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Ankur:
Thanks for your nice analysis for India: Men for
Science and Women for Arts.
I think, the 'Men are from Mars and Women are form
Venus' theory may be true to some extent. However in India, men are flocking to
Science mainly for the following reasons: Jobs.
Since the British introduced English, the meaning
and purpose of education in India has changed forever.
Before the advent of the British, selected uper
caste Indians took the education as a pursuit of knowledge. Indians (mostly
men) went to some schools and learned everything (the sixteen arts: XWLO KOLA)
under a Guru: Language, Mathematics, Astronomy, Logic, Philosophy, Medicine etc
Pursuit of life was the purpose. Knowledge of
arts was highly prized. (Remember: Sahitya, sangito, kala bihino sakhyat
posu pusso-bishanga hino etc)
When the British came, people went to learn English
and Western literature (Shakespeare etc) to get jobs a clerks and IAS
officer under the British. The Indian arts were ignored, the purpose of
education has changed. On the plus side, the common people had access to
education.
Industrial revolution came to India along with the
introduction of Indian Railways, the Coal and Oil Industry. Along with
it came the need to technocrats. Engineering colleges were opened.
Medical colleges were also opened based on Western Medical
sciences.
The classical Indian Science, Math, Medicine,
Language (whatever these were) completely ignored and bypassed.
Men soon found out that to get a engineering job in
PWDs and make more monet than a College Professor, he does not need to study the
liberal Arts at all. All he need is to study Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics
(the royal combination) and Biology and Geology if one wants to get jobs in
those lines. Women, not being the main earner, went to the Liberal Arts where
there were less competition. However, the situation is different now. I was told
that women are flocking to the Sciences in India and making lives for men
miserable. Today, th e situation is reversed specially in Assam.
Girls are going to the science colleges, and boys, not being able to
compete with the Assamese girls, are going for the liberal arts
and for money: Insurgency.
Rajen Barua, Houston
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2005 11:35
AM
Subject: Why Indian Women Study The
'Arts'...
One of the most solidly established cultural dichotomies in Indian
society can be put in this brusque manner : 'Men study the Sciences, Women
practise the Arts.' To see what I mean, take a week off and travel through the
halls of Indian academia : most Literature departments in Indian universities
are filled with women, and the menfolk you will meet there will uneasily
explain to you how they narrowly missed the entrance examination to the local
engineering college. To put it more crudely, Literature is always the last
available option for Indian men. Or take Education or Psychology, for two more
examples : it would be an extremely intrepid Indian man who would dare to
pursue an M.A. course in Education or Pyschology, knowing only too well that
he is on the verge of being labelled as effeminate by his friends. In
contrast, parents whose daughter has earned an M.Sc. in Physics or Mathematics
will ensure that everyone knows how she has risen above her gender, earned her
laurels in the male bastions of the university, and defeated the men at their
own game.
One reason for this ludicrous state of affairs in the
Indian academy is because an ancient European rumour which says that Men are
'rational' and Women are 'sentimental' has sunk so deep into the Indian pysche
that though this myth has now been thoroughly exposed in European philosophy
as a dangerous untruth, many Indians still hold on to the sexist dictums of
their Victorian educators of the late 19th century. Consequently, the view is
still widely held across the length and breadth of India that 'precise' and
'exact' sciences such as physics and chemistry are the special provenance of
the 'masculine reason', and that 'emotional' and 'mawkish' affairs such as
poetry and psychology are the unique privileges of the 'feminine heart'.
Underlying this delegation of certain subjects (branded as
the 'Arts') to the irrational subterranean depths of feminine sentimentality
is a deep ideological conviction that Indian women should not be allowed to
speak for themselves in the socio-political sphere. Women are welcome (indeed,
urged) to study the 'Arts' in the privacy of their homes so long as they just
shut up when it comes to non-trivial 'political' matters that cannot be left
to their unreliable sentiments, and they should not pretend to rise to the
universal and dispassionate heights that are the special domain of the
masculine 'Sciences'. Instead, so the hidden story goes, Indian women should
celebrate the freedom that has been granted to them (by the men, of course, in
a magnanimous gesture) to enjoy their 'Arts', and in turn this 'humane'
education in the 'liberal Arts' will help them to refine their aesthetic
sensitivities, to develop their poetic feelings, and to express their
'romantic' propensities.
In this manner, even today Indian men and women are being
brainwashed with the drivel that the cultivation of the 'Arts' can be detached
from the process of analysis of the political aspects of our social existence,
that is, the examination of the power-relations of the systems we mutually
inhabit. They are brought up to accept the viciously circular argument the
'Arts' are about the essence of 'Life', and that it is this 'Life', which
cannot be examined, investigated, or questioned, that is expressed in various
ways through the 'Arts'. Consequently, a highly rarified and mysterious entity
called 'Life' is constructed, and departments of the 'Arts' then go about
training their women to study this entity which is believed to be ineffable,
spontaneous, creative, organic, impenetrable, unfathomable, genderless,
asocial, and apolitical. Perhaps the women students who are fed this heady
fare do not quite realise that they are being trained to come out, at the
other end of five years of their 'Arts' education, as entities that are as
identityless as the 'Life' they had been studying.
If you still think that there is such a thing as the 'Pure
Arts' that must be safeguarded from any possible contamination by
socio-political issues, consider this. In 1877, a Royal Commission report
declared that English literature would be a good subject for women and
second-class men who could become school-teachers. In other words, the High
Victorians apparently believed that there is something 'feminine' about the
study of Literature, which is precisely the view of many Indian men and women
in the year 2005 as I type these words.
Ankur
26 February 2005
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