Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust

by Khushwant Singh

The first communication between lovers usually comes through the eyes. Cervantes called them ‘the silent tongues of love.’ Likewise, Shakespeare in his sonnets:

  Come, fair friend, you never can be old

  For as you were when first your eyes I eyed,

  Such is your beauty still.

  I was under the impression that European poets were not aware of the phenomenon of eyes meeting – aankhey chaar hona - and transmitting messages of love. I was wrong. Byron on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has this:

  … and bright

  The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men,

  A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

  Music rose with its voluptuous swell,

  Soft eyes looked love to eyes that spake again;

  And all went merry as a marriage bell.

  No one will question the Shakespearean observation that a woman has ‘language in her eyes’. She can use its devastating effect when deployed as a side-winder missile – tirchee nazar which Milton described as ‘love-darting eyes.’ He saw ‘heaven in her eye’ – presumably before he went blind. Thomas Moore ascribed his downfall to them:

  The light, that lies

  In woman’s eyes

  Has been my heart’s undoing.

  Now to the Urdu poets. Shaad Azimabadi summed up their devastating effect in one couplet:

  voh chashme-mast, voh tirchee nazar maaz Allah.’ Hayaa hazaar bharee hai, magar, maaz Allah!

  (Those besotted eyes,

  Those side-long glances

  The Lord protect us!

  Full of innocence though they be

  The lord protect us!)

  Shah Wali-ur-Rehman wrote of both their positive and negative aspects:

  Jo phiree to tegh-e-qazaa banee

  jo milee to aab-e-baqaa hanee

  (When they turned away,

  They became the sword of destruction.

  When they met my eyes

  They were the elixir of life.)

  Hasrat Mohani was intrigued by eyes which, like photographs in which the sitter is looking into the lens, seem to follow you everywhere:

  Dekho jo yaar kee jaadoo nigahiyaan

  har ik ko hai gumaan keh mukhaatib hameen rahey

  (Look at the magic in my beloved’s eyes)

  Everyone is under the illusion,

  She is only looking at him.)

  So the gossip and the sherbaazi went on and on; from gazelle-eyed Rekha to the almond-eyed Hema Malini to Greta Garbo-eyed Nandini Satpathi. The downpour continued and we adjourned to the Taverna Latina. We raised our glasses to drink to women’s eyes:

  Drink to me only with thine eyes,

  And I will pledge with mine;

  Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

  And I’ll not look for wine.

  8

  Eve-Teasing

  The most salutatory punishments are not fines and imprisonment but disgracing Eve-teasers in public: the traditional blackening of their faces and taking them on a donkey’s back through public thoroughfares would do them a world of good.

  Eve-teasing is a delightful Indianism which does not exist in any English dictionary. The rest of the English speaking world find it very intriguing. ‘Why Eve and not Sita, Savitri or Urmila?’ they ask, ‘and why teasing?’ Only little boys and little girls tease each other! Once you achieve adolescence you stop teasing and learn to ‘make passes.’ Their young ladies do not mind being made passes at; on the contrary if nobody makes passes at them, they conclude that they are not good looking enough to attract attention. To wit Dorothy Parker’s classic: ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’

  Making a pass is regarded as a form of compliment. A wit commented: ‘Whether men will make passes at girls who wear glasses depends quite a bit on the shape of their chassis.’

  In other words, good faces and shapely figures should get the attention they deserve. It is the girl’s geography that determines her history, i.e., whether or not she will make the grade.

  Our closest equivalent to ‘making a pass’ is chher chhaar which is far from being complimentary. It may be directed at any woman irrespective of her looks or age and is often indulged in without as much as looking at them, i.e., when a man takes advantage of being in a crowded bus to press himself against a female or lets his hands stray over the most prominent bulges on her body. It is only a brave woman who will risk creating a scene by slapping the fellow or admonishing him with the traditional formula: ‘Have you no mother, sister or daughter of your own to do this to?’

  There are milder forms of chher chhaar which do not involve personal contact: a wolf-whistle, a wink, a leering look or an obscene gesture. In my younger days the favourite slogan of Delhi’s gutter casanovas used to be: ‘Hai Jaanee mar daala, pyjama phaar daala – Oh life you’ve killed me and torn up my pyjama.’ I haven’t heard that for a long time.

  It can be maintained that some girls invite more unwelcome attention than others. Frustrated, lecherous types find fat Bessy Buntings irresistible. The over-dressed obviously invite attention. One may be forgiven for a long, lingering look at someone who is dressed to kill:

  Sab hee mujh se kehtey hain

  Neechee rakho nazaar apnee;

  Unsay koi nahin kahta

  Mat niklo yoon ayaan ho kar

  (Everyone tells me to keep my eyes lowered:

  No one tells her not to come out so splendidly

  attired.)

  There is yet another class of female, usually unattractive, who makes up stories of men making passes at them. This kind of Eve is deadlier than any Adam.

