: Patriarchy in language #IndiaNEWS #Opinion The question about how a woman who is elected to the post of President should be addressed in Hindi first came to the fore when Pratibha Patil became the

Patriarchy in language #IndiaNEWS #Opinion
The question about how a woman who is elected to the post of President should be addressed in Hindi first came to the fore when Pratibha Patil became the first woman to occupy the highest constitutional post in India in 2007. There were debates about whether she should be addressed as ‘Rashtrapati’ or ‘Rasthrapatni’, but that debate did not invite the amount of uproar that was caused recently when Adhir Ranjan Choudhary, the Leader of Opposition in the Lower House addressed President Droupadi Murmu as ‘Rasthrapatni’. Unleashing a scathing attack on Choudhary, the ruling BJP demanded an apology from the Congress party for insulting President Murmu which led to huge drama both inside and outside the Parliament. Though Choudhary apologized for his remark citing his poor Hindi, the issue has sparked a much necessary debate that concerns the gendered nature of our language.
The controversy that emerged around Chaudhary’s remark can only be understood if we look into what the two words ‘pati’ and ‘patni’ mean and what meanings are attributed when both these words are suffixed with Rashtra (nation). The Hindi word Rashtrapati is used as a translation of the English word ‘President’ which is generally used to refer to the presiding head of a group and is a gender-neutral term, but its Hindi translation as ‘Rashtrapati’ is not neutral, because of the suffix ‘pati’.
Etymologically the Hindi word ‘pati’ is part of the Indo-European language family where it usually means ‘lord’ or ‘master’. When used as a suffix it usually means ‘lord of…’. For e. g. the Sanskrit word for a married householder is ‘Grahapati’ which means lord of the household. Similarly, ‘Senapati’ means the commander of the army; ‘Ganapati’ means lord of the tribe; ‘Chhatrapati’ means the lord of kings. Such examples can only be multiplied to show the power relation that the word ‘pati’ denotes. In our everyday usage, the word ‘pati’ generally means husband but again the inherent patriarchal power relation is reflected through compound words like ‘pati-dev’ or ‘pati-parmeshwar’, which refer to the husband as lord or god for the wife.
In contrast to pati, the word ‘patni’, which is used for ‘wife’, has no such meaning. It is a relational term unlike ‘pati’ which is an independent term and is used only for a married woman. It is simply a female derivative of pati and therefore has an inherent sexual connotation and meaning attached to it. ‘Patni’ is merely a sexual partner of a man, moreover, there is no counterpart to Hindi words like ‘pati-dev’, or ‘pati-parmeshwar’ in any Indian vernacular for a married woman, which only shows the power differential between pati and patni in Indian society.

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