This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  The anti-women diktats of Manu and the ferocious feminism of Durga reflect what Banerji believes may have been a violent confrontation between matriarchal and patriarchal communities. It is these cultural incongruities that Indian society has inherited and been subconsciously shaped by.

  So, well beyond the daily battles against sexual violence stretches an even larger war-zone—the gladiatorial ring where women must first fight the contradictions of this historic conditioning and learn that insidious gender bias can often be subliminal and not overt.

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  The company I worked for would periodically run media campaigns for women’s equality. I had imagined that as a female mentor to an editorial and production team dominated by young women, we were all strengthened by each other to live lives unfettered by stereotypical sexism. Many of the women in my team had accompanied me into conflict, war, floods and the fury of angry crowds. They were extraordinarily talented and spunky, often outperforming men in the same roles. Yet, over the years, I watched in dismay as that familiar work–life balance bogey aborted some brilliant careers. Marriage, or even children, did not drag down the professional graph of a single male colleague. Yet, the ambition of more than a few women I knew declined once they had to juggle managing a home along with a career. Many asked for less strenuous shifts, some opted out entirely. I cajoled, sulked, lost my temper, offered friendly counsel to try and change their minds. I even argued that we were betraying the battle fought by the generation of women who had gone before us, professionals who had struggled to get past a glass ceiling that their best efforts could only crack, not break. Perhaps I was not empathetic enough; perhaps as a beneficiary of exceptional personal freedom I was not sensitive to the pressures and demands made of women by their families. But I worried—how could we break down barriers at work when it was not at all certain that women themselves would grab opportunities that were presented to them with the same fervour and staying power as men?

  My experience was anecdotal but statistics about the female labour force in India told their own dire story. Data from the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) showed that the proportion of working women had actually plummeted from 40 per cent in 1990 to less than 23 per cent by 2012. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), India ranked eleventh from the bottom on a list of 131 countries when it came to female participation in the workforce. So had India’s years of economic liberalization simply bypassed women? Or was there some other explanation?

  Ironically, the percentage of women who worked in the villages was much higher than in the cities, where globalization had brought malls and McDonald’s and ostensibly a slew of new opportunities for employment. In a definitive study, economists Surjit Bhalla and Ravinder Kaur analysed the numbers to show that in urban India, the percentage of women in the labour force was ‘much lower and with a labour force pattern not very dissimilar from that prevailing in most Islamic countries’. Their study also showed how as incomes and education levels of men increased the women they were married to showed a greater inclination to stop working. At poor and low levels of family incomes the very need to survive ensured that women worked as well as managed the home and children. They plotted a U-curve for the number of working women in India—the numbers were high among the poor but declined steeply as income levels of the family began climbing before registering an increase again at much higher levels of income.

  Another study by Vinoj Abraham conclusively showed that greater education was no guarantee of greater economic independence or self-reliance for India’s women. In urban India, for instance, the proportion of working women graduates had plunged from over 60 per cent in the 1980s to 26 per cent in 2010. Abraham argued that institutionalized patriarchy and the peculiar socio-cultural norms of Indian society associated upward mobility with the ‘labour market participation of men, marginalization of women in the labour force and the domestication of women’. In other words, status-seeking households continued to idealize domesticity when it came to women. Social scientist M. N. Srinivas had described this process as ‘sanskritization’ in which women’s seclusion was traditionally a marker of high status among upper castes and was now being emulated by castes and communities seeking to rise to the same level in the social pecking order.

  The peculiar social norms, the engrained societal hierarchies, the absence of shared responsibility in household chores and no guaranteed infrastructural support for child care meant that women who chose to be as professionally driven as men were expected to either be magicians or surrender at least one dream to privilege another.

  Even India-born Indra Nooyi, the global CEO of PepsiCo—who was No. 15 on the Forbes list of the most powerful women in the world in 2015—declared that women could not ‘have it all’. Biological determinism remained an unalterable impediment to free will and Nooyi was absolutely on target when she said that the biological clock was in ‘total and complete conflict’ with the career clock.

  I have often been quizzed about parenthood and whether I had never wanted it for myself. The truth is that as an adrenalin junkie, whose job comes with unpredictable hours and travels to dangerous hotspots, I was too obsessed with work to think about much else in my twenties and thirties. When the passage of time began to shrink the space left to make a free choice, I began to feel conflicted. I wrestled with questions millions of women have had to deal with. Could I go off to report on the fall of Gaddafi in Libya (as I had for days on end, illegally crossing over into Benghazi, from the Egypt border in the darkness of night, with gun-toting strangers for company) with a baby at home? Would I have taken the same risks at the front line of the Kargil War if I was also responsible for a young life? Would my drifter instincts and love for being on the road for long stretches interfere with my capability as a mother? I don’t know if a man in my role would have struggled with the same dilemmas; logically, any parent—man or woman—would have had to agonize over these questions, but I suspect this hand-wringing and second guessing is particular to women. It wasn’t until I was in my forties, just about the time that biological fatalism had in any case sealed my choices, that I could answer the question—do you want to be a mother?—without getting annoyed or defensive.

