#nosgbv Futility

I had promised myself that I would blog everyday. I make this promise on a regular basis and too often, do not get to keep it. But I am proud to say that I do not give up and I persist and start over and over. So it is today. Yesterday, I was just too tired to post. Today, I am too blank. Or maybe, not blank but just saturated with things that I have said too often. 

After today's event, as we sat around talking, we egged each other on listing all the challenges to ending gender violence. Each challenge was more complicated and underlay the previous one. How do we do this? This is an impossible task. 

The sense of futility pervades this little promise I have made to myself to blog. What difference does it make? No one reads this blog anyway. And if they did, what difference would it make?

The longer I do this, the harder it is to answer the question about what difference it makes. Because it is clear that nothing makes a difference. Most of what we do is simply surface work--even when we change the law, it is just work on the surface. Beneath the designer vocabulary and the expensively, exquisitely* perfumed posturing, we are just the same-old, same-old products and pawns of patriarchy. 

Cynthia Enloe's book about the resilience of patriarchy leaves us thinking about the ways in which we are complicit in reinforcing patriarchal values and misogynistic ways. Yesterday was Women Human Rights Defenders' Day and today is South Asian Women's Day. What did I do to mark either of those in a way that at least casts a puny pebble at patriarchy? Not much.

I tell myself that we are all working ants and if we keep our heads down and just move along, someday, some ant, somewhere will reach our destination. I remind myself of the Gita--do your work. Or for that matter, Voltaire--cultivate your own garden. 

As I write this on the 6th day of Prajnya's 2022 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence, my fatigue and sense of futility drain me. Perhaps, I actually have nothing to say that matters. 

*Thank you @syrinje for reminding me of this exquisite word. 

#nosgbv Who will protect us from our protectors?

 I am settling down to blog after having just watched a news video of an attack by men claiming to be from the Hindu Sena on the prison van carrying Aftab Poonawala who is now infamous for abusing and finally murdering and chopping his partner into bits. They said to the mediapersons around them that they would protect their sisters and mothers from such people. 

Somebody ask us, sisters and daughters and mothers, what we would like. 

Respect. Consideration. Kindness. Honesty. Not because we are delicate darlings. But because we are human. 

What does not translate into happiness for us are protection, patronage or possessiveness. So much abuse happens because men think they are protecting women, or being benevolent dictators/ benefactors, or showing their love by staking territorial claim on their bodies, their choices and their identities. Actually all of these are abuse. Patriarchy does such a good job indoctrinating its female victims that we lap up masterful heroes, and identify with heroines that swoon in someone's posessive grip, or buy tickets to watch films where male leads forcefully plant kisses on women turning them forever into devoted slaves. 

But in real life, protection is the rule that says you cannot go to college because there will be boys on the bus. It says that you cannot go out to earn a living because men will harrass you, and when they do, you will be blamed for stepping beyond that 'Lakshman Rekha.' Sita was not abducted because a king wanted to avenge his sister's humiliation at the hands of her husband and brother-in-law or even because two kings were fated to fight an epic battle and she was the pretext that fate had written into the script. She was abducted because she stepped past the Lakshman Rekha. 

Protection offers patriarchal politicians a quick fix to the questions we raise about gender equality. More women's buses. More lights on streets. More CCTV cameras. More police. Death penalty. No night shift for women workers. No girls in evening college. And so on. It makes them look like they are doing something. 

What they actually do is to hem women further and further in while those who abuse them roam freely. Rapists roam free while their victims shelter. I am not speaking of any one case here but a general reality. 

Can we please confront the beast? Is there someone in politics that has the courage to say that the problem is how men are raised and how we forgive them everything? That does not mean they must be hung or castrated but can we have realistic punishments for the small acts of bullying and misogyny that begin in childhood, can we model fairness and equality in our homes? Can someone in politics take a stand on the kind of vicious sexist speech that is rewarded by the deal-making in the men's toilet (sorry, locker room is too dignified for the horrible things male politicians say in India)? Can someone say that such people will not get tickets, no one will campaign for them? All these groups of men that will protect us from ourselves and others, who will protect us from them and the deathly cocktail of their prejudice, entitlement and unthinking vigilantism?

