Here come the slutty savitris

 It all started in February, at a college in Toronto. A cop began to speak, taking the trouble to state beforehand: “I’ve been told I shouldn’t say this.” He went on to sermonise on a theme familiar to every urban Indian woman — log kya sochen ge, tameez nahi hai, aisee ladkiyon ka yahi hota hai — though in a different form:  “If women don’t want to be sexually assaulted, they should avoid dressing like sluts.”

Feminist hell broke loose. Unlike in India, where, for instance, being ranked the fourth worst place in the world for women (ahead of even Somalia) barely created a ripple, Canadian women were up in arms and took off their clothes. Dressed in fishnet stockings, bras, tank-tops, and knee-high boots, they took to the roads daring anyone to touch them. Placards declared that they were ‘Taking Slut Back’, that ‘It’s My Body And I’ll Wear What I Want’, and that ‘Clothes Don’t Cause Rape, Rapists Do’. “We chose the name of what we’re doing consciously. We wanted to get attention because we want people to talk about this. A large part of it is the language that surrounds these things. We want people to think about the language they use and what it really means,” says Heather Jarvis, an organiser of the original Slutwalk. This movement spread wide and fast; soon women in Glasgow, London, Sydney, Sao Paulo and Dublin were taking up the cause.
Who’re the sluts?

A slightly off-chart entrant into the Slutwalk destinations is New Delhi, also known as the rape capital of India. It was an initiative by Umang Sabarwal, a journalism student at the Kamla Nehru College in South Campus. “The word ‘slut’ is ironic, and it gets everyone’s attention. We all know what happens in this city,” says Sabarwal. “It’s understood as a norm: don’t go out at night, don’t wear revealing clothes. The men on the roads stare at you like you were a piece of meat.”

Sabarwal and her friends began the Slutwalk where apparently all revolutions begin nowadays: on Facebook, in March of this year. Within a month, the event had 17,345 confirmed attendees. “It became much bigger than we expected,” continues Sabarwal, who is all of 19. To get things in place for such a huge number, the event has been postponed to July. 

Ritika Sinha, 24, a lawyer who has lived all her life in Delhi, remembers that she was just 14 when she first experienced the casual molestation that the city is notorious for. “I was traveling in a DTC bus on my way to school. It was so crowded, and some guy standing behind me started feeling me up and rubbing himself against me. I was horrified and didn’t know how to respond. I could see out of the corner of my eye that another woman and an elderly uncle had noticed, but nobody came to my assistance. I got off at the next stop.” Sinha says that her biggest grouse is when people call it ‘eve-teasing’. “It’s called molestation. Don’t pass it off as something else.”

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), there is a rape every 18 hours, and molestation every 14 hours in Delhi. One of every four rapes in India is committed in the capital. Only one in 69 rape cases in India are reported; just 20% of these cases result in conviction of the rape accused. In other words, the chance of a rapist being sent to jail is 0.28%.

One would imagine that the word ‘slut’, heard more often in Hollywood movies and western television shows, would have little impact in India. Besides, if only sluts are molested, who are all the sluts and how do we spot them? “If you ask a Delhi man, I’m sure he wouldn’t know the word, or the distinction between a slut and a non-slut,” says Neha Jayshankar, 22, a sociology student in JNU.

“That’s because we are all ‘sluts’ merely by virtue of being on the road, of traveling alone, of working in an office, of being unmarried. I’ll go to the Slutwalk wearing what I was wearing when a man felt me up on the road: kurta and jeans.” She is also against the idea that Delhi might not be ‘ready’ for such a protest. “Why would we have a protest if Delhi was a feminist, tolerant city which was ready for it? The protest is to shock our society, as all protests are.”

Are we ready for it?
Jayshankar’s mother is less enthusiastic. “I just want to protect my daughter,” she says flatly. “She’s an opinionated girl, and I support her. I know what these men do is wrong. But we live in a society, and we have to live by its rules.” And what are these rules according to her? “I don’t know,” she says quietly. “Not making a tamasha.”

So who are the women in Slutwalk talking to, and are these people listening? “As a firm, dyed-in-the-wool feminist, I never thought I would disapprove of anything that empowers women, but the thought of a Slutwalk in Delhi terrifies me,” says expat Christine Pemberton, a longtime Delhi resident. “There is a serious, visible, aggressive macho under-current in this city. I hope to God I am wrong, but I have visions of men taking photographs of these girls, ogling them, trying to touch them — and not getting the point at all. To be blunt, I don’t think Delhi is ready for this kind of in-your-face protest.  Sad, but true.” Piyushi Jain, 26, a call centre worker in Gurgaon, is cynical. “It’ll become a spectacle for others. But worse, it will give urban, educated women the illusion of social activism. It might feel good to walk in the Slutwalk, but what will change? Where are the women who don’t have the luxury to protest?”

Feminism is every protest
“We are working on it,” says Mishika, a co-organiser. The core group of the Slutwalk consists of 15 college-going girls; their feeling of having gotten into something way over their heads is palpable. “Random people are calling us and asking us, what do your parents do, where do you live, and so on — as if that makes us less eligible to protest molestation,” sighs Mishika. “Our parents are worried about our safety.” But the group is forging ahead, holding meetings inviting all and any to debate the issue and the event’s execution. And they are also mulling a name-change (“Maybe Besharmi Morcha,” says Mishika) and plan to conduct street plays and workshops, reaching out to women who don’t have access to Facebook. “We are going to ask for the police to manage the crowds,” she continues. “One day a guy will whistle at you, the next day he will grab you, and the week after that he will rape you. This movement is speaking out to the men who rape, and the women who don’t stand against it.”

“I don’t care what women are protesting,” says Diya Manjrekar, 35, a guest lecturer on Culture and Social Studies in Delhi University. “Women should protest, protest Brazilian waxes, protest rape and molestation, protest dumb television that objectifies us, protest anything that oppresses them in their own context.”

Manjrekar’s view is seconded by Shilpa Phadki, the author of Why Loiter, a book on women and public space. “The Slutwalk is restricted by an urban and a middle class location. But this does not make it irrelevant. Feminism needs all kinds of movements and forms of protest. Our struggle against violence directed at women is not separate from our quest to demand the right to dress as we live and go where we please, when we please.”