Recently at the Guruvayoor temple in Kerala, a non-Hindu woman was censured for dipping her feet in the temple pond and making a video. While the woman apologised and deleted the video, it has once again brought to fore the complicated and controlling relationship between religion and women.

Women and their access to places of worship has been restricted or even completely denied in all ancient religions. Zoroastrianism, Vedic religion and Puranic Hinduism, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism and Islam, no religion is innocent of this discrimination. They all contain injunctions that explicitly prohibit, regulate and at the least, disparage women because of physiological attributes like menstruation, the resultant ‘impurity’ as well as the desires evoked by their sexuality. In Jainism’s two sects, the Digambars insist that a woman has to be reborn as a male to be eligible for moksha while in Buddhism a similar inequality is professed between male and female disciples. But these are milder problems compared to other religions.

It is written in Chapter 15 of the book of Leviticus, in the Old Testament, “...and if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days, and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even”.

In the ancient world when humans were terrified by their inability to comprehend nature and its myriad manifestations of lifeforms, and of phenomena such as........

© hindustantimes