Feminists Anonymous

The new brand of feminism is cleverly inclusive, subtle but decisive. It is a way of life with the young Indian woman, away from those knee-jerk bra-burning days, writes MEENAKSHI RAO

A boy and a girl were constantly in competition to stand first in class. To emerge winner for all times to come, the smart Alec thought up a sexist competition in which the girl would have no answers to his limerick. But if she did manage to reply, he would concede, once and for all, that women had more brains than men. The girl accepted the challenge and this is how the contest went:

Boy to girl: Two twos are four,Three threes are nine.

Mine can go into yours,Yours cannot go into mine.

 Unanswerable, a winner, he thought smugly. But the girl, not to be cornered, came back with a reply that had no answer from the boy, once and for all.

Girl to boy: Two twos are four,Three threes are nine.

I can measure the length of yours,You can’t measure the depth of mine.

Of course, boys will be boys so they all smirked, not realising that the girl was actually talking about the depth of her brains and intellect, and not of that part of her anatomy which has been used for centuries to put her down in a patriarchal set-up, which has stayed with us despite a fair share of effort.

No wonder then, Shankar Mahadev is seen and heard telling Vishnu in one of the TV serials how he needs to step back for Parvati to realise her true shakti, for Gauri to turn into Kali with powers to destroy the world if she so deems fit to fight for her honour. He adds that men need to be like the string of a bow, which has to be pulled back for the arrow to find its trajectory and target, arrow being the woman.

Chauvinistic patronisation, you might say, especially when you know that actually the bowstring is often the woman and the arrow man — that “woman-behind-the-man” thinking which has survived the centuries, as has patriarchy, despite being rarely acknowledged and never propelled as anything more than an indulgent giveaway by men in their weak moment.

Another matter though that one of the pioneers of the Indian feminism movement was a man — Raja Ram Mohan Roy — who threw open the issues of child marriage, widow remarriage and the sati pratha with such force that law had to be made to abolish these ills.

Since then, Indian feminism has grown slowly but surely, metamorphosing into a kind of existential practicality, and propelled into the system by you-and-me people, an aspect so well portrayed by young director Alankrita Srivastava in her acclaimed film Lipstick Under My Burkha. The lipstick here is symbolic of the young Indian woman’s new brand of feminism which breathes and lives in her common mores and chores despite the restrictions that come with being a homogenous entity in this part of the world.

This nevertheless fierce individualism in the clever garb of adjustability makes it a more potent force

than very many women’s movements of the medieval days which pushed boundaries, but mostly of lunacy in popular minds.

And even as this subtle, everyday woman feminism grows unhindered, the more carcinogenic issues of poverty, women’s health, pregnancy mortalities, female foeticide, crime against women, domestic violence, dowry killings, glass ceilings, lack of pay parity and sexual harassment at the workplace are being handled by committed women activists who are in the process of making it a movement wherein every girl next door joins in to wipe out victimisation by changing not only her plight but also the asphyxiating cordon of mindsets around her.

As Nivedita Menon, professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, author and activist, explains in her book, feminism is not about that moment of final triumph over patriarchy but “about the gradual transformation of the social field so decisively that old markers shift forever”.

The growing brigade of women bikers, bouncers, detectives, truck mechanics, bartenders, surfers and the like would agree that the markers Menon talks about are actually showing up on the social firmament as the modern Indian woman weaves into society a refreshing brand of wholesome feminism, which has matured into spirited inclusivity, away from those knee-jerk bra-burning days when bosom bashing women were considered the fringe even if they deigned to suggest that they were anything other than a doormat.

Having said that, putting your butt on to a totally male vehicle like a pulsating Bullet, and going off into the unknown with just a backpack for company, may not be considered a womanly thing to do even today, but Srivastava shows on reel precisely how the modern woman is enjoying these lipstick moments under her burqa, doing her own thing, in her own way, at her own pace and despite the regressive mores and chores the so-called patriarchal society imposes on her. And she does that without being excluded from, or battered by society, empowering a change that often comes as a big effort from a small place where the odds are higher and the going tougher.

