Thirty years after I left it, I realized that Beewada deserves to have a syndrome named after it. In my mind, it survives as both a noun and an adjective. The place where I spent a part of my childhood and early youth was a small town aspiring to be a big city. Everything about it was aspirational. The single arterial road that connected us to the highway was as wide as any in the big metropolitan cities of India and hid the reality of its narrow, broken, roads that crisscrossed the interior parts of the town. Traffic always moved above permissible speed limits, and people drove with aggression that bespoke their desire to get ahead in life quickly. Life was a rat race, after all, and the road was their race course.
Beewada had gained from the prosperity that accompanied the introduction of new technologies in the villages surrounding it. The small section of the rural elite, who rapidly became rich, began to invest their wealth surplus into the real estate market of the nearby town. So, house rents and costs of living were like those of a Class-I city, even when the house rent allowances of government employees were equivalent to that for a Class-II city. It had a state-of-the-art athletics stadium, a professional swimming pool and an excellent badminton stadium for national-level competitions. It also was a major railway junction with a dedicated mango siding for transporting the extremely popular and high-quality king of fruits that it produced in abundance for the rest of the country.
Beewada also boasted of 42 cinema theatres. The movie-crazy small city ensured that most new releases ran to full houses for several weeks. A “flop film” was unheard of. All major superstars had fan clubs whose aggressive promotion of each film ensured that the audience never let down their heroes. Action films were the most sought-after. The larger-than-life hero with his trademark mannerisms would flip a cigarette stylishly to his lips, roll his sleeves up aggressively, twirl his mustache in cold deliberation or hold down one collar while lifting the other and send the audience into raptures. Fans, male and female, swooned over their hero, washed his cardboard cut-outs in milk on the first day of a film release, wrote letters to him in their own blood or had his name tattooed across their bodies. They copied his fashion sense and hairstyle along with the characteristic mannerisms and mouthed his dialogues in common everyday conversations. The hero would kick, punch, whip, pummel, chop down a villain, provide instant justice or occasionally bring in the bad guys to face the long arm of law after having sufficiently softened them up with his action-laden theatrics. A female character, chosen mostly for her oomph factor, hung in the background helplessly. She was the all-suffering damsel-in-distress to be rescued, the wayward victim to be “purified” and brought back into the family fold, or the pure and child-like highly excitable modern-woman-gone-astray to be tamed by the hero during the progress of the film. The hero always conquered; the audience unfailingly approved.
Politics in Beewada also had a touch of the celluloid world. It was the stage for some extremely sensational political plots and murders. I can still recall an attack on the convoy of a political heavyweight just as I drove past it. The bomb hurler was instantly catapulted into mainstream politics and won the elections soon after. Jostling for political and business supremacy and long-drawn gang wars led to a series of targeted killings and retaliatory executions. For trying to bring some semblance of law and order to the streets, the police chief was gunned down on his early morning walk at the national stadium. At least twice, I was off-loaded from buses, along with other passengers, so that supporters of one politician or another could set the vehicle aflame, as a way to both create a spectacle and to rapidly hit the news headlines. So inured were we to this goings-on that it was over two decades later, when a similar incident elsewhere killed three women students of an agricultural university, that the enormity of ‘what could have been’ actually hit home.
A town that didn’t blink at political brutality, treated street violence as run-of-the-mill stuff, and ‘eve teasing’ as a casual pastime. Girls and women routinely experienced sexual harassment on the streets and put up with it without a protest for fear of the repercussions. As in the celluloid world, male ego was constantly sought to be appeased. Overtaking a guy on the bike could be considered provocative enough to make a woman the target of macho ire. Women physically shrunk themselves to occupy the least possible spaces in public transport as they attempted to put maximum distance between themselves and their male co-passengers. When the buses would get overcrowded, many women preferred to get down at the closest bus stop and wait for the next one. Not doing so could seriously endanger one’s sense of self-esteem. When caught off-guard or trapped without the possibility of escape, young women were likely to suffer humiliating verbal and physical assault. No tinsel town hero would come to their rescue. Some rebelled and wore midi-skirts, and others conformed and wore long skirts. Or half-saris. Or saris. None was spared the roving eye or the wandering loathsome touch. Many dropped out after school and got married, preferring the physical ‘safety’ of their homes to the degrading travel for the cultivation of their minds.
