Immovable property (fertile, crop-yielding land) led to wars. Each one was trying to capture the others' land to gain control over wealth-generating land for sustenance. Countries which had sufficient fertile land to produce enough crops to feed the population never needed to attack anther another. This explains the historical truth that India never attacked any country : it was self-sufficient in wealth.
Here again, the males participated the the wars because of their superior physical strength. But, was there not enough land for everyone on this planet? Actually no. Not all land was fertile. There were enough barren deserts, snow-covered lands, and useless grasslands. The figure below shows the deserts of the world. When you are not able to grow your own food, you steal/exhort it from others. Extortion requires violence and brute force. Therefore, cultures originating from the deserts have been historically violent and destructive. In the 11th Century, Mahmud of Ghazni (Afghanistan) attacked, plundered, looted and ruined Central-Western India 17 times, carrying back huge wealth. This trend continued for centuries, with various foreign invaders making a beeline for the prosperous land of Bharatvarsha.
Barbaric cultures have even more stringent, conservative, and patriarchal norms : controlling women, limiting their education, keeping them physically covered, monitoring their (limited) movement outside the house with a constant male escort, having a lifelong male guardian, practicing of polygamy, etc. etc. In short, such cultures dehumanized women completely. Please see the details here.
Rapes became common in both wars and riots. It became a psychological warfare. The attacking side wanted to impregnate the defendant's females with their different genes and thereby 'pollute' the race. The males panicked. Mono-andry had become a lofty ideal by then. Captured women was raped by default. It was process of dehumanizing the female as chattels of the males. Through War rape, the opponent implied :
(1) "I have tampered with/destroyed your prized possession (female)".
(2) "I am polluting your race/lineage with my sperms".
Women, by then, had already been reduced to reproductive roles. Now, the outside invaders were 'polluting' them in wars. Thus came in Jauhar/Sati. When faced with imminent defeat, the women burned themselves to death to avoid capture as subsequent sex slaves. But why self-immolation? Isn't it the most cruel form of death? Apparently, the conquerors should not even touch the corpse of the female : it was deemed an insult to the men!
Medieval India has seen several Jauhars in West-Central India, especially Rajasthan, with tens of thousands of people sacrificing their lives in the most cruel way possible (burning). What else could they do?
A cruel reminiscence of the above practice is honor killing, which is present to this day! If a woman is raped, her family members will kill her. If she had pre-marital sex, they will kill her. This is because sex outside the 'sanctimonious' institution of marriage had already been considered a crime for women. Therefore, a raped or a sexually active unmarried woman was deemed 'impure' and had to be squashed, exactly like squashing a rotten fruit into the garbage. The body of this woman was now 'untouchable', and having such a "polluted" person in one's family was considered a shame. The family members wanted to purge out the 'rotten' person and re-establish their position in the society as a respectable family. (Imagine your own father/brother chasing you with a hatchet!)
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Now we move on the the systematic process of hypnotizing the female mind in Part 5 of this series.
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