Acknowledging the markers of a patriarchal world

MUCH OF THE recent public discourse in India has centred on the gang-rape and murder in Delhi last December. The savage crime has led to introspection about the kind of society we are and about the prejudices deeply ingrained in our fabric; there has been discussion of the misogynistic elements of our popular culture, which can both reflect and influence social attitudes. At a cinema-related session I recently moderated at the Apeejay Kolkata Literature Festival, the conversation steered to representations of women in popular Hindi films—about how even seemingly innocuous movies have scenes where the “hero” pursues and harasses a girl until she falls in love with him. On the panel was Shyam Benegal, who himself has been such a sensitive portrayer of women that he is sometimes referred to as a “feminist director”. Unfortunately, the word “feminist” can draw ambivalent reactions. Many people I know are not comfortable describing themselves as such, because it is sometimes used as a derisive term, built around the stereotype of a man-hating woman who is venting her personal frustrations. But as the journalist Rebecca West said with ironic terseness, feminism is not a complicated idea at all—it is merely “the radical notion that women are people”. Seeing women as sentient human beings appears not to be easy in the Indian context, where they are typically treated as either objects to be possessed or goddesses to be worshipped. The two things often go together: the image of women as custodians of a family’s “honour” easily becomes a pretext to suppress them, to deny them basic rights such as freedom of movement. (Those goddess idols you see in temple—they stay rooted where they are, unless they are carried by men.) In the current climate, then, it is important—even for those who consider themselves liberal—to constantly be reminded of the many forms of discrimination that women face on an everyday basis. Some fine books on the subject have been published recently, among them Nivedita Menon’s Seeing Like a Feminist, which is a clear-sighted setting out of the feminist position as it tries to shift the markers of a patriarchal world. There is much food for thought in Menon’s book, but one section I found particularly stimulating was the one about the fluidity of gender— built on the idea that the classification of people into watertight “male” and “female” categories can be misleading. Referencing the work of the feminist philosopher Judith Butler, as well as observations of gender roles in pre-colonial African cultures, Menon writes that being specifically a man or specifically a woman is to a large extent a “performance” that most people engage in, according to what society expects of them. Human bodies are really quite versatile and complex, occupying positions along a spectrum (lactation can be induced in men, for example), but due to stern cultural codes “a range of bodies becomes invisible or illegitimate”. Thus, a mother might worry about her son’s bulging breasts and a doctor might tell her that surgery might be required—though it is not a biologically “abnormal” condition. Another recently published book that touches on gender performancesand learned behaviour is Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, co-written by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade. The authors point out that in public spaces in India, the act of constant self-surveillance by women produces what the French thinker Michel Foucault called Disciplined Bodies. “At bus stops and railway stations,” they note, “a woman will often hold a file, folder or book close to her chest, keep her eyes averted and seem to focus inward rather than outward [...] the average woman will occupy the least possible space, rendering herself as inconspicuous as she can.” For a male reader, Why Loiter? is an eye-opening analysis of how hard it can be for women to use public spaces in a relaxed manner. Especially disturbing, I thought, was a chapter about the disgraceful shortfall in public toilets for women even in big cities, a feature of urban planning that tells us something significant about the still-prevalent attitude that a woman’s place is in the home—that she has no business wandering about too much. A more piquant approach to the subject of feminism can be found in The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader, which includes extracts from Namjoshi’s previously published work such as the 1981 book Feminist Fables. These page-long fables are fresh takes on existing folktales and myths, done to emphasise the workings of social dominance. Much of their content is didactic, but also entertaining. Namjoshi compresses a lot of social observation and sarcasm into a few pithy lines. In one fable a Brahmin who wanted a son is given a daughter instead. “Though only a woman, she was a Brahmin, so she learned very fast, and then they both sat down and meditated hard.” (Of course, the father’s purpose in meditating is to ask again for a son, and Vishnu grants him this wish but not quite in the way he had expected.) In a Beauty and the Beast retelling, the lovelorn Beast is not a nobleman but a lesbian; since the books she reads make it clear that women love men, she decides that she can not be human. Questions of what is socially permissible are discussed elsewhere, too. “A plant with feet is not natural,” says the mother of a plant (or a human girl?) that has had the temerity to pull out its roots and prance about. Namjoshi’s original manuscript title for Feminist Fables was The Monkey and the Crocodiles, and the story by that name is one of her most representative works. In it, a monkey who has grown up with two crocodile friends near a riverbank decides she wants to explore. The crocodiles try to warn her of beasts that are “long and narrow with scaly hides and powerful jaws”, but the monkey goes anyway and returns years later, badly injured. “Did you encounter the beasts?” her friends ask, “What did they look like?” “They looked like you,” she answers slowly. “When you warned me long ago, did you know that?” The story can be seen as an allegory for parents warning a daughter of a world populated by other humans who look like them and might not seem intrinsically threatening, but who could turn out to be predators. Namjoshi’s work, like the other books mentioned above, is a constant reminder of how hostile our world can be to 50 per cent of our population— and of the urgent need for both sexes to participate in the carving out of spaces and mindsets that let women live on their own, human terms.