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Showing posts with the label 4. "The air is sweet here" Eve Hall's 1973 diary continues

4. "The air is sweet here": Eve Hall's 1973 Maharashtra diary continues

Gulbarga fort mosque (Photo by Louayg ) As a soft dusk fell, we went to the Gulbarga mosque; 600 years old and very beautiful, huge and clean, old paving cool on bare feet, rich tombs hung with reds and golds and outside, white washed walls. But nowhere is woman's inferiority more brutally demonstrated than here; the few women there prayed in the open courtyards, are not allowed inside. In one tomb/mosque, men prayed and filed past the draped sarcophagus while the women crowded round the little grilles in the walls to peer inside. These oppressed women, made to feel themselves so little when they do so much, when their lives are so completely dedicated to other people, they stand there with their hideous veils thrown back over their heads as they watch, then down it comes again, the iron mask. How did women ever allow themselves to be so used and abused? And the beggars came crowding round...now I've really heard beggars whine. ......................................... Top o