When Sara passed away, we buried her in our family's graveyard in the foothills of the "Suleman Teng" or "Shankaracharya Hill" in Srinagar, Kashmir. We marked the grave with white marble. At the head, below the bismillah, the caligraphy reads "Wafaate Ahleya Abdus Samad Bhat"; It marks the death of the "Wife of Abdus Samad Bhat". She was my grandmother, had been a proud and loving wife to the wonderful Abdus Samad Bhat, and her name was Sara.
Quite likely the omission of her given name was a manifestation of what-was-done and what-was-proper in the collective psyche. When i looked at it this September the marking struck me as a symbol of our, for want of a better word, male chauvinism.
This "our" identity seems to be defined by our nationality and culture and religion and history and the list can be longer. The "we" it constitutes puts women on a pedestal that seeks to grant respect but comes with a denial and suppression of feminine individuality. Apparently, it did not want to acknowledge Sara directly.
3 comments:
This is an interesting article. I never paid attention to this aspect of our life. The next time I go home I will try to read what it says on my grandmothers grave stone. However, I am thinking, how would it matter what is written on the grave stone regardless of gender. What would really matter is what we carry with us to the grave in terms of our deeds. That is all we would need. Recognition or not, in this world is a very temporary thing and in the long run worthless if we look at the big picture.
imo "individuality", however transient, if shunned voluntarily is one thing; if denied another. Further, the association with death is not essential to this reflection; it is quite a matter of life down here in this world.
The custom of erecting a tombstone is un-islamic and thus the practice of writing the name itself is redundant. Secondly, without getting into any arguments, not using the name of the woman has the same background and reasoning as the hijab. 'Even the name of a woman has a hijab on it' - this statement is very old and commonplace. Thirdly, the way the societies were, unless the woman had a name and place of her own in the society, like the first wife of our Prophet, people usually would not know the women-folk by their names, not because of chauvinism, but only because it was only logical to know them as the wife-of, mother-of, sister-of or daughter-of someone they knew. Now, this practice went into a kashmiri innovation of erecting tombstones where even the name of the male is redundant, let alone that of a woman.
Post a Comment