09-25-2008, 08:56 PM
An interesting article on contemporary Indian Society from the International Herald tribune :-
Quote
A feminist revolution in India skips the liberation
By Anand Giridharadas
Thursday, September 25, 2008
MUMBAI: Arshi's India is not your (or her) grandmother's India.
She is 25 and saucy, a public-relations executive in New Delhi, a daughter of divorce who lives with a cocktail-mixing woman named Topsy. She and her circle exchange wet kisses with their boyfriends in the privacy of their cars, relish both loving and loveless sex, and smoke a cigarette every few minutes. They pride themselves on rolling joints with that perfect-sized marijuana nugget, "the size of the Nokia switch-off button."
Two generations after a sexual revolution gusted through the West, a new generation of urban women in repressive societies like this one would appear to be riding that revolution's second wind.
But appearances lie, and feminism, Indian-style, can be so accommodating, so eager to please and appease, that it is sometimes scarcely feminist at all.
Arshi is a literary invention, the protagonist of a book on the increasingly crowded shelf of Indian chick-lit. But she is really a composite of the young, educated women whom you meet by the brigade today in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, and whose identification with the book has made it a publishing success: women whose sexual revolution is more sexual, less revolution.
The novel, "You Are Here," by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, is a voyage into the heads of urban women, and a portrait of the sometime shallowness of their modernity. With brutal honesty and an acute eye, Reddy Madhavan chronicles twenty-something women who pay lip service to Women's Lib, do the tequila shots to prove it, but who still conceive of themselves, deep down, as orbital moons to the planets of men.
Arshi and her female friends smoke, drink and fornicate their way through life. But if liberation is defined more sweepingly, as the freedom to do whatever men do, and to define oneself other than by one's relationships to men, then Reddy Madhavan's heroines are less liberated than they think.
Like many educated Indian women whose credit-card bills transfer seamlessly from a father to a husband, Arshi and her friends have good jobs and toil at them, but have a somewhat recreational view of work. When Arshi walks into a Delhi fashion designer's home, enchanted by his white sofas and plasma television, she does not think, "I should go buy this stuff." She thinks of marrying him, "just so I could make that house my home."
Arshi's mother tells her to save men for later, take the admission test for graduate school, move to America, get a second master's degree. But Arshi, having kissed a new love interest just once, rules it out: "I'd definitely not want to leave him." Never mind that he stands her up most nights, "leaving me fancy-underweared and cleavage-perfumed and miserable."
Reddy Madhavan said in a telephone interview that her characters reflected the real dualities that Indian women straddle. Arshi's liberties make her a feminist of a kind, she said. But Arshi also sees men as emotional and financial feeding tubes.
"If she were a true feminist," the author added, "she wouldn't need him to define her."
In some ways, Arshi is just an Indian Bridget Jones. But in the West, that kind of post-feminism was possible because feminism came first. India, which has produced a female president, prime minister and business tycoons and whose universities are filled with brilliant women, has had its elite rebels. But it is leapfrogging into "Sex and the City" post-feminism without having had a broader-based women's revolution.
Indian women are trading regular bras for push-up bras, bypassing the phase of burning bras.
The earlier feminism trashed bras, not as a fashion statement, but because it signified rupture. The lattice of attitudes, prejudices, customs and religious doctrines that kept women in place would not just step aside. The entrenched ways needed to be fought, deoxygenated, purged.
Indian women have fought plenty of battles, but in a country not shy about demonstrations and revolts - by so-called untouchables, the landless, the indigenous, Hindus, Muslims - there has never been an inclusive, game-changing feminist movement.
If protesters can stop the world's cheapest car from being built and light themselves on fire over low-caste affirmative action, where are the women marching against millions of female feticides and widespread rape in Kashmir?
In the West, too, militancy has drained out of mainstream feminism, but only after making gains. You cannot fast-forward to the Carrie Bradshaw phase of man-woman relations without a stint of Betty Friedan.
Indian feminism is the feminism of compromise. It is the feminism of daughters who press their parents for late curfews, but would never hurt them by dating a man of another religion. It is the feminism of women who collect big paychecks by day, but do not question husbands who treat them like maids by night. It is the feminism of women who cope privately with workplace harassment, but never see it as a systemic phenomenon to be fought.
It is the feminism of small victories.
"I have super-feminist friends who will conform to gender roles with their partners, like they'll take it upon themselves to be more nurturing than their partner would be, taking care of them when they're sick, cooking and stuff like that," Reddy Madhavan said.
"I find myself doing this every now and then," she added. "It's partly fear that if you spend your entire life bucking the norm and being different, I might end up alone and eaten by my cat."
Scratch the surface, and Women's Lib means little more than sex, cigarettes and alcohol to Arshi's urban demographic. In starkly different corners of India, other groups of women remind us what a more saturating feminism can look like.
Millions of near-destitute village women are joining microcredit cooperatives, handicraft-making networks like the Self-Employed Women's Association and elected village councils. Meek, abused wives are turning into go-getters, turning male regimes on their heads.
Not a few village husbands have become stay-at-home dads, a phenomenon still rare in the big cities.
But because these women don't sleep around, don bug-eyed sunglasses or down mojitos, it is Arshi's demographic that is deemed "liberated."
Modernity involves more than sin. It demands irreverence. How many urban young women chop off their hair, or choose not to procreate, or dine out alone? How many, despite their modern garnishes, believe in prospering alongside, and not through, a man?
"If we are put on this planet with the aim of figuring out who we are," Arshi muses one day, "and the only way we can figure out who we are is through someone else - either the person we wind up with or the person we create - then what hope does my generation, my we-don't-need-nobody-dude generation, really have?"
