As a pure defense of the well-being of my lobes, I tend to interact with fellow feminists more than I do with UnFeminist people under the (misguided) assumption that at least, Ze feminists won’t make me want to puncture my own eyeballs on an alarmingly regular basis. I can be such a half-turnip sometimes! This doesn’t mean any feminists haven’t been accused of endorsing harmful tropes like classicism, trans-phobia, racism, ableism etc — from Margaret Sanger to Mary Daly. Even today we will find someone who will insist theirs is the “right” kind of feminism and anyone who deigns to disagree with zie needs brain transplant right away. All said and done, when I actually meet one of these Self-Proclaimed-Dispatchers-Of-Feminist-Privilege, I’m always shocked, then outraged and ultimately undergo too much chafing of my BrainCells.
This week at a conference on the Renaissance Women of Maharashtra, I came across these revolting lines — There has never been a ‘real‘ feminist movement in India. They further explained this conclusion because there have never been any “Waves”, just tiny “ripples” in the stream of women’s rights. While their facts seem to be correct, the conclusion they drew was hasty and contrived. If I were to put it delicately, they were WRONG. When I contradicted their statements, they managed to drown more in quicksand of their own doing. Apparently the reason it’s not a real movement because it’s “nothing like the Radical Wave of the 60’s in the U.S” — the doctrine of gag reflexes? It fits in right here. Then the speakers said something else too along the lines of “the wave in Europe and U.S. can only be called a movement; as there is a collective desire and agenda of change”. I confess, I didn’t bother to listen to anything after that but it can’t have been anything good judging from my fellow speaker’s disgusted looks. Once again, in a conference — the most academic of its kind– we forget the contribution of the so-called “lower caste” women as they don’t represent “the normal demographic“. I invoke the omnipresent gag reflex again.
It’s not unusual to see such conscious erasure of Dalit women’s involvement in academic discourse. Unless, of course one of them comes to represent their own clan, we pretty much ignore them. We proclaim loudly on LegalPaper that “untouchability” is a crime and is now completely absent from our culture while we continue to practice it, blatantly and ostentatiously (albeit craftily). People think Dalit feminists are being melodramatic when they claim triple oppression on grounds of Class, Caste and Gender. Many people rob them of speech because whenever they speak out, they highlight the suppression they face at the hands of the upper castes (read: who wants to read just how big arseholes they are being?). Many can’t stand “Dalit writing” because of how unaesthetic it is — considering how Dalit writing often closely mirrors their lived reality — or some just think they should just shut the hell up now that they have “reservations” or “protective discrimination”. Some have a problem with the way masculinity is constructed in Dalit writing, an almost hyper-masculine ideal, which again is a little too close to home. But the problem most people have with is the organic, cohesive bond Dalit women depict. There were many critics at this conference that suggested that these Dalit feminists shouldn’t give so much importance to women, as “after a point, this whole pro-woman diatribe seems forced“. Never mind that Dalit women were the pioneers of the Ambedkarite movement, bore the brunt of educating their children and themselves by themselves, took unmitigated violence from their spouses and the society for simply being women. Never mind that their bodies bear the harshest wounds of oppression, as till date, they are seen as bodies literally to be possessed — by their own men and men of the upper castes. Let’s completely disregard their entry and sacrifice into the Nationalist movement; they have reserved seats in public transport now. IF they are ever mentioned with academic discourse, then their husband’s contribution gets special mention for being benevolent and kind while women are silenced again. People don’t even want to consider that Dalit women led and sustained a “movement” that would satisfy even Western standards (though questions why should our movement match up to other cultures are met with heavy silences) of the “feminist wave”.
Such is the precarious nature of Dalit feminism, their struggle becomes more immediate than most, as living life from the lowest and meanest position of the Subaltern makes them “outsiders”; chromatically so. Most people don’t regard their movement as feminist at all because they aren’t concerned with mainstream ‘feminist’ problems. Their struggle is “basic” as a large demographic of Dalits live below the poverty scale (to the sadist pleasure of the Landed Gentry). I don’t see how can these women ever worry over reproductive rights or sexual freedom if they don’t even have food to eat, aren’t educated, fighting sexism in the most personal way possible. But of course, because they don’t mimic Simone de Beauvoir’s tongue or her qualms, they can’t possibly be feminist, can they? Instead of judging the world with a Western lens, I’d prefer it if we saw how these RemarkableWomen — collectively, as they are, many hearts and bodies pulsating as one — negotiate their manufactured invisibility.
To think we celebrate each passing year of independence with pomp and pride but are dedicated to never divorcing this collective colonised persona is hilarious. Tragically hilarious, rather.
P.S. Another brilliant post on ‘Whiteness’ by Wallamazoo that I’m just too damn tired to cross-post. Read it here.