#nosgbv Rambling reflections on domestic violence, dowry and imaginary safe havens

For three years or so, I've been part of a project that seeks to understand how domestic violence survivors access help and justice. Some of their stories are heartbreakingly familiar. One has seen so many variations all of one's life that I went from rejecting that women should fast and pray for good husbands to thinking that they desperately needed to because good men and good marriages seemed so rare. Nothing in our world was going to hand a woman romantic or marital happiness on a platter. 

When I was young, the first bad marriages I heard of were those of the women who sometimes worked in our homes. Their husbands would snatch away their salaries, spend them on alcohol and then beat them. I heard of this often enough that I am very, very uncomfortable around men who drink alcohol. The alcohol-battery association was so real to them that it is still real to me.  (On another day, I will write more about this.)

No, as many of the survivors in our project said, it was not the alcohol that made them abusive. The alcohol gave them the courage to act on their abusive ideas and it became a pretext to grant them impunity. Alcohol does not cause abuse but particularly in India, women in most communities have pinpointed to alcohol consumption, alcoholism and the presence of alcohol stores as a source of insecurity to them. 

I now hear young people I work with say they are uncomfortable with this association. And they have a point when they say it comes loaded with class prejudice. But when you hold consultations with trade union women and self-help groups, one of the first things they point to is the location of their local TASMAC store. 

When I grew a little older, in the films I saw, marital families would ill-treat their daughters-in-law and demand more and more dowry. With the advent of Doordarshan, we saw these themes of dutiful and abused daughters-in-law, mistreated wives and endless dowry harassment in films screened in every Indian language--in the Marathi and Gujarati films on Saturday evenings, in the Hindi films on Sunday evenings and in the other regional films they began to show on Sunday afternoons. In Indian films made as late as the 1970s, the long-suffering Sita-heroine was featured either to glorify patriarchal culture or to showcase 'social evils' in the service of the new nation-state. Marriage was inevitable but almost always quite a miserable state of affairs. 

And it was very hard to miss the messaging about dowry: Dowry was evil, dowry was bad, dowry led to domestic violence. The government assiduously communicated that giving and taking dowry were punishable by law.

In the 1980s, one read about an epidemic of bride-burnings and kitchen accidents that were all related to dowry demands. Women's groups protested and filed complaints and insisted on investigations. We now recognise dowry deaths in Indian Penal Code. We read of these things scandalised--who were these people still giving and taking dowry?

In families like mine, dowry had not been a part of weddings for two generations and the simpler the wedding, the more proudly people remembered it--one ceremony, cotton sarees, small guest lists, temple weddings, court weddings. I learned that it was not the wedding that mattered but the marriage. 

I was out of India between 1992-2003, and in this decade, it seems as if all of this socialisation was just tossed aside. Weddings became ostentatious--actually, weddings became an industry and ostentation was now merely a minimalist expression! I was shocked to meet people whose weddings still involved a discussion and then display of dowry given. Whoa! Where had they come from?

They were always there. We never quite rooted out the idea that we had to get rid of our daughters somehow. That they were not on their own good enough but their lack of value had to be compensated through gifts of cash and consumer durables. That we needed to bribe men to marry them. That our own value was reflected in how much we devalued our daughters by sending them off with large dowries. We were always like this. 

A few years ago, at a college training, I added a slide on the Dowry Act passed in 1961. It still shocks me to think of the young women who came up after the session to say they had no idea that there was a law prohibiting dowry. Some time later, students interviewing me for their magazine told me that they felt obliged to have destination or theme weddings. Every single serial treats marriage as the only end-game for female characters. 

