Originally posted by: WormikaGrubby
I know this is ragebait ,I get what you're doing here but I'm biting anyway.
You pretend to care about the plight of women who faced the prospect of abduction rape and lifelong slavery yet your biggest concern is what would have been done with their corpses ? Are you insane ? Certain situations in my life put me at a great deal of vulnerability and once in a while I do worry about sexual assault even when I'm not travelling and the least of my concerns is what anybody would do to my corpse. I would gladly make arrangements for my corpse to be handed over to necrophiles or cannibals ,whoeever would have it. Get real !!
Slavery and other post war bruralities were very much a problem but it's not your place to sit in the safety of your home and decide mass suicide was better for all the women who committed jauhar in Chittorgarh than the life of a mistress or domestic servant which were what female prisomers of war who were taken as slaves ended up being. Saying that an ' honourable ' death is better than the prospect of these experiences adds to the shaming victims of such things go through. It was for each woman at the fort to decide for herself what she wanted to do with her life . Which brings us to whether or not they did it voluntarily.
What are the odds of hundreds of women of different ages, personalities , life experiences and living situations all coming together as a monolith and saying " Let's kill ourselves because that's better than waiting to see if there's some other means of escape " ? How exactly do we say for sure that not even a dozen of them wondered if the tables might turn, if some Rajput leader with the help of neighbouring kingdoms might change the course of things . There are countless stories of Western women who were captured and kept in basements for years , routinely raped and abused in every which way , who waited and waited and waited ,with no contact with the outside world whatsoever , hoping to escape one day . And they did. They talk of horrific abuse for years , some got pregnant from their rspists ( in some cases their own fathers ) ,gave birth in captivity and ended up getting out after decades. If theres one thing you can learn from that , it's that people have the desire to survive ,and live. even if they are women . For so many women to kill themselves en masse it takes a great deal of coercion and indoctrination ,and that doesnt happen without coward shaming and honour mongering. They weren't victims of sexual assault , but they were taught to think and behave like one. They were pressured to preempt rape ,which they were told was the worst thing that could happen to not just them as women but also to their men because duh ,they were the belongings of those men.
You cannot pretend at least a few of those women chickened out and said no I can't do this. What happened to those women? Were they dragged? Were they pushed ? Did those women have the option of saying " I 'm scared , I would rather stay alive and deal with each day as it comes "? NO. So just stop romanticising it already. Hoards of women being conditioned to kill themselves to avoid rape arent anybody's tickets to pride.
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