Unquote
Quote
A feminist revolution in India skips the liberation
By Anand Giridharadas
Thursday, September 25, 2008
MUMBAI: Arshi's India is not your (or her) grandmother's India.
She is 25 and saucy, a public-relations executive in New Delhi, a daughter of divorce who lives with a cocktail-mixing woman named Topsy. She and her circle exchange wet kisses with their boyfriends in the privacy of their cars, relish both loving and loveless sex, and smoke a cigarette every few minutes. They pride themselves on rolling joints with that perfect-sized marijuana nugget, "the size of the Nokia switch-off button."
Two generations after a sexual revolution gusted through the West, a new generation of urban women in repressive societies like this one would appear to be riding that revolution's second wind.
But appearances lie, and feminism, Indian-style, can be so accommodating, so eager to please and appease, that it is sometimes scarcely feminist at all.
Arshi is a literary invention, the protagonist of a book on the increasingly crowded shelf of Indian chick-lit. But she is really a composite of the young, educated women whom you meet by the brigade today in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, and whose identification with the book has made it a publishing success: women whose sexual revolution is more sexual, less revolution.
The novel, "You Are Here," by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, is a voyage into the heads of urban women, and a portrait of the sometime shallowness of their modernity. With brutal honesty and an acute eye, Reddy Madhavan chronicles twenty-something women who pay lip service to Women's Lib, do the tequila shots to prove it, but who still conceive of themselves, deep down, as orbital moons to the planets of men.
Arshi and her female friends smoke, drink and fornicate their way through life. But if liberation is defined more sweepingly, as the freedom to do whatever men do, and to define oneself other than by one's relationships to men, then Reddy Madhavan's heroines are less liberated than they think.
Like many educated Indian women whose credit-card bills transfer seamlessly from a father to a husband, Arshi and her friends have good jobs and toil at them, but have a somewhat recreational view of work. When Arshi walks into a Delhi fashion designer's home, enchanted by his white sofas and plasma television, she does not think, "I should go buy this stuff." She thinks of marrying him, "just so I could make that house my home."
Arshi's mother tells her to save men for later, take the admission test for graduate school, move to America, get a second master's degree. But Arshi, having kissed a new love interest just once, rules it out: "I'd definitely not want to leave him." Never mind that he stands her up most nights, "leaving me fancy-underweared and cleavage-perfumed and miserable."
Reddy Madhavan said in a telephone interview that her characters reflected the real dualities that Indian women straddle. Arshi's liberties make her a feminist of a kind, she said. But Arshi also sees men as emotional and financial feeding tubes.
"If she were a true feminist," the author added, "she wouldn't need him to define her."
In some ways, Arshi is just an Indian Bridget Jones. But in the West, that kind of post-feminism was possible because feminism came first. India, which has produced a female president, prime minister and business tycoons and whose universities are filled with brilliant women, has had its elite rebels. But it is leapfrogging into "Sex and the City" post-feminism without having had a broader-based women's revolution.
Indian women are trading regular bras for push-up bras, bypassing the phase of burning bras.
The earlier feminism trashed bras, not as a fashion statement, but because it signified rupture. The lattice of attitudes, prejudices, customs and religious doctrines that kept women in place would not just step aside. The entrenched ways needed to be fought, deoxygenated, purged.
Indian women have fought plenty of battles, but in a country not shy about demonstrations and revolts - by so-called untouchables, the landless, the indigenous, Hindus, Muslims - there has never been an inclusive, game-changing feminist movement.
If protesters can stop the world's cheapest car from being built and light themselves on fire over low-caste affirmative action, where are the women marching against millions of female feticides and widespread rape in Kashmir?
In the West, too, militancy has drained out of mainstream feminism, but only after making gains. You cannot fast-forward to the Carrie Bradshaw phase of man-woman relations without a stint of Betty Friedan.
Indian feminism is the feminism of compromise. It is the feminism of daughters who press their parents for late curfews, but would never hurt them by dating a man of another religion. It is the feminism of women who collect big paychecks by day, but do not question husbands who treat them like maids by night. It is the feminism of women who cope privately with workplace harassment, but never see it as a systemic phenomenon to be fought.
It is the feminism of small victories.
"I have super-feminist friends who will conform to gender roles with their partners, like they'll take it upon themselves to be more nurturing than their partner would be, taking care of them when they're sick, cooking and stuff like that," Reddy Madhavan said.
"I find myself doing this every now and then," she added. "It's partly fear that if you spend your entire life bucking the norm and being different, I might end up alone and eaten by my cat."
Scratch the surface, and Women's Lib means little more than sex, cigarettes and alcohol to Arshi's urban demographic. In starkly different corners of India, other groups of women remind us what a more saturating feminism can look like.
Millions of near-destitute village women are joining microcredit cooperatives, handicraft-making networks like the Self-Employed Women's Association and elected village councils. Meek, abused wives are turning into go-getters, turning male regimes on their heads.
Not a few village husbands have become stay-at-home dads, a phenomenon still rare in the big cities.
But because these women don't sleep around, don bug-eyed sunglasses or down mojitos, it is Arshi's demographic that is deemed "liberated."
Modernity involves more than sin. It demands irreverence. How many urban young women chop off their hair, or choose not to procreate, or dine out alone? How many, despite their modern garnishes, believe in prospering alongside, and not through, a man?
"If we are put on this planet with the aim of figuring out who we are," Arshi muses one day, "and the only way we can figure out who we are is through someone else - either the person we wind up with or the person we create - then what hope does my generation, my we-don't-need-nobody-dude generation, really have?"
Unquote