We, The Oppressed Women

Here is a familiar story, even for those of you who never made it beyond grade ten so far as studying history is concerned : one group of human beings (X) oppresses another group (Y), by drawing upon the vaster pools of socio-economic capital, and the more extensive resources of socio-cultural legitimisation that are at its hands, so much so that Y is even induced to believe, over a period of time, that this oppression is ingrained into the 'very nature of things'. So what do you do if you happen to be in Y (and this, by the way, is in no sense a hypothetical question)? I shall give one example of what people in Y have actually done, historically speaking, and are still doing as I write these lines. The example comes from the disputed territory of 'Indian feminism'. There are, as far as I can count (notwithstanding the charge that counting and categorising are typically masculine activities), three possible reactions to 'feminism' in an Indian context.

(A) The first goes as this : 'It never happened'. This is usually the reaction of an earlier generation of Indian women who have a profoundly ambivalent response to the sudden euphoria of freedom that their daughters and grand-daughters are beginning to experience. On the one hand, they wish that they had been born at least fifty years after their time. On the other hand, like the famous Tortoise tactic of the Roman army, they draw in their flanks, and claim that things were much better during the old days. Yes, the men were in power, but so what? That is the way things are destined to be, and why create any confusion in the divinely arranged scheme of things? Why muddy the waters when they have sprung from the very fonts of divine truth?And besides, in those days, at least the buses ran in time, people came home before 6 in the evening, everyone had their meals on time, everyone woke up at the crack of dawn, and so on and on. And, of course, most crucially, nobody knew what divorces were about.

(B) The second is something of this sort : 'The ship is sinking, but the holes can be plugged'. This reaction is a middle-of-the-road response, usually heard from metropolitian women who have had their fair share of 'European' education (a.k.a. 'convent education'). They find themselves in a somewhat sticky position. On the one hand, when they go out to college or university, they 'hang around' with the cool people, and find themselves surrounded by intellectuals who practise Marx and Lacan, deconstruct Patriarchy and Colonialism, and subvert Establishments and Institutions. On the other hand, when they come home, they find their parents stuck in a time-capsule from which they had never emerged, and their famed skills at deconstruction and subversion go out of the window when they have to meekly sit down and listen to a long list of prospective grooms who have been gracious enough, through the matrimonials (or shall we say patrimonials?) in The Times of India, to kindly agree to descend upon them and test their tea-making capabilities.

(C) The third is rather more straight-forward : 'The ship is sinking, and it cannot be repaired; so jump straight out of it into the wide, open, free, boundless sea'. This group believes in 'direct action' and it has a no-nonsense attitude towards the bygone centuries of piled up oppression. It puts forward its own brand of Reductionism in a world where there are already too many around on sale : everything that is masculine is corrupted, or corruptible. So it is not just the outer husk that must be removed, the inner core must be consigned to the flames as well. Consequently, they become supreme masters of the art of suspicion : all masculine influences must be tracked down, uprooted, destroyed, obliterated and forgotten. Such women, though only a handful on the landscape at present, will become, in the future, one of the greatest nightmares of Indian men who are only gradually learning to stammer difficult words like 'patriarchy', 'hegemony', and 'feminism'. Multiply their number by even a thousand in the next five years, and sit back and enjoy the spectacle of the men complaining that this world has become a living hell for them.

Though I personally believe that (C) is the only way out for Indian feminism (and, indeed, for any meaningful version of feminism), I believe that (C) is self-destructive as it stands. I shall therefore make a few brief comments regarding (A) and (B), and then point out how (C) can be made more self-consistent. (Yes, of course I know that women in (C) do not need a man to point out all of this to them, but I am offering these comments nevertheless, even if only to myself.)

Firstly, of course (A) is, as we say, way off the mark. So much so that this is, in fact, all that I shall say about (A). Secondly, (B) too is quite a painful affair for many women around in the country, and how they deal with this situation is anyone's guess. I therefore come to the case that I find really interesting, that of women in (C).

As I said earlier, (C) needs to be made more self-consistent. That is, (C) needs to be clear about its responses to three vital questions : (a) Where exactly is the dividing line between 'masculinity' and 'feminity'?, (b) Is this dividing line timelessly fixed or is it itself changing every decade?, and (c) Does the rejection of 'masculinity' go with the rejection of everything that has historically been associated with it?

For example, consider the notion of 'rationality'. In their hyperbolic moments, women in (C) sometimes claim that rationality itself is a masculine concept and needs to be discarded. Now if by rationality is meant 'a tool through which one seeks to persuade another person about the coherence of one's own position by developing a pattern of arguments', it is clear that women in (C) who debunk rationality are undermining their own position. Why should anyone listen to them, not to mention accept what they are saying, if 'rationality' itself does not exist? There are many other issues that are associated with this fundamental point. Should women stop studying 'science' (or 'pure mathematics'), given the fact that the scientific enterprise has traditionally been a male-dominated affair? Or even, should they stop using language itself, since masculine presence is so clearly inscribed into our linguistic conventions?

All of this is associated with another question : Is 'truth', in whatever way we understand this notion, itself gendered? That is, is it possible that something can be 'true' for men and 'false' for women, and vice versa? If it turns out, at the end of a careful discussion, that truth is, in fact, not gendered, are not women in (C) themselves guilty of 'sexism' by introducing gender into a context where it is irrelevant?

I shall not attempt the foolhardy task of settling such (epistemological/metaphysical) disputes in this post. The coherence of (C) will depend a lot on precisely how the above three questions are grappled with, examined, discussed, and continually re-examined by women in (C). Nevertheless, if I may be allowed speak in a prophetic tone for once, I would say that the future belongs to (C) alone. Or even more, it should belong only to (C).