There’s no Indian post-feminist movement: even feminism was left incomplete because the left, which arbitrated its course earlier, ditched women’s causes in the 1990s except through episodic, clichéd responses to ghoulish rapes, vigilantism, etc. And, as for the Right….
The death of Veena Mazumdar went practically unnoticed in the Indian media in May. That’s hardly surprising because the newspapers and other aspects of the Indian establishment celebrate the very mindset that ‘Binadi’ documented with painstaking, dignified skepticism throughout her career. Whatever people may hold dear of her electric persona and her witticisms rooted in the dry tradition produced by the Anglo India-Bengali literature encounter which doubtless shaped her earliest sensibilities, these will remain but perishable reminiscences. What would remain her lasting legacy, however, is the richness of the books and reports she authored to demolish patrician hegemonies in the power structure.
Without ‘women’s studies’ as a structured academic disciple there could never be a women’s rights movement, leave alone feminism. Documentation, data assemblage followed by their dispassionate analyses must precede policy articulation and its necessary advocacy. The happy coincidence of having as a personal friend the one-time Shantiniketan ashramite prime minister, Indira Gandhi, played no undistinguishing part in institutionalising multi-disciplinary address of the myriad and complex problems bedeviling Indian womanhood in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
In 1972, Indira appointed ‘Binadi’ Member Secretary of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, a body mandated by United Nations resolutions to scientifically inquire into the status of Indian women. Wrote Vibhuti Patel, director of post-graduate studies in SNDT University, Mumbai, “‘Binadi’s unique contribution while preparation of the landmark report Towards Equality to explain the material and ideological conditions that determined women’s predicament in India made her the most-sought-after scholar and activist during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the millennium era.”
In 1975, ‘Binadi’ was appointed Director, Programme of Women’s Studies, Indian Council of Social Science Research. She went on to be the founder-director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, and after leaving that post in 1991 served as senior fellow at Centre for Women’s Development Studies and and was JP Naik National Fellow, ICSSR, for two years. From 1996 till her death she served as the chair of Centre for Women’s Development Studies.
Now, coming to the specifics of her legacy, what the present generation needs to know is that it was ‘Binadi’ who in 1974 identified, using tools of scholarly probity, how ingrain to the national psyche was the preference for the male child. Under her direction, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences conducted a sample survey on Amniocentesis to find out about foetal genetic conditions and enrolled 11,000 pregnant women as volunteers. It turned out that once the results were out, all those who were informed of imminent female births, queued up for abortion which was perfectly legal at the time. Alarmed, ‘Binadi’ rushed to Indira Gandhi and that set the ball rolling for legislations to end the abuse of Amniocentesis for sex selective abortions.
Hijacked by the left
‘Binadi’s appropriation by the left is not only a truism, but also sad reflection of the intellectual insufficiency in the Indian Right. She was anything but an opponent of traditional values. Even the staunchly leftist Mainstream magazine had to admit in its obituary, “With all her rebellious traits she remained an essentially Indian woman whose foremost duty had been and even till the last day remained to her family in its old traditional style. (She) was a delectable amalgam of the traditional Indian womanhood and a defiant and aggressive rebel.” Yet hardly anybody in the Right was even aware of her existence, confirming in the process the Rightist as the stereotypical chaddiwallah-Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani.
So, apart from becoming Sitaram Yehchury’s mother-in-law, she unwittingly got linked with a retrograde movement which let Indian women down after economic liberalisation solidified the maal-maa (Commoditisation- Deification) dichotomy — incidentally a term coined by ‘Binadi’ herself to explain the binary perspective that defines the Indian psyche. Under Communist domination, the Indian left not only spoke with a forked tongue on the threats to everything decent posed by marketnomics, they also colluded with big business to demolish the hard won rights of the Indian feminist struggle.
Turn, for example, to the air hostesses on Indian carriers. Up to the 1970s, female cabin crew were “grounded” by even government-owned airlines at 25 (a term used to describe the withdrawal of rights to flying and redesignation as ticket girls) even though their male counterparts were allowed to continue till the normal retirement age.
