“She is single, has a career and is willing to have fun, take risks and find a man her way, which is not necessarily her family’s way. – It is a woman we have read about in books from the Western countries, and now suddenly we are finding her on Indian roads.” (Lakshmi, 2007).
It was the decade of heady optimism. All around the world, old ideas of feminism were being torn apart, questioned, reimagined, and in the process, making way for a new order of things. And in 1991, when India opened up its economic frontiers, this wave of global optimism swept us up right alongside it. When we look at this decade today, all that stares back at us is the face of the “newly liberated” working woman, with her rose-tinted vision and the avatar she has been granted by popular culture in the years since. But when we scratch the glitter, what do we find?
The Advent of Advertising
Television was introduced in India through the state controlled Doordarshan in 1959, and was restricted to “educational” programmes until 1982, when the National Programme introduced entertainment programmes. This was part of the government’s project of modernization that would “lead India into the twenty-first century”. The impetus provided by the improvement in broadcast technology, introduction of colour television, and an active effort to restructure programming were reflected in the sharp increase in the sales of television sets, from 5 million in 1985 to 35 million in 1990. By 1992, the reach of television had expanded to include 80% of the population. Television established itself as an invaluable medium for the creation of social and cultural hegemonies, and the most crucial facilitator of the shift of economic focus from capital goods investment to consumerism.
Hum Log, the first dramatic television serial to be produced in India and broadcast on Doordarshan in 1984-85, was conceived along the lines of a Mexican telenovela, with the ostensible aim of encouraging family planning. The production of this hugely popular serial, and that of other narrative serials to come, were enabled by the introduction of a commercial sponsorship scheme that allowed corporations to cover the production costs of a show in exchange of ninety seconds of advertisement time. The lucrativeness of this scheme for sellers of products is epitomised by the success of Maggi noodles after FSL started sponsoring Hum Log. Unlike current television formats, the advertisements then did not interrupt the narrative flow of a programme and were clustered at the beginning. After FSL started sponsoring Hum Log, the Maggi noodles commercial occupied the crucial few seconds before the beginning of an episode when it had access to a large captive audience. The sales of Maggi noodles increased more than three-fold in just one year, and made packaged food acceptable and attractive to the Indian middle class. The contribution of advertisements in not just selling specific products but manufacturing the aptitude to consume is evident in the fact that a major part of the 90’s nostalgia ubiquitous on the internet today is composed of memories of advertisements and the products they sold.
Purnima Mankekar, in her book Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, analyses the way viewers interacted with the narratives portrayed on Doordarshan through an ethnographic study of lower middle class and upwardly mobile working-class households in Delhi. Her observations cast light upon the way television shaped gender, communal and national identities, set the stage for the tumultuous 90’s and changed forever the approach to discourse on social and political reform. The products advertised on Doordarshan came to symbolise middle-classness, and many of the households Mankekar interviewed saw the possession of these as essential to establish middle class status. The aspirations ignited and legitimised by advertisements stressed already precarious finances. The middle and lower middleclass households that were already entrenched in the dowry system, often sought to fulfil these aspirations through outrageous demands for dowry. Several of the people Mankekar interviewed saw a direct link between the proliferation of advertisements on television and increasingly elaborate demands for dowry, and the penetration of the dowry system into communities where it had not been historically prevalent. Refrigerators and scooters now joined jewellery and cash as dowry demand staples. Ironically, advertisements for consumer durables that drove this trend often framed serials with overt anti-dowry messages.
Adverstisements in print and Doordarshan alike showcase stereotypical gender identities hiding behind apparently progressive narratives.
A Woman of the Nation
Though the introduction of commercial sponsorship shifted the focus of Doordarshan to entertainment, these entertainment programmes had specific, state sponsored agendas. One of these was national integration, in the wake of the rise of secessionist movements in different parts of the country. The urgent need to create a national culture was the main motivation for the broadcasting of the National Programme in the first place. So, while viewers from one part of the country were exposed to the culture of another part by the dramatization of stories written and set in different parts of the country in Ek Kahaani, Buniyaad, Yugantar and others, the brutal excesses of the repression of secessionist movements remained excluded from television and largely from the consciousness of the middle class in the Hindi heartland. News bulletins on Doordarshan were also accused of devoting very little air time to important news concerning opposition governments at the states. Another aim of the government was to broadcast programmes that would further the cause of emancipation of women, and the late 80s and early 90s saw a slew of “women-oriented” programmes that claimed to foreground women’s experiences and problems. These programmes sought to inform women of the importance of hygiene and family planning, promoted education for women and featured assertive female protagonists. The target audience of these programmes connected with these narratives. One of the women Mankekar interviewed recalled how the popular serial Rajani inspired her to confront the local milk delivery service that had started delaying deliveries, messing up the busy schedules of women in the area.
