Fearless Freedom Read online

  Here, Adityanath echoes the sentiments expressed in the Gita and the Mahabharata (see Chapter I in this book) where women’s sexual and reproductive powers are viewed as both beneficial and dangerous and potentially destructive to the caste patriarchy.

  Adityanath writes that women should receive education today, but only as a safety valve to stave off the dangerous urges for freedom:

  Else the thoughtless storm of women’s freedom of the Western world will drive them to an even more disastrous condition and it will hamper the creation and stability of the home and family and prevent the glorious rebuilding of the nation and motherland.

  He vehemently opposes the idea of 33 per cent reservations for women in Parliament and assemblies, saying it would affect women’s duties as mothers, daughters and sisters:

  Women do already have reservations in many areas. First, analyse and assess the impact of this in gram sabhas, panchayats and local bodies. Assess and then decide whether women who are in active politics, and public life like men, whether in this process they may not lose their importance and role as mothers, daughters and sisters.

  He adds, ‘If men acquire women-like qualities, they become gods but when women acquire men-like qualities, they become [‘rakshasa’] demon-like. Serious thought must be given to these issues. What if this leads to the creation of the Frankenstein’s monster?’

  Adityanath is not a fringe figure. It appears that he has been given the status of potential successor to Modi. He is not only the chief minister of the politically crucial state of UP, he also seems to be the favoured star campaigner51 for the BJP in elections all over the country. His ideas, in my opinion, provide the fodder for the BJP’s real ‘Mann ki Baat’. By mainstreaming Adityanath, it seems that the BJP is preparing the grounds to turn India into a Hindu nation. And if a fascist Hindu nation were ever to come into being, we should expect Manusmriti-inspired ideas to be enshrined as law, imprisoning India’s women and endorsing and enforcing the subjugation of women and Dalits.

  Islamophobia Disguised as Feminism

  My reader may ask: ‘You critique the Manusmriti, but aren’t the religious texts of Islam or Christianity just as misogynist?’

  Most organized religions have historically been misogynistic and have proclaimed women to be naturally inferior or subordinate to men. Any theological state is, therefore, likely to have a misogynistic constitution and laws. The example of Saudi Arabia is a handy one. I keep meeting Indian people who suggest that India needs laws like Saudi Arabia that punish rape with stoning or other ‘harsh’ measures. My standard reply is: Saudi Arabia has a particularly misogynistic state, with laws that place adult women under the ‘guardianship’ of men and conflate ‘forbidden’ consensual sexual relationships with rape—so how would its laws make Indian women safer or freer? Saudi laws define rape as the loss of ‘honour’ rather than the violation of consent. As a result, a rapist can avoid prosecution as long as he marries his victim.52 In 2014, Morocco did away with a similar provision in its law after a sixteen-year-old rape victim committed suicide to avoid being forced to marry her rapist.53 In Saudi Arabia, rape victims are afraid to complain, because they risk being punished for ‘mingling’ with men. In 2007, a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia had been blackmailed by a boyfriend into giving him her photograph. After she got married a few years later, she feared the photograph might be misused and asked the former boyfriend to return it. He said he would if she agreed to meet him and go for a drive with him. While she met him in his car to retrieve the photograph, a gang of seven men took them both captive and gang-raped them.54 Her attackers received prison sentences ranging from ten months to five years, and 80 to 1,000 lashes. The woman and her former boyfriend, both rape victims, were sentenced to ninety lashes each for violating the Saudi law prohibiting a woman from meeting in private with a man who is not her husband or a relative. When the woman’s lawyer appealed this verdict as unjust and spoke to the media about it, the court increased her punishment to 200 lashes and stripped her lawyer of his licence, while also increasing the sentences of the rapists. Eventually, in response to an international outcry, the Saudi king pardoned the woman and her former boyfriend.55

  The thing is that in India, you, of course, have both Hindu and Muslim communalism. However, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was right when he observed that while the communalism of both majority and minority communities were anti-democratic, the communalism of the majority was more dangerous because it was ‘apt to be taken for nationalism’ and could therefore lead to fascism.56 This is exactly why Ambedkar too, while being sharply critical on many occasions of Muslim fundamentalists, was clear that ‘if Hindu raj does become a fact, it will no doubt be the greatest calamity for this country . . . a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity. On that account it is incompatible with democracy. Hindu raj must be prevented at any cost.’57 In Pakistan or Bangladesh, then, Muslim communalism is a far greater danger than the communalism of any minority, because it can masquerade as ‘nationalism’ and stake a claim to state power, crush democracy and usher in fascism. In India, the Sangh disguises Hindu communalism as ‘nationalism’ in a way that minority communalists cannot.

