Emotional atyachaar'

There's a saying in Bengali which loosely translates to mean, "in the female, lies the family honour". Loosely translated in social terms, it refers to matrimonial alliances – if a woman marries below her caste, her whole family falls several castes below.

The female, therefore, can only marry upward. So if you look at it realistically, it's clear that actually being female has no honour at all. The woman by herself carries no weight – a Brahmin man marries a Vaishya woman, the children are Brahmins; if a Brahmin woman married a Vaishya man, oops.

In various parts of India and indeed across the world, this story has been repeated endlessly over a few millennia. Women bear the cultural burden of society but in themselves have neither responsibility nor power.

Rather, their use is symbolic – the female gender, with its frightening powers of procreation, is to be worshipped but individual women must know their place. This historical belief still appears today as honour killings, as women being forced to cover their faces and not to mention various parts of their bodies and in a number of other small and large ways.

But it is also true that in many parts of the world, there is an attempt to acknowledge that 50 per cent of humanity has been given a bad deal through history. In these times, which are post-post-feminist, you might say, women are claiming – and sometimes being benevolently granted – a greater say in areas which were earlier exclusive male preserves.

But when women are perceived to cross that invisible line, incidents like the assault on girls in the Mangalore pub happen. The attack by the Sri Ram Sene is now being presented as part of that old Indian argument against "westernisation".

If that were the case, the unemployed youth hired by the Sene would have attacked the pub itself and all the people in it. But they targeted only the women, while claiming they were protecting Indian women. The argument that beating up women is not part of our culture is tempting here but it has no bearing on this argument.

It is women who need to be respectable so that the tenets of our idea of culture can be preserved. There is also no need to point out that many of these tenets are hollow. Hypocrisy is understood here: the edifice of the culture is necessary so we can tiptoe around it slyly.

According to the religious scholar Elaine Pagels, early Christians were targeted in Rome not so much because they believed in Jesus but because they refused to pay lip service to Roman gods as well. This was a minimum requirement to keep the idea of Roman culture alive.

The Roman authorities were bewildered by the fervour of these new converts who would not even pretend to save their own lives. The bewilderment led eventually to violence. Dikhava – for show – an Indian concept we are all familiar with was all that was needed.

Any intelligent society picks up from its past what is worthwhile and junks the rest. Very often, this happens automatically but as we can see now, a certain kind of churning has begun.

In Independent India's movie tradition of old, it was the bad girls who were shown smoking and drinking. They were called "vamps" and they spanned the spectrum of society from rich daddy's laadli beti to a gangster's moll. The audience took vicarious pleasure from them and then they got their comeuppance.

But the vamp has vanished from the screen and is now everywhere. Rich, upper class and upper middle class women always did what they wanted and so did women from the lowest. It was all the way from the lower middle to the middle-middle that women were put in purdah, maintaining the edifice.

Now those women have started to step out. And they are shaking those concepts of society in very basic ways. Orthodox Jews and Muslims do not allow women to even show the world their hair – a prime sexual symbol. Girls going to bars and drinking? Surely anyone can see that the very foundations of conservatism and orthodoxy are being challenged here. And if you do not get the women in line, your carefully erected structure will crumble.

It is interesting to see how the women are responding. Union minister of women and child development Renuka Chowdhury has shown rare political courage by announcing a "pub bharo andolan", thus displaying her upper middle class origins in public. And many other largely well-to-do independent urban women – and a good number of men -- have taken it upon themselves to join the Pink Chaddi campaign and send pink underwear to the Sri Ram Sene.

It is a gesture filled with self-deprecating irony – like blacks calling themselves niggers – but it is also an ultimate slap in the face to these self-proclaimed arbiters of Indian culture.

Women sending right-wing conservative men underwear – surely the sexual symbolism and references to female fecundity and procreative potential cannot be missed here – to demonstrate that they are not afraid? Yes, another battle of the sexes has begun. This time, one suspects the men need to watch their step.