There has been a recent flurry of media campaigns to reconceive masculinity in terms of “real men” as protectors of women rather than assailants.. but this only perpetuates the culture of gender violence by glorifying patriarchal notions of men being in charge of women’s safety and wellbeing… Sayan Bhattacharya explains.
“Let me introduce the Common Indian Male… Frequently spotted in domestic circles, traveling in a family herd… There is a telling phrase that best captures the Indian man in a relationship — whether as lover, parent or friend: not “I love you” but “Main hoon na.” It translates to “I’m here for you” but is better explained as a hug of commitment — “Never fear, I’m here.” These are men for whom commitment is a joy, a duty and a deep moral anchor.”
Against the barrage of coverage in the Western media that exoticised gender violence and luridly painted a predatory landscape, came this recent op-ed by Lavanya Sankaran in the New York Times that exoticised the Indian family.
Post the 16th December, 2012 rape incident; a cottage industry seems to have sprung up to churn out instant fixes to sexual violence! However, among all these fixes, the one that has caught on most seems to be Farhan Akhtar’s MARD (Men against Rape and Discrimination) campaign[i] that was launched in March, 2013 to “instill gender equality and respect towards women… thereby bringing about a sustained change in society.”
It has received massive coverage with a host of celebrities, chiefly from Hindi cinema and some from cricket endorsing it.
In this day and age of social networking and 24X7 media, Farhan Akhtar has succeeded in mounting a campaign that has reached out to lakhs and lakhs of people through Twitter, Facebook and a host of tie-ups. MARD merchandise is catching up too with brisk sale of tee shirts and caps from the online shopping site myntra. The campaign clearly has a target audience base, which is the urban, middle class consumer. Akhtar constructs his real mard/man as someone with a pan Indian identity base, thus subsuming the specificities of class, caste, community and language. He is ‘modern’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘liberated’, all attributes used metonymously, but does not overstep the boundaries of Indian tradition either.
The logo of the campaign is a moustache. While many gender activists have read the logo as an assertion of machismo, it can also be seen as a subversion of dominant gender signifiers. That a moustachioed man can also be gender sensitive, soft spoken is not an image that is too often seen in the mainstream media. To that extent Akhtar succeeds in bending a gender norm. However, he only goes upto that and not beyond. On the surface, it would appear that this could be an opportunity to dialogue with lakhs of people with internet access on gender norms and violence and given the fact that Akhtar has the infrastructure to mount such a dialogue, if one goes to the facebook page of MARD and scrutinizes the posts put up every few hours, one is startled by the complete lack of any moderation, which is extremely unlikely on a social networking forum. For example, a post which says that there is no connection between how a woman is dressed and sexual assault, one response reads, “Real men don’t rape, real women don’t expose!” This very post could have provided the admins on the page a conversation starting point on misconceptions around violence. But Farhan Akhtar’s team of web editors put up posts without paying any lip service to communication. Another post reads, “A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men! Are you the new feminist?” While the use of the word “humanity” to invoke equality is itself masculinist and is premised on inequality, the use of the word “new” before “feminist” implies as if there was an “old” breed of feminists whose politics was premised on the superiority of women over men! This actually plays into a popular connotation of feminists as joyless man-haters! Thus Farhan Akhtar’s pet project on gender comes undone! However, the response to this post which again went unresponded, is equally telling. One of the respondents goes, “I understand that is why they claim maintenance, even the educated ones, some claim it as their rights. This is why adultery is not punishable for women… women can abort their child and cry female foeticide… I understand the feminist definition now… thanks MARD.” So here is a peculiar situation. While unraveling the reactionary and patriarchal nature of this campaign, it is also important to note that patriarchal forces are castigating the same campaign too
If we trace the career trajectory of Farhan Akhtar, a direct link can be established between his choice of films as director and actor and his pet project, MARD. The charter of the campaign defines a man as someone “… Whose heart holds respect, whose deeds display honour/He, who venerates women for their mind, body and soul/who ensures that their dignity will never be compromised…” Now, let us sample the oath to be taken by any officer in the Indian Army. “I,………………………… do swear in the name of God that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by the law established and that I will, as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully serve in the regular Army of the Union of India and … that I will observe and obey all commands of the President of the Union of India… even to the peril of my life.” The MARD manifesto and the Indian army oath read almost identical in tone and tenor. In the former, it is the woman’s honour that is to be protected while in the latter case, it is the honour of the Constitution and the State of India that commands allegiance. Thus women and the nation state can be used interchangeably whose honour and integrity are with the real mard/army (interchangeable too) of the country. This theme of ‘honour’ can be traced back to Farhan Akhtar’s second feature film as director, Lakshya centering around an aimless youth who finally finds his true calling in the army and finds purpose in life by becoming a major catalyst for the Indian victory against Pakistan in the Kargil War. The Hindi version of the MARD manifesto has the lines, “Jo agar saath hain/Jo agar paas hain/Uske hone se aurat ko apni suraksha ka ehsaas hain…. Sach to ye hain/Vohi mard hain”. Yet, this protectionist attitude is what feeds into the culture of violence. While on a factual level, both Jyoti Pandey and the young photo intern in Mumbai had male companions but protection in this form did not ensure their safety, on an ideological level, such a discourse does not question the patriarchal institutions that produce and reproduce misogyny and heterosexism and hence breed gender violence.