Nevertheless, a section of girls and young women continued their intrepid daily journeys on the city buses. And they studied, played games, ran races, danced, sang, acted in plays and dreamt of the moon. Feminism was learnt instinctively on the streets and resistance took myriad forms. They had to be twice as good as the boys to have half the chance to be noticed, they knew. The need to excel in academics was a necessity because no other talent could quite persuade families to allow them greater freedom and space to ‘live their lives’. An escape to university campuses required significant motivation and an acknowledgement of their above-ordinary abilities by their families. Quiz competitions and public speaking were two other such platforms which could earn them the much-needed respectability within academic institutions and a sense of achievement that their families could take pride in. Unfortunately, they came with the usual perils.
Like all open public spaces and platforms, extempore elocution and debate competitions had audiences that were predominantly male. Catcalling, whistling and hooting at the women contestants were common occurrences. Neither the organizers nor the judges saw these as problems or deemed it necessary to curb them. They were simply dismissed as exuberant expressions of an audience’s “enjoyment” and a sign of the success of the programs. Most women, if they wished to compete, had to just block it out of their heads and hold forth on the merits or demerits of ahimsa or the problems of traditionalism or whatever else was the topic of the contest for the day. We bravely walked on and off those stages, held our nerves, collected our accolades or accepted defeat and left. Not participating was not an option, obviously. Women were still too insignificant in numbers to significantly alter the course of any of the events by merely boycotting them. Our appeals to organizers or friends and fellow male contestants to do something, when the events were held in their colleges, were always met with an expression of helplessness followed by a reassurance that the audience was actually quite harmless. They are our friends, they would say, we know that they don’t mean any harm. Mentally, it drained us and we yearned for that one opportunity to compete in front of a well-behaved audience on an equal footing.
Such a moment did finally arrive in the most unusual way on an otherwise unremarkable March evening, although the audience was far from“well-behaved”. The open event received much publicity and the large auditorium of a high-profile college was packed to full capacity. The topic was exciting and many signed up to participate. The evening began with two of the women speakers getting their chances to set up the ‘for’ and ‘against’ propositions. The audience began hooting and clapping wildly, aiming paper balls and paper planes at us throughout our speeches. As always, we ignored the audience, spoke aloud our lines over the din and left. Two more women came forward and were similarly treated. Some switch seemed to trip in their collective mental circuit and the audience got onto a strange high, determined to elicit a response to their antics from the speakers at the podium.
The next contestant waited a little while for the whistles and paper planes to stop. When the audience persisted, he began his speech nevertheless. Midway through the speech, he suddenly quit the stage, unable to focus on the topic. The audience was tickled by this reaction and much mirth and celebration followed. The organizers made an announcement requesting that the audience “behave itself”. A temporary truce was established by the time the sixth contestant had walked onto the stage. When the first paper plane was launched at him mid-way through his opening statement, he lost his thread of thought and stood looking blankly at the audience for a while before beating a hasty retreat. A seventh contestant completely ignored the topic of the debate, when he got onto the stage, and gave the audience a piece of his mind. Provoked by this, the audience successfully booed the eighth contestant off the stage. The men competing in the event were nervous wrecks by now; a few sat behind the stage and wept openly. The judges decided that it wasn’t “fair” and the event stood cancelled.
It was also the last of the public speaking competitions for me in Beewada. University campuses in large metropolitan cities beckoned. There was much to look forward to. The university I entered was designed to emphasize its openness to exploration, to knowledge. Its deliberately non-imposing buildings accentuated the vast open spaces. The absence of crowds and the freedom to walk alone was exhilarating. There was no need to keep one’s head down and to fear eye contact. There was no compulsion to constantly look over one’s shoulder or to gather one’s clothes close to oneself lest they be tugged at by a passing cyclist. There was no need to walk the well-trodden path.
For many, this freedom was both confusing and frightening. On her second night in a single room in the hostel, a neighbour knocked on my door requesting that I give her company for a part of the night. Back in the village, her home had always been bustling with people and privacy was an alien concept. She was not used to being all by herself in a room and couldn’t sleep a wink the previous night. You can leave once I fall asleep, she said earnestly, as I settled down on the floor beside her. But it took her a whole month to find the courage to be on her own entirely.
Towards the end of her second semester, she was knocking on my door once again. This time, with the opposite problem. She knew I was an early riser. Exams were at hand and she too wanted to wake up early to study. Seeing my amused smile, she laughed self-consciously. I’ve never slept so soundly before. I just don’t seem to hear my alarm clock ring! There had to be a more self-reliant practical solution to the problem. We placed her wind-up alarm clock on a stainless-steel plate and set it on the metal table in the room. Surely, the din it generated would be loud enough to wake anyone up. And it certainly was. Early next morning all the residents of the hostel wing were at her door trying to wake her up!
