Keerthika
Govindasamy on Misogyny in Unexpected Quarters
Shrikant G. Talageri
Recently, I put up an article “A Few Youtuber Recommendations for Indians, Hindus and All Those Who Don’t actively Hate Hindus” in which I named two or three prolific youtubers whom every Hindu should read. One of them was Keerthika Govindasamy. And while I expressed (different kinds of) reservations about the persons recommended by me, I wrote about her: “So far, I have seen nothing in any video by Keerthika Govindasamy which I could possibly object to or distance myself from”.
Also, I have written quite a few articles on Veer Savarkar, whom I consider one of the two greatest of Indian politicians (the other being Babasaheb Ambedkar), and many of them were strongly critical of people who criticize Savarkar (and this included great people who are icons to me, like M Nageswara Rao and even Sita Ram Goel)
But today I saw a new youtube video by Keerthika Govindasamy which I simply must talk about. In this video, she sharply criticizes many people, and one of them is Savarkar. So I must write about this video, “What our Freedom Fighters REALLY Thought about Women. Were Our National Heroes Sexist?”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIIyncmmL5g
After seeing this video, has my respect for Keerthika Govindasamy been diminished by at least a little bit? On the contrary, my respect for her has multiplied manifold. Misogyny is something that I have referred to many times in my articles, where I have repeatedly pointed out how every single religion in the world (Hinduism no less) is basically misogynistic, and misogyny is present in different degrees in most human beings, including our Gods and mythical and historical heroes. In modern times, criticizing misogyny has become a tool or weapon of leftists and woke people, and their “anti-mysogynistic” attitude is always blatantly fake, hypocritical and propagandist, and brazenly and viciously (and even pathologically) based on double (or more) standards, on a par with their “love” and “concern” for “children”. I have dealt with the attitudes of these psychopathic and viciously sadistic leftists in various articles:
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2023/08/suicidal-hindu-misconceptions-about.html
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2016/05/rapists-child-rights-left-and-right.html
And recently, in the matter of “children”:
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2025/11/al-jazeera-stop-using-children-as.html
And misogyny (or lack of concern or respect for women) is not totally a leftist characteristic. In the second of these articles, I also pointed out that while leftists are the most hypocritical and viciously sadistic in such matters, rightists are not out of the race: “There is no ethics, logic or honesty in the stands taken by advocates of the “left”, “right” or “centre” in any matter, there is only personal or political convenience: the positions of Dr Swamy and the human rights activists would be diametrically opposite to their present stands, but they would still be facing each other from opposite sides, if the discussion were about Asaram “Bapu” rather than about the cherubic “child” in the “nirbhaya” case”.
Likewise, in the matter of our ancient heroes, plenty of misogynistic references can be dug up. But I leave that matter to the Breaking India Forces. As I have pointed out repeatedly in my articles, for every molehill of faults in Hinduism there are mountains of faults in Christianity and Islam. This does not mean we should ignore, stonewall or whitewash those molehills: it simply means we must have viveka-buddhi, and a sense of balance and proportion.
It is possible that there may be many issues (even if I have not seen them yet) where I may not be on the same page as Keerthika Govindasamy (for example, she may be a Modi-bhakt, I don’t know) but those would be relatively minor matters. After seeing the above video, I am absolutely sure that she is a really very great historian. She is very definitely not a “leftist” historian, but nor does she show herself to be a blatant and biased “rightist” one. She may be that ideal one representing the third point (see my above article on suicidal misconceptions) in the ideological triangle, a true “Hindu Nationalist” historian who can call any spade a spade.
Having said that, let me express a few points about her criticism of Swami Vivekananda in the above video. She admits that his “misogynistic” views were not “hateful”, and the only quote she can give from him is “The ideal woman is the mother, marvelous, unselfish, all-suffering, ever-forgiving”. Keerthika agrees that “this is not cruelty, this is not misogyny in the extreme sense, it’s the kind of traditional thinking that many men even today genuinely believe. But it still puts women inside a very narrow box, where the perfect woman is someone who sacrifices everything and never puts herself first.” And then she goes out to point how every leader from the past had a similar viewpoint: “All of them believed a woman’s role was to be a selfless mother, a moral guide, and a supporter of the family and nation. Very few of them imagined women as equal political thinkers or independent individuals”. And she goes on to praise Ambedkar and counters those who excuse misogyny in past heroes, by saying “that is just how things were back then”, by pointing out that this “is not an excuse. Because in the same era, some people chose justice, some people chose equality and some people chose courage”.
