IQBAL HASAN’S PAINTING of a young woman sitting on a chair with an older woman standing beside her makes for the cover of Anuradha Marwah’s third and latest novel Dirty Picture. As a reader and someone who has seen these paintings in a plush Lahore restaurant called The Cuckoo’s Den, incidentally located in the  heart of the city’s red light area, I immediately identified it as one of several painted by the artist to document the lives of prostitutes in this area. Most locals are shy of admitting to the existence of prostitution in the city. For them, the red light area in the forted city still has certain mujra performances by ‘artists’ and nothing else. The painting illustrates in brush strokes what Anuradha Marwah documents in words – exploitation of women and the lower classes through a deep-rooted mechanism of inequitable gender constructions often obfuscated by ill-disguised hypocrisy.

The novel has been read as a fictionalised documentation of the Ajmer Sex Scandal of 1992. However, Dirty Picture, tracing the personal narratives of two sisters Reena and Bharti, uses the incident as a site to critique exploitation at the levels of gender and class. Reena and Bharti live very different lives yet their narratives absurdly merge into each other’s forthright questions about notions of love and consent. Reena, divorced from a man who was struggling with substance abuse, is engaged to the married CEO of the company that employs her. She lives a seemingly comfortable life in the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai weaving dreams of a married life with her boss, Suhas, a middle-aged man inebriated by the power he wields.

In Ajmer, Bharti lives a life driven by idealism and a desire to make a difference to the parochial town and its regressive outlook. To gain clout in college politics, she befriends local politicos Anish and Sarosh, which in itself is a scandal as these are Muslim men. Sucked into a vortex of political intrigue, Bharti finds herself involved in a sex racket with no one to turn to and nowhere to go. She looks at her sister for help in the hope of escaping an Alcatraz of impending shame but Reena is caught up in her relationship, which she realizes will never evolve into more than that of mistress.

A novel that gains momentum with each word hurtling towards its fatalistic conclusion, this reads more like a journalistic account than a work of fiction. The universe of Dirty Picture has no clean edges to it. The world of Reena and Bharti leave the readers with a keen sense of discomfort. The journalistic gaze gains strength in the section on the making of the blue film where the writer assumes a stationary camera angle and pens an otherwise traumatic imagery in monotone, thus de-fetishising the woman’s body. De-sensationalising the issue was the writer’s concern and the literary tools that she uses to describe the sexual scenes in the novel achieve the purpose quite effectively.

Marwah’s writing has often been called manly. This refers perhaps to the way she handles sex in her works. According to her, when people say she does not write like a woman, they mean her writing is not internal and domesticated. She says this is only a perception about fiction by women. She herself finds writing an exercise in androgyny. The demeanour of the book as well as the attitude to writing seems like a simultaneous exercise in involvement and objectivity for the writer.

Unlike her first two novels, The  Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta and Idol Love, which negotiate the space between the personal and the political without locating a concrete political centre, Marwah’s third novel is honest, brave and candid. She fleshes out each character — even the ‘villains’ — so non-judgmentally that they could be any of us. The nonchalant prose disallows prejudice as reader’s judgments too are suspended and deferred, nudged towards a desire for deeper analysis. During her extensive research for the novel, the writer came across a number of reactions and observations to the scandal. She documents some of these in the introduction to her novel: ‘Ajmer tapes’ are still freely available in the blue-film circuit. Muslim men consider it their obligation to ‘spoil’ Hindu girls. The real culprits have escaped; the arrested men are scapegoats. The real culprits are bureaucrats and politicians; the arrested men are scapegoats. Why did the girls keep going back to their tormentors? Could it be that they were enjoying the sex act? Certain Hindu sub-communities have issued whips against their boys marrying girls from Ajmer. Three of the girls involved in the sex scandal have committed suicide. It wasn’t suicide; the families murdered their girls to escape the stigma. What else could they have done?’

The victims of the scandal either committed suicide or are leading their lives in anonymity denying any association to the scandal that shocked the whole country. The victims have been coerced by the same socio-political paradigms to erase or at least pretend to erase all memory of the event. Dirty Picture challenges such an erasure, the coercive structures that first conceive and then erase such shameful memories, the facade of notions of women’s emancipation within such structures, and most importantly, the networks that centres of power operate to veil their existence.

