New Delhi: A planned seminar on the “harassment of women as recorded in Tamil literature” at the St. Joseph’s College, Trichy has been postponed after a Bharatiya Janata Party leader objected to it and the state governments said it would not allow it.BJP’s H. Raja had claimed on Twitter that an event of this kind would be an assault on the Tamil language and Hinduism “by missionaries and urban Naxals”.According to the Hindustan Times, Raja was angry that the invitation for the event referred to women in the Vedic period being “subjugated”. “A minority community could not be allowed to denigrate the majority community and our Tamil literary works.”After Raja’s tweet, minister for Tamil culture ‘Ma Foi’ K. Pandiarajan said that the state government would not allow the event to take place as it was “derogatory” and “slanderous”. TN government will intervene with the college concerned and ensure this derogatory and slanderous seminar does not happen. When there were numerous Tamil literary books that glorify women and Tamil culture, a poisonous idea that Tamil literature demeaned women should not be allowed to be sown,” The News Minute quoted him as saying.The college has said that the event has been postponed, but not cancelled.The seminar planned for December 6 and 7sought to address the gender imbalance that prevails in society from Vedic times, according to TNM. MPhil and PhD students had been asked to submit papers on 41 topics, including familial violence depicted in Sangam literature, women depicted in Silappathigaram, male chauvinistic thoughts seen in Kambaramayana and violence against Surpanaka in Kambaramayana.The government’s decision to intervene and try and stop the seminar from taking place has not gone down well with activists and intellectuals.“Mythology becomes a basis for lifestyle and one always has to go back to history to understand roots. If we don’t question or challenge what we learnt, what is the point of education?” documentary filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar told TNM. “In most mythologies, women are always characters that exist to appease men and meet their desires or expectations. Can we deny that Panchali was shared by five men or pawned off by them? Can we not question why Sita was made to walk through fire to prove her chastity? Religions are fundamentally sexist systems that bind women. All religious texts – Hindu, Christian or Islamic, all display oppression of women. These are matters that we must discuss and politicians have no right interfering in such matters.”