Slutwalking

The really dangerous part of Slutwalk Delhi is dodging media cameras and avoiding the mikes thrust in your face. When it starts, the media-aam junta ratio is 3:1, which leads to the spectacle of a reporter trying to persuade a younger colleague from another magazine to give her soundbytes. "You're marching too, no? Say something as a woman, na?" The younger reporter declines.

By 11 am, the pace has picked up; I'm estimating a conservative 500 or so people--young girls, a healthy and heart-warming number of men, auntyjis and several stalwarts of the gay rights movement in Delhi--have joined in. Depending on when they join in with the Slutwalkers, the media has the numbers at 200--far too low, even if you subtract the organisers and Asmita's street theatre troupe--or at 700, which seems optimistic. I see a young lesbian couple wade through the crowds, swatting TV mikes like flies.

The media is all over Slutwalk, which is turning out to be a plain vanilla, sedate Jantar Mantar protest. Most of the marchers are carrying banners with slogans attacking Delhi's history of violence against women: "Soch badal, kapre nahin", "I have been HARASSED at least once in my life", "Ab toh bol", "Proud to be shameless". One woman, carrying a banner that speaks of child abuse, is stopped several times. "I've lost count of the number of women who say this happened to them too, who were 12 or 14 the first time they experienced harassment and abuse," she says. "It's amazing, sharing our stories."

This is so different from the skimpily-clad marchers dreamed up by the media and by the kind of leering men who've been trolling Slutwalk's FB page. These few hundreds are nowhere near the kind of turnout Toronto had, with thousands of women taking to the streets in anger, but being here feels surprisingly good. The women police officers guarding the march tell me and another young woman: "Do this every year, then maybe the men will start to listen."


The boys marching quietly, banners raised, watching politely as Asmita performs a street play, listening to Slutwalk's young organiser, Umang Sabharwal, speak, are very clear about why they're here. "It's an issue for us," says Deepak, a young college student. "Delhi men have the worst reputations, and many of us are here to say we're not like that, and men shouldn't be like that."

The mothers marching in Slutwalk, two of them side-by-side, are bemused by the media. "They only want to photograph the foreigners and that one woman in small clothes," says one of them. They're here because a) they're sick of being pushed around on buses and the Metro and b), because as Mrs Kumar says, "Why should only the young women march? We can also come out, this issue affects all of us." Were they not put off by the name--Slutwalk, Besharmi Morcha? Mrs Kumar glares at the reporter who asked her this question. "You have time to waste thinking about names. Think about why Delhi is so unsafe for women, no? National capital, and look at the crime rates!"

The young women melting in the heat as we do the ritual march around Jantar Mantar, escorted by bands of police personnel, are clear about why they're here, too. "I'm tired of the TV shows saying think about female foeticide first, think about dowry deaths first," says Rina. "We have to live in this city and move around and you know, our fathers aren't rich men that they have chauffeured cars. Doesn't our safety matter? Look at the rapes, look at the harassment, aren't Indians ashamed of what women have to face in Delhi?"

The men from the Greater Cooch Behar Association, on hunger strike in the cheerfully open-to-all protest bazaar that Jantar Mantar offers, are being steered back to their own tents by a reproachful minder. One of them is arguing that he should be allowed to join in the Slutwalk, but he's being accused of wanting to sneak off to have an illicit ice cream on the side. Unfortunately for his protestations of innocence, his mouth is stained orange from a Kwality's Orange Bar.

I'm thinking of the first Blank Noise protest in Delhi, a walk at night for which less than 20 women showed up, where a police escort was necessary to ensure the safety of that small, tentatively activist band. This is just a start, and the debate over the name and the meaning of Slutwalk almost hijacked the issues behind the walk. But it seems like a good start, to me, and to the people who've gathered here in the July heat. I'm reminded, by the numbers and by the conversations in the crowd, of the early, tentative beginnings of the Gay Rights parade a few years ago. There, too, there had been fears that the movement would be too insular, too self-referential and too niche. Here, the crowds are very different from the media's expectations; this isn't just the usual South Delhi protest veterans crew. "Where are the celebs, yaar?" a TV reporter is demanding. "There are no celebs, only ordinary-shordinary people. How will I get my bytes?"