What happened along the way? How did I grow up in exactly the same country and culture and turn out so differently? For that matter, so many of the women I know and young women I work with--how were we so lucky as to escape this?

This research project has brought home some other horrific realities. Young women beaten or raped on their suhaag raat (first wedding night), keeping quiet and asking friends discreetly--is this what marriage is? Because they have no clue. They are married, whether at 16 or at 22, before they are ready to be in a marriage or understand what that partnership should be like. All around them, they have only seen abuse. And in this post, I am talking only about physical and some sexual abuse--I haven't got to verbal or emotional abuse at all. 

Women have no confidence in their ability to survive. We are raising unconfident daughters in an age when male hubris is nauseating--and powerful. Women also have no confidence that their families, their communities or their government will support them at all. If anything, many women see that all of these support the powerful--in this case, their abusers. If the first months of the pandemic saw a lot of 'woke' discussion on the 'shadow pandemic,' the matter stopped with the discussions--we have not improved our support infrastructure significantly enough that a repeat of the situation would not leave women just as helpless. 

We tend to characterise public spaces as unsafe for women and homes as safe havens. It is time to acknowledge that give what a misogynistic culture we are, any place where we are present is inherently unsafe. Women and girls and boys must fear the sexual predators in their homes. Women and girls must survive structural deprivations such as being fed the least, being a low priority for education and health care. Girls grow up being told they are a burden and in a crisis, getting rid of them through marriage becomes a solution for family troubles. Relationships are unequal, fraught and violent and each generation teaches the next to expect violence as normal. 

I can type these words. I have lots of words. But the question is: When will this change? How will this change? Will it ever change? Will young people see marriage or other relationships as partnerships rather than hierarchal transactions? 

It is so hard to have hope in such a dismal world.

#nosgbv For the sake of the daughters who did not survive

Amartya Sen made the idea of "missing women" famous--those baby girls who should be walking among us but are not because someone aborted them as a foetus or killed them as an infant or simply neglected them so much that they did not survive ordinary childhood illnesses. Our mothers and aunts and sisters and daughters and nieces who should have been with us. 

I think about them a lot. Many years ago, trying to connect gender to security when it was not a thriving subfield with its own conference circuit, I began to look at sex ratios. In the districts from which my parents came, and whose attitudes you might have expected them to possess, the sex ratio began to decline around the year of my birth. Everytime I think of that, I think how luck I am that my parents did not choose to get rid of me while hoping for a son.

From that lucky fact, my life has been blessed with good fortune. My parents thought it appropriate to feed me, to school me, to nurture me and to encourage me. Most girls barely get to enjoy one of those things. For every one of these blessings, I sink deeper into debt.

What do I owe the daughters who did not make it? Where do I begin to calculate that?

For sure, I owe it to them to make the most of opportunities and gifts I have received. And I owe it to them to re-invest those in creating a world where fewer and fewer women go missing. 

How do you re-write male child preference into a genuine ability to care for all children of all genders with the open heart that they show adults until trained otherwise? 

Punishments will take you only so far and incentives are almost as shallow. But if we can start pushing at the reasons that people give and showing them that they are not valid, maybe something will shift? 

You tell me you want a son to take care of you when you are old. I show you a generation of children of any gender who are unlikely to live at home and take care of you. And I can also show you daughters who take care of older parents. 

You tell me that your son will cremate you and perform your shradhdha every year and I can tell you that now daughters are doing the same. What is more, maybe neither of your children will believe in the customs and so no one will do this for you. And when you are dead, how do you know you will care?

You tell me that your son will carry on the family name. Daughters keep their names nowadays and your son may choose not to have children. What would you have paid for the probability of extending your family lineage? 

People argue that they have the right to choose the genders of their children. By extension, also the skin colour and IQ and so on. This is just wrong. 

The fact that India's missing women in the last century make up the population of more than one medium-sized country makes me so angry that I don't even think we need a rationale for why pre-natal sex selection and femicide are wrong. 

