by A. J. PHILIP
Boys pass comments on girls terming them sexy but sexy means beautiful and charming. We should not see it in a negative sense”. This pearl of wisdom has come from the National Commission of Women chief Mamta Sharma. She made the controversial statement while addressing a seminar on women empowerment organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Terapanth Mahila Mandal at Jaipur on February 25.
In doing so, she was able to capture the headlines in the Press. There were people like this writer who had not even noticed that she had been appointed head of the NCW, whose primary job is to protect the interests of women. Was it her job to advice women to take such “sexy” remarks in their stride, though the law specifically mentions that use of sexually-coloured words is a form of harassment and is punishable?
Sharma’s comment was tantamount to the fence eating the crop. During my college days, the local Romeos did not use the word “sexy” for girls. They had a Malayalam substitute “charakku” (commodity). My students tell me that the Hindi equivalent is “maal”. Both are detestable words because they reduce women to an object like a bag of sugar. By no stretch of the imagination can “commodification” of women be acceptable.
I am not sure whether Mamta Sharma’s “sexy” comment was at the back of my mind when early last week I went to the National Book Fair at Pragati Maidan. Every year I visit the Fair for the sheer pleasure of seeing books, holding them in hand and leisurely thumbing their pages. A nicely produced book is, in fact, a beauty to behold. I found the Penguin stall very attractive. They have recently brought out some best-sellers like Amartya Sen’s “The Argumentative Indian” and P. Sainath’s “Everybody Loves a Good Drought” in a new format and at affordable prices.
To drive home the point that the worth of a book is not measured in terms of its newness, they had placed in the middle of the stall, an old Ambassador car, painted in Penguin’s colour combination, calling it the Penguin car. I found the car “sexier” than the Fusions, the Swifts and the Palios that have pushed out of road the grand old Ambassador about which it was said that every part of it made sound except the horn.
It is always claimed that books have become expensive and have gone out of the reach of the common man. However, this is not said about cigarette and liquor prices which, too, have been going up. What I noticed at the Book Fair was that every stall recorded brisk sale of books. It shows that the habit of reading and buying books has been growing. At Om Books, I had to stand in a long queue to buy a book of bedtime stories for my grandson.
I wish my former colleague Chetna Banerjee, who wrote a highly imaginative book for children in which carrots and lady fingers are adorable characters that titillate the imagination of the tiny tots, had seen the brisk sale of children’s books and was encouraged enough to write another one. Ruskin Bond’s books, too, recorded good sales.
The first book I picked up was Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (Vintage), which I always wanted to read but kept pending. When it was first published in Paris in 1949, it was an instant success with 20,000 copies sold in the first week itself. She got encomiums and brickbats in equal measure. While the Vatican included it in the list of prohibited books, it was soon translated into several languages and made the author a cult figure.
Like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was in the news last week for the claim that it had baptised Mahatma Gandhi, I am a latter-day student of feminism. My interest in the subject was aroused mainly by my former colleague Pamela Philipose, who wrote an eminently readable weekly column “Straight Face” in the “Indian Express”.
When I left the paper a decade ago, my colleagues made a collection and bought some books for me. It was Pamela who chose them. One of the books was on the Capability Approach jointly authored by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. She probably knew that I was about to join Pratichi (India) Trust, set up by Sen with his Nobel Prize money.
The idea was originally articulated by Sen in the eighties but it was their collaboration that took it to a new level. The capability approach theory laid the foundation for the UN Human Development Index that plays a major role in policy making all over the world. A few weeks back, I interviewed the Oxford scholar Sabina Alkire, who had also done considerable work on the subject and wrote about it in this column. What Sen, Nussbaum and Alkire argue is that there are certain human capabilities which every democracy should support.
Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished and sheltered, being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction and being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise are some of the capabilities.
In practical terms, a wealthy Indian woman might have less “capability” than a poor Swedish woman – because of the sexist society she lives in. In “Sex and Social Justice” (Oxford) Nussbaum argues powerfully how sex is used to deny justice to women, even gay men. The sexual harassment she faced at Harvard and the difficulties she as a young mother underwent when she could not find help in bringing up her daughter had played a role in shaping her views on sexuality. I saw a very interesting one-hour video of Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies of the University of California at Berkley interviewing Nussbaum.
The interview threw light on how Nussbaum, who dabbled in acting while reading literature, was actually pursuing philosophy! When she became the first woman ever elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard, the question of what to call her arose. Someone suggested that since the masculine for ‘fellow’ was ‘hetairos,’ she should be called a ‘hetaira,’ which did not mean ‘fellowess,’ but was, in fact, Greek for ‘prostitute’.
