There’s a general sense that you shouldn’t be living at home as an adult, but I quite like it. It gives me leeway to do what I enjoy – to not work all the time, to have leisure, to see friends, to travel, to devote myself to the study of something. My mother and I sometimes don’t meet for three days under the same roof, but a rumpled newspaper here or a pair of shoes left by the front door there will tell us what’s up. Sometimes we leave each other notes. She is, de facto, my flatmate.
My relationship with her is the kind of daft domestic relations dance that provides much fodder for my columns. I make fun of her convent-educated breeding, which she displays magnificently by taking it in the right spirit. ‘Where am I?’ she’ll say, if I’ve left her out of a column, ‘I miss me.’ She worries about my physical safety (‘You drink/smoke too much, you drive too late, you sleep too little’). But she has learned to fully accept my life, if not fully understand it. She’s peered at it at close quarters and is reassured that while it is unorthodox, I’m not stealing cars or trafficking drugs – at least not that I admit to – and appear to be reasonably happy.
But there is one thing she cannot seem to overcome, and that is shame – on my behalf. She can’t bear the idea that when I come home in the morning in the previous evening’s clothes, or when I walk out of the house with a man who’s wearing what he had on the previous night, the staff who hang around the gate of the complex – the guards and drivers – might leer knowingly at me and gossip about it. I have no idea why she believes that they do – they’re unfailingly polite to me – or that they don’t, even when there’s no man in sight (which is most often). This is also the view of many other people who employ domestic staff. Do they think that those in the Economically Weaker Section are like kindergartners, innocent of sex and swear words, around whom we must not let on that such a thing is possible? I imagine they have a rich enough sexual life that they might not perish of shock on the spot.
The gentleman who has worked in our family for three generations is a good example. Once in a while I might come down in the morning and take two cups of coffee back up to my room. He and I will look each other in the eye and have a completely deadpan conversation. If he’s uncertain how to react, whatever he thinks of me, he keeps it to himself – he’s a true professional. Not that I would do it differently if he weren’t.
The real threat is not, of course, gossip. It’s violence: chronic, daily, mainstream violence against women. India has always had a dubious fame for being a place where women are harassed, threatened, groped, violated, abused, raped, stabbed, burnt, hanged and melted by acid, but somehow we never got a national conversation going about it until December 2012, when a girl in Delhi was gang-raped and so brutalised that her doctors were shocked. She died of her injuries, but not before setting the country on fire.
Delhi – home to the politically apathetic bourgeoisie – erupted in massive, furious protests against that rape and all the gender crimes it represented. Thousands of women, and men, decided to step up and refuse to continue to ignore or silently accept the gross violations of sexism. They decided to raise hell, and so did the media. Suddenly, the people who shame women for getting raped, for dressing or behaving in certain ways, for having mobile phones and wearing jeans, were getting called out – loudly. Words like patriarchy, sexism and misogyny became TV studio staples. And, as in any cultural tipping point, there was backlash. The patriarchs and misogynists got louder too, and made specious nationalist and traditionalist arguments about Indian culture and how Leslee Udwin’s BBC documentary on the story was giving India a bad name.
The listless UPA1 government of the day typically failed to recognise and seize an opportunity. It could have harnessed public anger to push for the political good for all Indian women. Instead, it tried to dismiss the protests as elitist and insignificant, yet cracked down on them with thousands of police personnel, water cannons and metro shutdowns, and came off as confused and terrified. Today’s BJP2 government under Narendra Modi is, if possible, even more gender tone-deaf than the last, especially since it is rooted in patriarchal Hindu culture. But the conversation has begun, and is slowly beginning to push back, in small but relentless ways, against the mainstream sexism that pervades Indian society.
Women are certainly fighting back harder than ever before – reporting crimes and misdemeanours more, taking cases to court, calling out workplace sexism, wearing what they want to wear, marrying the people they want to marry, or not marrying at all, and increasingly not just refusing to cede space but actively expanding it. Women have just been accepted into combat roles in the Indian Air Force. They are making a name in sport. They’re playing in rock bands. They are voting according to their own priorities. They are dissenting loudly in the media. Indian women are an impressively strong lot of human beings, and they only intend to get stronger. Economic compulsions, the mind-altering possibilities of the Internet, and the world beaming in on us from television and phone screens are putting big cracks in the implacable power structures we’ve always had.
It will be generations before we get anywhere near gender equality. It’s an inevitable process, however, because – I’m convinced – the impulse to freedom and self-expression is as fundamentally human as the impulse to live with social acceptance. And women are fighters.
Autonomy is the most powerful drug in the world. The ability to govern your own life, your own thoughts, to make the choices you want to make, is a wild high given to too few people around the world.
I’m a lucky woman. The choices I make in Delhi as a member of the freelancing liberal elite, with supportive family and friends, have about a million more insulating layers than the choices of a blue-collar, lower-caste woman who lives in a village or a slum in the middle of an orthodox joint family. There is nothing brave or pioneering about my choices; the only thing I have to worry about, really, is other people’s opinions, and I choose not to. I have the liberty to live relatively autonomously. Why, then, wouldn’t I?