The “women-oriented” narratives, however, operated “within the system”, and did not transcend the boundaries drawn by the hegemonic patriarchal culture keen on protecting the sanctity of the family and on seeing women as flagbearers of “Indian culture”, modernising to better perform her role in the family and in the service of the nation while retaining all the glorious traditions of an ancient country. Kavita Choudhary, who wrote, directed and starred in Udaan, a popular serial about a woman IPS officer, spoke to Mankekar of the tradeoff that she had to face as a feminist as an activist, between the access to a large audience and the dilution in ideology mandated by this access. So, while Kalyani, the protagonist of Udaan, fought bandits and tried to reform a corrupt system, her father emerged as the true hero – as the facilitator of her success by allowing her the same opportunities as his son, and as her moral compass and dispenser of crucial advice. This phenomenon is echoed in the recent movie Thappad, which has gained wide acclaim as a woman-oriented narrative, but I wonder if the makers of the movie had any of Kavita’s awareness of the patriarchal framework that they had chosen to place their narratives in.
Another feature of these narratives against social evils was the treatment of women as an object of reform, “dowry-victims” who needed to be rescued by the state. This formulation effectively ignored the efforts of activists who had worked to empower women in various socio-political contexts. Women activists, when portrayed on television, were either bogged down by a relentless stream of woes resulting from their activism, or were rampaging hordes out to destroy the fabric of Indian culture and break up families. Thus, while to some extent women’s independence was encouraged, women’s collective action for social justice was either ignored or vilified – suppressing the contribution and potential of several grassroots movements and organisations that had worked tirelessly for empowerment of women and fought for equal rights and opportunities.
Growth of the Autonomous Women’s Movement
The evolution of the women’s movement in India has been characterised by an acknowledgement of the existence of multiple schools of thought within it, and of the diverse needs of the constituency of women whom it sought to represent. Since pre-independence times, the movement had been closely linked with other democratic and radical movements, and by the 1990s, it was more sophisticated and self-aware than its “Western” counterparts. Indian feminists, since the inception of the movement, were anti-colonial and anti-imperialist, criticising western feminism for its inability to engage with other social justice movements long before intersectional feminism became woke. Women’s movements had often risen out of struggles for justice in other spheres – from militant peasants’ movements, from trade union movements and from the struggle for a safe environment. They were led spontaneously by women from disadvantaged communities, women workers and labourers, who, while fighting against the oppression of their communities, applied the same sense of social justice and freedom from oppression to identify and collectively resist their exploitation within their communities and families.
In the 1980s, the country saw a large-scale mobilisation of women against two major forms of violence against women in India – dowry murders and rape. The government was forced to take notice and amend legislation. While these amendments were inadequate in formulation and in implementation, the magnitude of the agitations drove home the political potential of the constituency of women. For the largely middle-class face of the movement, it underscored the importance of supporting individual women alongside continuing the agitation for changes in societal and legal frameworks. Several women’s centres were established in different parts of the country, that provided health care, legal aid and counselling in an explicitly feminist framework. The new centres also sought to build a sisterhood of women across class and caste, drawing upon Indian traditions of female friendships. Saheli, a women’s centre in Delhi, approached this though a workshop on song, dance, drama and painting for women from all over the country. This approach reinforced the possibility of joy and playfulness in exclusively women’s spaces, and inverted hierarchies when middle class women learnt traditional song, dance and art forms from working-class or peasant women. Unlike the present, when Madhubani painting and Gond art can be appropriated by Instagram artists without any acknowledgment of the lived experiences of the communities that have developed and kept these art forms alive, the knowledge of the rich and diverse cultural heritage of the country in the 80s came with an awareness of the different forms that oppression might take depending on the subject’s position along axes of gender, caste, class and community.
In 1991, Giti Thadani founded Sakhi, a network for lesbians all over the country to communicate via letters. This expanded the access to community support beyond the circle of urban activists, and paved the way for the establishment of several other initiatives to provide platforms for lesbians to interact with and support one another. In 1998, upon the release of Deepa Mehta’s Fire in India, lesbianism gained public spotlight as it was attacked for being “against Indian culture” while drawing large crowds to theatres. The lives of transwomen, however, continued to be precarious as they were excluded from spaces that were opening up due to globalisation in the late 80’s and 90’s. It would be more than a decade before conversations on transrights would gain traction in India.