Absolutely correct in everything she says here. In my article “Apologetics in the Guise of A "Hindu" Response to Criticism of Puranic Personalities”, I have also expressed this view about “that is just how things were back then”: I attach the relevant portion of that article as an appendix to this present article. The URL of that article:
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2021/12/apologetics-in-guise-of-hindu-response.html
But I do not think that the indictment of Swami Vivekananda merely on the basis of that one sentence is fair. Perhaps he should have stopped at “The ideal woman is the mother” or should have also said “The ideal man is the father, marvelous, unselfish, all-suffering, ever-forgiving”. Even then Keerthika is right: no-one should be blindly and self-destructively “unselfish, all-suffering, ever-forgiving” towards anyone, even to one’s children. That is also the main point of my above article on “Apologetics..”
But I think if Swami Vivekananda was to be included in the list of “misogynistic national heroes”, something with a little more “cruelty” was required to be quoted from his writings. And it is possible (or not) that such quotations may exist: I myself have quoted and criticized some of Swami Vivekananda’s views on the AIT in my second book, “The Rigveda, A Historical Analysis” (2000).
Also, since she mentioned Golwalkar, I have pointed out an even more blatant example of misogyny on his part:
https://talageri.blogspot.com/2025/08/an-example-of-despicable-self-hating.html
So I end this article with the hope that we get more true “Hindu Nationalist Intellectuals” like Keerthika Govindasamy, and that she continues to be as objective, honest and outspoken in future videos as she seems to have been till now (though of course I have not seen all her videos).
APPENDIX: Part II of my article “Apologetics in the Guise of A "Hindu" Response to Criticism of Puranic Personalities”
II. Past Issues Through Modern Lenses
This is the second of the two major arguments made against the criticism of Epic-Puranic personalities. According to this argument, the ancient period of the Vedas and Epics was a different period from the present period, with a different set of morals. We cannot pronounce judgments on the actions of the people of that period based on the perspective of our present-day moral and ethical perspectives (whether derived from the West or not).
This argument is perhaps even less well-thought out than the first argument, since it contains many fundamental flaws:
1. Firstly, it is absolutely true that we cannot judge actions and people belonging to one period or one place by the moral and ethical perspectives of another different period or place. But this is not a cover-all piece of logic, so then what exactly are the fields to which this logic can be applied?
It will be seen that this rule applies to the general social-cultural mores of any society. Most often, this applies to the sexual mores in any society: the most common aspect in which people of any period or place are likely to be shocked or outraged, or prompted to criticize, judge or condemn, are the sexual mores of a society in a different period or place. Then there are countless other aspects pertaining to clothing, food and drink, social behavior, family life, etc., of any society which can lend itself to judgment and criticism from people belonging to other societies from other periods and places.
In these respects, yes, it is definitely wrong to issue sweeping judgments and condemnations of other people and societies based on the contours of the moral-ethical mores to which the critic is accustomed being different from the moral-ethical mores to which the other peoples or societies are accustomed.
But there are certain other things where judgment of "right" and "wrong" cannot be based on the moral-ethical "mores" to which anyone is accustomed: robbing and killing people purely for gain and without provocation, raping and gang-raping helpless persons, slavery and exploitation of people, capturing women for sex-slavery, sadistic tortures and mutilation of captured people, and other such blatantly evil acts where there is on the one hand a victim and on the other hand a perpetrator of the acts, cannot be treated as neutral acts whose "rightness" or "wrongness" depends upon period and place. There are definitely things of this kind which are "right" and things which are "wrong" from any perspective, not just from "such notions of human rights as are prevalent in our own times rather than the time-space complex in which our forebears lived, breathed, and reflected".
The opponents of the criticism of the misdeeds and foolish acts of Puranic personalities however want to blur the lines of distinction between the two types of concepts of "right" and "wrong": if it is wrong to condemn the sexual mores or dress habits of people from another time and place, then, they insist, it is also wrong to condemn the criminal, unjust or exploitative acts of people from another time and place. But this is untenable. [But for another angle to this, see point 4 below].
2. This becomes even more untenable when we see that Hindu apologists who purport to oppose criticism of the criminal, unjust or exploitative aspects of people from other times and places, are very selective in the application of this principle. [Needless to say, anti-Hindu activists and writers, as pointed out many times in my earlier articles, consistently excuse anything and everything in Islam (or Christianity) regardless of time and place, and equally consistently condemn anything and everything in Hinduism, regardless of time or place. But it is not the venomous anti-Hindus that we are discussing here: it is the Hindu apologists]:
Would these Hindu apologists also agree then that the same principle — of not judging the past, since that past must have had moral and ethical mores different from our own — applies also to the complete destruction (real or imagined, but definitely described in great detail in the Old Testament) of the original people, cities and civilizations of ancient Palestine by the incoming Israelites, the mass massacres of the Pagans of Europe by the early Christians, the complete destruction of the native American civilizations by the Conquistadors, the complete annihilation of the native Tasmanians by European conquerors, the long and ugly history of slavery in the USA, the terrible acts of the Inquisition in Europe (and in Goa) and (on both sides) of the participants in the Crusades, the Nazi concentration camps and gas-chambers, the bloody history of the Islamic conquests of most of North Africa and West Asia (right up to Afghanistan), the blood-soaked history of Islamic invasions and rule in India and of the subsequent history of Islam right up to 1947 (and after it as well), of the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Pakistan, Bangladesh and even Kashmir? Are all these events to be above and beyond judgment because they took place at some point in the "past"?