But if you needed instrumental reasons, and we live in a cost-benefit driven age where the most convincing arguments either address money or security or both--then the work that Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer did more than twenty years ago on 'Bare Branches' may convince you. They found that when the numbers of men outnumbered women in a society, society was prone to enter a period of unrest and civil war. The available women married men of high status and those who were left unmarried and without families went off to join gangs and militias. 

We also know in Indian states where the sex ratio has been very lopsided that a shortage of brides has resulted in the importation of women from other regions. But because families cannot afford more than one bride, several brothers and sometimes the father-in-law share them. I do not think I need to say more about the plight of a woman trapped in a strange place with strange men and no right to say no. 

In patriarchal societies, even shortages don't raise the value of women. 

My grandmother had six daughters. When neighbours came over to her mother's place, ready to lament, இன்னும் ஒரு பெண்ணா? (Innum oru penna--or ponna, in the colloquial? One more girl?), my feisty greatgrandmother would say, yes, playing on the word for gold, பொன் (pon)--more gold! Her faith that women were gold, that they had minds and hearts that could do anything, that they could speak out and challenge and be themselves and her lessons in solidarity make me a fourth generation feminist.

For these four generations of women who survived and thrived, and for the children of all genders of the fifth and sixth that we are raising, and for the sake of the daughters who did not survive and are missing--I must find the small tasks everyday that will contribute towards changing this world.

 

#nosgbv "You do such good work!"

“You do such good work!” I hear this comment from time to time when people recall that my work has something to do with gender-based violence. Most people assume my organisation and I do rescue work. We don’t. It is not important enough to them to find out what exactly we do. (We do public education or awareness work.) They are sure it is good work.

The comment makes me uncomfortable. I want to correct them. I want to explain what we do even though I know that most of the time, they are not interested. This much was enough for them.

The thing is, I am not sure what we do, or more important, what I do. After all, one is ultimately only responsible for oneself and one’s choices.

Look at the state of this world. Today we released the 2022Prajnya Gender Violence in India report and every page describes all the things that are wrong with the world. But a compilation of data is probably the happiest place you can read about gender violence, given that numbers are just numbers. Even the NFHS numbers, which tell more of a story than most, are just numbers. When you listen to people’s stories or read their accounts of abuse they have experienced, you realise the full horror of what it means to live with abuse all the time. We feel that horror and in the course of our day, we forget because blunting the edge is what allows us to function.

When people say to me, “You do such good work!” I want to say, no, I don’t. I do the bare minimum. I do what is comfortable for me—reading, writing, teaching, training, mentoring, designing. I do not throw myself in the breach to protect a woman in trouble. I do not fight hard cases in court. I do not set up shelters and make sure they run. I just do the work I can and hope it matters in some way.

To do this should not be a big deal. For all the privilege and good fortune I enjoy in so many ways, spending a little time trying to absorb and make something of these heartbreaking stories, staying up to make posters for a discussion on some new emerging form of brutality or standing before a disinterested group to drive home the point that consent matters—these are small, very small tasks. This is the smallest instalment plan for repaying my debts to this world.

I am uncomfortable with “You do such good work!” because I am just one working ant in a history of millions of billions of ants (and other animals) that have done this work. Our efforts add up slowly if we persist. But I am not the first, not the best, not the most efficient and not the most passionate. I am just doing what I can and what I must. Even a well-intentioned singling out, beyond my family which I know does it solely out of affection, is so patently false that I want to say, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing!”

And also, I do not always do this with perfect passion or grace. Working on gender violence related topics is depressing, it is infuriating but mostly, for me, it is that thing you don’t expect me to say: It is tedious. Tedious, because in order to be able to do persist, I have to become a little unfeeling and because no matter what we do, the world does not change fast enough for us. We are like machines chipping away at a task, endlessly, unable to stop, unsure of what happens beyond our station. Reductions in numbers do not matter because you know and I know that each person matters. For each one, their suffering and their ordeal are the only things that are real and a reduction in reporting or incidence does not really matter. Unsure of what my work is going to achieve, I often do it with irritation or impatience or resentment. So when you tell me, “You do such good work!” I am embarrassed.

