The Constant Deviant

It is International Women's Day and I thought of letting this day go by in silence, but my head got the better of me. Nandita Das wrote a nice, little, rambling piece in the Sunday Times which touched a raw nerve somewhere. She talked about what it might feel like to be treated as a person instead of someone whose identity was drawn in relation to other men. This statement took me back to when I was an ambitious 17 year old, who had just enrolled in Lady Shri Ram, fresh out of an all-girls school. From day one in college I tried to define myself in relation to how capable I was at work/academic life.

And once at a family gathering when asked what my life's goal was, I said that I wanted to be known for ME and not who I was married to, or whose daughter I was. This caused much amusement. The only problem was, I was dead serious! These were not empty words of empowerment for me.

I come from a background where our parents never told us we couldn't do something because we were girls, my sister and I that is. We were never stopped from voicing our opinions, our parents never answered for us when we were asked questions about what we did, we took horse-riding lessons, badminton lessons, tennis (at some point, I think), swimming lessons, ill-fated golf lessons from dad (an avid golfer),etc. We were encouraged to debate and declamate, and keep focused on academics. The option of marrying and settling down was never openly discussed; we were expected to be working women. At times when we got really vocal and mad about something, my mom would despair jokingly about finding men strong enough to withstand us. After I got an MA and an M.Phil, my dad joked about how hard it would be to find Rajput boys to marry me because I was much too qualified. But this was all humor in the family. My parents remained extremely proud of us.

My sister and me went to the same college in Delhi, both equally ambitious and we continue to be. She has a sprightly daughter now, a six-year old exceedingly vocal brat, who is perhaps one of the most precocious six-year-olds I have ever encountered. I am glad that being surrounded by strong and resilient women will also trickle down into her behavior and choices she makes in life.

At that point, while growing up under this parental authority which actually allowed for us to develop as capable individuals, I never once realized that even girls living next door to me in secluded army cantonments did not have such an upbringing. In Delhi I stayed in a hostel for daughters of army personnel, a secluded, institutionalized place in South Delhi where we were much insulated from the vagaries of Delhi student life, under the watchful gaze of a very unpopular warden. I met many phenomenal women there, but I also met women who would discuss how much money their fathers had saved up for their dowries. And then there was the beauty contest craze. Many women from the hostel ended up as contestants in various beauty pageants and the Miss India contest, some also ended up in serial bad relationships. But many others also ended up as anchors on TV, in movies, made excellent fashion models. I was never very sure what to make of these women who willingly entered the beauty industry. I was at a college where the administration frowned upon pageants as a matter of principle. Yet that year one of the Miss India finalists was an ex-student of the college.

At one award interview in college I was asked by the faculty panel, "what do you think about women contesting in beauty pageants?" This was the last question, which came (as I still remember) after a long discussion with MG (the famous principal of LSR) over Ben Okri's work. I remember taking a deep breath and saying, "Ma'am in this college we teach women to make independent choices; free from the influence of the patriarchal structure and other men. So if a woman makes a conscious choice to enter the fashion/beauty industry, we should be supporting her, not punishing her. It's about choice and the right of women to decide what they want to do with their bodies, publicly and privately." I would personally never have chosen to step into this industry, but I would defend the right of every woman who wanted to do so, and I did - as one of my best friends went on to be pretty successful in this industry, till she too left the country.

At the end of three years there I transitioned to another student space - JNU. This was my first exposure to REAL India, as it were, with all its contradictions and complications. One of the most formative experiences in JNU was stumbling downstairs for breakfast in a pair of shorts on day one, to the utter horror of having 30 pairs of male eyes staring at you shell-shocked. I had not realized wearing shorts to breakfast was a big deal. I had spent six years in exclusive female places - school, college and hostel. Now I was in a "co-ed" hostel in JNU sharing a room with Bong, my old buddy from LSR. Co-ed in JNU meant that the hostel had two wings - a girls' wing and a boys one. The dining hall was common, which explained how my "short" transgression had led to some hastily swallowed omelets. I had not known for sure if it was the shorts, or the fact that I was a new girl that had generated the reaction, but I had gone back up, changed into my trackies and come back down to fetch tea for Bong and me. I had realized instantly that JNU was unlike any other space I had ever inhabited. Much was not permissible there and more than anything the mingling of the urban and the rural created certain norms of behaviour amongst the student community. There was much lost in translation between the people from Bharat and India, especially with respect to women. One could sense a certain disapproval and aloofness from some men if a female student was too familiar with members of the opposite sex, or dressed provocatively. In a couple of hair-raising cases, urbanite women were stalked by boys from small towns who had inferred from the woman's free manner of speech and body language, a declaration of undying love and affection.

JNU changed as well, the demography changed and shorts became more common. With the GSCASH rules, women felt safer and privileged. GSCASH is the Gender Sensitization Committee Against Sexual Harassment, a body mandated for all universities in the country under the Supreme Court's Vishaka Judgement of 1994. And the men on campus learned as well, that mingling was alright, that women had a right to dress any which way they wanted. Some of the most brilliant defenses of women's free will came from a boy from rural Bihar who had embraced Buddhism. On the other hand, an upper-caste boy from Bihar once commented that women enjoy being raped because it couldn't happen otherwise. Bong and I had passionately risen collectively as righteous demons against this man before realizing at some level, we were wasting our breath.

