a bi-ped? Just think].

Woman and the Idea of Family

It has to be acknowledged gracefully that family, home and kids, are constructs which have no existence at all in the absence of a woman. The modernist culture was upset with the ideas of goodness, godliness, happiness. So, the home was assaulted. And, here was the catch. Woman’s mindset was attacked. Up till now, she was brought up to set up a home. And taught all necessary arts.  Suddenly, the social emphasis changed and family disappeared. Home disappeared. Kids disappeared. Goodness disappeared. Godliness disappeared. And, can happiness wait? Can peace wait? They all felt ignored and slighted, and left.

Read: Catharsis is not a one time affair: Looking for eternal Catharsis

The young girl now is not trained to set up a home. Who is there to tell her? Will a mom tell her who is herself lost to the kitty consciousness? The young girls in middle class homes, are given liberty to grow independently. Marriage is an artificial construct, a license to have occasional sex, and grow or not grow a kid or two. The entire focus is on joy, pleasure, partying, friends, and boy or girl friend culture. This is ultra-modern culture and if at all a girl is trained for anything, it is not for home making, but for office management.

From the Spinning Wheel to the Laptop

Nowadays, computer has taken the place of the spinning wheel. The spinning wheel would have girls young and old, singing songs of love and loss. Computer creates an isolated human being. Lonely. Who is happy in superficial company. It appears, the entire focus of modernist times is to focus on the body, its maintenance, its pleasures, its joys, and let the languishing soul go to dogs.