Two nights ago, our Feminist Theory class group on Whatsapp was buzzing – thanks to Shivani Gupta’s Instagram video capturing the aftermath of a middle-aged lady Soma Chakraborty (referred to by the girls as Auntyji in their hashtag #auntyjiapologise), who harassed Shivani at a Delhi restaurant. Shivani was having breakfast with her friends when she was lectured on her short skirt by the lady, who then asked the men in the restaurant to rape women wearing such clothes.
When Shivani and her friends followed the lady into a store and demanded she apologize lest they upload the CCTV footage of her brandishing rape culture at the restaurant, she unashamedly told them to “go ahead”, while requesting the manager to call the police. When a lady shopping at the store stood up for the girls and shamed Soma Chakraborty for her statement, the latter refused to back down. She even left a “message for India” near the end of the video, reiterating her views on short dresses being an invitation to rapists, and asking the parents of the girls to “control their behaviour, their dresses, and (teach them) tameez se baat karna”.
Shivani Gupta put the 10-minute long confrontation up on her Instagram account, and true to her word, made it go viral in a single evening. Unfortunately, Instagram took it down around midnight, because it violated the community guideline of women-cannot-protest-against-violent-threats-to-their-bodily-autonomy-instead-they-must-be-the-bigger-person-and-tackle-the-larger-issue-by-patiently-having-conversations-with-the-perpetrator-of-said-threat-in-order-to-teach-her-empathy. If only Instagram would give the same treatment to the sexist/racist/casteis/classist/communal content that thrives on the platform. However, that’s another rant altogether.
While the girls were heavily trolled and policed by feminists and non-feminists alike on various social media, they received a truckload of support as well, mostly from other young women for whom rape culture is a daily battle. Personally speaking, I hadn’t seen a video that satisfying in a while. I loved how the girls had the presence of mind to film everything and carefully ensure that Soma Chakraborty repeated her regressive statements on camera, and I was impressed by how coherently both they and the other woman put their points forth in the video.
I fist-pumped when the girls asked Ms. Soma whether she thought only girls in short dresses get raped, to which the latter replied, “they (those who rape old women and children) must be psychic” (sic). It was so fulfilling to see her splutter at their ‘badtameezi’ when the girls ironically turned the patriarchal gaze onto her and asked whether the tightness of her kurti was an invitation to some ‘uncle’, thus exposing how offensive she was being. It was empowering to see girls my age being so uninhibitedly angry (of course, that uninhibitedness is a factor of their social privilege as urban, middle-class, educated, English-speaking women), and even receiving support from an older woman on the scene.
Since all us girls on the class group agreed that Soma Chakraborty’s behaviour was hella problematic, we shifted to asking whether the girls’ behaviour was unproblematic; specifically if making the video go viral was a valid move on their part. While the girls’ anger and distress was perfectly warranted, would their public shaming campaign really make a change in the patriarchal mindsets of people in the long run? While the lady and other proponents of rape culture might be intimidated into keeping quiet, they’d remain misogynist and impose those principles in private settings. Perhaps a more efficacious and more feminist solution would’ve been to sit her down and have a patient conversation with her about why her behaviour was harmful, keeping in mind her socialization into the patriarchy of a previous generation.
Many would watch the video only to sympathize with the ‘poor lady’, and demonize the girls. Just take a look at the comments section of Gupta’s post — there are comments ranging from how the girls should’ve handled the situation in a calm and controlled fashion instead of ‘hounding’ the lady, and how this was just a publicity stunt on the girls’ part. Another thing we talked about on the group was how Ms. Vandana, who came to the girls’ defence at the store, effectively fat-shamed Soma Chakraborty when she said that the reason she couldn’t wear a bikini was because she ‘didn’t have a body to flaunt’.
We talked about how it wasn’t okay that one of the girls held Ms. Soma by the shoulders to usher her out of the store and was immediately rebuffed. We talked about how it was unfair of the girls to mock Ms. Soma’s Bengali accent near the end of the video. However, we agreed that all this was mere nitpicking, and derailed attention from the issue at hand. While these things were problematic, they were political flaws of a different kind, and of a much smaller degree of harm. In no way did they invalidate the girls’ anger, or lessen the immediate harm perpetrated by Soma Chakraborty.
