Recently there has been a spate of headlines about horrific rapes; followed by murder. The Hyderabad Horror is just one in a series of crimes perpetrated on Indian women recently. The subsequent encounter that killed the alleged rapist-murderers and the jubilant reaction to this is also horrifying, but that is a rant for another day. Another story that caught my attention is the viral video of a dancer being shot in the head simply because she stopped dancing.
The video shows a couple of women dancing on a stage at what appears to be a wedding. News reports place this event in Chitrakoot, UP on 1 December 2019. We can hear a voice saying “goli chal jayegi” and then the dancer is shot in the face. Apparently the man asked the woman not to stop dancing. When she did stop dancing he shot her. What is the sense of entitlement that makes a person – more particularly men – behave like this? What is the mindset that makes so many men feel that it is OK to violate women's bodies? Is it this mindset that is the root cause of the utter brutality; the inhumanity of so many of the crimes perpetrated against women?
Gender inequality is ingrained in children pretty much as soon as they are born; sometimes before birth, as the scourge of sex-selective abortions demonstrates. While the girl child is expected to do household chores, the boy is not. Girls are even expected to fetch and carry for their male siblings for no reason other than their gender. While it is OK for boys to play outdoors, many households will place curbs on such activities of girls. The education of boys is typically privileged over that of girls. It is OK for boys to stay out, return late in the night, but girls have to remain indoors as much as possible (for their own protection of course).
Boys are encouraged to enter the workforce and become financially independent. Girls are brought up to believe that their sole aim in life is marriage and childbearing. Even in school, little girls are expected to wear long skirts or shalwars and/or dupattas while shorts are perfectly fine for boys.
A boy who expects that his mother and sister will cook for and feed him, while he and his father do nothing to help, develops a sense of entitlement. He comes to believe that it is the job of women to serve men and that the time, aspirations and wishes of women are unimportant and secondary to that of men. So yes, it starts very, very early in life and it is internalised by both boys and girls.
In more educated and enlightened families, women are empowered and are part of the decision-making process, and the girl child is as beloved as the boy child. However, there is still no doubt that the overarching impact of patriarchy will still make its presence felt. For instance, there is never any question that it is the female who will take the name of the man she marries, it is she who will leave her family and live with her in-laws after her marriage. The reverse is not only unusual; it is frowned upon and jeered at by society. There is also no question that she is the primary caregiver of the family and that if there are personal compromises and professional sacrifices to be made, it will be the woman and not the man who will make them.
All this is a given. It is not questioned --- not even by women. Women are brought up to believe that this is tradition, this is right. They are brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is virtuous and desirable. The favour and approval that this attitude/behaviour earns women from the men in the family – within whom the power and decision making authority generally vests – reinforces the patriarchal ecosystem. In other words, women internalise and then perpetuate the patriarchal mindset and ecosystem, because to run counter to this is too radical and altogether too difficult.
Like it or not, rape culture exists in India. The honour of the whole family resides in a woman’s ‘purity’, her ‘character’. If she is raped, she is shamed and her whole family is supposed to hang their collective heads in shame. It is a bizarre mindset that expects women to be ashamed that they were attacked, violated and had violence done to them. Also bizarrely, it is expected that ‘good’ women should feel worthless because a violent crime was perpetrated upon their bodies. It is also expected that they should prefer death to such terrible infamy. Women are routinely made to feel guilty about crimes against them – victim shaming is an undeniable reality of our society.
Apparently there is one set of women that must be respected – mother, sister, daughter and maybe wife – because of their connection to the man. All others are fair game. There are women who apparently do not deserve respect – because they work, because they don’t work, because they wear certain types of clothes, because they are at a particular place at a particular time, because they make certain choices – the excuses are many and varied. If ‘such’ a woman is attacked, it is course her own fault.
So if that woman in Chitrakoot dances to earn a living, she is not worthy of respect and deserves what she gets – that is the attitude that thinks nothing of shooting a woman who dared counter a demand to continue dancing.
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