Last week the “Indian Express” reported Janata Party leader Subramania Swamy asking Minister of State V. Gopalaswamy a bit loudly at a public function, “Where is your Madam?” He was asking him about Congress Chief Sonia Gandhi, who had gone abroad for medical purposes. Would he have asked Sushma Swaraj in the same vein, “Where is your Sir?” about A.B. Vajpayee, who has not been keeping good health? Literary felicity is a weapon used against women.
If Nussbaum was called “hetaira”, Congress leader and nominated member of the Rajya Sabha Mani Shankar Aiyar, once called Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa a “gangster’s moll” which also means a “prostitute”. While Nussbaum merely contemplated suing Harvard and then moved on to other universities to build up a formidable career in philosophy and feminism, Jayalalithaa hauled Aiyar over the coals for his sexist remark.
All Aiyar’s attempts to defend the word were like the attempts to clean the bloody hand of Lady Macbeth, who realises that “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”. Nussbaum is no stranger to India. In fact, the photograph on the cover page of “Sex and Social Justice” is that of a sari-clad Indian woman.
As part of her research, Nussbaum made frequent trips to India to study the problems of poor women. She advised programs aimed at increasing female literacy in India and the prosecution of domestic violence. Nussbaum had little patience with those who accused her of foisting “foreign” values on other cultures. “It is better to risk being consigned by critics to the ‘hell’ reserved for alleged Westernizers and imperialists,” she wrote in “Sex and Social Justice,” “than to stand around in the vestibule waiting for a time when everyone will like what we are going to say.”
Mamta Sharma’s “sexy” remark was not the sole motive for buying “The Second Sex”. Though it is older than the Indian Republic, the copy I bought was a new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. It was the first unabridged version in the English language and was published in 2010. Any book has to be read in the context in which it is written.
P. Kesav Dev’s “Odayilninnu” (From the gutters) makes no sense to someone who has never seen a hand-pulled rickshaw which can still be seen in some areas of Kolkata. Similarly, Simone de Beauvoir wrote the book when adult franchise was still a dream for women of many European countries where they also got lesser wages than men for the same kind of work. The worldview of the author of the landmark work in the history of feminism is reflected in the two quotations with which the book begins.
One is from Pythagoras who says, “There is a good principle which created order, light and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness and woman” and the other is from Poulain de la Barre who says, “Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion because they are both judge and party”. And then, buried in the book is the author’s own famous line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”.
Now I know why H.M. Parshley, who first translated the book, felt compelled to abridge the book a bit. He removed what he thought were references too explicit for the young and the old. The author explains why women have been forced to accept a place in society secondary to that of men, despite the fact that women constitute half the human race. Supporting her arguments with data from biology, physiology, ethnology, anthropology, mythology, folklore, philosophy and economics, she documents the status of women throughout history, from the age of hunter-gatherers to the mid-20th century.
As I read her, it is difficult to disagree with Simon de Beauvoir on many points. The book also explains why feminism of the kind she advocates does not appeal even to women. To portray menstruation, defloration, love-making, breastfeeding and motherhood with paranoid hostility is to put off many readers. In contrast, widowhood seems to appeal better to the author.
Though she describes love-making in the harshest words possible, she had many lovers, including long-time partner Jean-Paul Sartre who complemented each other. What she wanted was existential freedom for women. It is a different matter that she would be constructed by others as a mythical antithesis to women’s lot. To some this meant she was frigid and a nymphomaniac, to others a feminist heroine.
I have a doctor friend, who is a relative of M.O. Mathai, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s long-time personal secretary. Mathai in his old age published an autobiographical work in which the final chapter “She” was withdrawn at the last minute because it was written in the manner and style, as the publisher claimed, of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. It did not require much imagination to know what “She” contained.
My friend, who reserves the choicest epithets for his uncle, gave him a piece of his mind before the man, who claimed that he, not Nehru, took all the momentous decisions, died in Chennai, unwept and unsung. When his body was taken to the burial ground, there were few in the cortege.
At a time when Class X students gang-rape a classmate in Delhi, it is a pity that women leaders like Mamta Sharma justify sexist comments. Women want a level-playing field, not sexist admirations. Recently someone asked me on Facebook: “Do you see your mother and sister in every woman you meet”? I answered, “Sometimes I see in a woman a colleague or a friend or a fellow worker or a subordinate or a superior or a business person or a sales person or a bank clerk or…”
A. J. Philip can be reached at ajphilip@gmail.com