And if I do, if all of us in this field do “such good work,” why have we not succeeded in ending the scourge of sexual and gender-based violence? Why does each story we hear top the previous one in viciousness and brutality? Why does human creativity find its true genius in innovations of how to be violent and hurtful? After all these generations of campaigning and crusading, counselling and social work, why is sexual and gender-based violence still pervasive and ubiquitous? We cannot be doing “such good work” when there is still so much work left to do. So much work.

So much work that when someone says, "You do such good work!" I suspect they hope that the compliment will distract me enough that I will not ask them to do something. It's not enough that I do this work or that those billions and millions of other ants have. It will take each and every one of us. 

Each one will have to challenge patriarchy's stereotypes. Each one will have to call out misogynistic speech. Each one will have to make a donation or volunteer those who provide pro bono support services to victims of violence--because we are all complicit in the continuance of a violent world. Each one will have to intervene when we witness abuse. Each of us will have to commit to learning new ways of thinking and speaking. It will take each of us doing this "good work" tirelessly, and together. You may think I do such good work but my work is ineffective without you.

Treading water, typing words

Of all the promises I make to myself, exercise is the most easily broken, followed by writing. And I do not make many promises to myself so that's a hefty percentage! Why is it so hard to make time for either of these--both in their way life-giving? 

But that's not what I want to write about. I actually have nothing to write about in this post. This is a treading water, typing words post, intended to remind me of how good it feels to write. If I keep typing, I will remember that it is possible to write. It is possible.

All through the day, I am writing or typing perfectly composed pieces on this and that--in my head. I could be jotting them down on paper. I could be typing them into my phone as Notes or even, into a blog interface. I could be opening a new document on the computer. But I leave them in my head and like a rice-flour kolam, they are slowly consumed and disappear. 

That is fine. Must everything be documented and recorded for posterity? Life itself is a temporary condition. "Everything must change,"as the song goes. I do not lament my lost words. 

This exercise is about treating myself everyday to the physical pleasure of writing--somewhere, anywhere. It is not about preserving my thoughts and words. It is not about readers. It just feels so good to do this. I must indulge myself more often. 

Seeking Hope in Apocalyptic Times

In the eery stillness of the first weeks of the pandemic, the air heavy with anxiety and fear, it was hard not to think of the apocalypse. Would we ever emerge from this moment we could not understand, even as we registered the sudden deaths of people who were hale and hearty? The invisible peril from Wuhan was the stuff of mythology and horror films, terrorising humans who could not fathom what hit them but fell to it like ninepins.

Alongside the pandemic, a steady stream of frequent climate-induced disasters--floods, tsunamis, cyclones--remind us of the mythological end of time in several cultures, Biblical rains and floods or the pralayam of Indian puranas. The Ark of our times has turned out to be a private yacht and most of us are still drenched. The Big Fish that was to save the planet seems to have eaten all the small fish. 

"Hell in a handbasket" has been a phrase I have come back to several times a day. Just look at who we have become, the newspapers seem to say to me: mean, petty, conniving, untruthful, vengeful, egoistical, selfish, self-serving, arrogant, oblivious, unable to feel compassion, incapable of empathy, opportunistic. We watch people being lynched and raped and we film them first before briefly performing outrage and then moving on. We are just horrible. 

Our leaders. The less said, the better. In Indian mythology, the Big Fish ate the small fish and corrupt, venal Manus (kings) who oppressed and exploited the people and the earth eventually provoked the Pralayam. 

You tell me--if these are not apocalyptic times, what are they? 

And then yesterday, Ela Bhatt died. 

I did not know her personally. But in recent times, we have lost so many of these good human beings. Principled. Devoted to people--not work, careers, causes--but people. Humane. Hard-working. Trying to live their values. Gandhians. When I type the last word in the context of death, my heart breaks a little more. 