  In India, it is Muslims who have challenged Muslim fundamentalism and communalism most consistently and steadfastly. Muslim women are at the forefront of the struggle to change anti-women Muslim personal laws. The Sangh, by posing as the champion and saviour of Muslim women from Muslim men, propagates the Islamophobic myth that Islam is uniquely patriarchal and evil; that Muslim men are the most oppressive and Muslim women the most oppressed. The same BJP that can claim that the hijab (head scarf) is a symbol of oppression of Muslim women can proclaim, through its government in Haryana, that ‘ghoonghat’ is the ‘pride and honour’ of Haryana!58

  In 1995, when I was a student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, BJP leader, the late K.R. Malkani, came to our hostel mess to address a public meeting organized by the ABVP on women’s rights and anti-women personal laws. I had been reading up on patriarchal laws in India and headed out to attend the meeting. Malkani spent much of his talk speaking about the plight of Muslim women like Shah Bano who were denied maintenance under Islamic personal law, and Muslim women oppressed by polygamy. He argued in favour of a Uniform Civil Code in India, to liberate Muslim women from their oppression. When the meeting was opened for questions, I raised my hand. I told Malkani that I agreed that Muslim personal laws were indeed unequal and called for change, and I asked him what he made of Hindu property and guardianship laws that, at the time, denied daughters the right to inherit ancestral property and decreed that a mother was not the natural guardian of her child. He replied, without missing a beat, ‘Hindu women do not need property, they get married and their husbands’ families take care of them.’ The room full of women students, most of them new to JNU, erupted in outrage at his casual denial of equality to Hindu women. I also asked him: if polygamy was a wrong done to Muslim women, would he also condemn a Hindu BJP leader who had recently committed polygamy? Malkani replied, in some confusion, that the leader in question was not really a Hindu but an Adivasi, a tribal man, among whose community polygamy was considered acceptable. Malkani had found himself in a strange situation: he had had to admit that Adivasis were not Hindus, and that polygamy was prevalent not only among Muslims but among some Adivasi communities too that also had their own personal laws. His party, the BJP, did not openly demand abolition of personal laws of the Adivasi communities. He also could not explain why a Muslim man committing polygamy was considered the epitome of evil while making excuses for a BJP leader who did the same.

  The BJP position on triple talaq displays the same double standards. Muslim women and women’s organizations (including the organization to which I belong, AIPWA) have been agitating for the abolition of instant triple talaq for long. The Supreme Court judgment holding instant triple talaq to be unconstitutional and illegal is a landmark one. However, as we feminist activists know from years of p
ersonal experience, the problem of wives being arbitrarily abandoned by husbands, without any due process of legal divorce and maintenance, is hardly unique to Muslim women. Around 19 lakh Hindu women in India today (and 2.8 lakh Muslim women) have been arbitrarily abandoned by their husbands, and they too require justice. The very public example of Jasodaben is a case in point: Narendra Modi only publicly acknowledged her existence as his wife in an affidavit filed before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. She has had to publicly correct claims by Modi’s colleagues that he is unmarried, and assert that she is indeed his wife; while Modi himself has never publicly told them off for any such claims.59 Now the question is not whether it is fair to expect Modi to treat Jasodaben as his wife, since they were both married as minors. The issue is: Modi cannot be exempt from the legal obligation to seek and secure a formal divorce, if he wishes to be free from the marriage. Modi after all has been able to live his life freely unencumbered by his marriage, whereas Jasodaben, being a woman in a patriarchal society, has been in a permanent limbo.