As Manju Kapoor, the author of Difficult Daughters writes, “This is a story that needs to be told, but because of its complexity, it is not an easy story to tell. But Anuradha persisted, and we all owe her a debt of gratitude that she did. This particular incident at least will not be covered by the dust of ages.”

Dirty Picture, Author: Anuradha Marwah, Delhi: Indialog Publications November 2008, Price: Rs 195.

***

Sanyukta Saha has just completed an MA in Theatre and Development Studies from the University of Leeds (UK). She received the Inlaks Scholarship last year to pursue this degree. She is part of a feminist activist theatre group called ‘pandies’ in Delhi and has been involved with a number of amateur and professional productions in India.

One phrase from her rebuttal is particularly striking: I believe that the history of women can be seen, in some ways, as a history of language. Language, of course, is more than just words – it’s phrasing, intonation and intent as well as vocabulary. The uproar over Trunk’s tweet went well beyond shock that she had reacted with relief to the miscarriage – it was really more about the fact that she had trespassed some code of conduct by which women are expected to speak, or keep silent about, certain things. And even the way we’re expected to feel those things.

What the controversy throws light on is how in spite of many taboos about speaking about personal experience becoming obsolete, how they are discussed can still scandalize and shame the speaker/writer. If Trunk had tweeted, for instance, that she was devastated, or returned after a few tweetless days and sadly and diffidently “confessed” that the miscarriage had put her out of action, it’s almost impossible that such a storm would have brewed. The problem was honesty about an experience, outside the fray of acceptable understandings and acceptable retellings of such experiences.

Nobody is above bias, and we both judge and are judged. I considered what this means in my own life. On the one hand, what this means is that (with big thanks to Eve Ensler) I can say “vagina”, and not have anyone bat an eyelid, but if I say “cunt”, my own preferred word in both conversation and writing, I get nothing but disgusted looks – instantly, my upbringing, intelligence and feminism are questionable. It means that if I ask that someone dismiss my cattiness as PMS, it’s okay, but if I write a poem about how I love the experience of menstruation (as I did some years ago, to horrified reactions), something’s wrong. On the other hand, however, if someone uses the phrase, “that female” to refer to a woman or girl, my hackles get raised, indifferent to the fact that in India, the usage is not derogatory. Similarly, I am sanctimonious about people who define sex in heteronormative or phallocentric terms, in spite of knowing that they may have never been exposed to alternate paradigms of thought.

What about you? How are you limited – whether by your own expectations or by others’ – by the notion of singular ways to experience or express certain things? How does it affect your experiences as, or viewpoints towards, women?

Of relevance is Chimamanda Adichie’s speech about “the dangers of the single story”, which you can watch here.

Miscarriage

A curtain of rain separates
My verandah from the hospital.
On any other day a hundred
Silent patients would pass through
The OP clinic. Each of them
Allowing us doctors to listen
Feel, touch and question them.
The warmth of their fever would
Make us uncomfortably hot.

Today the air is chilled downpour wet.
Water roars in the stony river.
Five nurses, Gi and I sloshed
Through muddy puddles to witness
Our stream in full spate.
Only one desperate couple managed
To make it on the early bus.
Wanting an abortion.

***

M’s Betrayal

When the skin on the bottom of your feet
Burns. Burns really red hot.
It becomes hard and black. Like
Old cracked leather.
It makes a ‘tok tok tok’
Noise like a coconut shell. Dry.

Inside creamy pus waits patiently.
The doctor will soon quit tapping
the skin with his pen.
He will mumble instructions in Tamil.
Nurses will scurry. The woman will
Starve to avoid vomiting with the anaesthesia.

In the evening Dhanam Akka will
Crack open a beautiful glass ampoule.
With the deftness of experience she will
Pull ketamine into a plastic syringe.
M lies on the steel operating table
Softly moaning under her green blindfold.

Soon cold steel clasped in latex
clad fingers will pare through
dead skin. Patient pus will burst
forth and dribble into a plastic
kidney shaped tray. Raw red
flesh will make a shy debut.

