By Mohua Das

Mumbai: When a Mumbai couple found themselves a woman qazi to officiate at their nikah two years ago, it was a first for Darul Uloom-e-Niswan established in 2016 by the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan to produce a steady stream of women qazis, previously unheard of in India.

There are at least six in Mumbai now who run sharia courts, conduct marriages, resolve divorce and inheritance issues, and counsel women facing violence or penury.In Maharashtra alone, some 600 women have trained as priestesses, according to Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, and have been presiding over ceremonies including housewarming rituals, weddings, naming and thread ceremonies, and more recently last rites, for over two decades.

Natasha Gocal of Divinity Weddings, who organized the wedding that Atta solemnized, says her phone has not stopped buzzing since. “We’ve been in this business for 20 years but never received a specific request for a female priest. Since these images appeared, I’ve been flooded with queries, mostly from young girls, in the past two weeks asking where or how they could find a woman priest.”

Mehak Shahani, co-founder of wedding planning portal WedMeGood, says: “Till about 2016 there were barely any requests for female priests. Google trends showed not more than 10 monthly searches for a female priest as opposed to 2020 when we found that demand had soared by roughly 200 monthly searches for a woman purohit and the requests we’re getting are usually from brides who want a progressive exchange of vows that rules out rituals like kanyadaan and vidaai,” she adds.

While couples are making unconventional moves, Darshan Shroff, cofounder of Momente wedding planners says the challenge is often about convincing the family who wield greater influence on such occasions.

“It’s usually a hierarchical decision and even if the older generation agrees to a woman performing pre-wedding rituals, ‘pheras’ are considered an auspicious service historically conducted by men and families get superstitious about a break from tradition,” says Shroff currently caught in the crossfire between a couple set to wed in May and their apprehensive grandparents. “But things are changing with younger people taking charge of their own weddings.”

Although female priests have sparked a buzz among digital natives, women leading the churn in priesthood began in the early 1980s when Shankarrao Thatte, the owner of a marriage hall in Pune set up Shankar Seva Samiti, a school that taught women to recite the Vedas and perform Vedic rituals. Today Pune has two schools for female priests, the other being Jnana Prabodhini, a Hindu reformist organization that has been training men and women across castes to perform rituals since the ‘90s

In the past eight years, women— mostly housewives in their 40s and 50s who spent decades raising their families and are looking for ways to pursue their own interests—have outnumbered the men entering priesthood at these institutions, points out Shetye.

At 44, Urmila Betkar, is the youngest among them. Betkar had quit her job as a computer operator after her son was born. “Never thought I’d become a purohita but when I was 37 and my son was a bit grown up I decided to study the scriptures because why women were entering every field and not priesthood always bothered me,” says Betkar. The institution now has a chapter in Dombivli to tend to their growing word-of-mouth demand across Mumbai.

The trend is not limited to Hinduism. At 60, an age when most people retire, Zubeda Khatoon from Bandra earned her title and jacket of a qazi. “I was into social work but issues women were facing with triple talaq, halala and harassment from male clerics if they wanted khula (divorce) made it necessary for us to represent vulnerable women,” says Khatoon, one of the 30 female qazis in the country

However, for some the fight for equal rights continues. Last year, 150 Indian Catholic women petitioned Cardinal Oswald Gracias, head of the Catholic Church in India, urging him to take steps to include women in decision-making roles in the Catholic Church where only men can be ordained as priests. This January, Pope Francis changed church law to allow women to do more things at Mass but maintained that they still cannot be priests.

Source: The Times of India