Pointing to the prosperous Indic civilisation where women held all major public portfolios, Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, put adequate women’s representation as a precondition to the development of any society.
“Ancient Indic civilisation was prosperous because all the important public portfolios were held by women – education or knowledge by Saraswathi, wealth or finance by Lakshmi, and even the power by Shakti. We had a great feminist civilisation where all the important responsibilities were given to women,” Ms. Pandit said stressing the need for adequate women representation in all public spheres.
She was delivering the keynote address at a seminar on nationality and national unity organised at Gulbarga University as part of the 19th conference of Political Sciences Teachers’ Association on Thursday.
Pointing to the huge gap between men and women in employment in India, Ms. Pandit said that only 23.6% of women graduates, as compared to 71.6% of male graduates, were able to get employed in India and stressed the need for constructive measures to fill the gap.
“India ranks 135 among a total of 146 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index. It is even behind Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Only Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan perform worse than India in South Asia,” she said.
In her brief address, Ms. Pandit raised issues pertaining to four major issues – language, religion, caste and gender – and presented her views on the ways to address them.
“India had 27 official languages and 600 dialects. Every language is as important as the other one. Do we need a link language for better communication among the speakers of these native languages? The issue came up in the Constituent Assembly and the members were equally divided between Hindi and English. With an extra vote by the president of the Constituent Assembly, Hindi became the language of the Union. In my opinion, every region should become multi-lingual and its people should be able to speak more languages for better communication,” Ms. Pandit said.
In her written speech, which was not presented but distributed among the participants, she emphasised the need to reformulate and deploy India’s own narrative — the Indic narrative — in the current global order.
“We have a rich legacy but we have been in a state of self-denial due to eurocentric dominance in our academic ecosystem unlike the Chinese who have been able to promote their grand narrative in the community of international relations. We need to acknowledge and celebrate this cultural continuum as we remain buoyant as a civilisational state in spite of the various invasions which couldn’t deter our cultural ethos nor obliterate our existence. This calls for creating an ecosystem of scholarship based on the Indic Renaissance,” she noted.
Gulbarga University Vice-Chancellor Dayanand Agsar presided over the inaugural session.