There is, of course, a dark side to a life singly lived. People often ask me if I’m lonely, if I worry about dying alone, if I will feel the same way about my life-choices in the future as I do now. A cop recently asked me, with a kind of stunned compassion, ‘You don’t have a husband and you don’t believe in God?’ The answer is: of course there are moments of piercing loneliness. There are bouts of hair-standing-on-end fear, of impossible depression, of feeling lost and alone, of weeping into my bed sheets at 4 am, convinced that I’m dying of a brain tumour – dying being much preferable to malingering, dependence or incapacitation – and moments of wanting nothing more than to crawl into someone’s arms and be taken care of. I sometimes go around begging my friends for hugs. There are moments of utter alienation from my environment. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. They constitute the cost of the choices one makes, and on balance those choices make me happy as a potty-mouthed clam.
As for the future, who knows? Perhaps I’ll feel differently, perhaps not. For now I’m just a girl, standing in front of one to four guys, asking them to love her in whatever degree is mutually acceptable, for some indeterminate length of time. Or not, and that’s fine too. It’s also possible that I will one day grow up, settle down, adopt a kid and have a career.
Just kidding.
So yes, there’s lots of uncertainty in my life. I choose it. I have an acute sense of mortality and don’t plan to waste my brief time on earth being someone else’s idea of me. Uncertainty allows space for new and interesting choices. What more can a thinking person with a free-range vagina ask for?
* * *
1. United Progressive Alliance
2. Bharatiya Janata Party
OXYGEN
URVASHI BUTALIA
I was twenty-one when I walked into the offices of a publishing house in Delhi in search of a life and a career. I had little idea what I would find. I knew only this: three decades into independence, Britain and all things English still held sway in India. At uni
versity I’d chosen to study literature, which effectively meant English literature. Much though I loved Milton and Spenser (yes, even him), they had nothing to do with the reality I saw around me. I desperately needed to escape the teaching job (English literature!) that awaited me. I needed oxygen.
‘We’re a little doubtful about giving you a job,’ my prospective employers told me. ‘We do not normally appoint women in executive positions because they get married and go away.’ I felt immediately guilty on behalf of all women – my feminist teeth hadn’t become quite as sharp as they are today – and rashly promised I would not do so ‘for at least five years’. More than forty years later, I’ve still kept that promise. I’ve not married, and I’ve not gone away from publishing.
At home, my parents – my mother a teacher and my father an editor – talked about my job. My father’s worry was how I would come and go – for the offices of the Oxford University Press were quite a distance away, and Delhi transport at the time was nothing to write home about. My mother – I never quite understood how she was so brave on our behalf – persuaded him to let me try. ‘She’ll find her feet,’ she said, and I did.
The year was 1973. I was twenty-one. You’d think twenty-one would be ‘old enough’ but that wasn’t the case in India then. An adult, I still lived at home – though I harboured thoughts of moving out – and for the first few months, did not contribute to the family income. It wasn’t the done thing. Parents were meant to ‘look after’ their ‘children’.
At university – I’d only just left so the memory was fresh in my mind – we’d begun to think and talk about feminism. We, the ‘newly minted’ young feminists of India at the time, were reading, furiously. Political turmoil was all around us; in Bengal the Naxalite movement, a violent left-wing group against landlordism, inspired many students to abandon college and join what they thought would be the Revolution. In Delhi, as young women, we fought small battles – better hostels for girls, safe transport and more. The times were heady, exciting, inspiring; every day brought a new campaign. We were confident that we would storm every citadel.
I sort of realised that the days of street protests and slogans and songs and furious shouting would have to be left behind when I stepped into a corporate office. But the question stayed in my mind – could there be a way to combine feminist politics and the workspace? It took a while to find an answer to this question, and in the meanwhile I proceeded to fall deeply and irrevocably in love with publishing.
The feminism didn’t go away either. In the evenings, at weekends, on holidays, my young feminist peers and I worked hard on campaigns, battling rampant violence against women. We created a women’s magazine, we lobbied for new legislation. One hot summer afternoon, we’d just finished lunch at home. I strolled idly out to our balcony to check something, I’m not sure what, and saw an elderly woman in a white sari standing under a tree, clutching a piece of paper and looking up at our house. The paper turned out to be a leaflet against dowry violence that we’d distributed in a protest march the previous day in another part of town.
Satya Rani Chadda came up into the house and told us her story: her daughter, Kanchan, had been killed by her in-laws for dowry.1 They’d set her on fire, made it look like an accident, waited till she was badly burnt, and then called her parents. Satya Rani was distraught. My mother listened to her story, fury battling with despair at the injustice of it, and I think that was one of the moments that pushed her into her decision to do something to help women in distress. Karmika, the women’s centre my mother subsequently set up, fought cases on behalf of women, helped them file police reports, get custody of their children, battle abusive husbands and more.
