Copy-Pasting Feminism: Caste, Culture, and C-words
On a pleasant December evening in the heart of posh Bandra (Mumbai, India), Indian journalist Barkha Dutt spoke at a participatory forum titled ‘We The Women’. This two-day event aimed to build a space for women in a world that, it claims, is plagued by “continued mansplaining” — that is, the propensity of one individual (usually male) to talk condescendingly and often inaccurately to another (usually female).
In a ‘Role Reversal’ segment with Bollywood actress Alia Bhatt, Ms. Dutt reflected on the women of the country by saying:
“While we all did ‘hashtag me too’ and wrote our Facebook posts, our capacity to name names, the protection that the system would offer us, the ease of access to legal systems, the sense that if we take names we won’t be judged — I don’t know that we’re there yet.”
In October last year, ‘#MeToo’ surfaced in an effort to empower women with the strength and capacity to identify abusers, extinguish judgement, inspire action, and urge a corrupt system to protect victims of sexual crimes. The two-word hashtag was originally coined by Tarana Burke in 2006 as part of an online campaign to promote “empowerment through empathy” amongst sexually abused women of colour. Spurred by the tempest of mounting allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, over 1.7 million Tweets across 85 countries helped revive the movement, making ‘#MeToo’ a perennial part of modern-day popular culture.
Since Weinstein’s fall from grace, scores of men and women across the globe have used the hashtag to identify assaulters amidst the highest echelons of power in politics, business, and the arts. South African singer and former politician Jennifer Ferguson described it as an opportunity for victims to “help each other be courageous, speak out and begin to heal as we find we are not alone”, while Jasmeen Patheja, founder of India’s ‘Blank Noise’ campaign, said the movement “symbolises the shift that we’re no longer willing to sit in silence and shame and denial. It’s created a space to listen in, share, heal.”
In Kolkata, the city police department issued an official statement on Facebook, emphasising that the nation’s surge in ‘#MeToo’ posts has not gone unnoticed.
Like it or not, the 21st century teems with digital activism, and this virtual colosseum of opinions is often a double-edged sword. While the Internet has made fourth-wave feminism globally accessible, social media forums are rife with misogyny: individuals channeling misplaced anger at ‘feminazis’, confusing feminism with misandry, and the right to free speech with that of basic existence. Pro-equality advocates often fear retaliation in the form of the ‘troll’: the keyboard-happy misanthrope shooting rape threats and ad absurdum in all directions. Amidst a sea of information exchange and international campaigns, the question then becomes: can all of this apply to a nation such as ours — one that is invariably divided by an economic chasm?
Of course not, the post-colonial hangover screams. India cannot achieve what the West has, because we have — and brace yourselves for this novel approach, ladies and gentlemen — the C-word.
The C-word can mean a great many things. Caste. Class. Colour. Colonialism. Confine. Conform. Culture. Cannot. It is thrown into conversations like some sort of ancient cataclysm that only appears to affect Indians, miraculously absolving slacktivism whilst rationalising an unspoken acceptance of oppression.
Which brings us here: to a pleasant December evening in the heart of posh Bandra, when the Creative Director and Curator of ‘We The Women’ proceeded to mansplain feminism to the average Indian woman.
“I feel that we’re a very diverse country,” says Barkha Dutt. “We can’t copy and paste a certain idea of Western feminism and replicate it here. Because, we have differences of caste, class… you know, in feminism, they call it the ‘intersectionality of the gender conversation.’”
Unfortunately, this raises more eyebrows than answers.
Intersectionality in feminist theory postulates that, in order to understand systemic inequality, all aspects of an individual’s identity — such as caste, class, sexual orientation, disability, and gender — must be examined as interrelated parts of a whole. According to Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who first coined ‘intersectionality theory’ in 1989, ignoring these attributes as interwoven essentials only serves to perpetuate cyclical oppression, or the very thing Dutt purports to condemn.¹
Structural, political, and representational intersectionality aim to identify and understand rather than segregate the struggles of marginalised groups subjugated by caste and class. Post-structural feminism emphasises the particulars of gendered subjectivities for people of colour, while contemporary standpoint feminist theory confronts India’s kyriarchal structure. Some scholars, such as Carol J. Adams, even extend their fight for equality to all sentient species.