Indeed, it’s people like Mehrunissa who are the new markers of women empowerment, women who live their aspirations. After all her efforts to join the Army or the police force were foiled by her conservative Muslim father and family, Mehrunissa took courage out of her burqa at age 20 to walk out of a regressive, repressive and oppressive Saharanpur to become what no woman had ever tried before — a bouncer.

For more than a decade now, Mehrunissa has been bouncing off trouble in the Capital better than her muscle-flexing male colleagues even as a time-zapped Saharanpur continues to live in the ignominy of its chained mindset. A jovial but committed professional in this Muslim girl has grown so vertically that today she is a much sought-after personality in security jigs of stars like Vidya Balan and Priyanka Chopra.

“Today’s young Indian urban woman comes with a no-nonsense approach, doing what she wants, wearing what she wants and living how she wants. I am loving this,” says Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research, and an activist, who has been spearheading the movement for passing of the Women’s Reservation Bill by Parliament. On a more serious note, Kumari says such individual rebellions, sneaking out of the house to somehow fulfil your aspirations despite the strangleholds, is a good step forward because it is such episodic splashes of feminism that will finally build into a larger movement for women empowerment and constructive activism.

Kumari knows what she is saying precisely because she has lived this change herself, having defied family and tradition to pitch for higher studies for herself in an away town and then walking out of a Varanasi village to work in a big city, doing precisely what her elders absolutely did not want her to.

“Property, progeny, and power — these are the three major control tools that men use to stay in a commanding position,” she explains while talking about the reasons why the rural Indian woman is still taking baby steps in the direction of empowerment.

So, in a changing society, you may have a Shatbhi Basu overturning existing gender norms to emerge as the sole woman bartender in India, that too at age 53, but “the rural Dalit and adivasi women continue to languish at the bottom of the table,” Kumari points out. However, even she concedes that in her 21 years of working for women needs in nondescript villages all over India, she has seen a change in the way the fair sex has been faring.

“It is a slow change but it is happening. Village girls are cycling to school, taking buses and even driving their own scooties. A growing number of women are getting access to a TV and mobile phone. They have started contributing to the family’s economy by understanding and exploiting market forces around them to their advantage and have even started occupying some genuine positions of power,” Kumari says.

 Earlier, the woman sarpanches were mere dummy heads put into the position by their men merely to keep the power within the family, doing what their men bid them to. Now, in villages where it is the third or fourth election after women were drafted in by the Government to play a small role in the power network of the local level, there are many more and genuine women candidates in the fray for panchayat elections. This is as much a stir in the countryside as the one Shatbhi unravelled in the big city when she emerged as the best bartender in India and opened a leading bartending institute called Stir to teach men the art of mixing up things.

Bottomline? Contradictions exist because our society is still churning and will continue to do so till that Utopian 50-50 equation between men and women is arrived at. That’s the reason why a Sunny Leone is in a losing fight to somehow shift the gaze from her boobs to her face, even as Harshini Kanhekar makes news as India’s first and only woman to graduate from Nagpur’s all-male National Fire Service College; why a raped and tortured Nirbhaya dies in the nation’s Capital decades after a Kiran Bedi stars as the nation’s first woman law enforcer; why since 1991, 80 per cent of districts in India have recorded a declining sex ratio even as an Indra Nooyi breaks the global glass ceiling, and a mother of eight becomes the man of the house as India’s sole truck mechanic.

Nooyi and the likes have shown how economic independence among the womenfolk has gone a long way in making the men more amenable to the presence of an equal partner in their homes and offices. No, one is not talking about men washing dishes at night and then the woman making the breakfast in the morning, but a much bigger and more comprehensive liberalisation where household expenses — and decisions — are shared by the woman and the man of the house, where the new marker is “you earn, I earn and we decide how to live happily ever after”.

But then there is a flip side to everything and the same goes for feminism too. The recent movement for the right to stand up and pee may come across as a hilarious over-the-top demand thrown at you by a stand-up comic. But activists insist it addresses the serious issue of UTI, just as toilets will ensure the safety and dignity of women. All said, doing your job sitting or standing doesn’t really matter. But taking it lying down certainly does!

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 20 August, 2017