Around this time – I’m not sure if it was before or after – we got to hear of these things called ‘virginity tests’. It seemed that the U.K. immigration authorities, suspicious that Indian immigrants were importing women from India to marry them (and thereby increasing the numbers of Indians in the U.K.) decided that one way to find out if a woman coming to the U.K. was illegitimate or not was to check if she was a virgin. In other words, if her hymen was intact. The assumption was that Indian men would only import virgins to marry, so any woman who was found to be a virgin was suspect.
My mother was infuriated by this, as were large numbers of women, including the younger generation. How dare this country, which called itself ‘developed’ and ‘advanced’, violate women’s rights in this way? My mother worked with a group of women her age, and together they decided to gather outside the British High Commission, storm the premises and go in and lodge our protest. So off we went. In those days, embassies were not fortresses. You could actually go up to the gates and beat on them and shout. That’s what the women did, with women like my mother lifting their saris high and scaling the walls and forcing their way in.
Intoxicated with our ‘success’ – I’m not sure if we actually stopped the virginity tests but we created a huge noise about them, enough to raise questions and cause embarrassment – groups of feminists decided to take campaigns against violence to the streets. With the help of two friends in theatre, we created two street plays, one on dowry and one on rape. By this time our large umbrella group had a name – Stree Sangharsh, which means women’s struggle. We went out and bought ourselves black kurtas, and became a travelling theatre group.
By this time the feminist struggle had caught the imagination of other members of my family. My brother joined in the team for the play. We based the story on the lives of two women, friends, one who’d been killed for dowry and the other who’d survived. We’d arrive at a street corner, start beating our drums, collect a crowd and start performing. The initial noise would die down, and you could sense people’s interest. As we performed the scene where the young bride is cruelly killed in her marital home, my mother’s beautiful singing voice would soar – clear, sweet, powerful – singing a moving, gooseflesh-making song of farewell, sung as young brides leave their natal homes. The pathos was not lost on anyone, and there were very few dry eyes around.
In many ways our feminism grew together, my mother’s and mine. We were very different – she always much angrier, always ready to do battle; I more temperate, sometimes conciliatory, a cold anger my last, but familiar, resort. Perhaps this was why she continued with her women’s group and I began to think of something different – of somehow changing the world that I now inhabited, my professional, publishing world.
I can’t exactly pinpoint when it was I began to think of feminist publishing, of making books by women, about women. But somewhere along the way, the street-level activism that we’d all been engaged in began to find its way into my professional life. Why was it that when we wanted to understand the battles we were fighting, to figure out why the world was the way it was, we had so little to read that could help us? Was violence against women a new phenomenon? How had patriarchy come to be shaped in India? Women were so central in the battle for independence, why did we hear virtually nothing about them afterwards? Or, for that matter, during colonial times?
The idea to set up a feminist publishing house took seed and grew, slowly. As often happens, life intervened, things happened, the idea lay dormant, but never quite disappeared. I left my job, took up another, less demanding, one, worked on the idea, then took up a scholarship for a doctorate. Halfway to Hawaii, which is where I was headed, I had a change of mind, and plan, and gave up the scholarship and worked instead in a publishing house in London, and two years later, voila, there it was. What had seemed like a pipe dream had become a reality: in 1984, Kali for Women was born.
Throughout, my parents watched and encouraged: ‘If this is what you really want to do, go for it.’ It couldn’t have been easy: they were not rich, just two professionals with no family money, only their salaries. And they must have worried about having to support grown offspring (fortunately they did not have to). I was thirty-two by then. Now and again they also worried about marriage, but then they gave up. Years later – I
must have been around fifty – my mother said to me, ‘You know, I used to worry about what would happen to you if you didn’t marry, but now I worry what will happen to me if you do marry!’
Kali for Women, the feminist publishing house that emerged out of my engagement with the women’s movement and my involvement in publishing, was formed with a publishing colleague called Ritu Menon. It was a strange sort of hybrid: part N.G.O., working on a non-profit basis (we had no money so this was the only choice available) and part business, producing books in the business world and selling them to produce more and to stay alive.
It was the women’s movement that gave birth to us – I suppose today one would use the term ‘incubated’ – and it was the movement that sustained us. Female activists wrote for us, they bought our books, they encouraged us and with this we survived, slowly, steadily bringing Indian women’s voices to the mainstream.
Looking back now, I can’t think of a moment that was not exciting, or challenging. We were so happy – we were doing something we loved and believed in, and we had so much support from other feminists, from family, from friends. Oddly enough, our colleagues in publishing – all men – were not against what we were doing. But they were a bit sceptical. Women? Do they write? Do they read? Who will buy your books? And printers and paper merchants and typesetters and block makers – at the time, all these were individual, separate services – did not know what to make of us.
But the feminists? They bought every book we published, going to bookshops and demanding, ‘When is the next Kali book coming out?’ And they wrote for us, and pointed us towards possible sources of money. Often, they’d turn up at our office to chat, and ideas for new books would grow out of these informal conversations. Basically, every turn we took, they were there, smiling, nodding, pushing, encouraging. I’m not sure what we would have done without them.
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