Reflections on Rage and Shame

These are some preliminary thoughts emerging from two incidents that had me seething with anger this time last week.

They are on the deep connection between shaming, rage and gender violence.

It started with an annoying phone call— I was all set to meet a friend and do some weekend chores we had each lined up for ourselves during the week. My phone rang as I was about to lock the front door. An unknown number. My “Hullo?” was returned with a “Heyylo” by a middle-aged sounding male voice. I responded with “Who’s this?” and hearing his next sentence realized that it was one of those Mujhse dosti karoge calls. As a woman in India, one just gets used to calls from absolute strangers at any time of the day or night asking if we want to befriend them. I immediately cut the call and blocked the number. Locked the door and set out to have a good day with my friend.

Mostly adult women in India are way past getting angry or exasperated at such phone calls.

We know that many men think that a woman seen to be navigating public spaces alone is construed as someone who might need a male friend. I know that sounds like we live in the early 19^th century. It does to my Gen Z students in my 19^th century literature classes. Sometimes the class acknowledges the disturbing similarity in experiences between women who moved around in the world alone in 19^th century Anglo-American literary depictions and our experiences as women in the age range of 18 to 68.

The number 68 wasn’t a random choice. The first time my mother remarked that she felt awkward outside the house was in the upper-middle class residential area I lived in a few years ago. She is an absolutely unselfconscious traditionally-attired modern Indian woman. On that day, she had walked about 250 metres alone to a nearby store or temple or to do some normal chore and thought that many men had turned and looked at her. She wondered what would explain men driving bikes and cars turning to look at an elderly woman walking confidently towards some place during the forenoon hours of a week day? Shouldn’t it be normal for a woman to walk alone somewhere during the day?

Well! It still isn’t normal for a woman, of any age, to walk alone on the road without facing stares anywhere in our country, including residential areas within the capital city.

We learn to ignore all those stares.

We also learn to overlook all sorts of unwanted attention.

And most importantly, we learn to not get provoked by men who feel entitled to annoy us with shameless stares and pushy phone calls.

We complain among ourselves and either make bitter jokes about those men or share some rage at our experiences and in extremely rare moments plan to take some solid action.

We sometimes complain to men when some tacitly agreed upon boundaries are breached. The last frontier of unwanted attention in Indian culture is touch. If we experience unwanted touch in a public place we feel sexually harassed. We might share that with the men in our lives. The reactions range from getting angry on our behalf to advise on the ways of navigating the world of men and in rare instances of acknowledgement of grave harassment to taking actions involving the laws of the land.

I have had any number of discussions – formal and informal ones – on sexual harassment in public places with family, friends, peers and students. I am a woman who has mostly lived alone as an adult in India. I teach courses on gender in literature. I research literary depictions of gender. I was part of committees for redressal of complaints, including those of a sexual nature, at my workplace.

It shouldn’t be a surprise therefore that I know my rights.

Moreover, it should not surprise anyone that I have thought of these matters for many years now.

Therefore, incidents like that phone call do not make me angry. Nowadays, I do not even register feeling upset.

This time around that nanosecond worth of upsetting emotion that had reached the unconscious at supersonic speed resurfaced due to another violent incident I experienced within minutes.

I had reached a traffic signal less than 50 metres from my apartment gate and was trying to turn right, duly signalling that my car is taking a right turn. At the very last second, I noticed a car violating the signal from the opposite direction. To avoid a collusion, I had to turn slightly right. There was a biker right next to my car and he too was ostensibly trying to turn right. Obviously, he had to apply brakes suddenly to avoid a potential crash. That crash did not happen but the man got raging angry at the risk, he, his wife and his infant child, had narrowly avoided. He hit the passenger-side window of my car with an open palm. I rolled the window a few inches down and said, “Sorry, bhaiyya”. That riled him further. I don’t quite know why. He started yelling—according to him, I had put the life of his child at risk. In fact, I had done nothing. Our vehicles hadn’t even touched. I kept starting at him, silently wondering what was making him reach a point where he was likely to burst a blood vessel. Hadn’t I just said sorry for an almost accident that had thankfully NOT occurred? Until I heard him say two things: “Gaadi mein baithi hain” and then the abusive refrain that was clearly making him angrier and happier: “besharam aurat”. Now I understood why I was making him angry—that I was a woman sitting alone in a car, driving somewhere on a Sunday morning. That was such an affront to this man’s ego that he declared me a shameless woman. Whereas he was unmindful of the risk to his family at his attempt at a precarious balance of speed and skill on a motorcycle with infant-child and wife as pillion riders on a crowded road.

