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Literary Review
No laughing matter
IT is surprising how the working woman is still not an accepted figure in our country. A woman has always been working outside the house — in the fields, in the market, in salt fields, on the roads, and in other people's houses. But it is the professional woman, the woman who goes to teach or works in an office or is a doctor or a lawyer who is looked upon as the working woman. And it is this woman who is considered a traitor to her home for she is "abandoning" her home to go to work. "A woman must work only when there is an economic need" is an argument that has been put forth all the time as if work must be taken up only as a compulsion, not as a choice.
But last week things took even stranger turns with some people making some pronouncements because they considered themselves some kind of social reformers who were concerned about society and human beings. Last week in an apartment house nearby, they forced open a flat which had remained closed for the last two years. They found the skeleton of the occupant. He had been dead for two years. He occupied the whole of one floor and had told the neighbour below that he was going abroad. Obviously he had packed but had died before leaving. No one had bothered to find out if he had really left. The stink of the corpse they had attributed to the fish stink that is common in the Versova area. After two years, when the building was being repaired and a water pump had to be changed, they forced open the door and found the corpse. It is a sad story of how lonely deaths can be in a city. Some time back, in Bandra, they had found the skeleton of a person and the skeleton of his dog in a closed house. In the busy life of city, very often, those who live alone on their own, die alone, unattended.
Commenting on the incident, a minister in Maharashtra has spoken about the glories of small one-room tenements called chawls, which used to be there. Such things never happened in a chawl, he commented. He also joked that since the chawl system had common toilets, people always met while standing outside and even marriages got fixed while standing outside the toilets. It is true that such incidents are rare in a crowded tenement or in slum colonies. But some people have attributed this lack of bonding with the neighbours to the phenomenon of the working woman. If only the woman did not go out to work, there would be more of bonding with others around and such things won't happen is what some people have said. How simplistic can these self-appointed urban anthropologists be?
As a child I have spent time in a chawl where an aunt used to live. I don't know about marriages getting fixed while desperately waiting to empty one's bowels, but even reaching the common toilets skipping over puddles of urine and excreta of children used to be a morning circus which one undertook only as a part of existential hazards. And it is nice to romanticise the chawl as a place of camaraderie and bonhomie but I have seen the most violent incidents of wife-beating taking place here. And the neighbours never used to interfere saying that it was their ghar ka mamla (their own domestic affair). All that bonding people are talking about did not work then. Apart from domestic violence, which is a common occurrence, incidents of child sexual abuse and rape are also not uncommon in small tenements and slum colonies. Maybe someone will not die alone or remain dead for a long time in these places because the living quarters are so close that it would not be possible to bear the stink. But along the pavements of Mumbai often dead bodies lie and the office-going men who whiz past them in cars and buses and motorbikes could not care less probably because they leave all that bonding business to their wives at home.
It is not unusual for some amateur anthropologists to link all social evils to the phenomenon of the woman stepping out of her house unescorted because she feels independent enough to do so. If only the woman stayed at home, there would be fewer crimes and fewer tragedies, go the laments of some of these people who feel that they are the only ones thinking in terms of dignity of individuals. All social problems from juvenile delinquency to child prostitution, from water crisis to unemployment would disappear if women stayed at home and remained good housekeepers and mothers, some of them feel. The woman who goes out invites trouble for herself and others is a notion which has been in existence for a long, long time. One is reminded of the story of Marudhi of ancient Tamil country. Marudhi lived in Kaviripoompattinam which was ruled by a king called Kakanthan. One day she was returning after a bath in the river with her wet clothes still clinging to her body looking nowhere else except her toes. But the prince who saw her this way was overcome with desire and he went up to her and asked her if she would come with him. Madhuri was aghast and she ran into the temple of a divine spirit nearby and closed herself in. She cried out saying that she had never been unfaithful to her husband and when such women were supposed to command the rains, why this indignity of a proposal from a man? The divine spirit appeared as a woman before her and told her that no doubt she was a good wife, but she had been reading useless stories with great interest; not only that, she had dressed up well during festival times and attracted the attention of others. The man making indecent suggestions to her was because of all this. It looks like this divine spirit has not really left our shores and often gets into the bodies of some people who feel they have the right to tell women how to conduct their lives.
Not very long ago, a male journalist, thinking that he must raise a question on an issue that was bothering the entire society, took it upon himself to ask a guru if women could work. Of course, women could work, he was told — they could work from home. They could make pickles, appalams, and rasam powder and not ever leave the confines of their homes. One laughed then, using some choice terms for the said journalist, saying he got the very reply he wanted. But it does not seem to be a laughing matter any more. It becomes a matter of concern when these things get repeated once too often and responsible persons metamorphose into some kind of gurus telling people, especially women, how to live their lives.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
C.S. LAKSHMI
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