Decoding feminism in India

A discussion I recently had with a professor left me feeling mildly discomforted and unsettled, the reason being she insisted that I was a hardcore feminist who wasn’t ready to accept that.  All my life I have lived in a country where sexism stares you in the face every step you take and everyday makes you realize in different ways, that the fight for gender equality is no where close to getting over yet. Having said that, I do not even remotely consider myself a feminist, in fact the word being applied to me made me squirm for some reason. I am committed to gender equality and that’s all there is to it. After doing everything I could to convince that professor that I was not a feminist I started thinking of what feminism really was and what it really means in todays world especially in the Indian context.

Processing everything I knew about women’s rights in India from the Pink Chaddi to bra burning campaigns and more, I realized that I would have to go beyond relying on my brain to understand how feminism operates in India. So I spoke to some of my friends who considered themselves die-hard feminists and what I heard from each of them shocked, amused and confused me simultaneously.  Their ideas of feminism spanned the whole scale of stereotypes starting with equality, reproductive rights, and hatred for the opposite sex. Liberation, beauty, and vanity encompassed many of their opinions and ideas as well. The more I talked to them the more I got confused between liberals, hippies, anarchists and a weird concoction of views that everyone seems to be basing their beliefs out of.

It then hit me that feminism is a reality of its own, subtle but not subtle, there but not there, empowering in villages and raging in cities.  All the polarities in the world of feminism that seemed to exist, only told me one story- where there is oppression there is resistance. We have to learn that men are not the enemy but attitudes are more often than not the biggest enemy. Amazingly and ironically enough it was men who first started the feminist movement in India.

The more I read up and analyzed feminism in the Indian context, I realized that after so many years of being around, feminism in India has still been undefined. Surprisingly, it is still an intensely debated definition. In the urban context, it is interesting to see the evolution of feminism and how it transformed to so much more than it was originally intended for. I love the flexibility though, that feminism offers in its definition in rural places and suppressive religious environments which is the saving grace and the only source of hope, self esteem and sense of being for women and girls as opposed to how contrastingly in some urban contexts, uber-stylish activists and feminist movements seem to use it to define their existence

It is amazing how feminism can be used for feeling cool as well as attaining liberation at the same time. I guess its definition lies in the shades of gray. In a way I have started to like feminism for its liberal views and for its allowance of letting a circle fit into a rectangle quite in its own way.

Just another story of India

As I sit by my window on a day that looks like it could be winter again, half way around the world from home in Washington DC, my mind wanders off to India and gets trapped in a complex web of thoughts. Everyday my heart gets tugged in 20 million ways by so many things Indian and India that are hard to explain in words and sentences.

So far my nagging urge to write about the musings of my own mind and its inconsequential reflections have been isolated to the white pages of my numerous journals, life-long friends that have been gathering dust in shoe boxes back in my room in Pune, India.  Nothing used to make me happier than a pen in my hand, and the blank pages of my journal waiting to hear and bare all the passing clouds and thoughts in my head. Over the years, so many of my friends and acquaintances have pleaded, encouraged and suggested that I start a blog and I have finally succumbed to it.  So I hope that in a world of infinite words and never ending blogs, mine will have its own message and stories from my everyday life and reflections of the east and the west, two worlds that simultaneously co-exist in everything I do.

I went back to India for a short break recently, after almost 18 months the longest I have ever been away from home. Landing at the Mumbai airport made me feel a million different things all at once. As I transitioned into everyday life for 3 weeks, everything felt the same as always but at the same time it hit me how tradition and culture is slowly but obviously evolving into a weird hotchpotch of its own, where everything and everyone seems to be battling against the old and the new simultaneously. The more I think of what is happening in India, the more I feel like I am lost in a haze of ironies and paradoxes. It miffs me more than ever.

We have all our big IT parks and tech companies that have got us money, fame and name but the fundamental problem of unemployment still drags. In this age of science and technology and village folk making it big in the IT and other sectors we still have depressingly below standard education and government schools.

I still struggle to understand how a country with such shaky foundations does well enough to be talked about globally as one of the next big things. Ironically enough 40% of the people in my city Pune, one of the most modern cities in India have no toilets and the same is true for 80% people in Maharashtra. Mushrooming multiplexes, designer shops and a few state of the art buildings make people forget about the everyday miseries of the less fortunate. It is this huge mass of the under-privileged that actually accounts for the vote banks politicians take for granted. In spite of that, development and basic amenities are so grossly neglected towards lower and more oppressed classes and they are conveniently spared progress and a better quality of living. A professor of sociology from Jamia Milia Islamia said in a debate on NDTV “Politicians today are ready to kill but not ready to die for their beliefs and ideals.” Those words struck me as very profound and reflective of the fabric and narrative of an evolving India. It saddened me that everyday in India just seems to increase polarities both economically and socially.

As my 3 weeks were up I still did not process India, something that has been a life-long endeavor so far. I left though with hope and an inexplicable sense of optimism for reasons unknown to myself. I felt a strange sense of peace that was truly deep-seated in spite of everything. This trip has just opened up a ton of mines that have made themselves home in my mind over a lifetime. Unsurprisingly, India once again was a reaffirmation of my old judgments, love, confusion and dreams for the chaos and enigma that it has become today.