In the face of multiple theories that can be exercised to examine gender and identity politics in the subcontinent, one cannot help but ask — what is Dutt’s issue with analysing research from scholars and activists as informed individuals, as opposed to the obtuse simplification of their identities as ‘Western’?
Although intersectionality, post-structural feminism, and subalternity — essentially, every avenue of academic discourse that addresses Barkha Dutt’s concerns — spring from non-Indian, ‘Western’ minds, it must be emphasised that feminism is not an exclusively Western construct.
Nearly a century before Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) was hailed as the definitive text on modern feminist theory, Tarabai Shinde’s Marathi work, Stri Purush Tulana (1881) condemned the social inequality of caste, as well as the attitudes of those who consider caste as the main form of antagonism in Hindu society. She highlights the interrelated nature between gender and caste, broadening the scope of analysis by introducing the simple idea that women everywhere are similarly oppressed.
135 years later, influential Indian women are still adopting C-words as factors for dissociation, making one wonder — what will it take for India to embrace intersectionality and forego dissonance in favour of active change?
There is little doubt that brown women are positioned within structures of power in fundamentally different ways from white women. However, when considering the struggles of women in India, the dynamic then morphs into a model that can, in as narrative a fashion as Barkha Dutt’s comments, be compared with that of the West.
In the USA, for instance, Professors Maria L. Ontiveros and Judy Trent Ellis suggest that women of colour are victimised by both citizens and the system.² In the West, marginalised groups often gain the status of ‘otherness’. In India, one’s chances of this are simultaneously magnified and nullified. Along with women, Dalits, rural labourers, and immigrants, too, are considered subaltern: the bottom rung of the sociological pyramid that is India’s kyriarchy. Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains, “the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” — implying that the subaltern: the socially disadvantaged individual who has been silenced by imperialist powers, when female, is even more at risk of being cast aside as ‘The Other’.³
Of course, oppression is a subjective construct, yet it is this subjectivity that fuels the case for equality. Like all socio-philosophical concepts, a myriad different analyses may stem from a single notion. While Dutt’s comments raise some valid points for discourse, it must be clarified that feminism is not a static concept. Feminism is dynamic and constantly developing: it is a global consciousness, growing and adapting to its environment as individuals of all races, genders, and classes interpret their notions of ‘equality’ through their own lens. As such, dismissing one form of feminism as inadequate and thus ineffective simply because it is unpalatable to one’s own interpretation of it only serves to further perpetuate disparity.
Bhanwari Devi and the ‘East versus West’ Debate
Dutt resumes her explanation of ‘intersectionality of the gender conversation’ by recounting the harrowing story of Bhanwari Devi.
On September 22nd, 1992, Rajasthan state government employee Bhanwari Devi and her husband, Mohan Lal Prajapat, tended to their fields in Bhateri village. Only months ago, Devi had attempted to prevent a nine-month old Gujjar girl’s wedding. The Gujjars are feudal landlords — the affluent and dominant caste group of Bhateri village — while Devi and her husband belong to the lower-caste potter community. Angered that she had meddled in their affairs, five Gujjar men attacked the couple one evening, pinned Prajapat down, and forced him to watch as they gang-raped Devi.
Over the course of Bhanwari Devi’s lengthy trial, the court acquitted her assaulters of gang-rape, condoning their heinous crime by claiming: “men of different castes cannot participate in gang rape”, “older males of 60–70 years cannot rape”, and “a member of the higher caste cannot rape a lower caste woman due to reasons of purity”.
Barkha Dutt’s example of Bhanwari Devi’s tragic story achieves its desired effect: one is left both appalled and enraged, as one should be in 2018.
It astounds one to think that the Rajasthan High Court — at the time, the highest authority Devi could turn to — would resort to such absurdity, yet the seasoned, desensitised subaltern within us all would likely experience a brief burst of fury at this, followed by quiet, practised defeat — what else can we expect from two decades ago, when local officials in India today cite chowmein as a valid reason for rape?