Parity
Thanks to ‘Binadi’s advocacy, based on a mixture of response to official pseudo-science (which sought to explain away the discrimination as necessitated by female biology) and stirrings of human rights, air hostesses on Indian Airlines and Air India won parity of pay and work conditions with stewards and flight pursers. “We are not sex symbols but an essential part of flying” ran the campaign to hammer home the first anti-sexist struggle in modern Indian history. But liberalisation changed all that. Today, with private airlines dominating the aviation sector, the attitude reserved for female cabin crew harks back to the 1930s when their presence lent a lascivious aura to flying. Short-term contracts are back as are the short skirts. Do the feminists of India weigh in hereIJ They don’t — they parrot St. Market’s doctrine that exposing skin is “empowerment” for womanhood.
Sexism — not just the glass ceiling but entry level discrimination — dominates the worksphere for women in ways that would have awed even ‘Binadi’ in the 1970s. This is not just the Indian, but global experience. In recent years, a book that has shaken up the complacency of western, specifically British, society to the dangers posed by sexism let loose by market economics is Kat Banyard’s The Equality Illusion (london, 2010). It shatters many of the myths about women’s role in the modern economy. For instance, women are finding it harder to get jobs while at the prime of their reproductive life -governments wink as corporates get around the maternity-with-pay rule by simply not hiring women. At another level, women are the subject of rampant ageism-notice how prettier and younger the “journalists” reading the news on even desi private channels are gettingIJ
The left’s betrayal of the Indian worker is secular and gender neutral. The question is, why did the Right not grab this placeIJ
Masculinity
Today, the summum bonum of the Indian Right seems to be asserting the masculine dimension of Indian statehood — “strong India” — through Westminster-approved methods. Its shrill spokespersons — both sexes — are hardly ever distracted by the lived experience. The image of “strength” based on macro-economic progress is at variance with the contemporary experience (the “trickle down” theory of growth has been disowned by its founder) as is the relevance of militaristic assertion in post-Pokhran South Asia. What’s interesting in this context of such balefulness is the utter insensitivity to the concerns of one solid half of India’s population — its women. What India’s women need is another ‘Binadi’ who would win them adequate representation (which was her idea originally and basis of a lifelong crusade) at the highest level and hundreds of other rights over looked by the patrician order. What women need is a system that recognises them as equal stakeholders from foetus to grave. Exactly what would they benefit from a “strong India” is unclear to India’s women. Did Britain’s women -except the miniscule who lived and died as show windows of their husbands’ wealth — gain anything from Pax BrittanicaIJ leave alone equality, they didn’t even have suffrage till the 1930s.
Beyond rapes
The December 16 gang rape has produced a focused response to sexual predators in Indian society. But along with the positive eruption of urban Indian self- righteousness, its ugly underbelly has also got exposed.
Beyond the debate — why tears for Nirbhaya and not the 478 that followedIJ — another cold fact has emerged. The media, polity, everybody in the patrician order, seems to be enjoying this one-dimensional, made-for-TV feminism. It’s easier demanding death for rapists than dismantling the infrastructure that facilitates rape. And this means more than ill-lit streets and unskilled policewomen. It calls for confronting the culture of commodification of women which sustains the so-called free market economy. At the bedrock of their vanity, Indian liberal feminists are conspicuously ignorant of contemporary neo-feminist maxims. They mouth slogans approved by India’s political masters and sting only selectively for fear of upsetting the very pernicious system that sustains them.
Jayati Ghosh, a doyen of Marxian economics in India, surprised her interviewer in Der Speigel recently by linking the spate of rapes in recent times to the lop-sided growth paradigm adopted by the Manmohan Singh government. Greater the rich-poor divide more the rapes, goes this latest jewel from the Marxian thoughtshop. Reading this, my mind went back to the Class XII economics texts from the 1980s which listed as one of the reason for India’s huge population, the “lack of entertainment opportunities for the poor especially in rural India”.
Isn’t it amusing that despite the explosion of cable TV from the 1990s onward, the population rate has not ebbedIJ How wonderfully inconvenient is the fact that the highest number of rapes happen not in poor India and sub-Saharan Africa, but super rich Sweden and Australia. In the United States, about 300,000 rapes were reported in the decade 2000-09. But the US Justice Department cautioned that this figure may be an understatement. The real figure could be — hold your breath — 3 million. ReasonIJ In sexually liberated societies (the Indian lib-left’s paradise) women are not the beneficiaries of the sexual revolution, but the victims.
I think there is a case for right-wing feminism by revisiting the foundations of ‘Binadi’s movement. An intellectual movement which recognises the next choice rape as the symptom of a deeper social disorder is the need of the hour.
Senior Editor, The Pioneer