Walking Towards Ourselves

by Catriona Mitchell

  One cannot speak of India’s women without speaking of her men, and certainly many men are stepping forward to support women’s safety and empowerment – for example, with organisations such as M.A.R.D. (Men Against Rape and Discrimination).

  This collection in no way intends to cast aspersions on India’s male population, nor does it seek to portray Indian men as misogynists. Such a generalisation would be not only wildly inaccurate, but absurd. Certainly, if numbers of India’s men are disenfranchised, brutalised and desensitised, then that desensitisation will affect women also, and this was a factor in the Nirbhaya case: her attackers were from impoverished backgrounds and several were labelled as ‘vagabond’ in the court records. The youngest of them had been living without family on the city streets since the age of six.

  Violence needs to end on both sides of the equation.

  It is true, however, that the all-too-common incidents of violence and depravity exercised against women in India, and the Nirbhaya case in particular, provided the impetus for this book. I found myself thinking about Nirbhaya, day after day after day. I could not get her out of my mind. I was not alone – her story came to epitomise the story of any young woman, in any country, innocently on her way home from a movie after dark – and it touched many people very deeply around the world.

  I followed the debate about safety for women while convalescing in hospital in Australia. At some point I wished to hear the voices of India’s women directly, freed from the hype and sensationalism of the media. It was, and still is, my experience that India is a source of greater inspiration, vibrancy, colour and enchantment; of more profound political, intellectual and spiritual enquiry; of more deeply felt and meaningful conversation; of more frequent displays of kindness from strangers and friends alike, than anywhere else in the world. Although addressing an all-important issue, the international press seemed to be overlooking India’s stunning diversity and cultural richness in its focus on the dangers.

  I wanted to hear first-hand from Indian women about the challenges, big and small, that they faced on a daily basis, and to share these with readers. I wanted to hear about the joys, rewards, opportunities and great range of experiences of being a woman in India too, in addition to the challenges. I wanted to hear from those who were bucking the gender stereotypes. I wanted to know what the country’s women made of the burgeoning gender revolution, and what it meant to them personally to be an Indian woman living through this time of incredible transition and intense confusion. I wanted to hear stories of love and hope, beyond the negative coverage: I wanted a balanced view.

  I was familiar with the writing of many female Indian authors and journalists, having got to know them over years of engagement with literary projects and festivals in different parts of the country. However, I hadn’t read many personal narratives – narratives that articulated the real-life experiences of India’s women in a subjective, candid, and intimate way. It was time for those experiences to be delved into, given a voice and shared.

  Seeking out these stories from established women writers was a logical leap. The idea for this book was born.

  I asked the authors to mine their own lives and experiences for their pieces; or, if they preferred, they could write about a woman in their immediate acquaintance whose daily reality offered a window onto a fascinating and telling world. The aim was to share the intimate details of real lives, and create a diverse, wide-ranging collection of stories that would say: ‘This is what our lives look like.’

  The title of the collection, Walking Towards Ourselves, comes from renowned dancer and choreographer Chandralekha2. In an exploration of that which connects art with life, Chandralekha said, ‘we are simply walking towards ourselves.’ So too, in this volume of ‘mini memoirs’, each contributing writer is walking the edge between her art and life. Each one is walking, one word at a time, towards the expression of a subjective reality, towards having a voice: a voice that rings out clear and untrammelled and original and vulnerable and strong and personal and true. Each one is using words as a means to find her way home, when home is a land that doesn’t always make her feel welcome, or cherished, or free.

  Free speech is sometimes brutally suppressed in India, as indeed in other parts of the world. In August 2015, in one such instance, the nation was shocked when a college professor and scholar from Karnataka, who openly questioned idol worship in the Hindu religion, was killed by a shot to the head at point-blank range at the front door of his home.

  For India’s women, speaking out is an act of courage. For India’s women writers, articulating the female experience and putting it in print for all to see – in other words, the expression and exercise of freedom of speech – can be perceived as an act of defiance or rebellion, a refusal to conform, a flying in the face of patriarchy that invites criticism, shame, recrimination, intimidation, or worse.

  Salma, the Tamil poet and fiction writer featured in this anthology, who shot to fame with her novel The Hour Past Midnight, became a writer in a closeted Muslim environment: she was locked inside her family home on reaching puberty, then married off, and later wrote to maintain her sanity but had to hide her writing from her husband and his family in order to preserve her life. When her first book was launched, it was under a pseudonym. Another contributor to this collection, who has written with outstanding courage and candour about her experiences of marital rape, has had to safeguard her identity in order to stay out of harm’s way.

  There is no doubt that in many instances, in choosing to share their stories, these women are staring down real fears.

  For centuries an Indian woman was the ‘property’ of her father and then her husband, subjected to an arranged marriage and then to the responsibilities of maintaining her family home. The honour of the entire family rested upon her shoulders, and her moral piety was seen a core contributor to social harmony on a broader scale as well. Since the opening up of India’s economy in 1991, however, women have been exposed to new opportunities for education and for joining the workforce. The impact of this cannot be underestimated. It is only this recently that women have really started to find economic independence, and have therefore been able to withstand social pressures towards marriage and other duties.