The first known gay protest in Delhi.
Image Source: Queer Activism in India – a Story in the Anthropology of Ethics by Naisargi Dave
The Politics of Division
As the women’s movement focused increasingly on empowering individual women, the establishment of the political significance of the constituency of women led to the mainstream political parties co-opting the narratives of the women’s movement. The individual women of the movement, and those that women’s centres were working to empower, started to be pitted against the “real woman” variously defined by political parties, especially the Hindu right wing, according to their agendas. In 1986, the opposition hijacked the protests against the Muslim Women’s Bill to attack the minority community. In 1987, a section of the opposition, in a perverse appropriation of the arguments for women’s agency, argued for women’s right to “voluntarily” commit Sati. These phenomena were precursors of a bigger agitation that would lead to widespread communal riots in different parts of the country.
The formulation of women as the guardians of the virtue of a community was at the centre of much of the narrative used to other the Muslim community – the allusions to a golden past – without any consideration of historical evidence or chronology – where Hindu women had elevated status, framing the contemporary discrimination against women as necessary restrictions for their protection put in place after the invasion by Muslims, and the legend of soaring Muslim fertility rates that would soon lead to the Hindu population being overcome in numbers, were all constructed on the turf of the politics of gender. The women ascetics who emerged as the voice of the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation urged Hindu men to fight for the protection of the honour of their women. The Hindu right, with its flexibility to accommodate certain notions of modernity like the women’s education and employment, managed to woo into its folds multitudes of middle class women. For them this space – provided within the Hindu right wing sphere with its explicit commitment to maintaining the sanctity of the family – was easier to access without antagonising their families than those provided by the mainstream women’s movement. The frameworks of these organisations, however, remained deeply patriarchal and firmly rooted in the belief that the family had absolute ownership over women’s time, labour and bodies.
Women in the Box
When, post further and deeper economic reform and liberalisation in the early 1990s, transnational satellite television entered the Indian market, there was hope that this would lead to more varied and sensitive programming on national television. But the market proved to be a censor of equal, if not greater, calibre. The satellite channels like Star TV and Zee TV catered specifically to the urban middle class, which was the target audience for the corporations that bought advertisement slots. The indigenous programmes offered by these channels was sweepingly homogenous in representing the Hindi speaking urban middle class, not allowing even the token representation that state sponsored television reserved for regional and class diversity.
The economic reforms of 1991 had led to a massive boom in service sector employment, many young women from middle class backgrounds started living away from home, which introduced them to new freedoms and anxieties. Tara, a popular serial telecast on Zee TV between 1993 and 1997, portrayed single working women living together, leading complicated lives and making complicated choices. Another, slightly older contemporary of Tara, Doordarshan’s Idhar Udhar, approached the depiction of single working women living together from a comic angle. There were also shows portraying the complexities of marriage, like Saans and Kora Kagaz. But the serials were soon homogenized further, and started portraying some version of the “new Indian woman” who is modern and educated, might be employed, but also unfailingly puts family first – and shoulders the triple burden of work, household duties and engagement with the community with an unfaltering smile.
By the late 90’s, adding to the capitalist censoring of content, were increasingly frequent episodes of moral policing that tried to control the depiction of women on screen on charges of obscenity, or of offending religious sentiments. While Deepa Mehta’s Fire faced violent protests for its on-screen depiction of lesbianism, the same director was prevented from shooting Water in India since it depicted the poor condition of Hindu widows. This, the protestors argued, was irrelevant, since it was a thing of the past, and would only offend Hindu sentiments.
Good News, Bad News
The coverage of news, which was expected to improve with the withdrawal of explicit state control, maintained a similar urban bias. As Uma Chakravarty notes in an EPW article, the coverage of the Kargil war, which struck at the close of the decade, was characterised by aggressive nationalism, and obscured all critiques of war as a tool of conflict resolution. The chat shows and debates aired on these channels also had an exclusively urban and middle-class focus. By the 90’s, the model of advertisements had changed – ads now interrupted narratives and news bulletins. In a tone strangely prescient of the present times, when social media is constantly bombarding us with a melange of news and advertisements, Chakravarty observes:
“The only time the other India (that outside the urban, middle class consumers) comes into focus is in the news during election time or in the form of disaster stories – natural havoc, or class, caste and ethnic violence. But before anything sinks in this reality too is immediately overlaid by the glossy urban India via the mandatory commercial breaks which must go on regardless of the tragedies that the news might fleetingly bring to the viewers consciousness; ‘commerce is clearly above tragedy’ and the ads impose their own reality as the camera cuts from the particularities of a tragic event to the universality of consumption desires. What does this do to our sense of comprehension? Does the other India register even when the camera does focus on it when every two and a half minutes our senses are invaded by the ubiquitous lure of goods?”
