Intimidated by the enthusiasm of various phenomena unfolding during Valentine’s week, a large proportion of our population mentally prepares itself for the occasion. A rigid notion of love also performs its function. Yet, ever so quietly that many within its hold barely notice how they are being manipulated.
In what we currently claim to be a ‘progressive nation’, it’s pretty rare for lovers to comprehend that their idea of love is not theirs in the first place. So they have been carefully constructed in surveillance and allowed to flourish.
While it undoubtedly keeps the population happy, in a significant number of cases, our rigid notion of love has not only condemned people for loving according to their desires but also validated heinous forms of oppression, including domestic violence and ‘femicides’. Long before feminist author Diana Russell coined this term for a hate crime against women, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo had already condemned such killings when she painted A Few Small Nips in 1934.
Art critics have also claimed that Kahlo had attributed her identity to the murdered women (owing to the abundance of self-portraits in her creation). However, equally noticeable is the incident from which the painting was inspired. A man who had murdered his girlfriend was presented before the court.
Defending himself, he had said, “But I only gave her a few small nips.” Surprisingly this act of normalising one’s act of physical and mental oppression of another being hasn’t changed much irrespective of time and geography. The fact that honour killing exists so proudly among several communities is one of the most vital evidence of the same.
Although the caste, class and religious barriers have successfully built the foundation, further catalyst requirements in the accomplishment of the edifice have been satisfied with the capitalist market, brimming with several for-profit organisations.
This profit practice stretches from the popularisation of occidental notions of Valentine’s Day as a tradition of exchanging cards and dinners within the boundaries of heteronormativity. The entertainment industry, which forms a vast community of Indian saas-bahu soaps, valorises the clandestine Stockholm syndrome-like atmosphere and toxic masculinity through surprisingly successful Bollywood films like Kabir Singh.
As the new generation hails forward courageously, voicing their notions of much better and liberal paraphernalia of love, commercial tactics have nonetheless found their way in that narrative as well.
While Dabur’s Karwachauth ad demonstrating the misogynistic practice through a same-sex couple might seem to many as a step towards acceptance of the change, the core agenda of the industry is more about attracting publicity and popularity through controversies than about creating safer and queer-friendly space within the society.
Moreover, why equate a for-patriarchy practice with the queer community?
Are the people and the free market alone fortifying love’s edifice as a for-patriarchy notion? Unfortunately, there can rarely be an affirmative response to that as prominent political figures- from whom we are accepting a positive revolutionary transformation-take their positions into consideration with the vote bank and personal profit.
Therefore, in 2017, we had the Anti-Romeo squad, objecting even over the lives of consensual couples. While the implemented idea was initially popularised to provide safer spaces for women, it resorted to dehumanising men as figures constantly preying over women.
However, I haven’t yet heard #notallmen arguing over implementing the law. Advocating such rules facilitates the maintenance of a particular conservative social order and the rejection of teaching youngsters the expressions of healthy and mature relationships.
Unfortunately, this is what a significant proportion of the population advocates and thus votes for. Such brewed combinations are fatally harmful to society as they can legitimise impunity for many, among whom we find perpetrators of Dalit murders over matters of inter-caste marriages.
Love in Times of Reality: Art Representing The Raw
While it is true that art in all its forms can represent society, it is time that artists offer a simulacrum, much better and much more socially inclusive of all communities. We can only have the courage and the power to revolutionarily transform the present that surrounds us in only such ways.
During childhood, my parents were the closest figure whose connotations of love were contesting against how we were supposed to perceive it. Unlike the astonishing relations between lovers from a T.V. serial, theirs was a marriage encouraged by their consent (which is still not quite omnipresent in India).
The marriage was not characterised by the criteria of a wife who could cook well or a salaried macho man, a father who is, as Hanya Yanagihara puts it in her novel “To Paradise” ‘shadowy presences in all our lives. You saw them on weekends and in evenings, and if you were lucky, they were benevolent, distant beings, with an odd piece of candy for you…. [otherwise] they were chilly and remote’ (Yanagihara)
Fortunately, I witnessed my father as a being who was much more than a ‘shadowy presence.’
However, I was undoubtedly confused about not spotting metaphors in proximity as a child. Later the difficulty and the audacity of representing the numerous shapes love can materialise into dawned upon me. We, as the audience, are not supposed to love as we desire but as social constructs wish us to do.