Akka, will you promise not to tell
Anyone. Promise on your heart.
Promise on your head. Promise. Promise.
I didn’t fall into a cooking fire
because I fainted being two months pregnant.

I took some tablets because I didn’t
Want a second child right now.
Ten pills from the local doctor. They
They knocked me out and then
Then my husband came home drunk.

Promise you won’t tell anyone. Promise.
On your heart. Promise on your head.
He was in a murderous rage. He.
He tied me up and then he.
He stuffed a cloth in my mouth.

***

Lalit Narayan is a doctor who graduated from St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore in 2007 and then spent two years working at the Tribal Health Initiative, a unique hospital and community health programme staffed by members of the local Malavasi tribal community in the Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu. The poems are based on patients Lalit encountered during his work there. Lalit currently works at the Centre for Public Health and Equity in Bangalore. He blogs at bodypolitics.blogspot.com.

My Kannada is not good enough to catch the nuances, but the emotions could not be missed. They sang of the families they had built for themselves, among people they could be themselves with – when everything else is denied to them. We have no mothers, no fathers, no sisters, no brothers, no work, no family, no home – except our own community, they sang, and even through through the underlying sadness, the sense of pride in the community was evident.

Then, a slightly built woman in a white kurta and jeans, began the ‘main’ performance of the evening. She started telling her story, a powerful one that kept everyone in the audience enthralled, despite the absence of any props or instruments. Told in the first person, in direct and evocative Tamizh, this was the story of a young boy’s journey to understanding his own nature and the long road to his finally becoming a woman. The life of the Aravani community, their challenges, their origin myths and their family dynamics were all part of the story, but the most powerful part of it was her longing to be a woman, and the desire for it which is so powerful as to enable her to endure the ritual castration, done by a traditional healer without anaesthesia. The performance was all the more gripping for its blunt edge, though laced with plenty of humour and witty dialogue.

So gripping was the story and its telling that I assumed it was the performer’s own story. Only at the end did we learn that the performer, Pritham Chakravarthy is not herself part of the community, but a theatre activist and researcher who has spent considerable time researching the stories of the Aravanis, and brings them to a wider audience through her story-telling.

One question remained at the end of the performance, which I was somehow reluctant to ask, but now regret not asking! Something which came up repeatedly during the performance was the attraction to objects traditionally viewed as marks of the Indian woman – saris, bangles, flowers. In urban India, at least, the markers of femininity themselves are in a state of flux.  In that context, is the Aravanis’ ideas of womanhood a constant or how is that changing? In other words, how closely is womanhood for them linked to the outward symbols of femininity and in particular, to these symbols? Do they need the ‘display’ of womanhood or is it simply enough to feel woman to be a woman? In this context, I thought blogger Deborah’s piece on the cluster-concept of being a woman was worth reading.

Leafing through pictures mailed by a friend, I find one of me on the beach laughing uninhibitedly with my hair streaming in the wind, and I smile to myself thinking ‘this is so me.’ I am a single woman in her thirties, have never been married and have no ‘special relationship’ with any man. Yes, at times, I do long for companionship and romance but for the most part, I revel in my being single. I enjoy the time and space I have and the freedom to explore love, life and relationships in my own way without the responsibilities that come with being a wife or a mother. Yet, living in a patriarchal society where a woman is expected to prize above all, the role of wife and mother, being single also means having to regularly encounter reactions ranging from the sympathetic to the malicious.

I do understand the curiosity others display about my personal life. I probably seem like something of an oddball to them and I’ve got used to fielding questions about the reasons for my choosing to remain unmarried. My reply — that I am single because I have not yet come across the right person and that I am against the arranged marriage system where caste and religion are of prime importance and superficial qualities such as colour of skin and looks assume greater significance than the kind of person one is — does not seem good enough. It’s usually followed by advice about why I should not be so rigid and ‘settle down.’ I have got used to that too.