Right after the Park Street rape incident in February 2012, the West Bengal Chief Minister ordered all pubs to be shut down after 11:30 implying as if only drunk men rape at night and hence women need to stay home to protect themselves from the past midnight raging hormones of men. The implication being city spaces are intrinsically hostile to women and hence they should either stay away from them or venture out only with protection.
The Maharastra Home Minister RR Patil offered police protection to all women journalists after a photo intern was raped on assignment. While this discourse of safety, outside of being classist (the target being the migrant or the slum dweller who render the city spaces unsafe and hence their removal sanitizes the space), allows the state to abdicate its responsibilities towards its citizen subjects on one hand, it also privileges the home as a secure space for women on the other, where as records show that the domestic space is a major site of gender violence.
Shilpa Phadke has argued[ii], the tool to combat sexual violence is not protection from violence but the freedom to share in the risks. And this is where her discourse on loitering becomes important. Women’s access to public spaces is always linked to purpose. And this idea of purpose often frames the State and society’s reaction to gender violence. So the fact that Suzette Jordan was out pub hopping and drinking late at night, unaccompanied, was as important, if not more, as the fact that she was sexually assaulted. So it is a challenge to conceive and create public spaces which women can own and consume with or without purpose, where they can loiter, amidst friendly and unfriendly bodies, where they can articulate their dissent as well as lay a stake to the spaces. However, Akhtar steers clear of such complexities and experiential realities of women to give prescriptive sermons on ideals of masculinity.
The benign man has also been hailed in the latest Tanishq commercial. A dark woman is preparing for her wedding. She is putting on her neckpieces when her daughter comes running to her. She walks confidently into the wedding mandap with her daughter. As she starts circling the fire with her new husband, her daughter pleads her to allow her to walk round as well. The woman asks her to keep quiet and tentatively looks at her husband and he asks her to come along. The commercial ends with the little girl asking whether she could call the man “daddy”. Here are images that Indian advertisements have never witnessed. A dark woman who is not apologetic about her complexion, who is not seeking cosmetic intervention to lighten her skin tone, a woman who is getting remarried, a man who is accepting of her and her daughter… and all of this in a jewellery campaign, jewellery that is seen as the foundation of a traditional wedding. In the media that pays maximum premium to skin tone, where women are set exacting standards of beauty, the Tanishq ad is an exception indeed. Yet, this exception cannot go unproblematised. A single commercial has packed in antidotes to as many societal ills as possible. Remarriage of women, then remarriage of women with children, that too girl children and to round it off neatly, remarriage of dark women. However, the makers of this ad, Lowe Lintas is the same advertisement agency who also count Fair and Lovely as its major client. Year after year Fair and Lovely and Fair and Handsome commercials keep telling us how the key to success is a light skin tone. Thus, when put in perspective, the Tanishq commercial ends up being just an antidote to these innumerable advertisements. In doing so, it ends up emphasizing the complexion of its female protagonist, the message being even dark women can get married because they are beautiful too.
The much successful “Dark is Beautiful” campaign had the same theme with celebrities like Nandita Das endorsing it. The problem here is in a country as diverse as India, one is not oppressed just on the basis of skin tone. Sruthi Herbert, a researcher, writes in the Roundtable India [iii], “In India, the ‘value’ of people’ and their ‘beauty’ cannot be so easily and automatically connected. If that were so, then one would not have heard so often that ‘She is so fair that to look at her, one wouldn’t say she is an SC girl’… This automatic correlation of skin colour with caste is a lived reality for most people in my part of the world. How many factors contribute to the self-worth of women in a society that is structured around many kinds of oppression?”
Putting maximum premium on physicality – be it dark or light complexion – ultimately could end up being two sides of the same coin, and that coin being the perception of women based on their physical appearance. Also, while the assertive and unapologetic woman is being celebrated, it is important to note that her autonomy is being asserted through the institution of marriage, where her husband is broad-minded and sensitive enough to accept her as she is.
So female agency here is interconnected with benign masculinity and this connection plays out on a site that is structurally patriarchal and misogynist. So while appreciating the content of the Tanishq advertisement, it is imperative to see it in the larger context of the portrayal of women in the media and beyond.
Thus, though the moustachioed man of MARD, an important image this year, that purports to rework machismo actually fits quite snugly within the contours of an ever mutating patriarchy.
(Endnotes)
1 http://www.realmard.com/
2 Phadke Shilpa, Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol- XLVIII, No. 39, September 28, 2013
3 Herbert Sruthi, A Dissent Note on the ‘Dark is Beautiful’ campaign, Roundtable India, August 28, 2013
