Refashioning a fight for survival into a politics of co-habitation has been feminism’s greatest triumph, writes Soumabrata Chatterjee.
Appreciating feminism is not the same as respecting women. A crude analogy would be that appreciating feminism is like life itself. It requires labour, extensive study, learning to unmake whatever you have crammed till that point in your life. It requires questioning the status quo in a manner that would threaten our value systems, maybe even topple them. It’s a difficult task, one that doesn’t suit everybody.
The other option is considerably easier. It is about respecting a woman as a fellow human being, as your partner, as your mother, as your wife, as your teacher, as your sister, as your grandmother. It doesn’t imply a judicial understanding of the French movement or its Anglo-American variant or the late post-colonial answer to them.
The difference between the two, I believe, is of posturing. A person who respects women may not be a feminist, but a person who is a feminist has to respect a woman. Both are not distinct categories; they overlap, determine each other’s foibles, but retain a certain sense of individuality.
The difference between the two, I believe, is of posturing. A person who respects women may not be a feminist, but a person who is a feminist has to respect a woman.
This difference can easily be understood through the outrage against Deepika Padukone’s ad campaign ‘My Choice’. There are significant problems in that advertisement regarding the uneasy representation of Deepika, and her privileged colleagues, as ‘Everywoman’. Moreover, the choices seemed to be lifestyle-oriented and didn’t really talk about the economic and psycho-political factors that determine a woman’s position in the lower ranks of the society. Fair enough! The advertisement gave us a very easily digestible form of feminism—in fact, it was probably pseudo-feminism—but what it did was that it highlighted certain value systems, which probably plague the hallowed sections of society as well. It instigated discussion, and maybe a mild disruption of the tip of the status quo, but it did a lot more than that. It talked about desire, unadulterated desire; desires which need to be locked in a Pandora’s Box until Apocalypse comes. However, it was not a feminist position; rather, it validated something that has been in the public domain for long: a general dislike for the term ‘feminist’ because the general understanding is that this philosophy entails the relentless bashing of men.
The difference between the two positions can well be understood if we go back in time to a particular woman and her life, and try to understand how she might have forecasted such positions and ideologies. I was introduced to her through the university syllabus, though I didn’t study her work in detail. When I look back at it now, I understand that the theoretical formulations present in that piece can help us understand the current scenario.
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain (9 December 1880 – 9 December 1932) was a noted feminist and social worker in undivided Bengal. She is not a household name—she isn’t part of the canon of feminist literature that aims to educate us about the historiography of such a diverse movement—but she is studied in some detail nonetheless. Some biographical details should be given before I proceed to talk about one of her works that has inspired me so much. Such is her influence that her death anniversary is celebrated every year in Bangladesh as ‘Rokeya Day’. But why is she so important? How does she stand out among all those who have fought to make this a better world for women?
Born into an upper-class Muslim family, Rokeya had to ascribe to the societal norms of adorning purdah and her education was limited to Arabic and Persian. Of her parents, Rokeya doesn’t reveal much in her memoir except her mother Rahatunnessa Sabera Chowdhurani’s adherence to the custom of purdah. Her father, Zahiruddin Mohammad Abu Ali Saber, was a reputed landowner who had mastered seven languages including Pashto and English. However, speaking Bangla was not a comfortable choice, because it was spoken by non-Muslims as well.
When Virginia Woolf searched for a library cataloguing women and their achievements, she came up empty-handed. She understood the woman to be a figure captured in her resplendent self in the waiting room of history, waiting for a chance to speak, to write, to participate. Her declaration that every woman should have a room of her own was a movement about clearing a space.
To look back with a renewed perspective is always hard, I believe, because you carry with you a set of beliefs, which are particular to your own period. At what point does fact became interpretation? At what point does the historian stops excavating and start imagining? At the threshold of historical writing, most ‘truth’ is often deduced. Yet there are certain elements that are carried forward through periods of turmoil. When Virginia Woolf searched for a library cataloguing women and their achievements, she came up empty-handed. She understood the woman to be a figure captured in her resplendent self in the waiting room of history, waiting for a chance to speak, to write, to participate. Her declaration that every woman should have a room of her own was a movement about clearing a space, and it is in this sensibility that I find women—from every sphere of life—united by the impulse of speaking for their cause and against oppression. Their mode of speaking, of formulating their personal and political theoretical arguments, is no doubt peculiar to their locales but in the act of speaking, of forming a discourse, they are part of a common, universal movement. There is nothing strategic about this essentialism, nor is there any political agenda about this cohesion which is beyond continents. It is sometimes about sharing certain ideas to fight for.
Rokeya was not allowed to go to school and learn English or Bangla but she gathered all those and a lot more from her younger brother. Later in her life, she was also supported by her husband in carrying her movement forward. Her elder sister Karimunnessa was discovered studying a Bangla puthi (a popular text in verse) and sent off to live in solitude at her maternal grandparents’ estate, eventually being married off at the age of fifteen. In her, Rokeya saw what Woolf would have termed as the missing female Shakespeare. The utter loss of opportunity for such a bright mind due to gender bias made Rokeya understand the importance of education, a realisation she later validated by establishing a school for Muslim girls, first in Bhagalpur (in the state of Bihar) and then in Bengal. It still stands proudly in Kolkata on Lord Sinha Road: Sakhawat Memorial Girls High School.
Rokeya’s husband was educated in Europe and held a progressive view on the issue of women’s education. This enabled her to write, to form a dialogue with others, and she did just that in the coming years. Her short stories talked about the importance of education in creating a space where women could fight for their rights. ‘Sultana’s Dream’ is a short story published in the Madras-based English-language Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905, which talks about an imaginary ‘Ladyland’ where the women are not secluded in the zenanas and can freely roam about in the city or the marketplace. Instead, the men are trapped inside the house and are even culturally conditioned to behave in a certain structured manner. This short story makes use of dream imagery and fantasy to describe a world where hegemonies are reversed. This is a world which is advanced, with the latest scientific discoveries like labourless farming, flying cars and solar power, where work is limited to just two hours a day—a world full of happiness and purity and no crime, since that is done by men. As you read the text, you recognise it for what it is: a concocted dream narrative that talks about socio-political fantasies, but does not talk about equality in the truest sense. It is a particular hegemony toppling the other.
This is a world which is advanced, with the latest scientific discoveries like labourless farming, flying cars and solar power, where work is limited to just two hours a day—a world full of happiness and purity and no crime, since that is done by men.
It is only when you start eating away at the layers, start scratching the surface, that you understand that Rokeya is trying to distance herself from such an endeavour. Rokeya asks questions throughout the story but never reveals how she feels about the project. It’s an enticing prospect, a world with men at the receiving end of oppression, but she realises that such oppositional politics can only achieve a freedom that is momentary and, for the most part, misplaced. In the end of the dream she wakes up. I think she is confused. She doesn’t leave an answer at the end of the text because she hasn’t found one. Can men truly ever respect women and accept them? Or do we need a Wonder Woman-like feminist politics, which reverses the process of gender violence?
This Ladyland that affirms its politics as a fight for survival has been refashioned by feminists as a politics of co-habitation. I believe that is the movement’s greatest achievement. Rokeya has shown us the path that her dream didn’t want her to tread; the path towards liberalisation runs through dialogue, through movements, through dharnas, through placards, through slogans, through endless proliferation of what should be a gender awareness discourse.
