From Father God to Hindu Patriarchy
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale became a feminist icon in the West because its nightmare was instantly recognisable: Christian patriarchy carried to its dystopian conclusion. Male religious authority controls women, scripture provides the sanction, and the female body becomes territory over which Church and State exercise power.
Western feminism arose against precisely this civilisational background.
Christianity calls God the Father. Jesus is the Son. The word “Pope” derives from papa, meaning father. The Catholic Church continues to reserve priestly ordination to men, and its Catechism states that only a baptised man can receive sacred ordination. Ephesians 5:22-23 instructs wives to submit to their husbands and describes the husband as the “head of the wife.”
This theology was reflected historically in law and society. In Britain, married women once surrendered significant rights over property to their husbands. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 were required to establish greater control by married women over their earnings and property. American women obtained a constitutional guarantee of the vote only in 1920, after decades of agitation.
Western feminists, in other words, had a patriarchy to rebel against—one deeply rooted in their own religious, legal and social history.
Then came a remarkable transformation.
The feminist critique born from revolt against Christian patriarchy was exported to India. Institutions rooted in that same Western world began supporting Indian feminist organisations and activists who increasingly employed the language of “patriarchy” to interpret Indian society and Hindu traditions.
Welcome to the Indian sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
The handmaidens have changed sides.
It was Rahul Gandhi’s recent exhortation to Indian women to “smash the patriarchy”, accompanied by an attack on the “Manusmriti mindset”, that prompted this essay. The phrase deserves closer examination.
During the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Gandhi sat with Christian pastor George Ponnaiah, who said that “Jesus is the real God” and that Jesus was “not like Shakti”. Gandhi did not make that statement himself. But the juxtaposition is revealing. Before Rahul Gandhi asks Hindu women to smash patriarchy, perhaps he should explain why his hammer so often appears to fall on Hindu civilisation rather than on the Father-God patriarchy from which the modern Western concept emerged.
Hinduism and Patriarchy
Look first at the civilisation being accused.
Where is the Hindu Pope?
Where is the exclusively male creator God?
Where is the single male prophet standing between humanity and the Divine?
Hindu sacred imagination moves through an entirely different universe. There is Shakti, Divine Power itself conceived as feminine. There are Durga, Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Lalita. Rivers are Goddesses. The Earth is Mother. The village Devi can occupy the centre of sacred life.
And there is Ardhanarishvara, in which Shiva and Shakti occupy the same body—male and female inseparably represented within the Divine.
None of this means that Hindu men cannot be chauvinistic or that Indian women cannot suffer discrimination. Human beings remain human beings. Nor does the presence of powerful feminine imagery automatically guarantee equality in social practice.
The point is more fundamental.
A theory generated from the historical experience of Father-God Christianity cannot simply be assumed to describe every civilisation in the same way.
Yet that is precisely what increasingly happened. “Patriarchy” ceased to function merely as an analytical category arising from a particular historical experience and became a universal accusation. Hindu practices were pushed into that framework whether the category actually fitted the practice or not.
And then comes the question that polite discourse frequently avoids:
Follow the money.
Consider Ranjana Kumari, one of India’s prominent feminist activists and Director of the Centre for Social Research.
Among the Centre’s foreign donors was ICCO, originally the Interchurch Coordination Committee for Development Aid and later known as the Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation. ICCO was founded in 1964 by Protestant churches and Dutch civil-society organisations. Its founder, Jo Verkuyl, had worked as a missionary preacher in Indonesia.
A published donor table based on foreign-contribution data lists ICCO as having given approximately ₹3.58 crore to the Centre for Social Research between 2006 and 2011, making it the largest donor listed for that period.
There is also the Hanns Seidel Foundation, another longstanding partner of the Centre. The foundation is politically aligned with Bavaria’s Christian Social Union and openly describes its political-education work as being conducted “on Christian foundations”.
Now follow the chain.
Christian-rooted institutions support an Indian feminist ecosystem. That ecosystem works with concepts of patriarchy and gender developed substantially from Western historical experience. Those categories are then applied to Indian society and Hindu traditions.
Eventually, the handmaidens arrive at the temple door.
The question is not whether Indian women deserve equality. Of course they do.
The question is whether a civilisation should be judged exclusively through intellectual categories imported from another civilisation—and whether the institutions funding that exercise should themselves be subjected to the same scrutiny.
That question becomes particularly uncomfortable when the subject is Sabarimala.
And that is where the real argument begins.