Some of us were still iffy on the appropriateness of public shaming as a feminist tool. Here’s my take on it. Public shaming, while incredibly damaging to the person being shamed, is warranted in this case because these girls were harassed and violently threatened in public, with the lady giving the men in the restaurant the go-ahead to rape women whose dresses expose their thighs. This wasn’t the subtler shit we girls endure on the regular, like an aunty/uncle staring at your legs/cleavage/arms with a sneer or an aunty coming up to you with ‘motherly concern’ and being all “beta, you should cover up na?”. Those are despicable, of course, but this was an actual rape threat, made in public, involving the men in the vicinity. Soma Chakraborty had the gall to repeat said threat on camera, and then refuse to apologize for her words despite being ‘hounded’ by so many ‘angry and loud girls’.
Sure, the viral campaign probably won’t change either Soma Chakraborty’s mind or the minds of the people who sympathized with her when they watched the video. However, I believe that what the girls are doing, through their public shaming of her and rape culture in general, is completely valid. In fact, they’re doing amazing so far, and have put their emotional and physical security on the line in order to expose the painful lived reality that so many women, in India and all over the world, call their own. They helped me realise that as a young woman in India who could potentially be harassed just as violently, I have the right to dhol peetke call it out and demand restitution; instead of ignoring the lady, rolling my eyes and scoffing at her with my girl group, and then going home and censoring my wardrobe for the rest of my life. The girls’ anger and the positive response to their campaign reassured me that, were I similarly harassed, I could use my social privilege to make a scene, and I would be heard and backed by a lot of people, both in real life and on social media.
As for the officious tone-policing and the “these girls should have focused on changing mindsets through rational conversation and not engaged in violence” brigade, I have this to say: If I’m the wronged party, I have no obligation to sit the perpetrator down and patiently teach them empathy through calmly rational conversation. One cannot be coddled into empathy. Sure, Ms. Soma Chakraborty will probably remain a misogynist until she has these conversations with someone. However, having that conversation with her is not something you can ask of the girls who faced an obnoxious intrusion into their peaceful breakfast at the restaurant, and were then harassed and threatened in public by this woman, all thanks to how she took offense to the length of a skirt. Ms. Chakraborty was a public menace that day, and I believe that one of the immediate steps we need to take in combating rape culture is ensuring that people are afraid of saying certain things, because they know they’ll be held accountable for what they say.
Mocking and public shaming would be banned tactics in any feminist world, but a) they hold power in a patriarchal context and b) wielding that power is necessary and warranted in the fight against patriarchal culture. We need to stop symmetrizing the behaviour of the girls on the one hand and Ms. Chakraborty’s on the other with opinions like “but they’re fighting hate with hate” or “they’re part of the problem” or “they should be the bigger person and show her compassion and understanding”. They’re not fighting hate with hate, unless you’re equivocating on the word ‘hate’ to mean both ‘violently threatening someone’s bodily autonomy and integrity’ and ‘standing up for oneself when such violent threats are made to one’s bodily autonomy and integrity’. They are also not obligated to ‘counter hate with love’: what they’re doing is fighting hate with resistance.
Sometimes, we are ungrateful for those who fight for us. Every single generation of feminists and women’s liberation activists has been asked to tamp down their anger, to be kinder, more patient, more polite, more empathic, and more willing to have rational conversations with their oppressors about why they deserve respect. They have all been told to keep expanding their horizons of emotional labour, and that their goals would be more easily achieved if men didn’t think women hated them. Same song, different generation. We must stay loud, angry, and rude. I’m relieved that some of us, thanks to our social privilege and cultural capital, have the means to be furious about this ‘rebel women deserve to get rape’ debacle. Society and our polity must struggle to ensure that context-specific means of feeling anger and protesting against rape culture become accessible to people (especially women) from a variety of less privileged backgrounds.