India’s Daughter: The white man’s stereotypes and our unease

I finally saw the documentary, having read enough reactions ranging from idiotic assertions of ministers to angry tirades and studied long academic pieces from men and women with more empathy.

The documentary is anything but brilliant and does endorse a certain stereotype that the former British colony hasn’t been able to erase from the minds of its former colonisers. India is poor, people live in slums and despite having carried the burden for a couple of centuries, the white man had not managed to impart enlightenment and civilisation after all.

For me, however, what the men said in the documentary didn’t come as a surprise or a shock. Perhaps they stated it blandly, and one suspects with an extra dose of bravado, but as a woman raised in India, in my 50s, I almost heard being told, this is why you have to be careful, why you must dress properly and be sure to be home before dark. What was bristling through the three men’s monologues was an amazing assertion of power that Indian society implicitly grants them. Jyoti would have been alive had she not resisted. If the rapists are killed, all future rapists will make sure they murder their victims. If my daughter or sister is seen with a man not related to her, I will douse kerosene and set her on fire.

Such bluster, reiteration of male machismo! They are not exceptional; they are so common that they fail to evoke any surprise. Which is what made Indians uneasy about the documentary!

It starts with men’s display of virility in being able to spawn sons and goes all the way to ensure that their parents reach the safety of heaven. By contrast, women are vulnerable, their bodies source of distraction, an object of use, essentially seductive and corrupting. This isn’t only about the lawyer using analogies of diamonds and dogs but most women in India are raised in an atmosphere of fear and potential threat.

Swim suits and sleeveless blouses, short skirts are frowned upon and marriage has to do largely about protecting the virginal body that only the husband is permitted to ‘possess,’ than about providing lasting companionship. The woman’s body is the men’s prerogative to ‘protect’ or ‘transgress’ depending on how she projects herself. The fault lines are unequivocal. This is still being heard, not only from Mukesh Singh, the rapist in jail, exploiting his moment of attention from a white film-maker, with  spine-chilling coolness, or his lawyers, lacking in sophistication and public speaking skills though equally pompous, but many more close to us -- urban, with degrees and well-heeled. I have so often heard it being said that women bring this to themselves -- male attention and then the obvious fallout.

Therefore, they are the ones who must be careful, given that they are prone to be naturally seductive. Men are not at fault, not essentially so!

My next concern is for the future. All the noise that the documentary raised, to its great advantage will die down in the wake of people’s short memory but Indian women will continue to be abused and transgressed. Incidents have persisted without any break. A father is seen walloping his daughter in the open, a 72-year-old nun is raped for resisting vandalism and robbery of the institution she was in charge, a young woman is killed by her husband for wanting to work in New Delhi. Physical abuse and rape are male responses to women’s resistance and at least in the case of two, the perpetrators have been urban and ‘educated’.

The much parroted ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Parao’ initiative, one suspects, will remain confined to the ceremony organised by the Minister of Women and Children.

Is it only about saving fetuses and then letting girls be born to a world in which vulnerability, fear and guilt are inseparable part of their fates? So deep rooted is this cultural and social nurturing that an ordinary step of living a life of dignity and self respect by a woman tantamount to resistance and rebellion. Women suffer because they are insubordinate which is manifested in the most innocuous of steps women take to iterate their choice.

Sadly there has been a rollback. What would have seemed acceptable a couple of decades back, appear dangerously unsettling in present India shining in chauvinistic glory!

Rapes are not an Indian phenomenon though the staggering numbers of incidents have given it an ugly appellation. Every nation and society must address the problem in the wake of their challenges. In India, we sadly live in delusion and denial. If the basic argument runs that the persons responsible for the acts of rape, men of different ages and from various social classes, are not really guilty, then the project is a non-starter.

We tend to sweep such state of affairs under the carpet and prefer to put the blame elsewhere, largely om women in this case, or on poverty or lack of good parenting or some such. Sexual harassment, another instance of male machismo, often flexed and frequently attributed to women’s initial advances is never addressed. I needed some convincing in the rural university that I was working for that there should be a sexual harassment cell and that men should not be the principal arbiters of complaints. The septuagenarian and father of three daughters who practically took upon himself to resole all students’ matters invariably placed the blame on girls if they complained of ‘indelicate’ behavior on the part of boys.

Physical abuse or rape of the vulnerable is a ubiquitous phenomenon and we in India must wake up to this reality and garner the will to address and redress. Acts of transgression or contravention of dignity are not symptoms of psychopathic social behavior. They have been dangerously naturalised in India by the culture and affirmation of power which is granted to men; they are endorsed by everyone, including women themselves, even important ones, like Sheila Dixit. Little boys are given guns and girls dolls so that the former look up to their fathers and the latter their mothers in framing their minds as they grow up.

These stereotypes are far more insidious and it will take a social revolution of sorts to prompt men and women in the public arena to acknowledge and discourse the warped situation. Every instance of abuse must be treated separately and boys and men, girls and women must be sensitized to the dangers that such behaviour exposes social relationships to. Otherwise, millions of investment from across the globe sadly will not change the lives of most Indians, forced to live as they are under the shadow of violence.

Tapti Roy is an author and historian