Years passed and I left for the US coming back only on vacation, running projects in the summer to write on. I got married to a non-Rajput man of my choice, with no parental opposition and considered myself fortunate. All was well.

I came back to spend an extended year in India completing fieldwork for my Ph.D. It involved traveling places I had never visited, leaving my comfort zone and seeing if I could live by myself as an outsider in the northeast. I found that I could, mainly due to the kindness and love utter strangers (now friends) lavished on me; but also because I realized I had some really good instincts which saw me through some pretty hair-raising situations - the type where you're not sure if you're going to walk out in one piece.

Unfortunately, people in India, especially north India are still getting used to married women putting career before husband (and till I was categorically told that) I had no idea I was actually doing this and that it was a big no-no. I also didn't think husband minded. In fact, he accompanied me to the northeast for a few days to make sure I would be OK. The sudden restrictions on mobility and decision-making, and having roles thrust by society on me, made me react in pretty aggressive ways. My productivity was compromised and I was not ready to give up my identity, my last name or my economic freedom. I constantly felt guilty because it seemed I could do no right. I felt the full-force of patriarchy come crashing down on me. It was different and strange for me to adhere to roles I had not been prepared for. I considered my husband and me as equals, in a partnership. Indian society told me that was not the case. I made career a priority, reasoning that I would never be this young or this energetic again and that I could not go back and do a 'better' dissertation. I was not used to playing homely roles, I was not brought up that way. I did not dream about getting married to a hunk or a savior. I did not play with dolls, mom made sure of that. Instead we played quiz games, strategy games, word games and outdoor sport. The concept of marriage had never entered my mind. It was a possibility that might occur in the future, but it was not what I was training for. This didn't mean that I was incapable of playing wife. I just found that I couldn't do it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I just couldn't! And I think it is horribly debilitating to expect a capable, educated, working woman to be forced to play this role for the better part of her waking hours. If some women choose to do housework and it makes them happy, so be it. If some women are able to handle home and career and work two shifts in this way, so be it. I just couldn't be one of them.

In some ways all of this has been an eye-opening experience for me. I realized once more how the way we think, even us liberated women, is conditioned by the force of patriarchy. Even when we do no wrong and make an independent choice to place career before home, we feel terribly guilty. We believe we are doing something wrong. It took me a while to recognize this paradox. There is hell to pay for any deviation from the norm. All of this only makes me marvel at my parents, who reveled in bringing up their two daughters in contrarian ways and protected us from the real world the best way they could, by making sure we only inhabited those exclusive spaces where we would be allowed full self-expression and be treated as persons, not girls.

That bubble has burst since at some point everyone has to confront the real world. And the real world for women is no longer something I read about in World Development Reports, data on female marginalization in the workforce and other such material. It is now something I see on a daily basis - the multitude of men who throng the streets of north India and the fewer number of women, the wonderful woman who could divorce her husband only in UK, where she went on an academic fellowship, because under Syrian Christian law divorce by women was not recognized (or so she said). The wonderful friend who got out of an abusive relationship with her husband and again escaped to foreign shores. The fellowship godzilla whose brilliant career in academia still came second to her role as a daughter in law. The fantastic female buddy who walked out on her boyfriend because his family demanded a dowry for their marriage (illegal under law). The amazing woman who ran out on her controlling father and fought her way through to the toughest universities in the country to forge an independent academic career.

Yes, women pay a price for being too good at what we do. Society still clamps down around the best of us. Some phenomenal women are able to make the best of a bad situation and work things out by signing a truce with the structure. Some of us are incapable of that and indeed small victories, small baby steps against patriarchy is essential so that our daughters don't have to deal with controlling men who have an inflated sense of their own self worth. People say, well they're old, it's hard for them to change. I disagree. I have seen men change. I have been able to win the respect of male family members who thought it was amusing that I wanted to be known for myself and not as an extension of any man.

But the most disappointing of all has been the participation of women in this structure. I tried very hard to understand it, and I have failed. I have had women ask me, "how does your husband allow you to go so far away, for so long." I always respond by saying, "It's work for me and work does not need permission. And he supports my enterprise, just so you know...". To me it seems women never ask me the question, "how have you allowed your husband to go away for one month to Scandinavia, or Peru?" The common assumption is that men can make such independent choices, but women need permission. Similarly, men don't ask other men, "how has your wife allowed you to stay away for so long?", except in jest.

I guess the point is in many ways we do feel like we have done something wrong if we mimic 'masculine' behavior in India. So in many ways all of our learning and our own upbringing is countermined by the learning and norms society thrusts on us, and to my utter horror I realized I had in fact internalized some of it, or I wouldn't have felt so guilty for putting career before home for a span of one year. It's good to have realized this at age 29. I have another 29 years at least in which to fix some of this.