India is so far behind in valuing its women in all fields of activity that it must catch up with the past before it can enter the future. The defence establishment has had a few good ideas in this direction lately, what with the IAF’s first women jet fighter pilots and the like. But of particular note is an assertion by the Union minister of defence, Manohar Parrikar, that the Indian Army should raise its first all-women battalion.
A good idea is never too late, but Mr Parrikar also spoke about it being a gradual process. This comment, however, has more to do with getting the men of the armed forces used to the idea than preparing women for the shock of battle.
Women have always been deeply entwined with the subject of war. They have caused them and they have fought them. But history ignores them once the bloodletting is done. Both mythology and history favour for them the role of vamp. Look at mythology’s treatment of Helen. A woman who should be known as Helen of Sparta comes down to us as Helen of Troy, a reminder that Ilium fell because of the female of the species.
History gives us Cleopatra as a woman bedding two very famous married men, Julius Gaius Caesar and his general, Mark Antony, and causing Rome all sorts of trouble, but a more careful study of the Roman sources by modern historians demonstrates that she was as capable as any man when it came to raising armies and building fleets. She did that both more than once, for Caesar and Antony, and was also adept at handling an economy dependent on the Nile’s ebb and flow. The Romans benefited from the soundness of her economic acumen soon after her death but she never got the credit. The earliest writers of the histories of these queens were men. The Indian military’s denial of fighting rights to women is a Victorian hangover that only now shows signs of wearing off. Victorian England treated its women like delicate china. It could get so bad that if a woman passed wind, a man, if he was to be considered a gentleman, would take the fall. You could imagine what they would have thought of sending her to war.
Why Victorian Britain forgot about Boudicea, the 1st-century Celtic queen who fought the Romans, has much to do with Arthurian romance taking off in 12th-century Britain and the much later chivalric code that assumed patterns of behaviour towards women in the past.
The Indian armed forces trace their origin to India’s colonial past and British traditions, many Indianised, still exist. Kitchener of Khartoum, a soldier of Victoria’s England, reorganised the army in India within years of her death, and he, and soldiers like him, instilled the early values.
Before that, in 1858, India’s masters had felt the fury of Lakshmibai of Jhansi. Hugh Rose, the British general who fought and defeated her at Gwalior in the battle that cost her life, described the warrior queen as the most dangerous of the Indian leaders.
World War II shook things up further. Indian women served in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, many of them falling to the advancing Japanese. And there was the British SOE’s (the famous Special Operations Executive) clandestine operator Noor Inayat Khan, taken by the Gestapo and executed in Dachau. Indian fighting women go much further back if we are to mention Razia Sultan, the first woman ruler in Muslim history, and Chand Bibi, who fought the armies of the great Mughal emperor, Akbar.
Britain’s own Victorian hangover ended on Friday when it said it would end the ban on combat roles for women. To deny women in independent India the right to fight for their country is to do them a disservice. Minister Parrikar’s idea is something that nature has already decreed: it is the lioness that does the hunting.