The overall atmosphere on the university campus was freer and more interactive than what many were used to. Women and men inter-mixed with fewer hang-ups. There were many more possibilities for learning from one another, for interesting conversations and friendships, despite the pressure of tests, assignments, continuous evaluations, or long-term research projects. For many men and women, therefore, their stay on the university campus became their initiation into a new kind of interpersonal politics, to a broader and less chauvinistic understanding of caste, gender and marginalization. It also led to the building of solidarities across castes and communities, and occasionally to the blossoming of love across “forbidden” boundaries.
A student once put up posters about a classmate whom he professed to love and who had rejected his sentiment. He claimed that her rejection of him was caste prejudice; he was from a marginalized Dalit caste and she was from a dominant one. Many overenthusiastic academic activists, following the latest academic fads, were quick to condemn the incident and, what they called, the woman’s casteist mentality. They published commentaries and papers on the subject, insisting that the woman should subsume her own choices for a grander political cause. The emboldened pursuer went a step further and put up posters all over campus questioning her character. Fed up with this, the woman approached the administrators. They responded by calling her parents over and requesting that they take the woman back home immediately. They would send by post all the study material required for her examinations. The parents threatened to file a police complaint against the administration instead. With that gun to their heads, the powers-that-be instantly hit upon a simpler solution. The man was called in and warned against putting up posters or pursuing or making any further contact with the woman. The woman satisfactorily completed her course and married her boyfriend who, incidentally, also belonged to a Dalit community.
One of the major challenges faced by women who came into higher education was the issue of finding suitable matches through arranged marriage agreements. Most parents worried that if they educated their daughters “too much”, there would be none within their own communities who would be suitable or willing to marry them and they would have to pay high dowries to find “compatible matches”.
One parent found a way around these vexing problems. During her visit to our hostel, she sat down with her daughter and drew up a list of the ‘eligible candidates’ from their own community on the campus. She then narrowed it down to the one whom she considered the ‘most suitable’ and told her daughter to go ahead and fall in love. For the next several months the two dated, while we watched with much amusement. Finally, when parents on both sides were informed by the couple about their desire to get married, the woman’s parents threw a tantrum. Many rounds of negotiations followed. The boy fell at their feet and pleaded; all he wanted was their daughter in marriage and not a single rupee in dowry. His parents readily agreed too, anxious that their son would harm himself otherwise. The marriage was solemnized soon after, without any dowry exchanging hands, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Not everyone found innovative solutions or found it easy to entirely disregard the values and the socio-cultural baggage that they grew up with. And our higher education campuses were not bereft of their Beewada moments. The tendency to avoid situations of conflict continued to make many women shrink in public spaces or “adjust” when faced with a challenge. Many women in a department stopped using the toilet when they learned that male students in the lab opposite the toilet kept a logbook of its usage. An insufferably brazen and abrasive classmate was sought to be appeased. Most women preferred to be on his right side rather than at the receiving end of his “loose talk”. In private, they spoke of his shocking crassness, but in public, they laughed it off. Some took on the task of reforming him by either mothering him or acting as his elder sisters. This helped place them simultaneously above and beyond him. Women who did not do so continued to be the targets of his grossness.
One hot summer weekend, a research scholar was waylaid and raped by a couple of outsiders on her way back to her hostel room. A single such incident can have a chilling effect on an entire community and reverse many little gains accrued painstakingly over time. The instinctive reaction of many, including of women in the hostels, was, Terrible! Was it late at night? No, mid-afternoon. Where was she? Just 500 meters away from the hostel, on the road leading up to the women’s hostel from the multi-purpose shop. What was she wearing?
When none of the questions threw up a significant point of “difference” between them and the survivor, their anxieties peaked. She should not have stepped out alone. University life, however, did not allow for a permanently chaperoned existence for anyone. They knew that the target could just as well have been any one of them. Their sense of freedom and independence evaporated in a single moment. One often wonders what the overall trajectory of events would have been had the survivor been an “outspoken modern woman”.