Seventeen years after Bhanwari Devi’s rapists were exonerated on bizarre justifications, Robert H. Richard IV, heir to the du Pont family fortune, was acquitted of raping his three-year old daughter because a judge deemed this one-percenter “will not fare well” in a prison setting. In 2012, a Swedish court cleared Mikael Halvarsson of rape on the grounds of “sexsomnia”. In 2015, a Canadian court acquitted an Irishman in spite of having received video evidence of the accused sexually assaulting his intoxicated wife. In 2016, ‘Stanford rapist’ Brock Turner served a mere three months in county jail for having sexually penetrated (i.e. raped) an unconscious woman. At his trial, it took a 7,138-word victim-impact statement for the global conversation on sexual assault to finally catch fire. In 2017, an Italian man was acquitted of sexual violence charges because his victim allegedly did not scream or become “emotional enough” to stop the attack herself. Later that year, Silicon Valley CEO Abhishek Gattani was filmed repeatedly assaulting his wife, but was granted a plea deal and only served 15 days in jail.
It has been three months since Harvey Weinstein was first accused of predatory behaviour, but a formal arrest is yet to be made. Meanwhile, sexual assaulters such as Woody Allen and Casey Affleck continue to make blockbuster films and win awards, while the victims of Dustin Hoffman, Ben Affleck, and Nick Carter persist through obscurity, their voices dulled by the resounding roar of retweets in the wake of paltry 140-character apologies.
These transgressions have not been cited to rationalise or condone India’s gender inequality issues, but to serve as examples of humanity’s journey ahead as a species, as opposed to an oversimplified ‘East versus West’ stance. Feminism in the United States is not purely about hashtags and Harvey Weinstein, just as feminism in India is not merely about opposing menstrual leave or misstating women’s safety statistics.
The movement for equality is not a competition, and the struggles of the ‘Third World woman’ do not involve a contest to see who is the most persecuted or most vocal. Attempting to separate and isolate the ‘Indian situation’ from a ‘Western experience’ only reinforces the illusion that progress is unattainable, when in fact, with mass protests making headlines and prompting conversation, it is very much within view.
Naturally, there is a significant economic and social rift between a Silicon Valley CEO’s partner and Bhanwari Devi in Rajasthan, yet caste or class must not be held solely responsible for oppression. It is a woman’s experiences, rather than her social class alone, that dictate her subaltern status. Bhanwari Devi was the catalyst for the implementation of the Vishakha Guidelines: she is the reason why millions of Indian women are now legally protected against sexual harassment in the workplace. Postulating upon her tragedy by leaning on C-words is counterproductive in one’s hopes to generate critical awareness. By internalising stereotypical societal views, one infuses these methods of domination with power, making us the very oppressors that Spivak alludes to.
The subaltern woman is no longer portrayed as exploited and in need of ‘saving’ by the white man, but rather, by our own women of privilege. As such, the contours of identity must be acknowledged in order to break free from hegemonic systems and obliterate the development of ‘self-interest for the woman below.’
Crossing the Rubicon
“Do you feel that there is a change in the women of the country today?”
“I think there is some change,” Barkha Dutt acknowledges, “but it’s not critical mass enough for us to cross the Rubicon.”
Dutt’s words ring true: India is, after all, infamously divided. Sex-selective abortions, dowry, legalised marital rape and assault are only some of its gender inequality issues, and the resolution of these issues often hinges on effective education. Fortunately, education does not always equate to literacy.
Organisations such as the National Federation of Indian Women, Majlis, Sayfty, Apne Aap, the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), CHETNA, the All-India Progressive Women’s Association, Women on Wings, and numerous others have been crucial towards dispelling ignorance and creating socio-economic, cultural, and political rights for Indian women. Campaigns as old as 1980’s ‘Forum Against Oppression of Women’ (FAOW), and the more recent ‘Blank Noise’ (2003), ‘Pink Chaddi’ (2009), ‘Freedom Without Fear’ (2012), ‘#WhyLoiter’ (2015), as well as the virtual medium’s collective ‘Womanifesto’ (2014) have been instrumental in asserting women’s rights as human rights.