This year, I finally visited Ahmedabad, a city that has been on my bucket list for almost four decades. The first stop we made was to Sabarmati Ashram. I sat on the verandah of Gandhiji's home for a long time, looking at the river, and asking desperately for the courage and determination to get up and do what is needed every morning.

Social media and the derivative news media that report social posts as news have introduced us to many individuals who are famous for being famous or famous because they post online. Good for them! But it is not people of this time I want to be like. 

I want to be like the Gandhians whose presence and work I have taken for granted all my life. I envy that sort of engagement in public life, the span, the depth. I want to communicate like Gandhi. I also want that disciplined daily routine that gently accomplishes so much and is so elastic it accommodates everyone. I want to read and write like Nehru. I want to persist and work in ways that make life better for people everyday--like Ela Bhatt and Jaya Arunachalam did, to name just two. I want to aspire to be truthful and good and I want to bring that simplicity to my messy life.

We have ingrained from the capitalist, corporate world, the imperative of measurement. How many steps did I walk? How far have I come? How many people did I meet? How much money did I raise? How many people did I feed? How many votes did I win? They matter somewhere but they also don't matter at all.

Sitting on the porch of Gandhiji's cottage, looking at the trees and looking in the direction of the river (the high wall that obscures it must be a metaphor for something), I tried to breathe and pray and in some way touch the space and energy of all those well-intentioned visitors who met Gandhiji here, who seem never to have said, "I am so frustrated" or "I am so burnt out." I did not quite succeed. But I did bring back something. Hope, perhaps. 

Ela Bhatt's life work, like that of all the other Gandhians including Gandhi himself, points to one thing--doing something everyday adds up. This is something I too have always known. But the apocalyptic scale of humanity's problems makes me feel--makes many of us feel--that our efforts are useless. They are not.

I am also struck as I leave this blogpost midway to do housework at the equanimity, even joyful acceptance, with which Gandhi embraced the routine, mundane maintenance tasks of life. I am very distant from that ideal, performing them at best with efficiency and more often, with irritation. I could suggest that it is because we are so much more stressed in these times but I am honest enough to suspect that it is also temperament. I am not as evolved and perhaps, as a woman, the expectation of my acceptance riles me as much as the work itself. Topic for another blogpost! The point is that those routine tasks are also part of the big change or the big resistance we say we seek.

Hope lies in solidarity. The deep loss I feel about Elaben's passing is also related to this. We connect to each other through our values and friendships and these keep us going in hard times. When storm winds knock us off our feet, it is the people who hold on in solidarity that keep us from disappearing. When we disappear, these are the people who keep asking: Where is she? When someone like Elaben passes away, we lose a strong, steadfast link in that chain, one that has stood up so long that she has anchored many, many others. 

With the loss of each Gandhian, it is as if that world of principled action and integrity in public life slips further away from my reach and becomes a memory that too will fade. They feel like the last bastion of quiet goodness and that bastion is crumbling. To be as the words of Gandhiji's favourite bhajan suggest, one who knows the pain of others, helps others who are suffering, without ego or pride, is the hard road to hope. 

Will our children ever know of this wonderful world of goodness? All we now know is this apocalyptic moment of invisible evils, nature in fury and amoral, immoral humans. 

I seek hope everyday. In the discipline of a daily routine. In hard work. In the sincere effort to be as good as I can--not good at something, but just good. In solidarity with others--expressed at minimum as compassionate thought, hopefully with empathy and sometimes, as public support. Hope is in my effort. Success is also in my willingness to try. Maybe that was the secret of the charkha and spinning--to centre oneself in the task at hand. To keep spinning anyway. 

Many years ago, I wrote this: 10 things to do in times of political upheaval, DNA, March 27, 2017. It does not seem like enough at this moment, but if this is all I can do, I must do this at least.  

Red Cedar Reminiscences