  Why have India’s women been traditionally subjected to such an extreme expression of patriarchy? This has deeply entrenched religious as well as socio-economic roots. According to the Hindu religion, parents cannot achieve liberation or ‘moksha’ after death unless there is a son to perform the cremation rites; and largely because of the dowry system, daughters have traditionally been seen as a financial burden on a family, while sons were considered to build upon a family’s wealth. Put simply, boy children are wanted and girl children are not: this has been true down the ages and holds true, for the most part, today.

  Although sex determination is illegal in hospitals (I was taken aback on a visit to an Indian hospital to see a huge sign at the entrance, declaring that the sex of foetuses would not be identified there) it is not uncommon even nowadays for female foetuses to be aborted and dumped, and for baby girls to be left at orphanages simply because the parents can’t afford to raise them, and see them married off, and be expected to provide a dowry or a fancy wedding, which has become the modern, more acceptable (and legal) form of dowry. There’s a higher infant mortality rate amongst girls too, because medical care for girls is seen as less of a priority than it is for boys. As a result of this, there is a staggering gender imbalance in today’s India, and it’s a source of alarming and ever-increasing frictions. Ira Trivedi writes in her bestselling book India in Love that in 2011, India had 37 million more men than women, and about 17 million excess men in the age group that commits most crimes. Ira asserts: ‘Violent crime increases as the deficit of women increases.’3

  More of India’s women are choosing to speak up than ever before. This is true across the board, but most overtly in the arena of sexual violence. It’s unknown if the number of sexual assaults aga
inst women in the country is on the rise. What is true is that taboos have broken open and sexual violence and sexual matters more broadly are being discussed in a way that was previously unthinkable; as a result the sense of a victim’s shame is diminishing.

  A few brave young women are breaking the way open for others to follow, by making themselves heard in the public sphere. I flew back to Delhi recently to participate in a live event on women and gender. One of the speakers was a young Dalit woman from Uttar Pradesh who in 2012 (when she was thirteen years old) was set upon by four men of a higher caste on her way to school. The men gagged her, and raped her, and filmed the attack. They later sold this recording in a local market.

  The courage it must have taken for this young woman (now known as ‘Bitiya’) to report this is unfathomable – she who had no power at all was speaking out against those who did. Her family accompanied her to the talk she gave in Delhi. ‘I was thrown out of the school …’ Bitiya told the audience. ‘The school teachers treated me as an accused. The villagers pressured me to take the complaint back.’ Her mother said, ‘We don’t care what happens to us anymore. I will not let this happen to any more daughters again.’ Bitiya’s aged grandfather also came to the event; despite being startled by finding himself on stage, in front of spotlights and cameras, he stood in solidarity with the women of his family.

  Acts of speaking up, of demonstrating courage of this kind, by men and women across different generations and castes, bespeak inestimable social change.

  Nita Ambani, wife of business magnate Mukesh Ambani (India’s wealthiest man), made a speech at the same women’s event in Delhi where Bitiya and her mother spoke. Nita was born into a (combined) family of eleven girls and one boy, but crucially the family was completely free of gender bias. She highlighted the fact that education was made available to her, making all the difference to her future.

  Nita’s was a view of hope: ‘When I see the people in this room, and their commitment to women’s empowerment, I know the future looks bright.’ Indeed there has been improvement for women and girls in recent years: economic growth and technological developments have been massive contributors to India’s social and cultural change, leading the country to such rapid modernisation that countless lives have morphed beyond all recognition within the space of a decade. This is spectacularly true for India’s young women, who are coming into new opportunities for education and employment.

  Deepti Kapoor captures this sense of radical change for the young in her contribution to this anthology. ‘In India it was an exciting time. The India I knew was going through a great upheaval. The economy was flourishing, people were no longer fleeing abroad for a life, jobs were abundant, the arts were vibrant. Social relations were changing too; life was loosening in the cities … I had many potential futures – TV newsreader, human rights advocate, wife to a wealthy banker, post-grad student at an Ivy League college. It was my decision to make. It was a time of optimism and opportunity and hope. I couldn’t wait to get on in the world.’

  Today’s India is characterised by a giant melting pot of roles for women, a veritable mix of tradition-meets-innovation. One woman’s life is bound by social mores that extend back centuries, with rules that are frozen in time, while another’s is defined by an all-new autonomy, a sparklingly modern sense of identity, like Deepti’s.

  These discrepancies are captured in the range of lives described in this collection. Contrast Anita Agnihotri’s protagonist Taramoni, who is fighting for her life amid post-cyclone catastrophe, with only a makeshift bamboo home for shelter from tigers and other threats, with hip urbane Indians preoccupied with an online dating app, as described in Ira Trivedi’s ‘Love in the Time of the Internet’. Contrast Salma’s story of being kept inside her husband’s home in Tamil Nadu, where her in-laws’ reputation is measured by the extent of her chastity, with Margaret Mascarenhas’s unique and daring exploration of gender fluidity in her home in Goa.

