Gender equality
SUBHASHREE KISHORE
In her article “A capital shame” (Open Page, August 19), the author has focused on Delhi’s shame to claim as ‘rape capital.’ While it may be a fact that north India is patriarchal and women still do not get their due place in society, the write-up confines itself to highlighting the insecurity of women in the capital without going far enough into probing the causes and coming up with solutions so as to combat such an evil.
The entire concept of emancipation or empowerment of women and giving them equal opportunity has an overbearing Western stamp. Women in India, right from Pandyas of the early Tamil Sangam age to Raziya Sultana and Rani Lakshmibai of recent times, have played a role in the predominantly men’s arena.
But the present day approach to betterment centres around freedom from social shackles, equal rights to property and also education and job opportunities. But women are still treated as ‘sex objects.’ Social reformation was fuelled by great personalities like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and others. But today, social re-engineering processes have receded to oblivion and the mainstream development debate has suffocating content of politics and economics with showbiz in no small measure.
The obsession with fairness, to be beautiful, young and alluring is evident in most advertisements, cinema, in the mushrooming of beauty parlours, grooming, the successive ‘beauty queens’ — beauty measured by inches and some politically correct answers. Why cannot a woman be dark, short, tall, lanky, beautiful, sinuous or rotund and still be a good human, worth emulating?
Recently, when colleges reopened in Delhi, a popular daily carried blow-ups of freshers and their attire with lewd comments thereon. Is college all about only dressing, campus love, the transition from adolescence to adulthood only a single faceted growth of lust and passion?
Dailies and journals publish survey results — how most of the youth do not accept the sanctity of marriage, how women are uninhibited; this sample survey of 40 or 50 youths is purported to be the general trend. By giving grossly disproportionate attention to what a minuscule section thinks or feels, the media does its bit to further the image of woman as an object of pleasure.
Constant exposure
No child of 10 or 12 probably knows wolf whistles, eve-teasing and the like. Constant exposure to the electronic media and the internet teaches him what a woman is supposed to be all about — parents and grown-ups who make most of these into family viewing and the censors who sleep through suggestive dances and close-ups are as much to blame.
We have a very elitist view on the ‘freedom of art.’ We are not a mature enough society to give freedom of art — a freedom to merely titillate, grab attention. Let the artist fraternity portray hunger and starvation instead of searching for artistic freedom in nudity.
We can do just as well, maybe even better, with non-controversial expressions. Instead of culling out justifications from history, Khajuraho or dress codes in ‘those’ days, we should decide what we need rather than what some may want in the present day context.
Art has a social responsibility too and must not be a mere expression of personal ideas. That is not to say we encourage the self appointed moral police to vandalise and indulge in violence. We need to accept that we have a responsibility to give the generation next some good guidance. Caution never hurt anyone.
One of the suggestions in the said list of do’s and don’ts is to avoid dark and lonely places. Is a street light and extra police patrol during odd hours such a Herculean task for a government which strains every nerve in policing and running successfully liquor shops in this land of the Mahatma? The soft Indian state should be ruthless at least in curbing exploitation of women.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Open Page
