A 12-Yr-Old Lost Her Life To Regressive Rituals. Can We Do Away With Menstrual Taboo Now?

Long-standing traditions declare women to be impure when they are on their periods. They are prohibited from entering the kitchen and places of worship.

By: Rakesh Jha |
November 22, 2018 5:25 pm

A 12-year-old girl lost her life to an age-old regressive practice at a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu which was hit by cyclone Gaja last week.

S Vijayalakshmi was asked to sleep in a thatched barn outside her house just because she had attained puberty and was menstruating for the first time. Being considered ‘impure’ during the period, she was not allowed to stay in the house. The class 7 student was killed on November 16 when a coconut tree uprooted by the storm fell on the barn resulting in teen’s death. Her mother was also sleeping with her in the room but she survived the storm with injuries.

The 12-year-old was among the 46 people who were killed by the cyclone that uprooted trees and eviscerated more than 80,000 hectares of farm land across 12 different districts.

“This is some tradition in this side of the state. When a girl comes of age, the family asks her to stay separately in a thatched hut for at least a week. She is asked to come inside the house only after the rituals are done on completion of a certain number of days. It varies from community to community. That is what happened with this girl,” Pattukottai DSP Ganesamoorthy told thenewsminute.com

The girl was asked to sleep outside because of the archaic tradition followed by certain communities in the state, director and head of the department of women’s studies at at Bharathidasan University N Manimekalai told Times of India

“Apart from Thanjavur, there’s a village in Karur where menstruating girls are sent to an isolated location for those four to five days. And at Agaram village in Perambalur,there’s a separate building on the outskirts where menstruating girls/women are supposed to stay,” ” she added.

The stigma associated with menstruation is deeply-entrenched in large parts of India. Long-standing traditions declare women to be impure when they are on their periods. They are prohibited from entering the kitchen and places of worship.

Last month, police arrested thousands of people protesting against the Supreme Court order that allowed women of all ages to enter Sabrimala hill temple, breaking age-old tradition that barred women of menstruating age from entering its premises.

The taboo has also resulted in little awareness about sanitary napkins. Of the 355 million menstruating girls and women in the country, only 12 per cent use sanitary napkins.