  Nooyi’s philosophical acceptance that women, as distinct from men, would have to junk some desires to fulfil others remains true for the majority of Indian women. But a telling anecdote she recounted about her own mother also offered a glimpse as to why. Seemingly without rancour or anger, she remembered how she had come home excitedly one night to share the news of a promotion at work. But she found her mother disapproving and barely interested in the news from the office. Instead, she wanted to know why Nooyi had forgotten to buy milk for the household. When the PepsiCo CEO asked why the errand could not have been run by her husband who happened to be at home, she was reprimanded by her mother: ‘When you are at home, you are first a daughter and a wife.’

  Nooyi did not tell us whether, today, one generation later, she would say the same to her daughter. But the argument echoed the conversations that many of my own female colleagues were negotiating in their newly married lives. Whenever a colleague would confide in me about irritable in-laws or a demanding husband and concede that domestic pressures were beginning to impinge upon her performance at work, I would urge her to ask for more parity at home. But, in India, the combination of socialization and cultural pressures has led to women just accepting that they can’t have it all or resigning themselves to the fact that they would still have to ‘do’ it all. In an interview with me, actress turned politician Kirron Kher freely admitted that she had opted not to work till her son was fourteen; her husband Anupam Kher had a demanding work schedule and she believed the obligations of marriage and parenting could not accommodate two equal ambitions. Firuza Parikh, one of India’s pre-eminent IVF doctors, told me how every landmark achievement in her career came with a subliminal sense of loss. ‘I would cringe with pain when they called me a superdoctor every time w
e had an innovation or breakthrough, because I felt if I am a superdoctor, I can’t be a supermom. At that point I made a choice; I can’t differentiate between my family and my patients, I can’t draw a neat line. My family got used to my missing birthdays because I had to cut a cake with a baby I’d just helped deliver.’

  The ‘superwoman’ and ‘supermom’ story has become a staple of glossies and advertisements (usually for pressure cookers or washing machines); this has created a fundamentally unfair and unrealistic standard for women to live up to. By internalizing the notion that both the boardroom and the household would belong to our domain of responsibility, by unquestioningly embracing the dual role of boss and homemaker, we have made things even tougher for ourselves. Whenever we women pay ourselves compliments rooted in gender generalizations—for example, the favourite theory that women are better than men at multi-tasking—we are complicating things even further for ourselves. These ways of thinking only reinforce the argument that some talents in the workplace are gender-specific, opening us to discriminatory evaluations based on our sex that we have spent years shrugging off. The new cliché is the image of the perfectly put-together female corporate executive, a string of grey pearls framing her elegant neck as she works the phones to instruct the domestic help on what to cook for that evening’s dinner while simultaneously hammering out the last stages of a million-dollar deal. It is an obvious glorification of subtle, but age-old cultural prejudices that deify domesticity when it comes to women. The superwoman tag is effectively a self-inflicted wound masquerading as a compliment. Indian men are not grappling with any of this; they are not agonizing over whether being a super-banker means they can never be a superdad.

  And, as before, women who were educated and well off and should have thus felt more empowered were the ones who were more inclined to surrender to societal expectations. Among the poor, the very debate was redundant; there was no choice but for women to do everything. Bhagwani Devi, who mopped floors and washed utensils in tony colonies of Delhi, also ran the kitchen in her own home, brought up her children and looked after her husband who worked as a daily-wage labourer. Though he had long spells of free time at home, ‘He wouldn’t even get up to get a glass of water for himself,’ she said, resigned to the many jobs that were left to her.

  VI

  In today’s India, the millennial generation has thrown up what I call the ‘new rebels’. Young women are embracing things that were once taboo, or words that are typically used as pejoratives against them, and converting them into provocative statements of power. So whether these are ‘slut walks’ or slogans of equality scribbled on sanitary napkins that are plastered across campus walls, the new urban feminist is looking for a fresh idiom to express herself in.

  That clash between the old feminism and the new was reflected in the cultural debate triggered by the Nirbhaya rape. On one of my shows soon after the Delhi rape, veteran actress Shabana Azmi and the much younger star Priyanka Chopra got into a raging argument over what Hindi films call the ‘item number’.

  While Indian society remains puritanical and closed when it comes to talking openly about sex, the portrayal of women in popular culture is hyper-sexualized like never before. Is the formal advent of the ‘item girl’ in Indian films—a flamboyant serenade extraneous to the plot and inserted just for its in-your-face sexuality—a sign of emancipation or another manifestation of the male gaze?

  Shabana believed it was the latter and called for women in the industry to make informed decisions about songs that were sexualizing even little girls who would then repeat the pouty gyrations at weddings. And then there were the lyrics. Did women really want to be referred to as ‘tandoori murgi’ or ‘chikni chameli’? Priyanka argued that it was about choice and that free choice was the cornerstone of all feminism.

