The Indian feminine quotient

What women here have been reduced to

The extra curve that completes a circle. The bump in the road that creates a fall. The seal on the envelope. A mark on the door. Women have different roles in our culture.

If humans bodies were compiled by segregating chunks of dust and ashes, then women’s bodies might have been created by placing in a few additions. A cervix here, a curve there. The softness propelled towards a churning pile of internal divergence. Latent convulsion buried behind sublime towers of compassion and motherhood. A pair of silent, submissive breasts.

The conservative sections of our society might argue that womanhood is created by physical borders; that the womb is an identity-defining vacuum and the vagina a passage that has to be safeguarded and protected. The liberals might provide a befitting counter-argument; mental, not physical borders, define womanhood, and that it is merely a state of mind. Probably the most earth-shattering beliefs might be the one held by the radicals; that womanhood simply does not exist. It was sculpted and pushed forth in our early child minds and probably grew as we grew.

To the idealists who like to point to the abundance of women in the political and economic spheres of power in India, a layman could point to millions more who die in the womb. Who are denied glances of a school. Who are taught to bury their gasps and chokes behind their faces. Who are taught that their bodies are fragile wisps of human flesh that have to be shielded. Whose minds are stained with bloated fear, echoes of distress and tears of shame. Eternally, irrevocably.

In the world of hidebound ideas, a woman’s body was meant to be an incompetent chassis designed for frail spirits, like a broken shell spread clumsily over a pearl. Instead it became much more. It became an antiquated, doomed prison; with a wreckage for a soul. A soul that was, and could be, so much more. This prison can be broken into, and wrecked, and robbed of virtue. This prison can be hidden or pushed into oblivion for protection.

Historians say that women did at some point, enjoy a better status. That ancient Indian women, though not having been considered equal to their male counterparts, enjoyed more freedom, and their bodily prisons were not taken as seriously. That during the Vedic period, women wrote, gained education and chose their husbands. The trouble started during the medieval times, with the advent of the Muslim conquest, which brought in the pardah. This pardah recognised the frailty of our prisons and sought tofortify it. Around the same time the Jauhar system came into existence in Rajasthan, whereby wives and daughters of defeated kings and warriors would immolate their bodies, their flimsy shells, in order to escape molestation and sexual attack. How insignificant is this mortal fortress. And how foully valuable what it contains within.

The concept of bodily prison hasn’t left our culture since. Its shadow still graces our otherwise pioneering constitution. It seeps in through the cracks of our astounding modern culture. It gags us at odd hours, unexpectedly, like the hour of our birth. On the way to school. In between the frank, bursting sunshine of happiness, or the fresh dawn of youth. In our homes, in the privacy of our bedrooms. Or simply, in our moments of mortal freedom.

Instances like when the nation roared at the brutal gang-rape of a 23-year-old woman in a cold steel bus in Delhi, where iron rods were used to tear her bodily prison apart, made us ask ourselves, like the radicals do, if womanhood is simply an idea that is pierced into our skin and minds as we grow. If being a woman is really no different from being a man. Simple questions, but radical in the way they bluntly ask. If protection is only a means for men to assert their power in milder but equally significant ways. If marriage is really a security and peace treaty that society provides us with.

Unfortunately these instances come and go, like a flash of an internal sun. And when evening blooms, we shake the painful dust off our shoulders and return to our blind, despondent reality. A reality where, the physical becomes more acute than the mental, intellectual or even the social. It becomes the vast patch of stain that we carry around with us, from adulthood to our workplaces to the refuge-like curtain of motherhood. This patch of stain can never be gotten rid of, no matter how much we try to hide it or shield it. It becomes our identity, our most acute prison.

But the flashes do come, no matter how intermittently. They peep in at unexpected hours, much like the realization of our mortal cages, or the piles of shame and clothing that are used to cover them. And they bring with them an insightful array of supple truth, no matter how briefly. And in those flashes of a few seconds in the evolution of humankind, we see plain, simple things that we hadn’t seen before. We ponder the intricacies of our sad, twisted prisons. We ask blatantly genuine questions. And sometimes, just sometimes—those flashes last a moment or two longer than they are supposed to. And our worlds are never the same again.

Prerna Kalbag is an independent journalist based in Chennai, India. Words, art, feminism and people are some of the things she is passionate about. An odd soul, she often lives in her own world of oddities and quirks, but has a sensitive approach to things outside it.