This is a point that all Hindu apologists must think carefully about: are you willing to give a clean chit to the perpetrators of all these above black crimes on the ground that they belonged to a different time and age and followed different mores of morals and ethics, and therefore should not be judged by us?
3. The insistence that the misdeeds and foolish acts of the Epic-Puranic characters (for examples, see my recent articles Karṇa and Yudhiṣṭhira in the Mahābhārata 13/10/2021, and Śambuka-Bashing — or The Confluence of Brown Racism and Casteism among the Hate-Rightists Masquerading as Hindus or Hindutvites 4/12/2021) must not be condemned because they belonged to a different period with different moral-ethical mores reveals another internal anomaly:
In all the examples given by me, not one of the misdeeds or foolish acts of the Epic-Puranic characters seem to be part of a regular practice common to a period different from ours with different moral-ethical mores: in every case, each of these acts is a unique one time act which in fact is cited as a special act uncommon to that period which makes that character stand out distinct and unique from the rest of his contemporaries in heroism, wisdom or virtuousness.
Thus, it is no-one's claim (and certainly no examples are given) that in the period of the Ramayana and as per the common moral-ethical practices of that time, wives who were kidnapped were regularly first tried by fire and then abandoned in the jungle after being rescued, or that Shudras performing penance automatically led to the death of Brahmin boys and therefore such Shudras were regularly beheaded. Nor that in the time of the Mahabharata and as per the common moral-ethical practices of that time, many brothers regularly married one woman so as to prevent conflict among themselves, or that dharmik people regularly gambled away their wives and sat by quietly while watching them about to be stripped, or that gurus regularly demanded the severed thumbs of their pupils and that pupils gladly fulfilled such demands, or that warriors readily gave away their divine armor to ill-intentioned people on request knowing well both the intentions behind the request and its consequences, or that Brahmin guests demanding the flesh of the child of the house as their food regularly had their requests granted, etc. etc. In each of these cases the acts are unique, and cannot be justified on the grounds that they were according to the regular moral-ethical mores of that period..
So in fact, the defenders of these acts have to indulge in double-speak: on the one hand they plead that these acts should not be condemned because they were as per the moral-ethical mores prevalent at that time, and, on the other hand, they glorify the characters performing these acts claiming these acts stood out for their heroism, sacrifice, wisdom or virtue from the general commonly prevalent mores of that period and were unique to the characters concerned.
4. Finally to return back to point one above: I wrote that the opponents of the criticism of the misdeeds and foolish acts of Puranic personalities want to blur the lines of distinction between the two types of concepts of "right" and "wrong": if it is not correct to condemn the sexual mores or dress habits of people from another time and place, then, they insist, it is also not correct to condemn the criminal, unjust or exploitative acts of people from another time and place. This, I said, is untenable.
But then perhaps, a person belonging to a certain time or place, and accustomed from his birth or early formative childhood to the particular moral-ethical mores of his period and place, will naturally act according to those mores even if they are "wrong" because as per his ingrained upbringing it is not "wrong" although it would be "wrong" from an objective viewpoint. Thus a cannibal child born in a cannibal society may not be able to understand why it is wrong to eat captured enemies, or a child born in a society which keeps, exploits and ill-treats slaves or sex-slaves may not be able to understand why that is wrong. While those practices and acts are definitely to be branded as "wrong", that child and the man/woman it grows up into cannot be unqualifiedly branded as "evil" or "wrong", since its whole outlook has been shaped by those societal mores: it has a "wrong" outlook because the outlook of that society is "wrong", and it is the society and not the individual that stands indicted.
In that case it becomes a case for comparison between "that" society and the present day society. And all those who insist that the stories and acts that they are defending are true, and really representative of the moral-ethical mores of that society, land themselves in a moral dilemma (whether they will admit it or not): was that society a better society than the present-day society, or was it a worse one, or are all comparisons to be eschewed?
For example, in internet discussions about the Śambuka incident in the Valmiki Ramayana, some people defended it by pointing out that as per the story, Shudras were not allowed to perform penance in the Treta Yuga (and the punishment for performing penance in that Yuga was death), but that they are allowed to perform it in Kali Yuga. This apparently made the story defensible, but inapplicable to the present period and day! But, if the two Yugas are compared, then which Yuga seems better: Treta Yuga (where Shudras are killed for performing penance) or Kali Yuga (where they apparently have the freedom to do penance)? What does a comparison show, in respect of the Hindu belief in the moral-ethical superiority of earlier Yugas as compared to the present Kali Yuga?