The hostile remarks get to me though. Sample this. One man asked me if I was single because I was ‘tainted.’ The same man also told me that my parents had been irresponsible and if he had been in my Dad’s place, he would have whacked me and seen to it that I got married at the ‘right age.’ I have been told by male colleagues that my being single gives men fodder for gossip about me and that if only I got married, the gossip would die down. I have been let in on some of the gossip and it is hurtful. I know this happens to other single women as well. A woman’s single status seems reason enough for men to speculate about her personal life and sexuality. Then, there are times when I have had to fend off men who assume that I must be eager to jump into bed with any man just because I am single. Of course, there is the ‘frustrated spinster’ tag that is lobbed at me even when I justifiably lose my cool in the workplace or with family. Mercifully, I haven’t had to deal with worse.

I recall my visit to Ahmedabad some years ago to visit a woman friend, also single. Her work demanded that she travel frequently and she often had to leave and return home at odd hours. We were leaving her apartment one morning when she spotted a few of her neighbours talking to each other. She warned me to ignore their remarks. Later, she told me that when she walked past, her neighbours sometimes called her a prostitute.

On a similar note, I have heard of a single woman in Mumbai being summoned by the residents association to explain her ‘indecent behaviour’ as she returned home late at times. The single woman, it would seem, is expected to adhere to some unwritten code of conduct — to not have male friends, not socialise with men, not entertain friends at home, to be home by a ‘respectable’ hour and so on. It also seems that it is okay to make assumptions about her character and to subject her to verbal abuse and harassment if she deviates from this code.

Even in this day and age, even in urban India, people find it difficult to accept that a woman can choose to remain single and lead a healthy, happy and full life. The idea that the single woman is entitled to the full range of freedoms that any other adult does and is entitled to live her life as she chooses is also one that is yet to gain full acceptance in our society. I wonder when the day will arrive when the single woman can just be and people see her as she is and respect her for what she is instead of making assumptions about her and her character based on her single status.

***

Our love toils about one period.
On the bloody and lusty grassland
You transform me into your self-pitied crippled rabbit.

When you finally discard everything you have
That is inside your permanently bulging equipment,
You turn your back
And ride towards the flat horizon

On a white horse
Whose tail is momentarily dyed pink.
Your horse clip-clops on the flatland.
Your horse remains no more.

I am still bleeding, and my inner thighs are sore.
I hop to the muddy river
To get myself some water.
That reflection of mine is startling:
She’s a ghostly ancient whore.

First published in Hutt

***

The Fisherman’s Wife

The Summer shower comes down
as mercilessly as running horses on full speed.
The afternoon news reports again that there’s no news
about the lost fishing vessel of late.
‘It’s okay, he’ll be back.’ They keep telling her.
They keep telling themselves to keep telling her.

Tonight, she leaves home and mounts the pier
on her palms and knees, without help
from her husband, presumably lost in the sea.
Before departure, he said it would be
a marvellous genesis.

To the salted wind and the salted rain
she serves herself. By the morning
she knows he isn’t returning.
The white-haired waves loom high,
clutching tight the wet air.

Sleepless, tired, she curses,
wails to the open sea like a dog being butchered;
but soon no voice comes to her.
She’s turned into a mad statue,
forced to wait for the impossible
come back.

First published in Qarrtsiluni

***

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, United Kingdom. She is an assistant poetry editor of Sotto Voce Magazine and a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Her website is http://sighming.com and she blogs at http://tammyholaiming.com.

The Indian parliament recently showed intense activity to promote women’s representation in decision-making bodies. Some months back, a bill was passed that reserves a staggering 50% of seats for women on the panchayat level. Currently under review and soon to be debated in the Lok Sabha is the Women’s Reservation Bill that promises 33% of seats in Parliament to women.

To give an international comparison: the current German Parliament has 32.1 % women in Parliament (1980: a mere 9 %). In Germany, a legal quota system does not exist. However, parties have internally introduced certain reservation systems for women (Green Party: 50 %, Socialist Party 40% etc.). Women however are still largely underrepresented in top ministries as well as top commercial jobs.

