Thoughts on women empowerment this Navratri

Women empowerment and female leadership has been an issue of concern of this century and the last, and lately there is increased sensitization of the matter with tabling of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the parliament.

- DR. SURAVI SHARMA KUMAR

This bill (Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam), had been doing the rounds of the parliament since 1996 under different governments, but political compulsions all these years had ensured that it never saw the light of the day. The recent tabling of the bill in the parliament is a political stunt or not, we see a lot of flurry but no plausible solution for implementation.

With the arrival of the auspicious Navratri this year, it reminds us one more time that we ‘women’ were ‘empowered’ since ancient times as is seen extensively in our concepts of Goddesses and in the rituals of Goddess worship.

In our ancient scripts, the feminine factor is strongly recognized in the philosophy of Sankhya -- in the concept of Purusha and Prakriti. Sankhya philosophy teaches us that the universe was born from the union of Prakriti and Purusha. Prakriti here refers to the basic cosmic material that is the root of all beings, and Purusha to the spirit or conscious energy that governs life and reality. Prakriti is an agile, flexible, earthly and eternal entity which represents the female aspect of creation. The prime concept of Sankhya is that of the divine duality of purusha and prakriti–matter and spirit, energy and consciousness. In the Bhagwat Gita, in his question to Krishna, Arjuna puts Prakriti before Purusha. Being a yogi, he knew that one must deal with the material-energy side of things before one can hope to know about spiritual matters. Also, he implied the threefold mystery: knower of the field, the knowing, and the known. Purusha and Prakriti are the two basic, independent and eternal principles that are the main cause and reason behind existence.