The culmination of this increasing urban, middle class focus in national discourse was a modification of the very parameters of development. Globalisation came to be viewed as an indicator, rather than a tool, of national development. As Prabha Krishnan and Anita Dighe observed, “educated articulate persons view their own and the country’s progress and development in terms of the goods and services available to the elite.” This desensitization of the politically powerful middle class to the existence of other realities aside from their own, meant that the evils of globalization remained largely excluded from public discourse and hence unmitigated. These evils were particularly prominent for vulnerable women – as corporations turned to them for cheap, flexible employment, as they were left behind with domestic and often breadwinning responsibilities in rural areas when the men migrated to cities, and as they were tasked to bear the emotional burden and to provide a sense of familiarity as their families adjusted to unfamiliar surroundings. The networks of women’s centres and the strength of the women’s movement suffered as they were ignored or vilified in public discourse.
Despite the many tensions between the urban and the mass-movement oriented feminists, the Sammelan showed that the Indian women’s movement does still have a common feminist perspective.
Image Source: Poster Women Archives – A Zubaan Project.
Gender In-difference
In an essay titled Communalising Gender/ Engendering Identity, Ratna Kapoor and Brenda Cossman identify three approaches to the question of gender difference. According to the first, women are perceived to be fundamentally different from, more specifically weaker than, men, and hence need to be protected with special provisions. The second approach sees men and women as equal in the eyes of the law, and hence any legislative provision that treats men and women differently is seen as unacceptable. This is consistent with the formal notion of equality. According to the third approach, women are considered to be a historically disadvantaged group, and some “positive discrimination” is deemed necessary to prevent the perpetuation of underlying inequalities – an approach consistent with the notion of substantive equality.
The patriarchal discourse, which perpetuates gender roles, represents the first, protectionist approach. The proponents of this approach often dismiss the concept of sameness as a “Western concept of equality” inconsistent with Indian traditions. Despite the dominance of the protectionist view, the sameness view had started making some inroads in the 90’s, particularly in context of the liberalisation during this period. Both approaches, however, fail to grasp the disparate effect that gender neutral legislation often has on men and women, and the necessity of legal support for women to overcome centuries of subordination and to participate in social and political processes in equal capacity. Currently women represent a meagre 13% of Indian Parliamentarians. The participation of women in the decision-making bodies of the major political parties is also dismal. While reservation of one third seats at the Panchayat level was introduced in 1993 and has increased the participation of women in local government, a similar provision for parliamentary elections has been pending for twenty odd years.
The formal notion of equality has since then established firm roots in the psyche of Indians. The anxiety of not conforming to this notion sometimes leads women to disavow feminism altogether, and to overcompensate for any special provisions that they might receive as women. This year, during the celebration of women’s day in the Rajya Sabha, a woman MP from the ruling party suggested that Men’s Day should also be celebrated, while during the same session, the male chairman cut off another woman MP from the opposition as she spoke about the increase in violence against women, insisting she speak about “positive” matters on the celebratory occasion. Several women MPs urged the house to focus on the women’s reservation bill, but whether this will be acted upon is yet to be seen.
Three Dots
In recent times, with the focus on intersectional feminism on the international front, many Indian feminists have turned their gaze inwards. However, this is mostly achieved through the application of frameworks developed elsewhere to Indian contexts and the awkward modification of trending hashtags. Because of the ubiquity of the populist narratives of history that focus on personalities rather than the evolution of ideas, young feminists are deprived of the rich treasure trove of the experience of their forerunners. A dive into the history of the women’s movement in India can lead to the discovery of valuable insights that would help us build an inclusive movement crucial for the reinvigoration of the struggle for social justice – especially important as unprecedented, horrifying disasters continue to affect women disproportionately.
Image Source: Poster Women Archives – A Zubaan Project.
Illustration: Suman Mukherjee
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