July 9, 2022
The soft staccato of the voluminous flute disgorges the feet of the dancers to thump a symmetrical maneuver. With arms clasped around each other’s waist, the dynamics of belonging are preserved. A timely recruit of the ebullient mind to trace the steps meticulously make the tribal dance a perfect combination of creativity and dominance. Somehow, I feel prompted today to splash off the gigs and grits of a ‘Michael Jackson feet-o-mania’ to valet a cultural distillation slated as soporific and vaguely deprecating—a beeline of human Satsuma on a tribal tarmac.
Is it an avocation Hailed! Hatched! Or Hobbled!—frantically not the case!
I am sure it’s the scrabble so diligently played by the NDA to present ‘Droupadi Murmu’ as the presidential candidate for 2022 elections. Murmu, belonging to the Tribal clad, her minority status is a hijacked possession for any political party for vote-bank politics. The murmurs surrounding her candidature has peeled off the skin of the boiling potato to denude the cracks that camouflage its original dexterity.
The sob stories of her dilapidated past, her harrowing stunt with loved ones and her strong affiliation to’ Brahma Kumaris’ (a religious sect) are being made the corner stone to bring out a personality that she would definitely not like to carry as the President of India. And, what about the Tribal dispensation so ignominiously projected in ‘Bollywood movies’?
But, would it be correct to lodge a prejudiced personification of a Presidential candidate, that too for a woman?
If she has her arrows well slithered into the casket, she would be surrounded by men who would clap to her saccharine debonair, but require her to be sangfroid if need be—a swan fortuitously joining the wolf herd. This opens a Pandora box of ‘identity issue’ where women are treated as silhouettes of forbearance no matter what route their inclinations take. What further bludgeons is the whip of ‘women empowerment’—the biggest antagonist to the patriarchal dystopia ingratiated by privileges and pounds.
Talking about ‘identity crisis’, it is insurmountable not to talk about the incongruous abortion laws promulgated by the Supreme Court in the United States, which has surfaced as an incessant targeting of bête noire walk to freedom. The directives are clear—a woman’s body is to bear a baby and then bear the consequences—no matter if the baby is an illicit entity or serendipity was the flavor of to give chastity a moral defiance.
The Supreme Court has dashed a preference of ‘mind over matter’ reducing motherhood to a woman’s prerogative bereft of her beliefs, inclinations, vulnerability and cathartic perseverance. It’s like the rustle of leaves that sing a descant on the folly of foreboding winds, crippling its own structure withered by the blustery storm. But, a woman is no leaf who needs the patriarchal wind to define her substantial existence.
The much awaited response of American President, Joe Biden, left me in splits, proposing to protect access to contraceptives—as if the rubber implant has access to the physical and emotional baggage a woman carries. Deviations from what seems propitious will only make a woman screech her throat out of the neck. What has now emerged as a deleterious identity crisis to impinge on a woman’s reproductive freedom is a cost that the progeny will have to pay.
Women have to take a step forward to expel out a character that defines their belongingness to. Either it’s the presidential nomination or the women deprived of their reproductive rights, the identity in prevalent paroxysms should be a clean state. The tribal dance, in geniality, is a validation of sanguine camaraderie to achieve equilibrium. When feet are thumbed to the ground, the Earth shrivels and echoes a voice that arouses the body of its stupor to carry the next foot effort in a collective embrace.