Rupa Sengupta: The dirtiest picture
Censors, khaps and mobs thrive in a culture that kills joy instead of spreading it. What do cartoons and mobiles, malls and pubs have in common? They are all scowled at in a culture that kills joy rather than spreads it. Communication, consumption, leisure — they create enjoyment. But enjoyment, as unfettered human interaction, is a dirty word in India. Pleasure's for the birds, not model citizens in general and 'decent' women in particular.
To start with, political aversion to cartoons is instructive, uncritical reverence being indispensable to our mai-baap culture. Poked fun at, could self-perpetuating circles of political privilege inspire awe? No doubt, then, politicians will frown at an NCERT committee's no to the Thorat panel's recommendations. If they had their way, we'd see humour vanish from textbooks. If departed national figures are barricaded against irreverence, their humourless political heirs can also avoid being ribbed for their ineffectual fight against socio-economic ills, including gender bias.
Ban subversive laughter and you weaken interrogation of power-obsessed rather than performance-oriented politics and the feudal set-up that props it. The habit of questioning, remember, is an enemy of the status quo.
So is technology that's a force of change and modernisation. A village panchayat in UP has barred women from using cellphones or moving about freely. North India, it thunders, will bow to its diktats. The political response has been breathtakingly flaccid — who dares confront the Jats who, constituting 17% of west UP's population, can sway electoral fortunes? Apparently not the chief minister, who's said the matter is for scribes to debate. Meanwhile, an RLD MP suggests the Baghpat panchayat's only managing its house like any family elder — read patriarch — would. The analogy couldn't be more telling. Or the fact that Baghpat is RLD chief Ajit Singh's parliamentary constituency.
Why has access to communication technology come up against deeply entrenched social conservatism? Mobiles revolutionise the way we live. In work or play, they help us reach out and touch someone: friends, information givers, distant markets, even support systems for abused daughters or battered wives. This can make local monopolies of sagacity and protection — family heads and village elders, matchmakers and middlemen, indifferent public servants and inept service providers — dispensable.
In Baghpat's case, mobiles also seem accused of facilitating unmediated contact between the sexes. Unless love and sex are demonised, "love marriage" can threaten acquisitive endogamy. Allow personal choice and you cede a key weapon of social — and political — control, especially over women's sexuality, that mythical repository of male honour.
Moral policing isn't confined to rural settings. Consider why fast-globalising urban India is accused of spawning so-called dens of hedonistic vice: malls, pubs, watering-holes, nightclubs. The mall — the former chief minister of a prime tourist state once declared — corrupts boys and girls into holding hands and worse. The pub, meantime, is a place where Sri Ram Sene activists thrash women, cops wield hockey sticks and predators sniff out prey. Note that the first incident took place in Mangalore, emerging IT hub. The second occurred in Mumbai, India's financial and glamour capital. The third happens everywhere.
Last week, it happened in Guwahati, Assam: a teenager was assaulted, molested, stripped. Tellingly, the thugs involved looked straight into the camera. They smirked into it. It's as if they said: In our testosterone-driven world, violence punishes 'transgression' and there's little law enforcers can do about it, because they're one of us — the same society produced us, the same patronage systems keep us ticking.
That rings chillingly true in a votebank-driven order whose numbers games and call to primordial loyalties — caste, creed, community — strengthen lobby groups and ultimately the mob against the individual. Look around. Leaders pledged to the Constitution wink at Taliban-style strictures. Law-keepers harass victims more than they do offenders, even cavalierly revealing their identity as happened in Assam. And no less than parliamentarians snarl at "par kattis", to protect male preserves. Routinely, authority blames the victim — especially if it's a woman. Denied her humanity, she is either goddess or harlot. She has no business having ambition, and even less having fun. Domestic toil is her lot; she can never own the night, when men are out to play..
