From the definition of feminism to the power of love marriage, Ruchira Gupta, the founder of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, touched upon a wide range of topics in conversation with Jadavpur University professor Paromita Chakravarti at An Author’s Afternoon, presented by Shree Cement and Taj Bengal, held in association with t2, Prabha Khaitan Foundation and literary agency Siyahi. The ever-smiling Ruchira also discussed a number of essays from The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader: As If Women Matter, a compilation she has edited.

♦ The Gloria effect

Gloria Steinem’s work has influenced my feminism. I call myself a radical feminist though I hate labels. I was very influenced by many things that she had simplified for me, which she had learnt in my own country 50 years ago when she came as a young person. She travelled with Vinoba Bhave’s followers in Ramnad and Bihar to small villages, trying to quell caste riots. She wore a sari and barefoot they used to go into mud huts and sit in a circle with the villagers to talk about peace. From their Gandhian leader, she learnt that if you want people to listen to you, you have to learn to listen to them.

If you believe in change, then change has to begin from the bottom and transform the top. 

Things like these were a part of my feminism because I had grown up in Gandhian India and with Gandhian parents and socialism of different kinds all around me... so Gloria’s feminism appealed to me and I began to adapt it. In India, I began to see the politics of intolerance growing. I saw that many of the things she had written in her book and in her essays were so relevant to India, but people didn’t even know about it.... 

There were things the women’s movement in America was actually organised against, and here we were importing those very same things! For example, Gloria and her groups had organised against Hugh Hefner, who owned the Playboy magazine and the Playboy clubs. She had actually dressed up as a Playboy Bunny and gone underground to expose them. And now we are about to open a Playboy club in Goa!

India is the country which has invented Kamasutra. We love sex, we love erotica. But we are trying to replace it with pornography, which is all about domination, not about mutual pleasure. That’s why I thought I would get an Indian publisher, like Rupa, to print this book, have mass distribution, not make the book expensive and choose essays which were relevant, contextualise the essays with little introductions and distribute it in India so that more people could read it. 

♦ Feminism is one country

People tell me that feminism is a ‘western concept’ or ‘western feminists think so’! That’s what I’m trying hard to cross, because I feel that we have a movement on our hands and we should not let anyone divide it. Cultures are dynamic and they cross borders and boundaries, so they affect us all, just as I was talking about the Playboy culture there.

While multinational corporations are working across borders and boundaries, grass-roots movements are not able to, because they are so caught up with the struggle to survive. So, it becomes very important for us to exchange information and practices and have joint struggles. 

The work that I do, for example, anti-sex trafficking, if there are good laws to punish men who buy sex in Sweden and Norway, they will travel to countries like Thailand to buy 13-year-old girls. So, we have to have the best laws in Thailand too. 

But there are some things very local in women’s movements. For example, in America, their biggest issue is abortion. They have to take on the pro-choice people and the pro-life people. In India, we don’t have to struggle for it. It is legal and for Rs 300 we can get a very safe abortion. The struggle here is the right over property or inheritance, food security… basic fundamental rights. How much food does a girl get versus how much food does her brother get? When does she get the food? Same thing with a wife and a husband. 

It will be a husband or a father who’ll decide whether a girl is prostituted or not. It is a brother or a father who will decide whether a girl would be sold into child marriage or not. But while these issues are not there in the US, something else is there. While arranged marriages and dowry are here, in America, it’s still the bride’s family that pays for the wedding. Patriarchy is everywhere. 

♦ Who is a feminist? 

Suddenly, there’s a comeback in feminism in the States, and also in India. But yes, till the December 16 bus rape, people didn’t want to call themselves a feminist. They thought that being a feminist was being completely desexualised. I remember girls telling me that ‘if we were feminists, we wouldn’t have boyfriends!’ They thought feminism meant cutting off all access to sex and flirtation. That has changed. Now, a boy comes and tells me that he’s a feminist. 