Dr. Ambedkar took this issue (of taking the acts, events and prescriptions in our ancient texts too literally) to the logical conclusion. After describing in detail the state of morals and ethics as described in the ancient texts, Ambedkar concludes: "It is not possible to divide this history into definite Yugas and to say that what state of morals existed in the Krita, what in Treta and what in Dwapara Yuga which closed at the death of Krishna. If, however, we allow the ancient Aryans a spirit of progressive reform it is possible to say that the worst cases of immorality occurred in earliest age i.e. the Krita age, the less revolting in the Treta and the least revolting in the Dwapara and the best in the Kali age. This line of thinking does not rest upon mere general development of human society as we see all over the world. That instead of undergoing a moral decay the ancient Aryan society was engaged in removing social evils by undertaking bold reforms is borne out by its history". (AMBEDKAR 1987:304). Thereby, he not only points out that ancient Hindu society was constantly reforming itself, but contrasts this favorably with the opposite development in the rest of the world in general.
He goes on to add: "it is natural to hold that from the point of view of morality the Kali Yuga was a better age. To call it an age in which morals were declining is not only without foundation but is an utter perversion" (AMBEDKAR 1987:305).
The truth is: no book is written by "God" or by Gods or by any Supreme Being or Beings. All books, including religious books, are written by human beings. And all human beings who write books are not saints. They push in their own biases and prejudices, and push their own personal or class interests, by making up stories and rules in the name of "God" or Gods or ancient holy men and heroes. Therefore, the "society" and the moral-ethical societal mores reflected or depicted in these religious books are not necessarily even of the society of the period of the writers, let alone of the society of the period of the ancient holy men and heroes that they are writing about. It is actually a society based on the biases, prejudices and personal or class interests of the writers and interpolators of the texts.
Therefore it is not right even to indict the society of those ancient periods on the basis of these stories. All these stories must be accepted as part of our rich heritage, but if we must derive lessons from them, we should derive the right lessons from them and not the wrong lessons. It is necessary to separate the grain from the chaff.
However, those who defend (and even glorify) indefensible or foolish acts in such stories in our ancient books, and blindly accept that those acts actually represent the acts of the characters concerned and the moral-ethical mores of the society of those times, and think they are showing themselves to be defenders of our ancient civilization are in fact indicting ancient Indian society rather than defending it.
And the basis on which they are doing this is not the objective ancient Indian perspective of Rational Inquiry, but the Abrahamic Western perspective of Blind Acceptance of Traditional Authority (primarily texts regarded as inviolable).
Postscript added 22 November 2025 to this extract from an old article of 21 December 2021:
I just realized when rereading this extract that a very recent phenomenon in America (i.e. the USA) and perhaps Europe and other European deserves to be pointed out here, although it has nothing directly to do with this article.
In my above extract, I wrote:
“1. Firstly, it is absolutely
true that we cannot judge actions and people belonging to one period or one
place by the moral and ethical perspectives of another different period
or place. But this is not a cover-all piece of logic, so then what exactly are
the fields to which this logic can be applied?
It will be seen that this rule applies to the general social-cultural mores of any society. Most often, this applies to the sexual mores in any society: the most common aspect in which people of any period or place are likely to be shocked or outraged, or prompted to criticize, judge or condemn, are the sexual mores of a society in a different period or place. Then there are countless other aspects pertaining to clothing, food and drink, social behavior, family life, etc., of any society which can lend itself to judgment and criticism from people belonging to other societies from other periods and places.
In these respects, yes, it is definitely wrong to issue sweeping judgments and condemnations of other people and societies based on the contours of the moral-ethical mores to which the critic is accustomed being different from the moral-ethical mores to which the other peoples or societies are accustomed.”
Today ever since the new government of Trump has taken control of America, the extreme-leftist anti-Hindu-anti-Indian hate-ideology of America’s woke crowd has largely been driven into the shade by the extreme-rightist anti-Hindu-anti-Indian hate-ideology of America’s culturally and religiously fascist-chauvinistic-racist fundamentalist crowd. Now India, Indians and Hindus are being attacked by large numbers of these mentally retarded westerners on matters which have nothing to do with any kind of morals, ethics or common sense.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than the fact that the social media is apparently being flooded by countless cheap and brainless comments by westerners of the second above type on the subject of, of all things, the fact that Indians eat with their hands. In this matter all kinds of other people are also dragged into this muck, even blatantly anti-Indian and anti-Hindu Islamic propagandists like the new Muslim mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani (who also eats with his hands)! With this kind of vicious contempt for and hatred of the cultural practices of “other” people spreading like wildfire in the west, the world is definitely moving backwards in spite of all the “technical advancement”.
