Barking dogs seldom bite
But they keep me awake all night
Love is such a wild goose chase
How elusive the beloved’s embrace?
I know these proverbs are a bit goofy
It’s Bachchoo trying to sound like a Sufi…”
From Forked Tongue Dialogues by Bachchoo
The Narendra Modi government has proposed passing a Uniform Civil Code into law. It’s one of those long overdue reforms of democracy which the British Raj was too timorous to touch and Jawaharlal Nehru and subsequent Congress Pms strategically, without resort to principle, left alone. It can be likened in the UK to abolishing the criminalisation of homosexuality in the 1960s or indeed to the legalisation by the David Cameron government of gay marriage. If the Indian Parliament takes this troublesome and antiquated bull by the horns and wrestles it to a well-deserved death in the arena (I am writing this from Spain and getting a bit carried away!) I will shout Ole! And possibly reassess the significance of the reform. Maybe it will be more revolutionary than legalising gay marriage and can be compared to granting British women the vote in the early 20th century.
All the codes of law of the main religious groups of India discriminate in one way or the other against women. The Hindu inheritance laws were and are unfair to daughters of the dynasty, the Muslim divorce law allows a woman to be cast out of a marriage at the whim of a husband. The Parsi law segregates the Parsi women who marry outside the community. It doesn’t allow the children of Parsi mothers and non-Parsi fathers to enter the Zoroastrian faith or be integrated with grace into the Parsi community as one of their own. I don’t want to get into legal arguments here. I am very well aware that the law as presently formulated without a Uniform Civil Code, while not specifying discrimination, supports it through legal sophistry. All that should be swept into the dustbins of the past. A Uniform Civil Code, even initiated and supported by the Modi government, is as feminist an issue as votes for women was in the UK in the early 20th century. Of course such legislation must ensure that “uniform” means uniform and the entire public of India, for and against, ought to be involved in the debate.
After the Brexit vote in Britain, I am convinced this debate should not be put to a referendum, but should be vigorously discussed in every media and democratic forum available to the country. Most commentators have already argued the pros and cons of the effects such a code would have on Muslim divorce law and on Hindu inheritance law. There hasn’t been much said about how such a uniform code would affect Parsi Zoroastrians, so allow me to rush in where angels fear to tread. In my childhood in Pune, I lived in a neighbourhood at the edge of the cantonment with a substantial number of Parsi families mixed in with Sindhis, Maharashtrians, Catholics and Muslims. On the opposite side of the street, a little way down, lived a Parsi lady with her son who was a few years older than me and my friends from the neighbourhood. This lady used to run a bookshop in the days of the Raj with her husband, catering to the reading needs of, among others, British soldiers stationed in the town.
She had a couple of children and became pregnant for the third time. When the child was born the husband disowned her and the boy because the baby had blue eyes and blonde hair and the husband claimed it was not his. There were no DNA tests in those days so the lady’s insistence that she had not committed adultery with a “Tommy” couldn’t be scientifically verified. The husband took his two children and left the lady with her newborn baby. She insisted that he was her husband’s child and therefore entitled, as the son of a Parsi father and mother, to be initiated into the faith She even found a Parsi priest who was willing to perform the “navjote” ceremony which at the early age of seven or eight initiates young boys and girls into Zoroastrianism. The boy had been taught his Parsi prayers but was regularly barred from going into the Parsi fire temple by its priests who sided with the father’s contention that the boy was not deemed a Parsi as he was the illegitimate son of an Englishman.
His mother contrived to have the navjote ceremony in her two-room, dilapidated home. No one from the neighbourhood, except for my grandfather and two of my aunts, accepted her invitation to be guests at the ceremony. As it progressed, a mob of Parsis, men and women, gathered in the street outside her house with black flags and shouted slogans denouncing the ceremony, the priest and, as they saw it, defending the Zoroastrian faith from being polluted by the inclusion of non-Parsi blood. It was, as my grandfather recollected years later, an ugly episode.
He was a fairly progressive sort of person and I am sure he would have welcomed the Uniform Civil Code as he argued, even all those years ago, without any recourse to the genetic sciences, that children were primarily the offspring of their mothers as their bodies were nurtured and brought to babyhood in the womb. Of course times have changed. My sister married a non-Parsi and gave rise to my beautiful nephews and niece. She wasn’t ostracised by the family or the community but her children were, by prejudicial tradition, barred from being formally initiated into the Zoroastrian faith. When my half-English twins visited my mother in Bengaluru she was permitted to take them into the firetemple but their cousins, my sister’s kids, were barred. The UCC in law should change all that and would go some way to stave off the extinction that the Indian Parsi-Zoroastrian community faces through its dwindling numbers.