Women such as Rupan Deol Bajaj (the I.A.S Officer who, in 1998, filed and won a molestation lawsuit against the then Director General of Police in Punjab), Meenakshi Arora (who, alongside women’s rights group Vishakha, was instrumental in drafting the Vishakha Guidelines), and Lotika Sarkar (who, outraged by the Mathura Rape Case of 1972, formed FAOW, India’s first feminist group against rape) have made significant contributions to legal reform and the normalisation of the Indian woman’s right to live, thrive, and exist free of discrimination.⁴ While governmental promises made to advocate these rights have been dilatory and inadequate thus far, for the Indian woman seeking empowerment and emancipation from discrimination, political awareness and efficacy are key to achieving legal reform.
In a socio-political climate that teeters on the brink of an Orwellian nightmare, it is imperative that we, as citizens, develop a critical gender/sex lens in order to better understand and continue the conversation on equality in India.
On Privilege
“All of this makes me feel, who am I to make sweeping comments on anyone else’s issues? I am a woman of privilege. My battles have been battles, but they haven’t been these battles,” Dutt ends to the sound of applause.
The power relations of being educated and upper middle-class in India come with its own set of tangled perplexities. Are we privileged? If so, can we comment on the plight of others?
In Seeing Like a Feminist, Professor Nivedita Menon asserts: “feminism is not about a moment of final triumph over patriarchy but about the gradual transformation of the social field so decisively that old markers shift forever”.⁵
Feminism is not a black-and-white, open-and-shut concept. It is intricate and ever-changing, its roots pulsating with the thoughts, identities, and voices of diverse communities. As is the case with ‘Black Feminism’, in India, a brown woman cannot separate her gender, class, caste, or (in some cases) religion from each other: they are bound in her experiences of oppression. She is not dark-skinned or a woman, Muslim or born into the working class, Dalit or the victim of abuse. She is all of these things, all of the time: ever-changing yet perpetual, like the inevitability of the sun in the aftermath of a storm. Her lower economic class and caste do not strip her of her rights, just as a higher income and education would not erase one’s right to opine, feel, and fight for equality. Bhanwari Devi was not only a victim of social class and caste, but also of gender and circumstance. Her decision to intercept a morally reprehensible act despite the obvious fear of reprisal is what makes her stand out: not her economic status, not her caste or religion, and certainly not her assault.
While Devi suffered a fate worse than imaginable, it is now up to us: the privileged, educated citizens of today, with our thumbs against touchscreens and information at our fingertips, to use the platforms at our disposal to foster and advance the development of equality. India’s unusual situation is evident in everyday paradoxes — such as the need for gender equality despite separate women’s compartments on public transport, the question of digital feminism as a classist issue, etc. — but to further alienate our position by belittling the strides of activists in other countries is myopic, for oppression is not simply about discrimination: it is about being institutionally and systemically repressed.⁶
Fourth-wave feminism does not aim to veil the inequalities faced by marginalised classes, but rather, to amplify these voices. As English-speaking, Internet-savvy viewers of Dutt’s summit, not only are we epistemically privileged in this case, but also able to work towards reversing the power hierarchies present within India’s multifarious social environment.
Brown women know what it is to be repressed, objectified, and treated with contempt. We are born into a world that is bleak with prejudice, our voices threatening to mar a carefully constructed landscape of domination. It is us: we, the women; the oppressed; the subaltern ‘feminazis’ who must seize the mantle and lead the movement. It is up to us to purge ignorance through education, lead by example, and favour action over indifference, for it is 2018, and Bhanwari Devi still awaits justice.
As Julius Caesar was said to have uttered the phrase “alea iacta est!” — ‘let the die be cast!’ — as his army marched through the shallow Rubicon river, so, too, must India’s citizens acknowledge that equality is an evolutionary inevitability. The question is, how many C-words will stand in our way?
Let the die be cast high, indeed.
¹ Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
² Ontiveros, M. L. (1993). Three Perspectives on Workplace Harassment of Women of Color. Golden Gate University Law Review, 23(3), 817–828.
³ Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–313.
⁴ Ray, R. (1999). Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (pp. 113–118). University of Minnesota Press.
⁵ Menon, N. (2012). Seeing Like a Feminist (p. 91). London: Penguin Books.
⁶ Walker, M. U. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. Oxford UP, 2008.