Therefore, I am surprised to notice that this new law that bears the potential of helping women into important positions within a culture that sees their role largely within the domain of household and family, does not get a lot of coverage in media and discussion forums. The exchanges that do take place are dominated by male politicians such as Lalu Prasad and Jaswant Singh (both of whom, fortunately, now have other problems to deal with). A somehow lukewarm statement came from the young MP Agatha Sangma: “Social and economic empowerment of women is “much more important” than the women’s reservation bill, which will only give political empowerment” (Indian Express, August 8, 2009).

In my opinion, the quota system in itself is certainly not enough to overcome a deeply chauvinistic tradition but it certainly is an important tool for Indian women towards getting more power. The current female MPs do not seem to be of the opinion that women’s empowerment is a big issue. They refrain from challenging old role models and belief systems about what women can and should do in Indian society. The Pink Chaddhi Campaign and the protests around Valentine’s Day were a rare example of women standing up for their rights as a group and a power to be reckoned with.

However, as long as women see themselves primarily as daughters, sisters and wives, they will lack the strength needed to facilitate changes in society. Lukewarm youngsters like Miss Sangma are a good example of such self-restricting behaviour.

So, I wonder where the women activists have gone since February 2009. Lauded in the West as a big step forward, the President Ms. Patil, is not an example of a modern woman. India clearly is not ready for women in leadership positions to challenge old habits of men head-on. Maybe the soon-to-be-founded Green Party of India will change that? In Germany, it was the Green Party that managed to empower women and got them important ministerial positions long before the Conservative Party was even dreaming about it.

The debate on the Women’s Reservation Bill now rages around how many of such seats should be reserved for scheduled tribes etc. Some are suggesting that more seats should be made available to provide for the “female seats”. All these arguments lead away from the topic: Indian women need a larger representation and a say in the decision-making process. They need to be educated and understand themselves as independent female members of society, not an extension of some household or other social group.

I remember a friend of mine, a single mom from Mumbai, cursing loudly while driving past a Manu temple that for her embodied all that was wrong with Indian society. Left alone by her husband, living on the fringe of society (even though we’re talking Middle Class here), has provided her with an intense resentment against any kind of chauvinism. That’s the type of strength needed to uproot deep-seated prejudices in men and women and create a society of real equal possibilities. It’s a long way, but the debate on the Women’s Reservation Bill should be reclaimed by the people whom it is all about: women.

***

Martin Lehmann-Waldau is a foreign journalist working on women’s issues across Asia.

As the day of voting for the Assembly elections approaches, the political parties have been making their achievements and plans known to the voters of Maharashtra through their manifestos. With a lot at stake for the political parties in the fray, they are leaving no stone unturned to convince the electorate that it is their party alone who has the best intentions at heart for every section of society in Maharashtra.

The manifestos of the Congress Party-Nationalist Congress Party and the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party do state the intentions of the parties to promote the cause of the Girl Child. They have promised to “invest” a certain amount in a fixed deposit for every female child born in Maharashtra, and Rs. 1.25 lakh and Rs. 1 lakh, has been promised by each party respectively, once the girl becomes a major. The parties have also promised free education for girls until graduation level.

The considerations given to the Girl Child are a positive step forward in securing the rightful place of a girl in society. What about the female child that does not even get a chance to be born or the girl child that does not get a chance to survive past the age of six because she is denied her right to nutrition, health and education? Who will speak up for her? She also has the right to be heard.

Census 2001 threw up a startling revelation – it showed an alarmingly skewed Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) at the national level and in the state of Maharashtra, with Mumbai being one of the biggest offenders. In 2001 there were 927 girls for every 1000 boys in India within the age group of 0–6 and 917 girls for every 1000 boys in Maharashtra. In Mumbai there were 898 girls for every 1000 boys!

An analysis of the SRB data since 2001 to 2007 has been conducted by D. K. Mangal of UNFPA for Maharashtra based on the data published by the Office of the Registrar General of India. The report stated that the SRB in 2006 in India was 901 girls per 1000 boys, 871 girls for every 1000 boys in Maharashtra and 736 girls per 1000 boys in Mumbai. If Census 2001 threw up startling revelations, the data of 2006 shows that those in authority have done nothing to arrest the decreasing sex ratio in our country, state or city!