  Had someone asked me to take a side I would have found it difficult. I remember feeling entirely conflicted when, during the course of a television debate on censorship, I met Mumaith Khan, a sultry beauty best known for her gyrating and pouting to the camera. At one point, springing to her feet, she pointed to the short skirt riding up her toned thighs and proclaimed aggressively that this was the freedom women wanted. The age of draping women only in salwar kameezes was over, she yelled, to thunderous applause. As a young Muslim woman from a conservative Lucknow family, she had defied several norms and cultural assumptions. But in the process had she just adopted an alternative stereotype where her freedom was to be defined by a camera travelling up to her navel?

  Unlike the naive years of my youth I had finally come to understand that the gender debate was impossible to dislocate from parallel arguments about social heterogeneity, economic equality, globalization and, of course, caste in India and race in the West. Nothing exemplified the dilemma for liberal feminists more than the debate around the veil. My feminist impulse opposed it completely; my support for multiculturalism in an increasingly homogenized world and for the rights of women to choose for themselves weakened that certitude.

  I found myself similarly conflicted following the global row over India’s Daughter, a BBC documentary on the Nirbhaya rape. The filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, a survivor of rape herself, had got rare access inside a Delhi prison to interview Mukesh Singh, one of the men convicted for the crime. The film was to air on NDTV when the government, in a knee-jerk and indefensible response, decided to ban it. The self-goal shifted the debate from the merits of the film and the wisdom of giving a rapist a platform to amplify his views to one of censorship. There could be no basis to rationalize the ban (which was later upheld in court) and we all took an unequivocal position against it. But, like many Indian feminists, I was less than convinced by Udwin’s decision to foreground the voices of misogyny—the rapist and his defence lawyers. I wasn’t sure what purpose it served; after all, we in the Indian media had chosen not to give the lawyers (one of whom said he would burn his daughter or sister alive were she to have premarital sex) the respectability of a television interview. Did we really need to hear the rapist say, as he did in the documentary, ‘You can’t clap with one hand—it takes two hands. A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’ clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy’. As abhorrent and sickening as these comments were, what did we expect from a man who had joined four other men and shoved an iron rod inside a young woman’s vagina. As Leslee and I debated these issues on a variety of global platforms—I suspect we were now being invited as some sort of latter-day Punch and Judy act—we became friends who were able to have an honest argument and still hug each other at the end of it. At one such conference, Tina Brown’s Women in the World Summit in New York, where both Leslee and I had been invited to speak, I got into a minor spat with our moderator, television anchor Norah O’Donnell. She opened our session with a reference to Delhi being the rape capital of the world. I argued that statistically this was simply not true, offering her Amartya Sen’s numbers from the New York Review of Books. I counter-questioned her: should the Ferguson incident—a high-profile shooting of a young African American—permit me to make a sweeping generalization about the US? Most importantly, I emphasized that the struggle of women was universal. This was a global fight—not a contest between nations and cultures. Udwin revealed that the BBC had deleted the global statistics on rape that she had included in her documentary, numbers that would have reinforced my point. She and I agreed that what the world needed to understand was that the protests that followed the Delhi rape were in fact a moment of hope for India. I tried to explain to a predominantly American audience that the reason they were hearing so much noise about sexual violence in India was because we, men and women, had decided that silence was no longer an option. I ended my comments by saying that I was most troubled by the complicity of Indian lawmakers in allowing marriage to be a licence to rape.

  I returned home to find that the video of our conversation had gone viral. It was trending on Twitter and Facebook and, apparently, I had managed to sharply divide people i
nto two camps—those who thought I had been too defensive about India and those who believed that I was absolutely right in calling out the stereotype. For me, this was another instructive experience that no feminist debate could take place in isolation from other existing hegemonies, in this case, the somewhat exaggerated perspective of the white world. I saw no contradiction in being a passionate, unapologetic feminist who could also challenge some of these broad strokes. That our comments had generated such a debate spoke once again to why the Nirbhaya rape and its aftermath was an inflection point in India.

  However, the fact that the plight of women has finally begun to make an impression on society should not in any way take away from the fact that the life of the average Indian woman continues to be a war zone. Data released by the NSSO shows that every second woman in rural India walked an average of 173 kilometres in 2012 just to fetch potable water. The 201 hours that this consumed also meant a loss of twenty-seven days’ worth of wages annually. This was apart from all the other jobs, inside the home and outside, that these women performed. In my forties, chastened by all that I had seen, I finally understood that for millions of Indian women, survival itself was a battle.

  While the war for equality for Indian women will have to be waged on multiple fronts—legal, economic, political—the first conflict zone is the home, where even the best intentioned parents cosset their daughters and give their sons much greater freedom. I know today that the greatest gift my parents gave me, and it must have been tough for them, was to set me free and not wrap me up in layers of protection.

  As a parent bringing up a daughter in this essentially misogynistic culture, you will have to fight your own urge to shield her and remain aware that mollycoddling will only stunt her potential. That freedom will have to be given, knowing that when she rides the bus home from basketball practice, she will, every so often, be whistled at, groped, and shoved around or even be coerced into looking at a man who will think nothing of unzipping his trousers in lecherous exhibitionism. It’s horrible to contemplate and I can understand why parents fall back on being protective.