A number of books have come out in the West prophesying the ‘end of men’ as we have traditionally known them. Do Indian men face similar fateIJUtpal Kumar analyses the scenario
Indiais a complex country to comprehend. It appears progressive, and the moment you start accepting it, something happens that shatters your entire belief system. Here modernity and medievalism thrive simultaneously, side-by-side. So, when I met an autorickshaw driver towards the fag end of December, he appeared genuinely perturbed by the Delhi gangrape case. He wanted the culprits to be hanged publicly from a lamppost. “Nothing else would justify the pain the poor girl and her family have gone through,” he said. And while we were chatting, the driver suddenly increased the volume of his radio. “Oh, it’s a good song,” he pointed out, referring to the Dabangg 2 number “Fevicol Se”. I was stunned. Here was the man who on the one hand wanted the alleged rapists to be hanged publicly for outraging the modesty of a woman, while on the other he wasn’t at all apologetic about a song that blatantly commodified women!
The auto driver, however, is not alone. A few days later, I met a college friend, now a middle-ranked journalist in a national daily. Fifteen minutes into the discussion, and we too got into the gangrape issue. He was aghast that he belonged to a city that treated women so badly. “I am ashamed to be a Delhiite now,” he said with an emotional overtone. It was reassuring to find someone so upset with the state of affairs in the Capital. No sooner did he complete his sentence that his phone rang. And guess what, he had set Yo Yo Honey Singh’s latest chartbuster as a ringtone on his phone. Yeah, he is the same ‘gentleman’ who, among other things, has composed the ‘Mein Hoon Balatkari’ song — a blatant glorification of misogyny at its crudest. But why single out my journalist-friend, particularly when last year Honey Singh was one of the most searched personalities online, along with actors Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif, and who not very long ago had a woman Chief Minister breaking out in an impromptu jig while sharing the stage with him!
As I am busy writing this piece, there is a trailer for Himmatwala — a remake of an utterly forgettable 1983 drama that releases this Friday — on the television. It has Ajay Devgn’s title character standing outside a temple with massive temple bells in each hand as a group of 50 armed men charges towards him. What follows is an absolutely unremarkable dialogue glorifying manliness, and then an equally listless fight scene whose era has eclipsed at least two decades ago. If this were not bad enough, then there’s Devgn and Tamanna doing a Jeetendra and Sridevi on a “Ta thaiya” song with the techni-coloured matkas — a relic of the filmi past — making a comeback after years of wilderness in a big-budget movie. So do the wretched gaon-walas, a wicked thakur, a weedy sister waiting to be exploited and a weepy mother leading an utterly miserable life. Sadly, Himmatwala is not an aberration in recent years and with perhaps the sole exception of Barfi, all Rs100 crore films have some form of vulgar manliness at display.
So, why is there sudden resurgence in gross masculinity, particularly in mainstream Hindi cinemaIJ Does it in any way showcase a larger societal malaiseIJ Or, is it the Indian patriarchal society’s last-ditch effort to regain some of the lost ground to the rising woman — at least in the reel world, if not in the realIJ
BEND, OR GET BROKEN
Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, explains the phenomenon. Writing about the dilemmas of the American man, she observes: “Men of the late 20th century are falling to the status oddly similar to that of women at mid century. The 1950s housewife, stripped of her connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with shopping and the ornamental display of her ultra-femininity, could be said to have morphed into the 1990s man, stripped of his connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultra-masculinity.” With the Indian woman asserting herself as never before, the dilemmas of today’s Indian man seem similar to the American man of the 1990s. And this partly explains the emergence of ultra-masculinity on the big screen: The Indian man, getting challenged — and often beaten up squarely — on his own turf, appears to be taking refuge in the escapist cinema wherein manliness still rules! But for how long remains the big question.
It’s not that the Indian man has already lost the battle. In fact, he still dominates the game, except in some quarters of the metros. Swati Sharma (name changed), a 30-year-old journalist, lives in one such quarter in Delhi. Yet, she is unable to come out of the shadow of patriarchy. She is financially independent and can easily take on the familial guardians of masculinity, but she desists doing this for the sheer love for her parents. She, however, knows her family is living on a borrowed time. Ask her and she will tell you how worried she is for her younger brother. “He will find it difficult to get a good girl for marriage,” she says, adding: “He has to get rid of his ultra-masculinity, if he wants to marry a competitive girl. Else he will have to go for a ‘small-town-mentality’ girl.”