I get stuck between two streams of marchers. One woman, to my right, is carrying a banner protesting female foeticide. She catches my slightly startled eye and shakes her head: "I didn't make that," she says. "I'm just carrying it for a friend, and no, I don't know what it has to do with Slutwalk."

To my left, though, is a hand-drawn banner that has drawn attention all through the march with a particularly baffling message. "Boys just eat grape and stop Girl Rape," it says.

Despite the intensity of the media scrutiny, the number of police personnel who've thrown a cordon around the marchers because of threats from a Hindutva rightwing group, and the quietness of the march, this is a good way to begin. "I want to come back next year," says Samira. She's 27, and has had enough of Delhi. "It's not about the clothes I'm wearing, it's about the violence we face every day in this city. I'm so sick of it, but I'm here because it's my city, and if I want things to change, then maybe I have to be here and be part of the change instead of just whining." Would she want the name of the march changed? She shrugs. "Call it Slutwalk or anything you like," she says. "So long as we have a regular protest, does it matter?"

Speaking Volumes: The F-Word, revisited

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2011)

The first issue of Granta, on New American Writing, came out in 1979. This was 11 years after Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, six years after the Boston Women’s Health Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves and nine years after Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch challenged conventional history. (To offer a little Indian context, it would be five years later, in 1984, that Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia would set up India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women.)

Over the decades of the ‘80s and the ‘90s, Granta’s pages would be open to some of the strongest feminist voices of the period, and its contributors’ page reflects a reasonable degree of equality between men and women writers. Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag, Jeanette Winterson, Germaine Greer, Urvashi Butalia, Zadie Smith and a hundred other women made their presence felt, on issues that covered everything from anorexia to ambition, motherhood, war zones, climate change, work and play.

But it is, in many ways, typical of this literary magazine to explore feminism at a time when it’s become, as the title of Granta 115 indicates, the F-word. Suggestions that feminism has been dying, or should be summarily executed, have been made since the late 1980s. We’re supposed to be living in a post-feminist era, and to many, feminism is not so much a threatening idea as a musty old word, a problematic label, a relic from another time.

Or so the media would have us believe. Granta’s F-word issue is a powerful collection in part because it is a reminder of why feminism shouldn’t, and can’t, die out. Back in the 1960s, feminism in the West was fighting for financial equality, sexual and reproductive freedoms, the right to emerge from decades of invisibility, more political and cultural power. Within the feminist movement, whether this was in the West or in Africa or in India, questions of class and race often came up, causing feminists to bump into and confront their own areas of discomfort.



(Image from Granta: The F-Word. Naddy Photomaton (My grandmother)' ©Clarisse d’Arcimoles)


This might be the perfect time to take stock of feminism and its discontents. Granta 115 has a broad, and global, canvas, but there are very few pieces here that are predictable. Some are inevitable, reflecting one of the problems with feminism itself, which is that the old battles are endlessly recycled.

AS Byatt’s reflections on the old days when women academics were excluded from men’s-only clubs may seem almost archaic these days, but it is a useful reminder of a time when the barriers for women were unthinking and all-pervasive. Taiye Selasi’s short story, The Sex Lives of African Girls, updates an ongoing narrative (incest, rape, mutilation) with such sharpness that her sentences will stay branded on your mind for a while. Urvashi Butalia’s Mona’s Story updates her account of the life of Mona Ahmed, moving from her initial attempts to capture what it means to be a hijra to a meditation on the cages of gender itself.

