Freedom to Choose Tradition Is Freedom Too

 

Kriti Sanon has made a statement. She asks a simple question: what girls will wear and what they will not wear—why should other people tell them? And when will this stop?

Rahul Gandhi reposted her statement and wrote: “What a woman wears, what she does and where she goes is her choice. Stop trolling women for exercising their freedom. Smash the patriarchy.”

At one level, the proposition is unexceptionable. A woman is an individual. Her dignity cannot depend upon the approval of others. Nobody should have the authority to police a woman's choices merely because they dislike them.

But the moment this argument is placed in the context of Raksha Bandhan, a larger question arises.

Is a festival merely an occasion for individual choice? Or is it also an expression of a civilisation?

This distinction matters.

Raksha Bandhan is not simply another day on the calendar. It is a religious and civilisational expression. Like every living tradition, it has its own symbols, rituals and conventions. Just as there are rules and practices associated with puja, there are practices associated with a festival.

To understand this is not to deny individual freedom.

It is to understand that individual freedom and civilisational practice are two different categories.

The problem with much of today's public discourse is that everything is reduced to the individual. What I wear. What I do. Where I go. What I choose.

But civilisation is built precisely on things that cannot be reduced to the individual.

A civilisation is a collective memory. It survives through rituals, symbols, customs, stories, festivals and practices transmitted from one generation to another.

A festival, therefore, is not merely an aesthetic event.

And aesthetics is not merely clothes.

A civilisation's aesthetics includes the sophistication of its thinking, its cultural value system, its understanding of beauty, dignity, sacredness and social relationships. Clothing is only one visible expression of that larger aesthetic universe.

This is where the argument surrounding Raksha Bandhan becomes revealing.

If a woman chooses to reject a traditional practice, that is her choice.

But if another woman chooses to follow the same tradition, that too is her choice.

Freedom cannot mean freedom only from tradition. It must also mean freedom to choose tradition.

Otherwise, the language of liberty itself becomes prescriptive.

There is an even larger contradiction that deserves attention.

When a three-year-old girl is made to wear a burqa, does the same vocabulary of patriarchy and freedom automatically arise? A child of that age cannot possibly understand the ideological meaning of the clothing she is being asked to wear. If concern for women's freedom is genuinely universal, then the concern cannot begin and end with one particular cultural tradition.

Freedom cannot be selective.

Patriarchy cannot be opposed selectively.

And cultural criticism cannot become a one-way street directed only at Sanatan traditions.

This is why the argument cannot simply be dismissed as a debate about clothes.

It is about how we understand Sanatan civilisation itself.

Whether the subject is Manu Rishi, Raksha Bandhan, rituals, festivals or traditional practices, the same question repeatedly appears: can a civilisation be discussed without first understanding its internal logic?

Sanatan civilisation was never merely a collection of rules imposed from above. It is a vast and evolving civilisational tradition containing rituals, philosophies, customs, debates and diverse ways of living.

To disagree with any particular practice is legitimate.

But to reduce an entire civilisation to patriarchy is not analysis. It is caricature.

This is also why Rahul Gandhi's intervention deserves scrutiny.

His sentence about a woman's freedom is perfectly intelligible in isolation. But when it is attached to a specific civilisational practice, the issue becomes more complicated. The question is no longer merely what an individual woman can choose. The question is what the cultural expression itself represents.

And that is precisely where the modern political vocabulary often becomes inadequate.

A festival is not merely a fashion statement.

A ritual is not merely a costume.

A symbol is not merely an object.

Each carries meaning accumulated over generations.

The mistake is to assume that everything traditional is oppressive and everything individualistic is liberating.

Civilisation is more complicated than that.

A woman can exercise her freedom by refusing a tradition.

She can exercise the same freedom by embracing it.

She can reinterpret it.

She can participate in it differently.

She can even reject it completely.

The essential point is that the choice must remain hers.

But that principle must be applied consistently.

If freedom means choice, then tradition must also be allowed to be chosen.

If patriarchy means coercion, then coercion must be opposed wherever it occurs.

And if pluralism means respecting diversity, then Sanatan practices cannot be treated as legitimate objects of ridicule merely because they are traditional.

India's civilisational genius has never been the destruction of the individual in favour of the collective. Nor has it been the destruction of tradition in the name of the individual.

It has been the ability to hold the two together.

That balance is now being lost.

The debate over Kriti Sanon and Rahul Gandhi therefore presents a much bigger question than what a woman should wear on Raksha Bandhan.

It asks whether modern India can understand freedom without contempt for tradition, and tradition without coercion of the individual.

That is the real test.

Because a civilisation does not survive by forcing every generation to obey everything that came before.

Nor does it survive by teaching every generation to despise everything that came before.

It survives when each generation understands its inheritance, questions it intelligently, preserves what is meaningful, reforms what needs reform—and passes the civilisational memory forward.

Freedom gives the individual a choice. Civilisation gives that choice meaning.