Defrauded $250,000? BK Shivani says, "It's your karma"

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Pink Panther

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Re: Defrauded $250,000? BK Shivani says, "It's your karma"

Post09 Nov 2019

John Lennon wrote that ”Woman is the nigger of the world”. That is, even among the aristocracy and wealthy elites of the dominant white race ( or lighter-skinned in the case of India) women were/are mere possessions who had to do as they were told.

because.parmeshaw wrote:Poor matas bow down to young BK girls even after going through life’s up and down, upbringing the children and facing the reality of life. This is tragic in one sense.

Women in India until today have to bear, even in the higher castes, the heavy weight of patriarchy. Being married off for social or commercial advantage is considered as a normal part of women's fate, with only the luckiest escaping the tyranny of a dominating demanding husband & in-laws which sometimes turns violent, the potential injuries and traumas of childbirth (even today post-natal care accessible only to the few) and the financial bondage as the woman lacks financial independence.

No wonder those whom the BKs call half-kumaris (now celibate but not virginal women) will often bow down to the full Kumaris (hymen intact women). They must see them as most blessed and fortunate, obviously (to the religiously minded) chosen by god to have escaped such a fate as their own. And when you have the head of the organisation, Dadi Janki, trading on her story of escaping a bad marriage and difficult child birth (including leaving her child) to join the Om Mandli as a tale of courage, this reinforces the idea of BKs as the avenue of escape for the chosen few rather than as agents for change for society generally.

This is despite the BKs’ self-declared and self-advertised "proto-feminist” credentials. They are not particularly known for that except by the few who accept them at their word, mostly in the West. (I'd be interested to hear from Indian members here how that sales pitch is received by feminists in India).

It’s ironic too. They would have all women become BK, but if that happened the society that supplies them with ‘members’ and money, would disappear. They actually depend on the "body conscious” activity of society to sustain themselves over the decades, playing to people’s deluded idea that they will be "cleared of sin" if they donate or join that congregation. (BKs are of course not he only ones who do this). Ironic also in the way they denigrate sanyasis for needing to abandon "householder" life to follow their spiritual callings. At least the sanyasi doesn't impose his life onto those he's left and they are free to live life as they wish, to start anew without him (traditonally very few female sanyassis) .

Some centres in the West were run/staffed by males due to the ambition for expansion exceeding the number of "suitable" women available. I remember a couple of Australian women BKs, who were not subservient wallflower types, mothers whose children were already young adults, who told me how offensive they found it to have these very young male "centre-wassis” (still in their 20s) sit on the gadhi and give them advice in ”classes” about how to live their lives, about relationships and attitudes to family. One said she resented the way her children were depicted in some Murlis as ”karmic burdens” etc.

The unfortunate thing about how human psychology responds to religious experiences and faith is how it leads us to rationalise all the things that are wrong because we associate our experiences as somehow dependent on that structure, the environment that our experience was had in.

That is not unlike the entrapped woman who stay in a bad marriage despite all that has gone wrong, because they see it as the place that she has some good moments, where at least there is some food and shelter, and the expectations of her immediate community need to be met. It is even more so if a woman chooses a marriage against the advice of others and it turns out bad, due to having invested so much emotion, time, energy, money (dowry?) and stubborn pride it is harder to admit it was a major mistake and leave than to think things may change if more time, energy, money and emotional investment is put in.
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Re: Defrauded $250,000? BK Shivani says, "It's your karma"

Post09 Nov 2019

Pink Panther wrote:Women in India until today have to bear, even in the higher castes, the heavy weight of patriarchy. Being married off for social or commercial advantage is considered as a normal part of women's fate, with only the luckiest escaping the tyranny ...

Slight aside.

The BKs always turned the tables on their own community, the Bhaiband/Sindhworkis of Sind, portraying them as backward and ignorant (where in truth it was God Lekhraj Kirpalani who was). In fact, very many of them were modernists and grasping all of the opportunities for female emancipation that the British were offering in India.

And, remember, while Lekhraj Kirpalani was turning his females into braindead gopis worshipping him as Krishna, India was giving birth to female lawyers, female pilots, female academics, female politicians and freedom fighters for Independence (which Lekhraj Kirpalani saw as traitorship against the British), female business women and so on. Saddhu Vashwani was educating them in real knowledge and teaching them business skills to support themselves as his college for girls/women.

See, for example, Freedom fighters and ticket checkers: The trail-blazing women of pre-Partition Sindh.

I read just the other day that, at this time, dozens of young girls/women were being sent to Lady Hardinge Medical College in New Delhi to train as doctors.
Part of the reason urban Sindhi women were able to work outdoors before their counterparts in many other parts of the subcontinent was because they had the opportunity to go to school as early as 1885. That’s when a reformer named Navalrai Advani, who was influenced by the Brahmo Samaj movement, opened the first school for girls in the town of Hyderabad in Sindh.

This didn’t just mean that woman were confident enough to do so and that their families supported these ambitions: it also implied the men of Sindh accepted the authority of a woman.

Funny, because both Saddhu Vaswani and the Brahmo Samaj movement were targets of Lekhraj Kirpalani's contempt.

The photo in that article above shows, a nineteen-year-old Mira Advani ... with a first-class double-graduate with an MA and MSc in pure and applied Mathematics from DJ Sind College in Karachi in 1943.

So much for the achievement of Om Radhe being able to sing, "Twinkle, twinkle little star" in English.

The article also mentions, women marrying in their late twenties to men of their choice and that out of a list of South Asians who became barristers at three Inns of Court in London before Independence, were two Sindhi women; Saraswati Dayaram Mirchandani, who was called to the Bar in 1937, and Shakuntala Rochiram Hingorani in 1947.

They were even sent abroad to the UK to study.

From: 'Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland' by Saaz Aggarwal.
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