You Belong to Nobody? A Second Thought on Smashing the Patriarchy

Savio SALDANHA

10.5281/zenodo.22121594

27 August 2026

 

    There is a verse in the Manusmriti, chapter 9, verse 3, that reads:

‘pitā rakṣati kaumāre bhartā rakṣati yauvane, rakṣanti sthavire putrā na strī svātantryam arhati’

            Which literally means that, "The father guards her in childhood, the husband guards her in youth and the sons guard her in old age. The woman is never fit for independence." It is not a stray line. The verse before it says women must be kept under control by the men of the family. The verses after it treat guarding a wife as the highest duty a husband has, and treat a widow's chastity after her husband's death as her defining virtue for the rest of her life. Read this slowly and you see what it actually does. A woman never becomes her own person. She is handed from one male guardian to the next. Protection, in this text, is another word for custody.

            This is the background against which Rahul Gandhi spoke to a crowd of young women in Pune last week, in the middle of a charged political season where Manusmriti gets thrown at the BJP and RSS almost as often as it gets read on its own terms. He quoted that verse, called it the Manusmriti mindset, and told the women they do not belong to their father, their husband, or their son. You belong to yourself, he said. Smash the patriarchy. Be loud, be proud.

            I agree with the diagnosis. What I want to sit with here is the line he offered as the cure. A rally is not a treatise, and it is worth engaging the sentence Rahul actually said, in full, rather than the shortened version of it that will end up on placards or circulated as memes. I have already come across several such photos with tagline, you do not belong to anybody but yourself. This is the better one than another shortened version which reads, you do not belong to anybody. This is where I see the danger. When Rahul spoke he addressed a real socio-political reality of the oppression of women. He spoke from this particular context. The photo memes take the tagline while ignoring the context, presuming readers already know it. I reflect on this phenomenon as a Jesuit, a teacher and a counselor who has some experience of working with the youth, women, tribals and the dalits.

What the slogan gets right

            Rahul was not making things up. The verse says what he said it says. And what it prescribes is not protection in any ordinary sense as some have claimed. A father who genuinely protects his daughter wants her safe and also wants her to grow into someone who can stand on her own. The Manusmriti does not want that. It wants the transfer of custody to never end. That is worth naming clearly, and smashing it is the right instinct. So when Rahul says a woman does not belong to her father or her husband or her son, he is right. Nobody owns another person. That much is not in question for me.

This was never only an Indian problem

    It is worth saying plainly that Manusmriti was not some isolated case of one culture getting this wrong. Aristotle, writing in Greece in the fourth century before Christ, said something with the same structure in his book on biology, Generation of Animals, book two, chapter three. He wrote that the female is, in effect, a deformed male, and that menstrual fluid is semen in an incomplete form, lacking what he called the principle of soul. In his Politics, book one, chapter thirteen, he goes further and says the woman has the capacity to reason but not the authority that reason needs to rule, which for him settles her place under the man's authority in the household.

    Two civilizations, arriving at the same idea: women are a lesser, incomplete version of men and that incompleteness justifies permanent male authority over them. That should tell us something. This is not a defect of one text or one region. It is a pattern in how men in power have thought about women across most of human history, dressed up differently depending on where you stood, biology in Athens, dharma in India.

    Neither tradition stayed frozen there. Bhakti poets and later reformers pushed back against verses like this one from inside Indian religious life. The Greek and Roman thought moved past Aristotle's biology too. So both traditions were larger than their worst verse, and it would be its own kind of unfairness to treat one line of thought as the whole of either.

 

Where I got uneasy

            Rahul's actual sentence was "you belong to nobody except yourself." That is a complete claim, not a fragment, and it deserves to be read on its own terms rather than as loose talk that happened to leave a phrase dangling. I have already explained the shortened versions making rounds and how I look at them.

            If I or someone read on its own terms, here is what it says: there is exactly one legitimate owner of you, and it is you. Not your father. Not your husband. Not your son, just yourself. That is a real position, not a slip of the tongue. It is close to what a great deal of modern liberal thought says about the person, that I am self-possessed, and self-possession is the ground of my dignity.

            I still get uneasy here, but for a more precise reason than I started with. If the self is the last and only owner of the self, the self also becomes the last court of appeal. Nobody has a claim on you, which sounds exactly right against Manusmriti's father-husband-son chain. But it also means, followed all the way through, that nobody's judgment of you can ever outrank your own. I have sat with enough people in distress, students back in India buckling under exam pressure or being torn apart by what strangers said about them online, or going through serious relationship breakups to know that a self answerable only to itself is not always a self at peace. Sometimes it is a self with nobody left to check it, and nobody left to catch it either.

    To be fair to the other side of this, traditional embeddedness has its own well documented costs. Restricted mobility, restricted schooling and no real way out of a bad marriage to name a few. Nobody sane wants to trade freedom for those. The real question is not whether the old bonds were worth keeping. They were not. It is whether the right alternative to being owned by others is being owned only by yourself, or something else again.