And to top it off, unlike his cowering sari-clad wife, with the veil on her head and infant in her arms, I was in the ‘Western’ outfit of trouser and top and was calmly sitting at the steering wheel of a car. Clearly, being the opposite of his traditional wife who was dutifully standing next to him as he called a strange woman shameless in the middle of a traffic junction, I was the image of female insolence to that man.

This incident took place less than 60 seconds, for that traffic stop turns red for 60 seconds.

Neither did he feel that he should be ashamed of his behaviour nor was he made to feel that by the people around who wanted the traffic jam cleared. Two well-groomed young men trotted up to this scene as soon as the signal turned green and said: “We are saying sorry on his behalf, please move on. Which way do you want to go?” At which I exclaimed: “Left! My car’s indicating the signal even now. I had to veer right because of that other car, which has zipped past”. They said, “Never mind, Madam. Please move on”.

I did but the motorcyclist chose to deliberately hit the rear end of my car with his bike. I stopped again at the traffic junction and yelled out: “This is not done!” The young men ran up to my car and gestured that I move ahead while muttering, “Please, please.”

The apologies and requests of the young men were made to handle a traffic logjam. I know that they didn’t need to make them. And I felt thankful that such well-brought up young men do exist.

I drove ahead and met my friend within the next few seconds. I was angry and upset. And shared my feelings with her. A brief discussion ensued as I drove ahead. A little later, she called her husband to share her agitation over the experience I had. Perhaps, she must have thought that speaking with her husband – also one of my oldest friends – would help me seem less upset. While wondering how it would help me, I narrated again the two incidents that had derailed me a bit that morning. He heard me calmly and then advised me that I should not let it spoil the rest of my day. He also added that it is true that the angry motorcyclist would not have behaved the way he did if I were a man.

Ah well! Thankfully, I have sensitive friends who get angry on my behalf and acknowledge the unique vulnerability that women in India still face in public places.

That is probably one of the reasons I can be that ‘shameless woman’ who ‘drives alone in a car’ and manages to move on after intermittent episodes of Delhi’s notorious road rage incidents.

Nevertheless, I am still appalled that a man can get away with yelling abusive, loaded, gender-specific labels at a strange woman at a crowded traffic stop.

I don’t get why a woman who can calmly stare back at a violent outburst is a shameless woman.

Does not getting provoked into anger by abusive accusations or not becoming tearful in the face of verbal violence make me eligible for that label of shamelessness? Is my being able to afford to be a woman who can drive around alone make me a shameless woman? Or just being a woman seen alone in public make me eligible to be called a shameless woman?

I am not going to feel apologetic for navigating my way through a very violent world populated by many troubled and frustrated people.    

I am not going to bow my head down for a perceived harm or hurt.

I do not need to feel shame for a stranger’s rage at me. And cannot, or even will not, get angry or violent as a counter reaction to a stranger’s anger.

I refuse to feel ashamed that I am who I am.

Three Movies in Thirty-Six Hours

I am coming back to this space after an entire year to talk about a highly unusual experience I had recently.

About a fortnight ago, I saw three films and gave a talk about another two within one weekend.

Three movies in three days might never get repeated but what an experience that was! Especially due to the movies and the diversity they represented.

The first was a Hindi movie about a young woman who refuses to be objectified to a role. I saw this on Friday afternoon, partly in preparation for the academic talk I was to give on “Femininity and Play in Two Contemporary Bollywood Movies” in a webinar for students from two colleges that were bridging the North-South divide in India through this collaborative effort. One college is in Hyderabad and the other in Patna!

I overcame my resistance to the movie and saw it because I wanted to check for myself the depiction of Indian femininity that led to the mixed reports it got in 2020, when the movie was released.

The movie was Thappad and my long resistance to the movie was on account of the title.