I was standing at Delhi airport when Bharat Ram, one of the boys who was boarding the same flight, came to me and said, ‘Are you Ruchira Gupta? I wanted to tell you that I’m a feminist.’ I said, great, and asked him why. He said, ‘Because feminism is for men. If we are feminists, then we will have a more equal society, where we can participate equally with women and that’ll be much more fun, so we’ll have sex with collaboration rather than sex with domination. Participation is more fun.’ 

People are beginning to understand that feminism is not only about being pro-women, it is really about understanding the feminine in all of us and supporting that.... When we say that we are not feminists, we are actually cutting off empathy with something inside ourselves because all of us have femininity and masculinity and so many other things in between, which are gender fluid. 

♦ The power of love marriage 

Love marriage is a sign of rebellion; you are choosing your own man rather than letting your parents choose him. So you rebel against your parents, but you don’t rebel against patriarchy, because you are still choosing a man. What about all the women who are choosing to live alone? That’s even more interesting to me, because I find more and more single women in beautiful homes and lovely careers, now even producing their own babies through all the science and technology available to them. 

Things are definitely changing. I think, in my lifetime itself, I will see the end of patrilocal cultures, where women migrate to the husband’s house. I’ve seen more and more young people buying their own apartments and living together. They are good to both parents and meet them occasionally with all the love and understanding remaining intact. 

On the question of love, these girls who choose to marry outside caste, outside religion and then have to face issues like honour killing… that too is a rebellion against set patriarchy. They are choosing husbands because that’s the only thing they know as a way of rebellion. But soon that will change… the single woman’s movement is growing and I think men will also appreciate it, because they too are being put into the prism of stereotypes. 

Recently, I put up on Facebook this picture saying, ‘A man is not an ATM machine’. Immediately one of my woman friends texted, ‘Nor are women pressure cookers or microwaves’. I wanted to write back that all of us can outsource being microwaves and pressure cookers, because we all hire maids, but men cannot outsource money, that you have to earn yourself. Even women have to begin to understand the new realities. They can’t expect men to follow the same stereotypes while women change their own. 

♦ Challenges ahead 

In India, the biggest gain has been legal. We have great laws and they keep changing all the time. For example, we got the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act after the rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey, as I’d like to call her. 

It’s a huge gain that we have managed to create laws around inheritance, domestic violence, rape, and redefined rape…. Because women participated in India’s Freedom Struggle, so constitutionally some things were a given for us. We had voting rights and equal rights in the Constitution. So we are much more self-confident than women in many other countries. 

Personally, I find Indian women to be more self-confident than American women. There’s such a deep insecurity in American women. Even in some European countries, like Germany, because they still have to play the role of the three K’s — kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen, church). In France too, patriarchy is entrenched.... 

India’s problem has been that we have not been able to deal with the social issues to manage the laws. So, one group of women who are educated, who are not working-class, have been able to make strides along with working-class women. The middle class and the lower-middle class are the ones caught between the freedoms that the upper classes and working classes enjoy. I think that is changing, which is very interesting, specifically since the December 16 rape. 

A film like Masaan couldn’t have been made before December 16, where the movie opens with this woman watching some erotica on the computer and she is the one who has rented a room.... It was such a true movie about the new Indian woman who is middle class, lives in small towns. Her aspirations aren’t shoes or clothes, her aspiration is independence. 

The moment when women began to march on the streets and speak up, and the government responded and changed the laws, it gave such a boost to the Indian women’s movement. Girl after girl has started speaking up, saying this happened to me, my sari was pulled, I was poked here. They’ve shifted the shame to the perpetrator. They’ve also started looking for independence in every sphere now. This change is so exciting and it has just happened in the last two years. Just yesterday Suzette Jordan’s verdict (in the Park Street case) was announced. She was courageous, she spoke up and did not let anyone talk her down. That is the biggest change in the Indian women’s movement.

 

Text: Malancha Dasgupta and Debdatta Sengupta
The new Indian woman’s aspiration is independence because.... Tell t2@abp.in