Why Indian Women Practise The 'Arts'

One of the most solidly established cultural dichotomies in Indian society can be put in this brusque manner : 'Men study the Sciences, Women practise the Arts.' To see what I mean, take a week off and travel through the halls of Indian academia : most Literature departments in Indian universities are filled with women, and the menfolk you will meet there will uneasily explain to you how they narrowly missed the entrance examination to the local engineering college. To put it more crudely, Literature is always the last available option for Indian men. Or take Education or Psychology, for two more examples : it would be an extremely intrepid Indian man who would dare to pursue an M.A. course in Education or Pyschology, knowing only too well that he is on the verge of being labelled as effeminate by his friends. In contrast, parents whose daughter has earned an M.Sc. in Physics or Mathematics will ensure that everyone (especially in the marriage-market) knows how she has risen above her gender, earned her laurels in the male bastions of the university, and defeated the men at their own game.

One reason for this ludicrous state of affairs in the Indian academy is because an ancient European rumour which says that Men are 'rational' and Women are 'sentimental' has sunk so deep into the Indian pysche that though this myth has now been thoroughly exposed in European philosophy as a dangerous untruth, many Indians still hold on to the sexist dictums of their Victorian educators of the late 19th century. Consequently, the view is still widely held across the length and breadth of India that 'precise' and 'exact' sciences such as physics and chemistry are the special provenance of the 'masculine reason', and that 'emotional' and 'mawkish' affairs such as poetry and psychology are the unique privileges of the 'feminine heart'.

Underlying this delegation of certain subjects (branded as the 'Arts') to the irrational subterranean depths of feminine sentimentality is a deep ideological conviction that Indian women should not be allowed to speak for themselves in the socio-political sphere. Women are welcome (indeed, urged) to study the 'Arts' in the privacy of their homes so long as they just shut up when it comes to non-trivial 'political' matters that cannot be left to their unreliable sentiments, and they should not pretend to rise to the universal and dispassionate heights that are the special domain of the masculine 'Sciences'. Instead, so the hidden story goes, Indian women should celebrate the freedom that has been granted to them (by the men, of course, in a magnanimous gesture) to enjoy their 'Arts', and in turn this 'humane' education in the 'liberal Arts' will help them to refine their aesthetic sensitivities, to develop their poetic feelings, and to express their 'romantic' propensities.

In this manner, even today Indian men and women are being brainwashed with the drivel that the cultivation of the 'Arts' can be detached from the process of analysis of the political aspects of our social existence, that is, the examination of the power-relations of the systems we mutually inhabit. They are brought up to accept the viciously circular argument the 'Arts' are about the essence of 'Life', and that it is this 'Life', which cannot be examined, investigated, or questioned, that is expressed in various ways through the 'Arts'. Consequently, a highly rarified and mysterious entity called 'Life' is constructed, and departments of the 'Arts' then go about training their women to study this entity which is believed to be ineffable, spontaneous, creative, organic, impenetrable, unfathomable, genderless, asocial, and apolitical. Perhaps the women students who are fed this heady fare do not quite realise that they are being trained to come out, at the other end of five years of their 'Arts' education, as entities that are as identityless as the 'Life' they had been studying.

If you still think that there is such a thing as the 'Pure Arts' that must be safeguarded from any possible contamination by socio-political issues, consider this. In 1877, a Royal Commission report declared that English literature would be a good subject for women and second-class men who could become school-teachers. In other words, the High Victorians apparently believed that there is something 'feminine' about the study of Literature, which is precisely the view of many Indian men and women in the year 2005 as I type these words.