One of the main reasons for these shocking figures is the availability of technology to determine sex of the child before birth. The proliferation of Ultrasound Clinics and their misuse for determining the sex of the foetus has led to large scale elimination of the girl child. There is a clear co-relation between the number of clinics and the declining sex ratio in the offending Cities and States.

This is happening despite rising prosperity, despite the spread of education and despite a comprehensive law against sex selection. If the leaders of our state are seriously concerned in bringing about gender equality through the projects for the Girl Child they have mentioned in their manifestos, we ask them to start at the very beginning – give HER THE RIGHT TO BE BORN. 27 Lac crimes take place under the PCPNDT Act every year, 10 Lac pre-birth eliminations and the number of convictions – below 100!

For the effective implementation of The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, it is time that the political parties give this commitment to the following action points:

1. Reconstitute the Advisory Boards as per the Law with representation of committed social activists and civil society representatives
2. Conduct social audit of documents received from sonography clinics between 2003-2008
3. Publish on appropriate websites data of USG machines sold by companies
4. Institute a special fast track court for PCPNDT cases at State level
5. Appoint a special prosecutor at state level
6. It is mandatory under Sec 23 of PCPNDT Act to prosecute the clinics found guilty of violating the law. It should be ensured that all such clinics are prosecuted as per the Law.
7. Demand for adequate financial and budgetary allocations for the implementation of the PCPNDT Act.

So far, there has been no political will to enforce the law due to the politician-doctor nexus. Let us hope that the new MLAs tackle this problem with seriousness, sincerity and vigour; and to begin with stop interfering in the strict implementation of the PCPNDT Act.

***

This is posted as a special contribution based on an email from Deborah Herbert. From time to time, we will feature such notices and announcements aimed at creating awareness on important issues.

Population First is an NGO focusing on the serious population and health issues facing India, looking at these from the perspective of women’s rights and social development. Laadli is a Girl Child Campaign initiated by Population First, supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), among others. ‘Celebrate her life’, the campaign theme, encapsulates the wider concern of the falling sex ratio, which is violence against women in general. Gender-based violence begins in the womb itself, leading to the elimination of the female foetus.

Population First wishes to highlight the lack of political will in strictly implementing The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, and asks the political parties to give their commitment to tackle the problem of the decreasing sex ratio in Maharashtra.

Ad 1: A little girl whines about how her hair isn’t as long as her mother’s was in her childhood. The mother apologetically mentions that she has to work while Nani (her own mother) was “at home all day.” As she drops her daughter off to school in a car driven by her, the girl whips around and retorts in Hindi, “Then don’t go to office!”  The situation is resolved by the mother saving the day, her job and her relationship with her daughter by producing a satisfactory solution, namely a bottle of Clinic Plus shampoo.

Ad 2: A schoolgirl, not much older than 8 or 9, boasts to the camera about how her mother is special because she lost oodles of weight on a Special K cereal diet that requires one to eat two bowls of cereal, twice a day as one’s only form of nourishment. The mother comes in at the end, smiles indulgently at her and then the audience and fondly asks “Bahut bolti hain na?” (Speaks too much, doesn’t she?).  And the ad ends with them sharing a cuddle.

So let’s think about this:

1. Mummies must primarily attend to their children’s every whim, to the point where their own needs/career aspirations must be sublimated. Vanity and shimmering hair over all else!
2. Little girls think it’s okay to be terribly proud of not-so-skinny mums turning skinny (so if they didn’t, would they be unhappy or embarrassed?)
3. Even if it’s half-jokingly, a girl who speaks “too much” must be chided, especially by her own mother.

Some ridiculously naïve part of me kept watching in the hope that the mother in each ad would rectify the daughter’s misconception but really, are the folks selling shampoo and breakfast cereal listening to a feminist rant? Three guesses, people.

On a more heartening note, take a look at this post on Saffron Tree. As a preschool educator, I constantly struggle with poor female representation in narratives and often create my own stories to compensate. But of course, the telly will keep beaming what it will as long as cereal and shampoo sell. Knew there was a reason they call it the idiot box.

Anyone want to get me that yummy t-shirt in red?