Protests by women for better security and facilities shook up the campus. Many men actively participated. It also exposed many paternalistic Beewada attitudes and social prejudices of the time. We will chaperone “our women”, which was one kind of refrain. Let women share hostel space with us, we will “protect” them, was another. Some suggested restricting their mobility. Women should travel between the hostels and the departments only in designated buses, not move around the campus by themselves. Others, predictably, blamed the clothes (it always comes down to the clothes finally). Women need a dress code.
Curfew timings with policing was the quick-fix response from administrators too. All women should be inside their hostels before dark, they said. But the rape happened mid-day. Women should make entries in a logbook when they leave or enter the hostel. But how would it have prevented this rape, and what about women who don’t stay in hostels? (Mobile phones became affordable and accessible only ten years later, or that could have triggered another debate altogether.) Men have their urges; women should be careful. Women must be indoors or leave campus by 6.30 pm. Lock the men up and we’ll be safe, we responded. Any man seen outside on campus beyond 6.30 p.m. should be fined. Our pushback restored the status quo, and life returned to ‘normal’.
Curfew timings came up prominently on my radar once again, some years later, when I stayed for three months at a working women’s hostel. The hostel was close to my place of work and I did not need to establish an independent set-up for such a short duration. The owner and warden ran it much like Agatha Trunchbull, despite the fact that all the women staying in her facility were adults, with professional lives of their own. The residents tiptoed around the place, shut their doors ever so gently and spoke in whispers not just in the corridors but also in their rooms. Singing or switching on a radio was completely out of the question. One had to visit the common dining room, a separate building, built well away from the warden’s living quarters, to know how the residents soundednormally. Even there they seemed to constantly look over their shoulders, ready to drop many decibels lower at the slightest signal. After 7.30 pm, all the women obediently locked themselves indoors, without waiting for the warden’s explicit instructions.
Once in a couple of weeks, pent-up frustrations would erupt and some residents would defiantly bang shut their doors once the corridor lights were switched off. The lights would quickly come back on and the warden would come wheezing up the flight of stairs, looking for a scapegoat to lambast. If she did not find an immediate candidate to berate, she would assemble all the residents together and give them a collective dressing down. It amazed me that adult women submitted to such indignities, but the residents always shrugged it off, insisting that this was much better than being a paying guest elsewhere in the city.
At the end of my stay, when I went to say goodbye to the warden, she was in an expansive mood. Perhaps the fact that I was older than most other residents, was married, and had a respectable academic career, gave me a slightly more exalted position in her eyes. We sat chatting amicably for a while over a cup of coffee and I casually asked her the secret of her “success”. Families know that I am a strict disciplinarian and their women are in good hands, she said. Strictness also prevents unnecessary protests and complaints, she added with a wink. That was certainly a great bonus!
I had entered the academic world in a manner that the celluloid world of Beewada would have much appreciated. The last among 90 candidates to be interviewed for a single position, my turn had come at Cinderella’s magic hour. It had not struck anybody to organize refreshments or tea and no candidate was willing to risk leaving the venue to visit the canteen for fear of missing out. Hunger and exhaustion made me light-headed and brave, and I responded to the interview committee with a flippant frankness that might not have surfaced in my saner moments.
Having landed the coveted job, I was looking forward to setting up an independent lab. I would finally explore the limits of my ideas and training. I was also eager to be back on a university campus, with the opportunity of being on the other side of the teaching table. But as it turned out, I was in fact in a parallel universe very different from what I had envisaged. I missed the vast open mental landscapes of the student world. I was met instead with narrow-minded bigotry and unique achievement barriers of the professional sphere. I had to find innovative ways to survive.
On my first day in the department, I was welcomed warmly by the head of the department. A clerk escorted me to the dark unventilated inner recess of the common room for lab attendants. The room was probably used to store broken furniture and there was neither an office desk nor any other intact office furniture to accompany the lone chair that I was provided. A male colleague interviewed for a different position, walked into a well-furnished office and lab space. The contrast couldn’t have been starker or the message sharper. I placed a broken tabletop upon the legs of two upturned broken chairs to complete the setting and invited my departmental colleagues for a cup of tea to inaugurate my new office. Within a few weeks, the key to one of the ten vacant offices in the department was provided to me, complete with office furniture and a computer. But nothing that I could contrive would open up for me one of the ten vacant lab spaces and provide a cinematic climax to my story.