Sharma is not exactly off-the-mark, as in more traditional/macho cultures, the concept of the alpha wife goes down much harder. “In Spain, marriages with foreigners have gone up to about 20 per cent of all marriages,” says Hanna Rosin in her latest book, The End of Men, adding that high-achieving women in that country marry progressive men from Belgium and Switzerland, while Spanish men seek out wives from Ecuador or Colombia. “The Spanish men are looking for a woman from the past, while the women are looking for men in the future,” she says mockingly. Even in South Korea and Japan, men from rural towns — and more recently even cities — are importing brides from poorer Asian countries with more traditional notions of marriage.
WOMEN EVERYWHERE
In India, it has been a new normal now: Of girls outshining boys in schools and colleges. Even in Jammu & Kashmir, girls now dominate the merit list in the class X examinations, securing nine of the top 10 positions last year. This feminine sweep is also visible in Indian offices, government and private. I remember how for most part of my stint at Hindustan Times I was the only male member in the department. My colleagues were all female, so was my boss. Interestingly, my department wasn’t an exception, with only the national bureau having more men than women. One hardly finds a woman editor in the Indian media, but just scratch a little and it’s evident that most of these organisations are actually being run by women. They are the real power centres behind most of the male editors.
The rise of feminine power is a global phenomenon. In the US, women have become the majority of the workforce for the first time in its history. Today, most managers are women. And for every two men who get a college degree there, three women will do the same. Even the future of women in America appears more promising: Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the US, all but two are occupied primarily by women.
Interestingly, women are the majorities in colleges and professional schools on every continent except Africa. Even traditional patriarchal societies are witnessing change. Rosin finds out how in South Korea, wherein a wife who failed to produce a male heir was once abused and treated as a domestic servant, about 40 per cent of parents in a 2010 national survey preferred a daughter, as against 30 per cent saying they would want a son (the rest had no preference) — this stands in sharp contrast to the situation in 1985 when half of all women said they “must have a son”. likewise, women today own more than 40 per cent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs.
Redefine masculinity
For years, a feminine movement has been all about catching up with men. But what if gender equality isn’t the end pointIJ What if post-industrial society favours women more than men, thus turning the world upside downIJ
In the past, men derived benefit from size and strength, but the post-industrial economy has completely negated any such advantage. “A service and information economy rewards precisely the oppose qualities — the one that can’t be easily replaced by a machine. These attributes — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not the province of men. In fact, they seem to come more easily to women,” says Rosin.
So, what does the man do to survive in the ‘post-heroic’ eraIJ Redefine the masculinity. That’s the only way out. The Indian male — being new to the feminist threat — can for some time take refuge in ultra-masculinity both in the reel and the real world, but the change is already underway. Anthropologist Helen Fisher has discovered that the men in the West today want children more than the women do. likewise, Nathan Hegedus, a Sweden-based author, finds indoor play centres full of fathers acting just as mothers would, describing about “poop, whether their babies sleep, how tired they are, when their kid started crawling or walking or throwing a ball or whatever”. Even Japan, otherwise a patriarchal society, is witnessing a subtle redefinition of masculinity. The Government there, for instance, has started to offer paid paternity leave, and newspapers now try to make celebrities of the new Iku-men, or men who stay home with their kids!
Faludi offers a way out when she says, “Social responsibility is not the special province of masculinity... And if husbanding a society is not the exclusive calling of ‘husbands’, all the better for men’s future. Because as men struggle to free themselves from their crises, their task is not, in the end, to figure out how to be masculine — rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human.”
For Faludi, it was the collapse of traditional masculinity that left men in America feeling betrayed. And, if the Indian man doesn’t change his concept of manliness soon, he is bound to follow the same beaten track. Thankfully, he still has some time left. He can use it to redefine his masculinity. Or, he can enjoy Himmatwala and create a facade of ultra-manliness.