  The attempt here is not to make a ‘whatabout’ point to say that if Modi and other Hindu men can be unjust to their wives, why can’t Muslim men also do the same? Instead, the point is to recognize that patriarchy and misogyny are not unique to any religion or community—and feminists, unlike communalists, do not use injustices to women as a stick to beat the ‘other’ community with. Feminists are not interested in any competition between communities to claim, ‘We treat women better than you do.’ Instead, we know that patriarchal injustices in one’s own community and family are the hardest to recognize because that patriarchy appears ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, whereas the patriarchy of the ‘other’ community or family, because unfamiliar, shocks us as ‘abnormal’. Whichever community we happen to belong to, we need to practise rendering our ‘own’ homegrown patriarchies unfamiliar and organize to challenge them.

  7

  Where Women Are

  Worshipped, Can

  Women Roam?

  Where she’s worshipped, the gods roam

  She’s Sita, Savitri

  She’s Mother

  She’s Motherland, greater than heaven

  But crashing against the walls

  Her head bloody

  She falls.

  —Gorakh Pandey, ‘Band Khidkiyon Se Takrakar’

  ‘Yatra naryastu pujyante ramante tatra devata’ or ‘Jahan naari ki pooja hoti hai, vahan devata ramte hain’—where women are worshipped, there roam the gods. Along with ‘Janani janmabhoomishcha swargaadapi gareeyasi’ (Mother and Motherland are even more treasured than heaven), this is the saying that is solemnly and sententiously repeated at many an official function in India.

  The question is: where women are worshipped, can women roam? Jahan naari ki pooja hoti hai, vahan naari ram sakti hai kya? Where the gods roam, can women roam? Jahan devata ramte hain, vahan naari ram sakti hai kya? Where women are worshipped, and the nation is revered as a woman, are women free and equal?

  The land of one’s birth (janmabhoomi) is often compared to the mother who birthed us (janani)—and this is a comforting image, suggesting that the nation nurtures us, cares for us and protects us from harm as a mother protects her children.

  Let us unpack the bundle of ideas that connote ‘mother’ and ‘motherland’ in our everyday lives and our culture, to see what these ideas spell for the freedom and autonomy of women.

  Mothers beyond Mothering

  In the 1985 film Parama, Rakhi plays a ‘typical’ wife and mother in a Bengali household, whose life suddenly experiences an upheaval when she falls in love with an itinerant photographer. While everyone in her family refers to her as ma), the young photographer is the first in many years to call her by her name. That recognition of her individuality is what draws her to him and upends her orderly life.

  When I think of ‘mother’, the image that leaps to my mind, naturally, is of my own mother. My mother loves her two daughters—my sister and I—fiercely. I have seen her mother, protect and nurture any number of strays (dogs, cats, squirrels, cows, buffaloes, birds and snakes), as well as trees and children.

  As a ten-year-old lying on the upper berth of a train, I had an early experience of sexual harassment and abuse: a man sleeping on the adjacent berth reached around the barrier and kept touching my fingers and arms. I climbed down quietly and told my mother. She (always, even today, a nimble scaler of trees and walls) climbed up to the berth without using the ladder, so that the man would not be able to see that she had replaced me. Then she lay in wait, with her tweezers in her hand. When the man’s hand came snaking around, she pinched the flesh hard with the tweezers. He yelped in pain and wrenched his hand back in a hurry. His friend and he tried to come over and accuse my mother of hurting his hand—my mother asked him what his hand had been doing on our berth anyway.

  Like a mother cat or dog, she could be rather fierce when she had to protect her kids from harm, but she would also play rough-and-tumble games with us. Like many mother cats and dogs I have known who periodically smack their kids smartly over the head and demand to be left alone, she would frequently express her wish to be utterly free of mothering and household burdens. Her wish to ‘escape (from us all, naturally) to the Himalayas’ and just be a free spirit was something we grew up hearing about quite a lot. It is no surprise that my mother derives endless amusement from Twitter trolls—including actor Alok Nath—who refer to me as a ‘bitch’ or attribute canine parentage to me. ‘Don’t they realize we think this is a compliment?’ she is fond of asking.

