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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY way out of the darkness of religious ignorance, patriarchal authority and medieval reaction. India is still languishing in the deceptive twilight of the tra lition of a dead past. She las not let the past bury its dead, and keeps a skeleton in her clipboard as a treasure of utuid valuc,
I am sure the reader is indignant with iny assertion that, in the social organisation of India, women occupy, and have always occurice, the
vsi 1992 of chatic. The zort indulgeni regler must be laughing at my animal ignorance. What can you expect of a cit? The poor beast cven cloes not know that Hinduism worships Sakii (Cosmic Energy) in the woman-places her on the pedestal of goddess. Der m:c! Don't know all this? Have I not heard the pleasant legend which keeps the Indian women blind to the reality of their social position, happy in the illusion of heings worshipped ? Buit, may deluded sisters, please look at the cow, for the picture of your true position. The cow is also a goddess; she is also worshipped. Why? Because she is an useful animal. The reality of chattel-slavery is hidden in the beautiful (for the acsthetically blind) legend of godliness. My dear sisters, you are flattered, so that you may make a virtue of your subjugation to the cgoism of man ; so that a religion, civilisation, a social system that degrades the sovereign function of motherhood to the performance of wifely duty-to the obligation of becoming the
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