A thappad, a slap, is more often that not construed as an act of violence perpetrated on one person by another and holds within it a sense of inequality in the relationship. Having heard that the female protagonist of the movie is a homemaker, I made the error of thinking that it was a movie about domestic violence and had avoided watching a movie on such a grave topic when we were grappling with the worries emerging from a global pandemic.

Although the movie did not contribute much to my talk on femininity and play, it made me realise that finally some voices in the large realm of Hindi cinema are representing women as people who see themselves as people—not as mothers, mother-in-laws, wives, sisters, girlfriends, lovers. And all of this through a series of potent shots and actions that would be immediately understood by any regular viewer of Hindi cinema. This was more than worthy of the three hours I spent on it on a week-day afternoon. And will probably lead me to a more academic examination of the crux of the movie very soon. Fingers crossed.

I can safely say that the Saturday night movie is one that I will not engage with academically. Though it was totally worthy of the really expensive IMAX ticket and I happily thank my friend for picking the perfect seats for that movie—absolutely the centre of the hall—this one got stored in my head as a one-liner my higher secondary school Physics teacher used to repeat fairly often, not just during the Solid State Physics module of the syllabus. This excellent teacher would remind us that "when Physics ends Metaphysics begins", and managed to get young adults like me to think in terms of the enigma and ethics of science. Thanks to my teacher, I realized that the makers of the film expected the viewers to have about as much knowledge of quantam theory as we would need that of kinematics to enjoy a James Bond movie. Nolan did with more Hollywood elan what the makers of Pathan did in true Bollywood fashion six months ago—make a stylish movie bordering on the absurd about an unlikely national hero who suffers pangs of conscience for ‘saving’ their nation through warfare.

Sunday’s movie stands on even more ethically shaky terrain, for it talks of feminism through a very glamourous object of a world steeped in consumerism. But it was a very intelligently made movie that has also become a global hit – Greta Grewig’s Barbie.

I had to see Barbie for many reasons. The most important one was that I research childhood and have recently published a monograph on the child-toy link in literature and in the cultures of childhood.

As a researcher of childhood, I have observed that children really do not need any store-bought toy to play happily. However, I was also curious about this record-making movie of the most famous doll in the modern history of toys for girls.

It's equally true that as an 80s child in India I had never played with a Barbie.

The first time I saw a Barbie was when I was in middle school.

A friend smuggled in her younger sister's Barbie – a gift from a Dubai-based relative – into our Jesuit convent school. She passed a chit among the girls in class that she has something exciting to show us during the short interval. A bunch of us crowded around her and she brought out a doll dressed in a parrot green sari with a zari border with tiny chilli red ambis (paisley) motifs on the border. The doll was inside the box that it had come in and she did not dare to take it out of the box. All of us – preteen schoolgirls in small town India – admired the absolute beauty of that very tall doll and thought it was extremely glamourous. But it was definitely not a doll! What can anyone do with it but keep it on display? Would our friend's little sister be allowed to play with it? Or would it go on the top shelf of the mantel piece of their home? That was the discussion for the day during the lunch interval.

This was the late-1980s. We hadn't heard of terms like liberalisation and globalisation.

The Barbie did not mean anything to me as a child.

It was a toy that didn’t even have the shape of a child and therefore seemed like a fairly useless doll for a child to identify with to the researcher in me in the early 2000s in India.

However, I have been recommending the movie to all my friends who have young daughters. We are in a globalized, neo-liberal, consumer-centric world. It makes total sense to use a toy they are familiar with to learn the basics of self-actualisation. Depsite all my reservations about the doll and all that it represents, I salute Greta Grewig and her team for appropriating the many shades of pink in Barbieworld to let growing-up girls know that pink too can be cool if one chooses it consciously with all the challenges it throws up at people growing up in a post-feminist, post-LGBTQA+, globalised world.

Although I enjoyed Oppenheimer and Barbie in two different ways, the movie that will stay with me for the depth of message it conveyed for my fellow countrymen/ women/ non-binary adults and young adults is Thappad.

It told us that no one has a right to the body and being of anyone in any sort of intimate or co-dependent relationship. And that for love to sustain through the complexities of marriage each partner needs to respect the others personhood.  

Thappad is a movie I will recommend to everybody I know.