The hypocrisy of Hinduism and its quest to explain away almost everything

Let me get one thing out of the way. I am not a feminist. I am an equalist. I care about equality; and it will not be marred by gender, religion, race or sex. Now that this is out of the way, I will share a deeply personal, and extremely disturbing experience I had the misfortune to encounter a few months ago.

Earlier this year, my father passed away. Suddenly. No warning. No expectation that this might happen, in the sense that it was not brought on by age. One day he was walking, had a heart attack and was gone. Just like that. I received the news while I was thousands of miles away, trying to get my few-months old baby girl back to sleep. I don’t recall how or when, but I threw a few things in a bag, booked a flight and landed in Mumbai roughly 20 hours after I got the news. I wanted to feel sad. Devastated. Hurt. Cheated out of time with him.

Instead, I felt…discriminated. And thereby started the Hindu death rituals — where you do not matter at all if you are female; and a son or any close male living relative has a duty to do the last rites, lest the one who has passed not attain moksha.

If you have ever had the misfortune to deal with the death of a loved one, and if you are a Hindu, you know exactly what I mean. There are 10 days of rituals, prayers, elaborate rites performed by the “male” member of the family, typically the son if one exists, or a brother or father. If you are a woman, you basically don’t exist. In the days immediately following my father’s death, I don’t recall grieving. I don’t recall doing anything at all except fighting and arguing and pushing my way to claim my rightful place in my family. I was the oldest and it was my job.

I was told women don’t pick up the dead body.

Fuck that. If anyone was going to pick up my father’s body, it was going to be me.

I was told women should not come to the crematorium.

Fuck it again. I was going. Who are these random people who can show up, and I cannot? Did they have a deep connection to my father? Did he hold their tiny hands and drop them to school when they were kids?

I was told women should not stay in the crematorium.

Fuck the fucking fuck of it all. I.was.staying.

I was told that women do not stay for the rites after the body has been cremated.

Again. Fuck that. This was my dad. I am staying. I will stay even if I’m burning from the inside out in the heat of the crematorium furnace.

Yet again I was told that women do not go to immerse the ashes.

Guess again. Nope. No thank you. I was going.

I was told to make balls of rice to offer to the souls of the departed because I could apparently do that.

Nope. Not doing it.

The funny thing was — there was always an arcane or illogical reason, shrouded in the cloak of half-baked logic that spanned thousands of years or patriarchy. I genuinely wonder when things took a turn for the worse and everyone upped and decided that women couldn’t deal with death, when they literally deal with the pain of bringing life into the world everyday.

At the end of 13 days I was hopping mad, tired of pushing through the endless discrimination that is blatantly thrown around everywhere in the name of religion. In a small way, I was satisfied that I pushed through the morass of discrimination and took what I felt was my right as my father’s child. Not his son or his daughter, but simply as his first-born child.

On the plane ride back to my children, I promised myself that neither of my kids will ever have to deal with this level of gender based discrimination rooted in religion that follows us through life and death. And I finally sobbed for 14 hours — feeling the full weight of the loss of my father, the weight of the discrimination I had dealt with, and gently smiled at the irony that my father would never condone this nonsense that I had to put up with, in the name of religion.

RIP, papa. Miss you.