Many pieces are unsettling. When Lana Asfour writes about the recent revolutions in Tunisia, she explores the much larger and urgent question of whether the revolutions of this summer will include women. This was one of the few instances where one felt a gap; a parallel essay on whether the focus on preserving multiculturalism in the West had led to women’s rights being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness would have been very welcome. And the fiction is often brilliant; Lydia Davis’ story, The Dreadful Mucamas, about a couple’s uneasy equation with the two sisters who work as their household help, is an examination of power and abuse that should be read by every over-privileged Indian.

Other excerpts and essays are illuminating, in the strictest sense of the word, casting light on forgotten and overlooked corners of history. Caroline Moorhead, who has explored what it means to be a refugee in the riveting Human Cargo, turns her attention to the women of the French resistance, the relationships between them, and the train that took them to the Nazi death camps. It is yet another reminder of how often, and easily, women’s histories are written out of the grand narrative, even today.

About the only glaring absence here is the energy and ferocious activism one sees among the younger feminists, especially on sites like Feministeing; a Jessica Valenti or two would have added much to this debate. But this is a thought-provoking issue despite these omissions. Beyond the impact of any individual piece, what Granta 115:
The F-Word reminds us is that feminism back in the 1960s raised some deeply uncomfortable questions, and that we don’t yet have the answers. In the intervening decades, feminism hasn’t died, or even gone underground; instead, it’s morphed into a hundred local avatars and versions of itself. Perhaps The F-Word will remind this generation yet again, as the old feminist slogan goes, that well-behaved women rarely make history.

Getting Around Your City: A User's Guide For Women

(I wrote this for Jagori and Gauri Gill’s Transportraits, an exhibition on women and mobility in the city. It’s somewhere between a rant and a cross letter to the editor.

And two brilliant examples of what the exhibition had to offer:

Blank Noise's Step By Step Guide To Unapologetic Walking

Amruta Patil's Navigation, Safe Passage.)


Getting around your city: a user’s guide

1) Weapons: Chili-water in a spray bottle, a shard of glass, a paper cutter, a knife, stiletto heels, pepper spray in the special we’re-sensitive-to-women shade of pink, a razor blade, anything that can be used as a baton, a club, a stick. No whistles; most Indian women are aware that whistles, like cries for help, will attract no attention and will be ignored by passers-by, should you be in actual need of help. Most of the women who carry weapons, with the exception of a few who have trained themselves, some sex workers, and others in dangerous, precarious jobs, do not know how to use them. We carry them anyway; like good-luck charms or pictures of your favourite gods and goddesses, these are talismanic, meant to ward off evil.

2) A spare man: This might be a husband, a boyfriend, a brother, a father, a grandfather, any male child over a certain indefinable age (toddlers and babies do not work), a colleague, your doctor, or a random stranger you’re careful to match your steps with so that other men might think you’re with him. A spare man is more useful than a weapon, if harder to pack into your handbag, because he signals to other men that you are already someone’s property. The downside of carrying a spare man is that you may have to talk to him, or that he may start to believe that you are, indeed, his property, but as a charm to ward off other men, he is invaluable. One spare man, however, is of limited use against groups, gangs and mobs.

3) A watch: This will let you know when you are out at the wrong time. The wrong time is usually any time between dawn and the very late night hours that you are accosted, assailed, abused or attacked by a man or men. If you are out at that time, whether it was for your morning walk or you were coming back from a late business dinner or you were shutting down your pavement stall at five in the evening, it will, whatever the hour of the day, automatically be the wrong time, and you should have known better. (See “Clothes”, below.)

4) Clothes: Anything you are wearing at the time of an actual assault, or that invites comment from men, is not appropriate clothing by definition. If what you are wearing is a tank top, a spaghetti string blouse, a short skirt or jeans, you will make the cultural police in your city very happy, because they can point to the fact that your Western values are responsible for corrupting innocent, helpless men, and instigating them to attack, assault or rape you. If what you are wearing is a sari, a salwar kameez or a loose, all-encompassing sack, then it signifies that you deliberately went out on the streets aware of your potential to attract the wrong kind of male attention, and your clothes are a feeble attempt to cover up your wrong-doing. If you are wearing a burkha and this contributes to your sense of safety on the street, a ban can be organized in short order so that you can experience your fair share of assault and humiliation.

