[Reader-list] Piece in International Herald Tribune that really annoyed me

[Shilpa Phadke]

 Dear All,

One reads ridiculous pieces on feminism in the media all the time and to
some extent becomes immune to them and is able laugh them off and move on.
After a long time a piece annoyed me enough to respond to it.

Here's a link to the piece in the International Herald Tribune and below my
mail am pasting my response.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/25/asia/letter.php

In some ways I suppose I'm relieved to find I can still get so angry that
the only way to exorcise it is to write.
Having written it, I feel compelled to inflict it on others.
Shilpa



Indian Feminism 101

*Shilpa Phadke*

* *

Mistaking one work of fiction to represent all women in a country is rather
blinkered and when it's a country of the diversity and complexity of India,
it borders on the ridiculous. Compounding this by attempting to pontificate
on a subject about which you clearly know nothing and circulating this in an
international newspaper should be a libellous act.



I refer to Anand Giridharadas's piece titled 'A feminist revolution skips
the liberation' in the column *Letter from India, *of 25 September 2008. The
writer begins innocuously enough reviewing Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's book
'You are Here'. The trouble begins when Reddy Madhavan's fictional
protagonist Arshi drawn from her blog begins to represent all of Indian
women, or at least all Indian urban women or what he calls Indian feminism.



The writer says, "Indian women are trading regular bras for push-up bras, by
bypassing the phase of burning bras". In doing so, he demonstrates his
lamentable ignorance not just of the history of feminism in India but also
in the US. A quick trawl through the internet would have told the writer
that no bras were burnt. A group of protesters outside a Miss America beauty
contest in Atlantic City in 1968 threw not just bras but also girdles, mops,
pots and pans into a 'freedom trash can'. A look at some feminist writing
would have told him that feminists don't actually view push-up bras as a
great feminist victory though some of us may choose to wear them.



The writer's understanding of American feminism has him trace its
(supposedly decreasingly 'militant') path from Betty Friedan to Carrie
Bradshaw. Clearly the writer has no little difficulty in separating
fictional characters from real ones. Almost as much difficulty as he has in
understanding that most basic of things: historical context.





The granting of universal adult franchise and constitutional equality to
women and men simultaneously in India in 1951 was not only a ripple effect
of suffragette movements in the West but also reflected the social reform
movement in the country and the presence of articulate women in the struggle
for independence from colonial rule.



It was in the 1970s that a nationwide women's movement came together to
reform the laws on rape. This followed numerous disparate feminist battles
in various parts of the country. In the 1980s the women's movement addressed
issues of dowry, sati, female foeticide and domestic violence targeting not
just the law but attacking the patriarchal ideologies that underpinned
institutions. In the 1990s and 21st century the movement grapples with
questions of sexual harassment and sexual desire, globalisation and beauty
contests, nuclearisation and Hindu right-wing pogroms, as well as the
questions of post feminism that the writer assumes are the only relevant
ones.



Indian feminism, yes there is such a thing, is a complex, multifaceted
animal that is not a replica of the west but one born of a unique context.
It encompasses many women and a reasonably large number of men who often
disagree vociferously with each other in person and in print. This Indian
feminism defies definition and struggles not just with concerns of gender
but also of class, caste and religion.



The writer appears completely in the dark about not just the various
demonstrations that women have been part of on issues of gender but he seems
to have completely also missed the times the women's movement has marched
with the environmentalists, the workers and most recently the queer
movement.



None of this is intended as a critique of Reddy Madhavan's book. Her quotes
in his piece tend to stick to the point – that this is a book and these are
characters, who represent in some ways some women but certainly not all
Indian women in all ways.



However, even if it's only this small minority of women that we are talking
about, there is no excuse for the writer's disapproving misrepresentation.
Many of these women whom he disdains as making fat pay packets by day and
kowtowing to husbands by night, work hard for their money, struggling to
play the role of neutral professionals, looking good without appearing to
invite trouble. Many of them agonise over how to fend off unwanted passes
without making a noise about it because this will affect their careers; note
*theirs, *not the man's. These women don't just "sleep around, don bug-eyed
sunglasses or down mojitos", (though one fails to see why any of these
should "compromise feminism") many also run households, support old parents,
and bring up children. They read books, watch films, meet friends, travel,
and make decisions about how to live their lives, including (but not only)
their sexual lives all of which are their own business. Some may call
themselves feminists. **





The writer's perception that 'real' feminism is about micro-credit in the
villages reveals his unease with women like Arshi, whom he then
moralistically disdains as urban sybarites seeking pleasure for itself. His
facile division of Indian women, into the 'innocent' hard-working real
'feminist' peasant women whom he romanticizes and the self-centred,
hedonistic, urban women wanting to 'fornicate' (do people still use such
words outside of court-rooms?) while seeing men as meal tickets whom he
deplores, is deeply judgemental bordering on the puritanical.



(As a self indulgent corollary one might add here that micro-credit's role
in the 'empowerment' of women has been contested and it has been critiqued
as locating women as only good citizen subjects who will work themselves to
the bone to pay off a debt.)



"Modernity", he pontificates, "involves more than sin. … How many urban
women chop off their hair, or choose not to procreate, or dine out alone?"
Apparently the writer doesn't seem to leave his desk much to stroll in the
irreverent city of Mumbai, or he might have discovered the answer is, *actually
quite few*.



Not only does the writer appear to be prejudiced, he is also badly informed;
certainly a 'sin' when information is for the asking at the click of a
mouse. If bald heads, non-procreation and dining alone are his meter of
female modernity then perhaps he needs not just Indian Feminism 101, but
might one also suggest Modernity 101.