Urban women seek empowerment through spirituality

An increasing number of urban Indian urban women are using spirituality to deal with complex interpersonal relationships and protect themselves from the imbalances of modernisation and its culture of 'ego-aggrandisement'.

However, opting for the spiritual path does not necessarily mean renunciation of the material world. Instead, it allows an individual to develop a distinct selfhood even as s/he carries out the routine social-sexual responsibilities implicit in conventional family life, says Renuka Singh in her book, Women Reborn -- an exploration of the spirituality of urban Indian women.

The author, who teaches sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, has adopted the phenomenological perspective while studying the involvement of women in spirituality. She has conducted in-depth interviews with more than 200 women from diverse fields and uses the oral autobiographical narrative to allow her interviewees to speak for themselves.

Talking about the new patterns in the ways in which urban women seek empowerment, Singh says some try to develop it through external sources of financial support, polity and society while others sustain strength and confidence by treading a spiritual path as well.

With most of her respondents displaying a strong commitment to personal relationships and work, the writer shows how spiritual advancement can be reconciled with daily drudgery. In the process, she redefines spirituality as a humanistic pursuit of compassion and wisdom in a seemingly fragmented, mechanised and specialised urban world.

One of the author's subjects, a teacher from an upper-middle class family, says the essence of spirituality is the opposite of material progress because ''I realised that the problems in the world and in my family were caused by the pursuit of material well-being.''

''I understood in my heart that the most important thing was love -- and how much of it I gave and shared and how much I felt I received. The simplicity of this child-mind is spirituality. We are all seeking to experience boundless love and compassion, for ourselves and for others,'' she says.

Singh feels that living in a constant state of stress has triggered off concern for the spiritual imperative in the lifelong journey towards wholeness, creativity, interdependence, transcendence and love. She is critical of the 'postmodernist' approach which, she feels, emphasises the 'difference' in the understanding of gender issues -- linguistic, cultural, socio-economic, political, sexual and psychological -- instead of generating insights in the 'universals'.

The Dalai Lama's perspective on the subject, as related to the author in an interview, stresses positive mental thought as his concept of spirituality. ''There can be spirituality without religion. For instance, you can have a very good human being, warm-hearted and altruistic, with no religion at all... Through certain mental training, it is possible to develop that kind of attitude,'' says Tibet's spiritual guru.

Singh equates spiritual quest with human self-realisation and, through her work, tries to project this hidden capacity which is essentially indescribable but can be felt, intuited or even self-realised.

In the book, a counsellor (one of the subjects) comments on the transformative event of her sister's accident that led to her vocation whereas, in the case of the doctor, the spiritual quest was refuelled in the wake of her mother's death. ''Thus," says the author, "facing the awesome dimensions of life and death makes them discover the sacred spaces in their lives.''

In the case of the aesthetic aspirants -- the designer and the beautician -- situational wisdom determines their advancement in spirituality. Both of them, she feels, have experienced interruptions in their lives but have been able to influence social trends. Their pain has intensified a changed consciousness.

In what is essentially a sociological study of urban women's psyche, Singh concludes that, for them, the family becomes the site of spiritual struggle and family relationships its central concern. In particular, development and acceptance of one's feminine potential through encounters with the mother/mother-in-law, sister/ sister-in-law, daughter/daughter-in-law or the 'other' woman pose a real challenge to one's sense of self.

UNI