India is fighting the gender equality battle with a new, candid language

The feminist movement in India has often been accused of being westernised, leftist, overly aggressive and distinctly anti-men. The discourse about women’s empowerment has, therefore, been circumscribed by this image.

The image in some people’s minds always has been that of the other Indian woman — the one who appreciates “Indian culture”, who is not difficult, in contrast to the uncompromising atheist whose only intention is to destroy “Indian culture”.

What then must one make of these movements across India by women who want to challenge the very foundations of that culture? Women who want to enter the sanctum sanctorum of dargahs, pray at mosques together with men, women who want to enter temples where only men have been allowed or women who no longer want to follow cultural proscriptions like menstruation being forbidden in places of worship?

These are not women who can be easily placed into the earlier compartment of clichéd feminists. Indeed, these are women who prove that the compartment itself was faulty, that the earlier assumptions were short-sighted and downright false. These are women who see that equality of gender, as assured in the Indian Constitution, can no longer be limited by cultural concerns and arguments.

As women fought against the priests of the Sabarimala temple in Kerala over the men’s problems with menstruation or women demanding that they be allowed into the inner chambers of the Haji Ali dargah in Mumbai, even old-school feminists were a bit surprised. Some argued that women should not bother with such fuddy-duddy rules; that daft and age-old cultural customs should just be ignored to die out by themselves. There was even surprise that women would want equality in places of worship notorious for their misogyny. And yet, this was also a cultural stereotype. The Church of England has allowed women priests. The fight is on to break the male stranglehold on priesthood in Hinduism and Islam in India. One can believe in god and still believe in gender equality!

Others were taken aback with the fervour with which young women today are willing and able to discuss menstruation so openly. Much as everyone knows or should know that from puberty to menopause, women bleed once a month as the uterus is part of the reproductive cycle, this is one of those issues that no one talked about. Even those tough, hairy-legged Marxist feminists, as the clichés went, perhaps picked up their sanitary napkins carefully wrapped in newspaper by the chemist. That was the way it was.

Instead, we have young women and men being part of a “Happy to Bleed” campaign, happy to discuss a physical process that is part of the circle of life and death and more importantly, advocate sanitary napkin dispensers in colleges. How times have changed! In some ways, this signifies a shift in the feminist movement. No longer is the issue just about breaking through, it is also about destroying all shibboleths whether legal, religious, social or cultural.

At the bottom of it all though, for all the changes on the surface, the war is no different from the old one, it’s just the battle that has changed. The target is still patriarchy and misogyny, both of which remain rampant if below the surface in everyday life. It is the most unedifying spectacle to watch television programmes where hidebound men argue with women who are only demanding entry into temples and mosques. The men perhaps do not realise how badly they expose themselves as negative and out of touch. They appear like anomalies in the 21st century and while they may not care, they do their gender no favours.

So also with the arguments for a common civil code in India. When it comes to personal laws, no religion wants to give up its hold over its section of society. Hindu defenders fought hammer and tongs against the reformation of personal laws for Hindus just after Indian Independence but they lost that battle, scars of which they still carry. Hindu laws of marriage and inheritance are more just than those of other religions in India. It is hardly surprising that Hindu political parties are most strident in demanding a uniform civil code for all religions. Surely, if Hindu men have given in and therefore presumably suffer, all men must?

But jokes apart, it is one of India’s tragedies that we are still bound by religious laws, where the biggest victims are women. Muslim women in India, for instance, have been fighting for an end to customs like the verbal triple talaq and polygamy. Many men and scholars agree with them. But the clergy and the politician, as ever in a nexus, are unwilling to let go. The argument is that these are laws of God or the gods. But of course they are not.

They are laws of man and it is men who want to use them to control women and each other.

As we have seen recently, all these new battles will not be won overnight. The temple priests in Kerala and Maharashtra’s Shani Shingnapur temple do not want to give in. The mullahs are adamant about hanging on to their masculinity through the subjugation of Muslim women and so what if other Islamic nations no longer follow these archaic laws or indeed that some have no basis in the Quran?

Politicians will wake up to this when they see some electoral returns for themselves. Many political parties themselves are steeped in patriarchy and this has nothing to do with how many women have become prime minister or chief ministers in India. The reaction to the 30 per cent reservation law for women in legislative assemblies provides a better clue. The courts — since the judiciary is the last refuge for justice — can also be distressingly patriarchal and misogynistic.

But if women today are even Happy to Bleed in public, which women like me in their 50s could never imagine, then change is coming sooner than we realise. Today’s young advocates for gender equality may not call themselves feminists and they may not even realise that they have benefitted from battles that others fought before them. But what does that matter? They are women who have grown up in a more equal India and they are genuinely shocked that some roads are not open to them. Men better watch out. The future has arrived before they expected it and it is asking some difficult questions.

The writer is a hairy-legged atheist-cum-old-school feminist