  Contrasting realities, indeed.

  India is so vast and diverse as to be more like a series of different countries than a unified whole; multiple voices are needed to shed light on her ways. For this reason, Walking Towards Ourselves seeks to give authentic voice to a range of women writers from different parts of the country. These women are of varying ages, religions, castes, socio-economic backgrounds, political orientations and sexual proclivities. And some of the contributors have different mother tongues. While the majority of the pieces were written in English by writers already in my acquaintance (owing to my own linguistic limitations), I’m delighted to say that in researching this project, my attention was brought to some authors working in regional languages who were hitherto unknown to me.

  They have been beautiful discoveries.

  Anita Agnihotri is one such example: her contribution ‘The Village Without Men’ was originally written in her native Bengali. Salma’s ‘Beyond Memories’ was translated from Tamil. In ‘Bamboo Baskets and Brocade Saris,’ C.S. Lakshmi documents the riveting life details of a Dalit writer by the name of Urmila – their discussions were originally conducted in Marathi. Nirupama Dutt’s moving depiction of the contrasting lives she and her sister led – born twenty-eight years apart to different mothers, and with entirely different access to education opportunities – is a story that was lived out in Punjabi.

  Despite the obvious diversity in the stories, one of the joys in editing this book was witnessing the common themes that emerged across the contributions, reflecting back at one another like jewels in a net. Different Indias intersect here, at times in startling and surprising ways. Rosalyn D’Mello’s account of being dark-skinned, and how this inestimably affected her sense of self-worth and desirability, is a theme explored in an entirely different way in Ira Trivedi’s ‘Rearranged Marriage’. Mitali Saran’s irreverent choice to lead a bohemian life with neither husband nor children in Delhi, is twinned in Tishani Doshi’s more reflective piece on why she has decided not to become a mother in Tamil Nadu. The legal issues addressed in Leila Seth’s piece – and more specifically her disappointment that marital rape is still not recognised as a crime in India – are directly mirrored by the author who has chosen to remain anonymous: ‘Within a marriage, fighting back comes with its consequences. The man who rapes me is not a stranger who runs away … He is the husband for whom I have to make the morning coffee.’

  Above all, the ways in which women inspire and help each other through the generations, is a theme that crisscrosses the contributions. For example, Urvashi Butalia describes the powerfully positive influence of her mother upon her own trajectory as a feminist publisher: ‘my mother … persuaded him to let me try. “She’ll find her feet,” she said, and I did.’

  Education stands out as an essential thematic strand, particularly when it comes to this legacy from older generations. The mothers (and fathers, and grandmothers) mentioned here step in most forcefully when it comes to education and career opportunity for their girls, and without this guiding light the writers might never have discovered their literary talents. As a blossoming young poet, Salma can only be published when her mother sneaks her poems out of the house, wrapped in a cloth bundle, to find someone to post them. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who has received a dazzling number of literary awards and whose books have been translated into twenty-nine languages, states, ‘Thanks to the power of education, and to a mother who would not compromise on my schooling, no matter how much people pressured her – I did it. Words became my scimitar.’

  Although only twenty-five per cent of India’s women are employed, this collection frequently features women at work. Anjum Hasan’s protagonist, a plucky young social worker in Karnataka, cares for girls who have been abandoned by their families, and who are ‘ravenous for affection’. C.S. Lakshmi offers a window into her world at SPARROW, an initiative that records and archives the stories of women from around the country, thereby providing a sense of ‘herstory’ as well as ‘history’. Also based in Mumbai – but on a different
note altogether – Tisca Chopra offers humorous insight into life as a Bollywood actress, and the challenges of being on the casting couch and in the hotel room of a scurrilous director who hopes to take liberties with her.

  There are moments of humour and moments of women at play. Mitali Saran, for example, is ‘an Indian woman in her mid-forties, single, childless, jobless, who dresses like an uncool teenager, wraps presents in newspaper, drinks, smokes, occasionally pops into a bar or a movie theatre alone, drives around in the middle of the night, has no ambition, dances tango, has taken to the guitar …’

  Beauty is a theme that repeats – both the pursuit of it and, interestingly, the active avoidance of it. Ira Trivedi, a former finalist in the Miss India pageant, talks to young women whose experiences tell them that only fairer skin will lead them to a suitable matrimony. Sharanya Manivannan explores what different forms of adornment signify; she masterfully interweaves a love of sartorial splendour and feminine expression with the inherently political. ‘If a red lipstick is wonderful anywhere in the world, it is most wonderful of all on the mouth of a woman who has claimed her own voice.’ Both Sharanya and Annie Zaidi dress in dowdy clothing in order to feel safer in the workplace. Out and about at odd hours as a reporter on Mumbai’s streets, Annie writes: ‘I remember looking down at myself – at my loose, long, chequered kurta and salwar, no make-up, flat slippers. I used to try to dress down for work, afraid that taking pains with my appearance would be held against me somehow …’