As a Hindu Brahmin woman, I am expected to fall in love with someone who belongs to the same religion and same caste (definitely not the same sex). While I may not be aware of how it was perceived in other social settings, the ground rules on the vision of Indian love didn’t stop at curbing the mixing of castes and religions.
Most forms of art, including films, novels and music, are guilty of subtly constructing ideals of ‘normal love’ and ‘beauty’. To briefly paraphrase, love came out as favourable only to those who had the ‘ideal’ body and skin type, and lovers confirming to regressive heteronormative gendered roles.
As someone passionate about exercising and jogging, I was once told that it would be easier for me to find myself a husband (in other words, to satisfy the patriarchally structured, objectifying male gaze) now that I have lost weight. So much for celebrating love.
As a young partnerless woman, I have also wondered if love as we know it is adaptive to queer representation and emerging unorthodox mindset, disruptive to how society is habituated to perceive it? We have undoubtedly ever received an affirmative answer to that.
The Road to an LGBTQ-Inclusive Society in India #LGBTQ #India #inclusion #rainbowflag #chennai https://t.co/0ZcPnAQxaA
— Mobbera Foundation (@MobberaF) February 2, 2022
Forget queer relationships. On the 14th of February, young couples became targets to repressive right-wing mindsets every year. They were mocked and chastised for upending the ‘Indian culture’ by building their healthy notions of intimacy.
Schools become places for raiding on the number of roses and chocolates, and even friendship bands(!) students bring for each other. But unfortunately, while the news at this occasion is exclusively filled with such conversations, couples advocating inter-caste relationships are often threatened by their own families.
It may seem like a shallow excuse for providing ‘better guidance’ to daughters, historian Uma Chakravarti unearths the very malicious intentions of maintaining (Brahmanical) patriarchy as she goes on analysing inter-caste marriages in her book “Gendering Caste”. Below is an extract from her book.
“Under Brahmanical patriarchy, women of the upper-caste are regarded as gateways-literally points of entry into the caste system. The lower caste male whose sexuality is a threat to upper-cast purity of the blood has to be institutionally prevented from having sexual access to the women of higher caste…When women and lower castes do not conform to the rules, that is Kaliyuga. This mythical dystopia represents the ultimate degeneration and inversion of the moral order.” (Chakravarti, p65).
“The law is yet to categorise crimes arising out of inter-caste marriages,” writes YKA user Sunil Kumar https://t.co/bxVdR9esez
— Youth Ki Awaaz (@YouthKiAwaaz) February 21, 2020
While naysayers may find numerous ways to deflect such accusations, other bright scholars like professor Nivedita Menon have repeatedly led to similar theorisations claiming “…that the hierarchical organising of the world around gender is key to maintaining social order.” (Menon, p7)
Circumstances are more than worse when it comes to interfaith relationships with women being reduced to an individual who apparently has no idea about her desires and thus should not be held accountable for being ‘bewitched’ by a lover from a different religion.
We as a society are populated with so many loopholes that the argument over healthy representations of love can be stretched to unending measurements, including how we reduce a disabled person to their very disadvantage.
However, while Bollywood is obsessed with representing the stereotypical portrayal of sexuality, we also have films like “Margarita with a Straw.” Laila, a person who has cerebral palsy (played by Kalki Kochelin), was portrayed as having disabilities yet was beautifully independent and exploratory in terms of her sexual desires. As written in Hindu Business Line:
“Margarita with a Straw is liberating in Laila’s portrayal of a person with cerebral palsy. It speaks of challenges with optimism rather than despair…[tracing] Laila’s fiercely independent journey when she gets angry with her mother for invading her privacy on finding her surfing porn…[or]when she tells her mother that she is ‘bi’ (bisexual).”
Reinforcing A Change
While Valentine’s Day has been chastised as a non-Indian occasion that may have been adopted as an influence on the part of western/modern discourse, there might not be a better opportunity to express our perspective. Therefore, it is essential to open newer approaches to how we perceive the idea of love.
We are creating better platforms that discuss love as a romantic notion from high-school musicals and as an essential element. For instance, within present circumstances of abnormality and health crisis, it’s not inconceivable that a newer and healthier setup to such abstract emotions will be available for the generation to come.
Work Cited
- Yanagihara, H., “To Paradise”, Part II: Lipo-Wao-Nahele, Doubleday, 2022
- Chakravarti, U., “Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens”, The Foundation of Patriarchy and The Subordination of Woman, SAGE Publication, 2018
- Menon, N., “Seeing Like a Feminist”, APA (6th ed), 2012