5) Transport: In most cities, the lighting at night has been carefully arranged to ensure that there will be no safe areas, especially around major transit points such as railway stations, metro stations and taxi stands. This is for your convenience. Most auto drivers will not offer safe transport, and many may also try to cheat you. This is so that you do not develop a false sense of security and comfort while negotiating the roads. Most taxis are safe, except for the ones that are not—if your corpse is not found in a drain before the end of your journey, you are in a safe taxi.

Most trains are safe, except for the ones that carry passengers who have no respect for women, which would leave you with the toy train to Darjeeling. The toy train is a very safe train, and you will enjoy Darjeeling greatly. Most buses are meant for the exclusive use of men, and while this will not be explicably stated, you will be made aware of the inconvenience you’re putting male passengers to at all times of your journey, during which they will lean on you, breathe on you, sing to you, fondle your breasts and attempt to molest and/or rape you. All other forms of transport, except for the footpaths, the roads and any stray rivers you may encounter, are absolutely safe for women.

6) Foreign women: All foreign women, including those from the North-Eastern states of India, should be aware of their moral looseness and willingness to be available to all men at all times. If you are a foreign woman and you are not aware of this, the men on the streets of your city of choice will be happy to remind you, several times an hour.


Please enjoy getting around your city. For your safety, we recommend that you travel as a man. If you must travel as a woman, we recommend that you stay indoors at all times. If you insist, after all this, on stepping out of your home, we do apologise for any inconvenience in the form of threats, harassment, rape, assault, violence, humiliation and murder that you almost certainly will encounter.

IHT Column: Taking back the streets

My second column for the International Herald Tribune's Female Factor series is up. This one's on women fighting back against street harassment and other kinds of violence against women.

"Something familiar emerges in the stories the women share, regardless of their ages or class backgrounds. All have experienced fear on the streets, fear when traveling alone. Few use the term “eve teasing” when discussing their own experiences; nothing about sexual harassment has ever felt like “teasing” to them.”

It doesn't show in the story (and it probably shouldn't), but writing this piece was a surprisingly personal exercise. I spoke to many women, aside from the women quoted in this story, and every conversation turned into something like an analytical catharsis. Gauri Gill and I spoke about how the quality of one's anger changes; the militant, fierce anger of our twenties has given way to a more practical and dispassionate emotion as we approach forty.

There were debates: has the situation improved over the last 15 years (yes), is it anywhere near ideal (hell, no), how much of a role did class play in street harassment, how much difference could better urban architectural planning make in cutting down violence against women in public spaces. There were confessions and sharings; every one of the women (and many of the men) I spoke to had their own scars, stories of assaults weathered and not reported (one of my personal demons), of terrifying train or bus journeys, of anger at being blamed (for one's "carelessness", for one's "looseness", for one's appearance), of helplessness, especially among the men I spoke to, at not being able to change the ground-level situation. The story couldn't capture the complexity of the debate; as more women enter the workforce, public spaces have had to accommodate their presence, but the underlying causes of the violence against women haven't changed or been addressed.

If you're interested in further reading/ action on this subject, here are some links:

The Blank Noise Project blog: Consistently creative in its approach, the BNP has run successful campaigns, from the We Didn't Ask For It campaign to their more recent Action Hero campaign. Many of the debates mentioned are covered in detail by Jasmeen Patheja and other contributors.

The Gulabi Gang: Run by Sampath Pal Devi, the Gulabi Gang now also runs centres for vocational training for young women, and could use your support.

Jagori: In addition to its Safe Delhi campaign and its mapping of safe/ unsafe spaces in the city, Jagori researches many other areas of feminist concern, from the rights of domestic workers to other forms of violence against women.

And please consider sending in an entry--a photograph, a story--for Transportraits, an exhibition curated by Gauri Gill, on your experience of safety in your city. Contributions from women and men welcome, and details here.