Recently I visited my home town, Uttar Pradesh, which is quite famous for its deeply entrenched structural and institutionalised misogyny. May is the hottest month of the year here, and the electricity supply is not consistent which results in numerous power cuts.
However, what caught my attention was the zeal and enthusiasm the women had during marriages in the month of May. Even in the scorching heat, with poor access to water and food facilities, women were working tirelessly to manage all the marriage preparations. I wondered if it was essential to plan these “pious functions” only in the summer. Generally, women’s decisions are not considered during these plannings, their conditions are never thought of. After all, men, brahmin men engage in these plannings.
In this mess, something hit me. Among the men dressed in “gamchas” and “baniyan” (vest or piece of underwear), outside the home in the “duaar“, there was a newly wedded woman, in her early twenties, cooking and cleaning for the entire large joint family, wearing a saree with a ‘ghunghat’ (veil) as per the brahmin scriptures, bathed in sweat.
Other women were also present in similar conditions. However, there was something which I felt was different in her. I could see in her my future, my family’s expectations loomed in front of me. A few minutes of conversation with her and I came to know that she was pregnant. The way she told me about her pregnancy did not mark any happiness of motherhood. Rather, it marked her body being subjected to force and I could recollect Kamla Bhasin’s words “Patriarchy limits abortion and often seeks to deny them entirely, but at the same time, subjects women to intense and unremitting pressure to engage in sexual relations. Patriarchy forces women to be mothers and also decides the condition of the motherhood which reproduces male dominance.”
Control Over Women’s Sexuality
What I read as a gender studies student, in theory, was in front of me on the ground, in reality. I was feeling sorry for her while she with a “sacrificial smile”, was busy being a good brahmin daughter-in-law, while ‘saffronised’ men were busy celebrating and discussing 2019 Loksabha election results as if they were all learned scholars! Another thought which was disturbing me was the expectations that my family would have from me. They too would want me to be like this voiceless, ever-smiling, ready to sacrifice woman; for women exclusively with these qualities are considered to be worthy of respect in this patriarchal Indian society. Women are obliged to provide sexual services to their men according to their needs and desires, irrespective of their consent.
A radical feminist analysis says that women under patriarchy are not only mothers, they are also sexual slaves and patriarchal ideology typically opposes women as sexual beings to women as mothers. Maybe this is the reason why most of the Brahmanical patriarchal minds get disturbed when questions about “women as sexual slaves” come up.
Institutionalised prostitution, pornography and forced heterosexuality are other examples of control over women’s sexuality. These factors are also evident (as I could witness them) in the vulgar manners of how conversations occur between certain relationships like that of “dewar-bhabhi“, “jeeja-saali“, etc.
Control Over Women’s Mobility
To control women’s sexuality, production and reproduction, the belief is that their mobility has to be controlled. The imposition of ‘pardah’ (veil), restrictions on leaving the domestic space, strict separation of private and public life, all control women’s mobility and freedom in ways that are unique to them- that is, they are gender specific, because men are not subjected to the same constraints, because men are not supposed to be controlled under the rule of patriarchy.
“Women are the gatekeepers of caste” (B.R.Ambedkar). It is believed that if they are not controlled, if their bodies are not gendered, their sexuality and mobility are not censored, entire structures of caste and patriarchy would collapse. This collapse will break the existing gendered patriarchal power relationships and lead to class struggles, ultimately to a revolution!