  From her, we learned to take up causes that seemed lost and certainly unpopular: standing fearlessly and all alone on streets defending a stray dog from hostile neighbours or protecting a community park from being turned into a vyayam shala or shakha (exercise and training ground) by the local BJP Yuva Morcha. As children, we knew that she loved us dearly and was our best friend—but that she also formed equally close and loving attachments and friendships with other people closer to our age than hers.

  All her life, my mother has done an inordinate amount of hands-on care-work: giving up her job to stay with and care for her ailing father, for her mother-in-law in her last years, for my father a full ten years after he had a stroke and developed Parkinson’s, and for her mother in her final days.

  But we would find it impossible to see her as a nurturer alone or as our sole nurturer. My dad was happiest feeding, cleaning and caring for his babies—a lot happier, I think, than he would have been as the stern, remote, authority figure, fathers are often expected to be. He taught himself to cook and cleaning the house remained his job for as long as he was able. Once, a colleague of my mother’s—a handsome young man—dropped in at our place and laughed out loud to see my dad chopping vegetables and cooking. I remember feeling bemused at why he found this funny—and angry when it dawned on me that he found it absurd and unmanly for a man to be doing what he saw as ‘women’s work’. But my dad did not seem in the least bothered by the man’s amusement. As a teenager, when I would ask him if I should not begin learning to cook, he would say, ‘Oh! Once you start living on your own, your stomach and tongue will teach you to cook!’

  That my mother’s life, love and aspirations were not confined to us—her husband and children—was something we grew up taking for granted. Working and earning were important to her, and so my sister and I were both latch-key kids from an early age. Watching cricket matches, learning music and new languages, enjoying the privacy to read a book or take a walk undisturbed—these were all things she loved to do. She didn’t let us labour under any illusion that every waking moment of hers was meant to be in service to our wants.

  And then, of course, the relation between her and me was as stormy as it was warm. She and I had huge battles in my teenage years, over what, we can no longer recall.

  The fights, the companionship, the games of hop-scotch and Scrabble, the sisterhood and comradeship between mother and daughter, and our openness to getting to know and ap
preciate or at least accept each other’s (likely and unlikely) friends and each other’s autonomy—this has been the salt and spice of our relationship. And that’s why I am frustrated by the blandness of the mother figures I find in most mainstream Indian films and literature. How many Indian works of literature can you think of in which there is a ‘mother’ character who has a rich emotional life beyond mothering? There are not many—you can come up with some, but you’ll have to work hard to think of them.

  I remember the thrill of recognition I felt on reading these words describing Ammu in The God of Small Things: ‘Ammu had not had the kind of education, nor read the sorts of books, nor met the sorts of people, that might have influenced her to think the way she did. She was just that sort of animal.’1 My mother too is ‘that sort of animal’—a feminist by instinct rather than by training.

  That novel could bring alive an Ammu who was a loving mother while also being a complete and contradictory human being, capable of being overly stern with her children, and capable also of ‘breaking the “Love Laws”—the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much’.2

  It is notable that Comrade E.M.S. Namboodiripad, in his polemical attack on Roy and her novel, wrote, that ‘the author has accused her own mother of indulging in deviant sexuality. Yet Mary Roy takes pride in the “beautiful work” by her daughter. Why is it so?’ In answer to his own question, Comrade E.M.S. wrote that this was because in the novelist’s vision, ‘sexual anarchy’ was not a moral failing but the mark of a ‘revolutionary spirit’. He wrote that he was fine with being portrayed unfavourably by Roy in this novel, because he was proud of being a communist, a real revolutionary rather than someone whom Roy considered revolutionary for displaying ‘deviant sexuality’.3 This passage tells us a lot about how, even for some on the left, the notion of a mother who divorces the father of her children and falls in love—and moreover makes love—across caste boundaries with a Dalit man is scandalous and morally repugnant. Once a mother, a woman must be nothing but a mother, it is implied: any desires of her own (especially those that break caste laws) are taboo. As a communist myself, I can say that if you can’t celebrate and work for the breaking of the Brahminical patriarchal ‘Love Laws’, you can’t really be a revolutionary in India!