What I would say instead

    As a Jesuit I would put it differently, and the difference sits exactly where Rahul's sentence ends. His sentence ends at yourself. I want to press on past that. Kindly be patient with me as I say that we all belong to God. This belief does not undo anything that Rahul said about not being owned by fathers, husbands, or sons. It agrees with all of it. But at the same time it does not let the self be the final resting place either. It means we are accountable, all of us, for what we do, and nobody, not even the self, gets the last word on that just by being the self.

    And next to it, morally, I say we are accountable to the society we live in. That is Gaudium et Spes speaking, the Second Vatican Council's document on the Church in the modern world, paragraph 24, which says a person cannot fully find himself/herself except through a sincere gift of himself/herself. Not through detachment from others but through gift. A self that belongs only to itself has nothing left to give and nobody left to answer to but its own judgment. That is not what any of us, man or woman, was made for.

    I say this as a Catholic, and I know the language is not available to everyone who was standing in that crowd in Pune. Most of those women were not going to walk home wondering what a Vatican council said forty years before they were born. A Hindu, a Muslim, an atheist woman in that stadium has her own ground to stand on for saying the same thing without needing mine, human dignity, equal citizenship, the plain constitutional fact that she is protected under the law regardless of what any dharmaśāstra says about her. I am not claiming my language is the only door into this argument. I am saying every version of it needs some floor under autonomy, whatever name a person gives that floor, or autonomy on its own will not hold the weight being put on it.

 

The harder question

    But there is a real problem hiding in what I just said, and I do not want to dodge it. What happens when the society you are supposed to be accountable to is itself the Manusmriti society? What happens when the accountability structure is the oppression? This is not a hypothetical for the women Rahul was addressing. Their families, their neighbourhoods, sometimes their own religious world, are shaped by exactly the mindset that the verse encodes. Telling them to be accountable to that society is not a moral answer. It is just handing the custody back to the oppressors. So accountability to society as it currently stands cannot be the last word. But that does not mean the answer is no accountability. It means the accountability moves. It moves from the society that exists now to the society that should exist.

    Mary's song in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 51 to 52, does exactly this: "He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly." She does not say she belongs to nobody. She names an order that is currently in power, the proud, the powerful on their thrones, and says God is against it. That is not a rejection of accountability. It is a redirection of it, away from an order that crushes people and toward one that does not yet fully exist but is being called into being.

    As stated earlier that redirection needs a floor of its own, or it becomes whatever the speaker wants it to be. Here is mine: no person handed to another as property, and each person treated with the dignity that is theirs by right. Every person answerable and every person answered to in turn. Dignity that does not depend on whose household you were born into. This is not an empty standard. It is exactly the standard the Manusmriti fails, and it is a standard anyone can check an order against, mine or Rahul's or anyone else's.

 

What Ignatius adds

    There is one more piece I want to bring in, because it is the tradition I was formed in. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Principle and Foundation that opens the Spiritual Exercises, paragraph 23, has a concept he calls indifference. It does not mean not caring. It means being free enough from disordered attachment to anything created that you are available to what God actually wants. He says we should not be more inclined to health than to sickness, to riches than to poverty, to a long life than a short one, but should desire and choose only what leads to the end for which we are made.

    Notice what indifference is not. It is not detachment from every relationship. It is detachment from whatever attachment gets in the way of the right one. Manusmriti's structure, where a woman exists to serve her father's household and then her husband's line, is a disordered attachment, a woman held not for her own sake but for what she secures for the men around her. Ignatian indifference would cut that attachment loose in a heartbeat. But it would not then leave a person attached to nothing. It frees a person for the deepest attachment there is, to God, and from that, to other people rightly. Rahul's slogan, read as opposition to a disordered custody, fits inside this. Read out of context, as opposition to belonging as such, it does not.

Where this leaves me

    So here is where I land. Liberation from an unjust structure and freedom from every accountability but your own are two different things, and it is easy to slide from the first into the second without noticing. The right-wing does this constantly when it defends structures like Manusmriti's in the name of tradition and order. But the language of liberation can do it too, when the self quietly becomes the only authority left standing.

    The correction Manusmriti needs is not "you belong to nobody except yourself." It is "you do not belong to your father, your husband, or your son, because you belong to God, and answerable to God, not just to your own judgment of yourself, is what makes you a person and not property in the first place." That is a harder sentence to fit on a banner. I do not blame Rahul for this; he made a statement from a different perspective than mine. I also do not say that my perspective is the only right one or the only one there is. There are several concepts on which we can base this argument rather than a Christian understanding of God, particularly in a pluralist nation like India. To the large number of Indian women who are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh or other religions, or atheist, or agnostic, the Manusmriti critique can be a part of a broader secular or reformist project of individual rights and constitutional equality, or a call to re-center on their understanding of God.

    I worked with women outside the classroom too. Before I became a Jesuit, I spent nine years as a bank officer, and part of that work was helping set up self-help groups for women, many of whom had never held a bank account of their own before that. Since then, I have addressed rural women entrepreneurs, assisting in building small businesses, with no capital behind them and no one behind them either, except themselves. Almost every one of those women had spent years being told, in one form or another, whose she was before anyone thought to ask who she wanted to be. That is what this argument is actually about, underneath the theology. Not detachment from everyone who ever had power over her. A different, truer accountability altogether, one that starts with God, or with whatever floor she stands on, and does not stop at whoever currently holds power over her life.