A ruin in progress 
Weekly Textual/Sexual Reader (Week 1)
Jaded16’s Note: So a few weeks ago I joined Tumblr on a whim. Alcohol may have been a part of the three second decision-making process. Or not. Anyway, on another equally fancyarse whim I promised myself I’d read one book a week. So readers of the Olde Interwebes I will torture you weekly with these inane book reviews. It comes with the territory of e-stalking someone. Heh.
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Dear Tumblr,
A year ago, in one of the best classes I’ve ever taken (women’s studies) my professor introduced a book to us ‘The Inner Courtyard’, a collection of short stories by Indian women. She read out an excerpt wonderfully and I just knew that I had to read this book. Sort of like a strange need to again re-create the magic the excerpt had weaved around me. I remember finding this book and feeling so happy, looking and touching the cover; it seemed like an image I’d seen before somewhere but didn’t know just where. Now I remember my grandmother’s sari had a similar border, but there yet remains an ever illusive feeling, of possessing something and yet letting it slip out in wisps helplessly voluntarily compulsively, taking tiny slivers of myself with it.
With page one started my difficult — at best — relationship with the book. People are always surprised when they see me not completely swooning over the book, after all it’s written by Indian women right? So I should be able to automatically relate to it, as if some part of my cell formation as an IndianLady should tug me towards these stories. As if, these words should re-vertebrate within my soul (if I even have one that is) or perhaps within my being as a woman, I should see my past coming out alive from the flesh of the book. As if I were to react to the book like I was an ant, caught between the words and print, till I became so tiny, forgetting who I was and become a part of the grand narrative. As if this ‘Indianness’ that I supposedly am born with will help me understand this book as an extension of myself. I can’t simplistically say that none of these assumptions were true nor can I completely accept what I felt reading these voices.
These are hard stories about women I can see around me. Perhaps I’ve known a few of them, met one, been one, aspired to become another. Sometimes I saw glimpses of my grand mum, in some characters I found my sister. In many lines, breaks and pauses, I saw me. How do you deal with a book that mirrors your life, makes sure you are deeply affected and then shrouds itself under the convenient label of ‘fiction’? As if it is really that easy to disengage with history, with the past that stills runs fresh in my larger collective identity as a woman of a certain Hindu community, even as I try to deny its presence. There were too many instances in the book where I had to keep it down, when I’d read about another repressed character and see it wound a place directly near my uterus. I’d feel that low guttural punch no matter how many times, in how many tempos I’d read Ismat Chughtai’s Chauthi Ka Jaura wishing fruitlessly this time it would hurt less as the protagonist would lock herself in that tool shed while her mother soothed her bleeding fingers from the wedding dress she didn’t finish making. Or I’d try not to smile at Anjana Appachana’s Her Mother as she blends stream-of-consciousness with the most abrupt pauses left mid-sentence. I wish I wasn’t moved as much by Vaidehi’s ‘madwoman’ Akku as she made up stories about her husband, dead child and dead self or I tried really hard to keep my distance from the fury unleashed my Mrinal Pande’s nameless protagonist as she raved against blatant sexism she witnessed as a child in Girls. The hardest moment was when I felt Vishwapriya L. Iyengar’s Library Girl slip under the veil. A claustrophobia so similar that it has become a part of my identity; precisely why I choked back tears when I read “Within the veil, a darkness seized Talat. It bandaged her mouth, her eyes and sealed her voice. She cried and screamed inside her black veil. But they did not hear and did not see“, shocked to see someone had peered somewhere inside and chiseled these words to perfection. I remember laughing out loud in the train reading Mahashveta Devi’s Draupadi as she subtly and beautifully recast history, this time giving her Draupadi a bare body albeit a proud one. It’s difficult to not fall in love with this book, exactly where the danger lies.
The moment you lose your cool, it slips under your skin leaving you with nothing but these voices right in your veins. As the title suggests, these voices are present in the Inner Courtyard of the house, inside that space that was made for women just so they could be contained within the confines of their home. The same happened to me; I was there in the courtyard, crying that my voice doesn’t leave the inner veranda of the house. At the same time, strangely relieved no one could see this bile pouring out. Just when I closed the book, that part of me in the courtyard sits there, waiting to unleash itself when I next open it. Ironically, the day after I finished reading the book I went to a wedding, pasting that fake smile, fitting into the heavy shoes of the ‘Indian’ woman who lost her voice a long time ago. And then I remembered the remaining five copies of the book on the shelf, fantastically wishing those five readers would join me in the inner courtyard later as we’d air our locked voices.
Love,
Jaded16
Posted by Jaded on September 27, 2010
https://jaded16.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/weekly-textualsexual-reader-week-1/