  This long prelude was written by me way back in 1984 for the benefit of Delhi’s city fathers. Having passed the age of Eve-teasing these worthies were determined to punish the practitioners of this trade – singing, ballad mongering, reciting, uttering indecent words, or making obscene gestures to annoy women was to land the fellow in jail and saddle him with a fine. I don’t remember whatever happened to their recommendation but am reminded of an incident which took place many years ago on board a ship on which I was travelling from London to Bombay. Among the passengers was a batch of young Sikh peddlers who had made their fortune but little else besides money. There were also two Indian girls who had acquired degrees from Oxford and disdained talking to their less educated countrymen. They would stroll round the deck with their noses stuck in the air. After a few days whenever the girls passed by the peddler boys would chant: ‘Saddey Val Vee Veykh Jao’ – a glance on our side please! The young ladies were incensed and asked me to tell the boys to behave themselves. When I did so with some show of temper, the lads asked me in loaded words: ‘Terey pyo da jahaaj hay?’ or does this ship belong to your father?’ Another passenger who was better acquainted with the peddler attitude to women simply asked them: ‘If these girls were your sisters, would you be asking them to look towards you?’ Thereafter the harassment ceased.

  Eve-teasing is an Indian phenomenon and can be best countered by traditional Indian techniques. First appeal to the Eve-teaser that if he indulges in harassing girls there may be other lads harassing his sisters. If that does not work, it is for the public and not the police to intervene. Why don’t college students who make much noise on issues that do not concern them organize squads of their own to beat up the eve-teasers? The most salutatory punishments are not fines and imprisonment but disgracing eve-teasers in public: the traditional blackening of their faces and taking them on a donkey’s back through public thoroughfares would do them a world of good.

  9

  Libber at a Loss

  Being called a male chauvinist pig does not really offend the male; on the contrary it adds to his notions of masculinity, his machismo.

  During my days in Bombay, an incident beneath my balcony made me aware of yet another wrong women have suffered at the hands of men over the ages. Brawls are so frequent an occurrence in my locality that I seldom bother to get up to see what is going on. But when it involves a man and a wom
an I even go down on the street to prevent the man from getting too rough with the woman. Consequently, when I heard male and female voices rise to a quarrelsome pitch I came out. There was this fellow about six foot tall and as villainous looking as any dakoo in an Indian film. And facing him a petite, pigtailed lass in sa1war-kameez sporting a sling-bag in the manner of ladies who frequent our footpaths after sundown. She was getting the better of the argument. The man driven to desperation replied with an obscene gesture with his hand. The woman rewarded him with a resounding slap across his face and a full-blooded oath: ‘Sa1a! Haramzada!’ Now, I said to myself, this dakoo will make mince meat of this maiden. Not at all. The maiden followed up her opening jab with flail of fists: left, right, under the chin, ending with a vicious kick in the fellow’s genitals which made him double up with pain. Then she delivered a coup de grace by a double-handed karate chop on the neck which sent him sprawling on the cobblestones. It was a heart-warming performance. But what bothered me was the use of masculine abuse which accompanied each blow: she swore to rape his mother, sister and daughter. Despite the prowess with her hands, the lady like others of her sex, did not possess the wherewithal to execute those threats. Why couldn’t she have sworn to molest his father, brother or son?

  Being called a male chauvinist pig does not really offend the male; on the contrary it adds to his notions of masculinity, his machismo. And although another male expressing libidinous intent towards his female relatives can incense a man, it does not when the same is expressed by a woman. It is time women libbers coined their own phraseology of abuse for men.

  10

  Women’s Lib

  It would appear that the only chance of women getting equal rights is to enjoy sex but refuse to bear children, to let all children be born in test-tubes and be cared for equally by men and women.

  Men have behaved abominably towards women. The record of Christian Europe is much worse that that of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Pagan Asia and Africa. In two centuries eight million women condemned by the Church as witches were burned at the stake in Europe. Indians, though they did not go to the extent of killing women who dared to be different, brutalized them in so savage a manner as to drive them to take their own lives. If statistics of women’s suicide were compiled, I have little doubt that India would top the list.

  We in India have gone a long way in atoning for the sins of our fathers. We have given women equal rights in matters of property, political participation, marriage and divorce. (Only the Muslims, of their own volition, have chosen to lag behind.) But rights conferred by law are rarely availed of and discrimination in practice continues as before. Let us deliberate on the full implications of giving equality to their sex – because difference of sex is the root cause of inequality.

  As long as women have to discharge the biological function assigned to them, they will never be equal to men. It is they who menstruate, conceive, bear and nurse children. These processes incapacitate them for long periods and make them dependable on men – father or brother, husband or lover or son. Since human infants take much longer to grow up than animals, the mother-children dependency on the male provider usually lasts the entire lifetime of the woman.

  No division of labour (man the breadwinner, woman the housekeeper) can conceal the fact that man is the master, woman his mistress and servitor. Shulamith Firestone, leading philosopher of women’s lib in America, put it tersely in her The Dealectic of Sex: ‘Just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underc1ass (proletariat) and the seizure of the means of production … to ensure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their temporary seizure or control of human fertility … the reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by artificial reproduction; children would be born to both sexes equally or independently of either; the dependence of the child on the mother would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others.’ And so on.

