Steeped In Misogyny – How Men’s Behaviour In India Shocks And Shames
In January, the silhouettes of women practising yoga, depicted in paintings on the walls of the central Indian city of Gwalior, were found defaced. There were markings and scratches on these figures where their genitals would have been (Image: @aashihoops/Instagram)
A few days ago, I came across a video on social media, ‘X’ to be specific. The video opens with three foreign tourists – one middle-aged man and two young women – somewhere in northern India, trying to take photographs against the backdrop of a tourist attraction. Suddenly, one young local man, in a white shirt, barges into the frame. The three tourists are left shocked at this and break up; out of them, one of the women even tries to move away from the local man, without success.
This is because, as almost all Indian women have experienced it at some point in their lives, the heckler/stalker aged around 20, keeps following the hapless woman. He attempts to get close to her, touch her and ruin her attempts at getting a simple photograph by being a terrible nuisance.
The video ends with the young woman looking flummoxed and irritated at such behaviour; we do not know how things panned out in the end. While the video’s ending is not clear, one fact is certain – a large majority of Indian men do not have any sense of personal space, especially when it comes to women, especially in public places.
In most incidents, this is deliberate and meant to take advantage of the situation by pushing their bodies against you, trying to touch you and brushing past you. The perpetrators do it with a straight face, taking care to let nothing of what they are feeling show on their visages.
Such conduct is common in buses, trains and now, increasingly during air travel. There are scores of videos of sexual harassment of Indian women on public transport. These incidents make it evident that women in our country face sexual harassment on a daily basis and can do little to change things. Watching them is depressing. It is also deeply shocking.
Last month, the silhouettes of women practising yoga, depicted in paintings on the walls of the central Indian city of Gwalior, were found defaced. There were markings and scratches on these figures where their genitals would have been. It led to large scale outrage on social media, with the girl who shared the video of the silhouettes on social media saying, “This is not harmless damage. This is cheap thinking, dirty mentality, and deep disrespect. It’s shameful, embarrassing, and extremely disappointing that even a woman’s painting isn’t safe from such sick minds.”
Many people said the sight of the defaced artwork made them “uneasy” and that “women were not safe even in graffiti”.
This is just another incident that proves that in India, according dignity to women is rare and figures nowhere with men, conditioned as they are by hundreds of years of misogyny.
From attempts at determining the gender of a foetus to abandoning a baby girl at birth; from ‘proudly’ saying ‘you are like my son’ to one’s daughter to spending more on the upbringing of one’s son (rather than one’s daughter); from expecting a woman to be as well-educated as a man (and earn the same as or more than him) and then be subservient to him as his wife; from hoping that a woman lands a high-paying job and then, after marriage, excels in both domestic chores and that demanding job – the expectations from a woman in India tend to border on the unreasonable and superhuman; they are highly exploitative and unfair.
This behaviour is not limited to public transport and heckling foreign tourists; it reflects in the nature of crimes against women, especially crimes of a sexual nature. Nowhere else in the world does ‘gangrape culture’ exist – except in South Asia, in particular India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Rapes of infants, toddlers and children are reported regularly in India; ghastly though such acts are, they are not rare and ‘exceptional’.
All this cements the impression that to be born a woman in India is a curse; it is something you cannot ‘recover’ from; it is a cross you have to bear – from infancy to old age.
This, in a land that considers pre-pubescent girls ‘devis’ (goddesses). Talk of cruel irony and irreconcilable disjunctions – as a nation, as people; and particularly as men who are sons, fathers, brothers, husbands.
