Making The Case For A Gender-Neutral Raksha Bandhan

What could go wrong with Raksha Bandhan?

Phoolon ka taron ka sabka kahana hai – that ‘70s ballad celebrating sibling love – makes you tear up. How you miss your childhood Raksha Bandhan festivities —jostling with girls in crowded streets to find the best rakhi for your brother’s wrist. The warm, scratchy feeling in the back of your throat when it was time to tie the knot. The explosion of laughter when your brother offered you money or a dress. An ornament tucked in the folds of your heart: Rakhi. Neither the god-fearing nor the godless could possibly hold a grudge against this festival, you feel, with its history of leaping over religious boundaries and forging new bonds.

How many festivals are devoted to celebrating sibling camaraderie and love? How eager you are to pass the torch on to your children and other unenlightened beings, tell them warm fuzzy stories of Draupadi and Krishna, of  Yama and Yamuna. Our families are as strong as bee hives because of festivals like this, you declare arrogantly in front of a group of tender-faced boys and girls.

“I’m not celebrating Rakhi-Vakhi”

So what if your American daughter wakes up in the morning on the day of Rakhi with a frown on her forehead and distrust in her eyes? She points at her younger brother and says, Wait a minute, I’m the one protecting him. Why shouldn’t he tie Rakhi on my wrist?

Don’t be a coroner who dissects festivals, you say.

I’m not celebrating Rakhi-Vakhi, she declares, nevertheless.

You are a felled tree about to crash with a deathly howl, cursing the day you touched down in America. Oh, how it has wrecked everything precious and close to your heart!

The back and forth that follows only deepens the divide and makes you see the cruel, impassable gulf. But you console yourself and remind yourself of your daughter’s teenage self-absorption. Don’t you need to be the grownup and help her?

You turn into your manipulative best. Festivals are just meant to be fun, you say, with a smile on your lips and a twinkle in your eye. You joke about your grandmother going to crazy lengths to ensure her brother received her Rakhi on time, back in those days when people didn’t have FedEx or Amazon Prime! You recount how your mother spent hours making gulab jamuns, her brother’s favorite sweet. It’s so easy now. Just buy a Rakhi thread online; if you don’t want to cook, just get delivery. Tying Rakhi takes less than a second. So, what’s the big deal?

Unfortunately, your arguments fall on ears sealed with American hot glue.

The Great Letdown

Is it the end of Rakhi? You feel trapped in the great mixing bowl slowly grinding you up into pieces to ensure you are not a person, only atoms and molecules held together loosely and humming stupidly like drones in the crisp American space. All the time spent raising kids unravels before your eyes. Yesterday you were a living, throbbing node soaking up signals from the past and streaming messages to the future. But today, you feel like a shriveling stem in the wasteland of modern life.

At night, your daughter’s words swarm around you and assail you like relentless, buzzing flies. If only you could zap them and trash them away in biodegradable bags. You certainly won’t allow them to peck your bleeding heart. Unfortunately, even though you clamp your ears, their sharp raspiness tears into your head. Don’t you see the hypocrisy of begging for protection if you happen to be the one offering protection? In how many ways do I help him? Let’s count the ways!

You do remember a twinge of bitter aftertaste after a day full of Rakhi fun; the annoyance of watching worthless, unemployed men and boys smiling pleasantly, swagging in verandahs, their arms adorned with colorful threads and bracelets of all the girls under their protection. It didn’t matter that they were desperately in need of help—moving in and out of jails, addicted to alcohol and drugs. It didn’t matter that the sisters were towering pillars of support for the brothers as well as their parents. Even in the Mahabharata story about Rakhi, it was Draupadi who first came to Krishna’s rescue.

Implicit messaging can last a lifetime

A thing once seen cannot be unseen. Your girl knows what gets conveyed when you tell her to tie the sacred Rakhi thread around her brother’s arm; what gets conveyed when she honors her brother by performing his aarti with a plate of burning camphor, sweets, and incense sticks; what gets conveyed when she anoints her brother’s forehead with tilak and feeds him before tying the thread around his arm; what unsaid message is conveyed when he offers money or a gift to her.

When he gifts a piece of garment or money to her, you are planting the notion that he, courageous and confident, will venture into the tough real world to earn and provide for his family. You reinforce the idea that housework is her domain when she feeds him with her fingers after spending hours cooking for him. Whether you like it or not, you are instilling the idea that he, no matter his age or accomplishments, is more valued than her when she performs his aarti, but he doesn’t do the same for her.

She knows you think of her as the weaker sex.

You know how difficult it is to undo biases taught at a young age, but here you are planting so many biases on impressionable young minds. You turn Rakhi, which should ideally be just symbolic of the enduring love between brothers and sisters, into a tool to make her feel inferior, helpless, small, and in need of protection, and to inculcate a feeling of superiority in him.

Equity begins at home

Will a man who thinks of himself as the protector of his sisters go out in the world and be comfortable with women who don’t look up to him? Is he conditioned to see women as his subordinates since they need his protection and money? Will he view smart and confident women as arrogant and odd? Will he establish relationships with other women based on equality and mutual respect?

What we do when we have fun influences our thinking on every aspect of life and exposes who we are. But you have held every aspect of your festivals sacrosanct, so you haven’t consciously looked for ways to change or improve. What if you asked your daughter and son to offer Rakhi to each other, or if your daughter tied Rakhi on the wrists of her sisters, too?

Over a century ago, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore reinterpreted the festival to unite Hindus and Muslims during the 1905 Partition. In some communities in India, girls do offer Rakhis to sisters-in-law .

The festival could grow to include families with only brothers or only sisters. The responsibility of earning money and protecting the family would spread evenly on all shoulders. The idea of a man guarding a woman would be gone. The idea of feeble, passive girls would be gone. But this special day would continue to rope in siblings, who’ve spent the most intimate moments of childhood together, lounging on sofas, eating meals with parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, being there for each other, loving and nurturing each other, would remain unchanged.

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