  Another argument to prove male superiority is that all the great works of art, literature and science were created by men, not women. True! But then women were never relieved of the burden of child-bearing, child-husband-home caring to get a fair chance to prove their worth. Men have created the myth of love and romance to keep women in bondage. The love they practice is different from the one they preach and expect from their women.

  Says Firestone: ‘Men are interested in nothing but a screw (wham, bam, thank you, ma’am) and once sure of their woman, they become philanderers.’ The worst tragedy befalls the ‘mod’ lass who deludes herself that by ridding herself of feminine ‘hang-ups’ and becoming a ‘groovy chick’, indulging freely in sex, she is striking a blow for women’s equality. All she succeeds in achieving is being slept around with and being discarded as a slut for a more ‘reputable’ woman.

  It would appear that the only chance of women getting equal rights is to enjoy sex but refuse to bear children, to let all children be born in test-tubes and be cared for equally by men and women. The day, it seems, is not far off.

  11

  When Women Demanded Their

  Birthright

  At one extreme were the American militants of the Women’s Lib burning their bras, abolishing nomenclatures like Mr and Mrs, addressing the presiding officer as ‘chairperson’, etc, and at the other were countries like Saudi Arabia…stuck to their own version of the sacred laws which sanction polygamy and require women to live in veiled segregation.

  I recall that way back in 1975, over six thousand women and men gathered in Mexico City for the International Women’s Year Conference. It could be divided into two categories: those who came in their own right because of their involvement in movements for women’s emancipation, and those who came through the bedrooms of presidents, prime ministers and eminent politicians. Those who came in their own right were more numerous and did the real work. Those who came through their husbands’ bedrooms made the speeches written for them but stole the limelight.

  The chief figures in the ranks of the deserving invitees were Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Ashraf Pahlevi of Iran, Mother Teresa, Gloria Steinem, Betty Frieden, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Angela Davis, Jane Fonda, Valentina Tereshkova (the Soviet cosmonaut) and Vilma Espir (the Cuban guerilla fighter). There were also a number of African and Latin American ministers and lady diplomats in this category.

  All the Indians were deserving participants. Prabha Rao (40), M.A., Minister for Education, Maharashtra, was the leader. With her were Parvathi Krishnan (nee Kumaramangalam) and Margaret Alva (members of Parliament), Sakina Hassan of Aligarh University, Shyamala Pappu (advocate, Supreme Court), Soonu Kochar of the Council of Cultural Relations, and the vivacious Padma Ramachandran of the I.A.S. who acted as secretary. Two men were attached to the delegation: P. N. Luthra, Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare, who was the think-tank and Srinivasan from the UN office in New York.

  The bed-hoppers made the headlines but little else. Why Jehan Sadat for Egypt or Nusrat Bhutto for Pakistan or Imelda Marcos for the Philippines? Why the wives of prime ministers of Guyana or Jamaica? And why Leah Rabin and not Golda Meir from Israel? Even the American delegation had the wife of Senator Jacob Javits as an adviser when her chief qualification was cohabitation with Sake. The point was of more than academic importance. Of the three items to be discussed one was the role of women in maintaining peace. Since these women did not speak independently but echoed the prejudices of their husbands, they made no womanly contribution to peace.

  This was abundantly proved by two incidents that took place on the first day. Jehan Sadat was asked whether she would talk to Leah Rabin. She replied with a blunt ‘No’ and used words which her husband would have had he been asked to meet the prime minister of Israel. The other concerned Pakistan and India. Begum Nusrat Bhutto had hoped to be among the elite to address a fu
ll house. But the inauguration had been a tiresomely long tamasha with tedious speeches by President Luis Echeverria of Mexico, Kurt Waldheim, Helvi Sipila, Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Imelda Marcos.

  When the plenary was reconvened after lunch, the attendance was very thin. Begum Bhutto refused to speak and asked for another time. She was billed to take the rostrum after the tea break. The attendance was even thinner. At the insistence of the Pakistani delegation a special after-dinner session was convened and an unofficial whip sent round the delegation to provide an audience for the wife of the prime minister of Pakistan. By then the Indian delegation had got wind that Begum Bhutto was going to needle India.

  Finally when the Begum Sahiba mounted the rostrum to unburden herself of the speech prepared for her by the Pakistani Ministry of External Affairs, she found herself facing the Indian contingent in full force. As far as the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are concerned, changes in the sexes of the leaders will do little to defuse the tensions that exist.

  Indians usually make a good showing at conferences. They have sharp minds, a love for logic-chopping and the gift of the gab. They are at their best in wording resolutions, proposing amendments and lobbying. It is only when the time comes for action that they run out of enthusiasm.

  Our delegation had obviously done its homework. Unlike most other nations, we had a commission to examine the status of women and were equipped with its findings. ‘We have our facts and figures at our finger-tips,’ said Luthra. ‘We know what we are up against and will tackle our problems with a sense of reality.’ All of the first day and most of the night Luthra and Parvathi Krishnan were busy on the speech that Prabha Rao was to deliver. What Prabha Rao said did not at first reading sound very revolutionary. But on reading it carefully one noticed that on all the three objectives, viz. Equality, Integration and Peace, she said something which had not been said before.