And so, I moved on, as casually as I had joined. The search for a new job was another set of Beewada experiences. You don’t need a job, I was told at one place, your husband already has one. Or, why not work as a guest lecturer? We have only one regular position and we would like to hire a man with career ambitions. And, don’t attend the interview tomorrow, we already have an excellent candidate. Sadly, this was familiar terrain. Not attending was no option at all. So, I readied myself for the interview.
Women scientists have a peculiar image conundrum to solve. First, there is the traditional image of the woman as an eternal giver, bound by social norms, an embodiment of culture and virtue. Then there is the default image of the scientist, an extremely rational, mild-mannered, and slightly forgetful man in a white coat, with unkempt hair, an eccentric genius with incurable personality quirks, who is wedded to his science above all else, an image that positions him above and beyond society, and thereby above all questions and questioning. Few demands are made on him in social or personal terms. Students, colleagues, technical staff, family, everyone learns to work around him, accepting his idiosyncrasies. Male students imitate these mentors, inherit their professional mantles, and keep the trope going.
Against this backdrop sits an uncomfortably split entity, the woman scientist, never permitted to completely escape the trappings of the first image and never allowed to entirely integrate with the second. She must demonstrate her commitment to science over and over again while always remaining within the social. As an acknowledgement of this duality, she ends up accepting all additional strictures placed upon her. When getting a foot in the door is hard, a ‘fair deal’ is not up for discussion. Somewhat like at our public speaking competitions at Beewada. Strangely, the imposition of these irrational restrictions by the male scientific community didn’t make them ‘unscientific’ or ‘prejudiced’.
Although much has changed, the stereotypes and unfair expectations remain. Some years back, an old building in the university became a site of contestation between different departments. The building had been set up using funds from a special grant to an individual faculty member. After his superannuation, all usable equipment and furniture were transferred to other labs. The building, with its broken equipment and furniture, lay unused for about a decade. When new hiring gained pace space crunch became acute. Offering the decrepit labs to newly recruited faculty members would have disincentivized them. But no established scientist wanted to shift. Besides the time, effort, and money involved, access to common instrumentation facilities would become more cumbersome. As expected, the departmental administrators tried to persuade the women scientists to shift ‘in the interest of the department’, to plant its flag, so to speak, on the space. Not quite the kind of moon I had aspired for in my youth.
Sometimes with humor, sometimes in anger and sometimes by sheer obstinacy, we resisted what I call the beauty-and-the-beast sentiment in scientific research: wanting at least one boy in the lab for the physical labor and at least one girl to make it more presentable; or asking the women to hand out bouquets, and the men to make scientific presentations; or putting women to oversee the food menu at conferences, while men made the decisions regarding the scientific sessions; or the rather common belief that teaching positions were better suited for women and research jobs for men. While our pushback made some individuals extremely uncomfortable, and even dismissive, others did revise their positions over time. Many were caring parents too, who had invested in the education of their daughters and took pride in their successes. Now these daughters were making it hard for them to justify the skewed access, the unfair restrictions, the unequal assessment parameters. Even their sexist jokes.
Recently, a group of ex-classmates came together for a reunion of sorts and we excitedly exchanged notes. Life had left its mark on each of us. Some sported a receding hairline or a thicker bulge in the middle. Others wore reading glasses. Several of us were so drastically different from our teenage selves that we would have passed each other by on the street, without a second glance. Most looked tired. The nearly four decades after school had changed us in other ways too. The quiet self-effacing back-bencher was now a confident entrepreneur controlling the flow of conversation. The bold effusive teenager had gone silent. The anxious student was a highly acclaimed doctor. The unassuming newcomer, a flamboyant movie star.
A banker friend was holding forth on his daughter’s many accomplishments. She studied at a prestigious university and was part of a team developing cutting-edge technology. She was also a volunteer on the gender committee of her university and was actively involved in gender sensitization. She didn’t hesitate to identify herself as an underrepresented minority requiring additional mentoring support and resources, rightly noting that there were invisible barriers in her career path. The father was deservedly proud of his daughter. He had encouraged her to stand up for herself, challenge everyone and everything fearlessly. Including my casual jokes, he said with a laugh, I have to watch what I say in her presence. A ticker tape from our past flashed before my eyes, ‘Don’t be such a feminist about everything. Enjoy a good joke, it is good for your health.’ A warm and happy sense of contentment sent me floating up to the clouds for a bit, and I momentarily lost the thread of conversation.
Did you know that women in science have to constantly deal with mansplaining?, he continued enthusiastically. I crash-landed back in Beewada.
No, I sighed, tell me about it ….
