Anindita Sengupta

…on this whole Oxford Poetry fiasco, and then I’ll stop (or maybe, not). But apparently our nominee AK Mehrotra had this to say:

“From India where I live, these extra-literary goings-on appear more unfortunate than amusing. I hope that some lessons are learnt from this, not least that the private lives of poets should, occasionally, be allowed to stay private.”

Sexual harassment = a man’s ‘private life’?

Dennis Loy Johnson at Moby Lives has been covering this quite a bit. Katy Evans Bush, who also wrote a piece on this at Guardian’s Cif, left a comment at Moby Lives which nails it:

I quoted Hermione Lee on my blog and I quote her again in my CiF piece, saying: “We are purveyors of poetry, not chastity.” As if it were just a sexual peccadillo.

Funnily enough, to the girl who was told that, unless she slept with him he would prevent her play (written for his course) from being produced, it probably didn’t seem like it was just about sex. It was more like being directly about her academic record. And if I’m not mistaken she only went public with it in the end because she heard about two other girls who had had the same treatment; one of them became depressed and the other had left the course entirely.

I’m sure Professor Lee, the great feminist biographer, would have expected to be taken more seriously than that when she was a student.

A culture that can’t even distinguish “sex” from the adjective “sexual” that modifies, in this case, the noun “harassment” isn’t anywhere near being ready even to debate the vexed question of whether this should debar Walcott from what is essentially a guest lectureship, not a pedagogic role.

The worst part is that Padel’s unfortunate behaviour has made people forget that the charges against Walcott were serious, and whether he should have been debarred or not was a serious question. It’s a question worth engaging with, because it cuts to the heart of what we expect from poets and public figures, and what we think of the relationship between ethics and poetry.

Instead, now Walcott is wronged hero, Padel is humiliated vamp, and all the real issues can go right back where they belong — under those university carpets. Plus you have some poets making vapid, dismissive statements about the whole issue like ‘who cares?’ or ‘what matters is that Poetry has suffered’ as if poetry exists in some sort of vacuum unaffected by (and un-affecting of) the real world. As if what happens in the real world, including sexual harassment, were not important to poetry at all.

The poetosphere has been abuzz with news about Derek Walcott’s dropping out of the Oxford Poetry Professor race because according to The Guardian, a  “100 academics mailed organizers missives an 1982 allegation of sexual harassment leveled against the poet.” Some poets posted notes about this on Facebook as well and some of the comments were along the lines of  ‘this is a small matter which should not come in the way of his being elected.’  Notice also that the Guardian article diminishes the allegations by alluding to them as part of a ’smear campaign’. I’m not advocating quick blame but easy vindication is also disturbing. Why are people so eager to believe that Walcott is blameless in this matter? Or to forgive him for any ’small mistakes’ he ‘may’ have committed?

Being a good (even great) poet doesn’t exempt you from human responsibility, does it? Or are poets such a back-patting, incestuous community that we are willing to overlook anything when the person at the other end is ‘one of us’?

The question here isn’t about the quality of Walcott’s poetry, which I will continue to read and appreciate. The question is about a hugely prestigious position of responsibility where he would have had power over students and been viewed as a role model. Sexual harassment is a pretty serious thing in this context.

Seth Abramson weighs in on this at his blog:

…my concern is less about Oxford University particularly, and more for (as I mentioned in my last post on Walcott, see link in next paragraph) the message it sends to young female writers, and for the possibility that Walcott, howsoever ceremonial his prospective professorship, might again be positioned to cruelly exploit vulnerable young students for his own sexual gratification.

An extract from a letter that I got from the WOMPO poetry listserve:

We are a group of women students at Oxford University and find this shocking and insulting. We would welcome your help, in demonstrating to the University and the British public, that Walcott’s sexual harassment and blackmail of women students are not mere “allegations,” as the British press assert, but a matter of record, with deeply offensive transcripts available in books and online.

Quite the opposite of Professor Lee’s assertion, we feel that electing a proven campus sexual predator, who is on record as admitting harassment in at least two cases, would shame not honour Oxford. The post is voted for by teachers at Oxford University. We feel the English Faculty is suppressing Walcott’s record. No one in Oxford or Britain knows or believes it. We find it scandalous, almost unbelievable, that it is a woman educator who is Walcott’s chief supporter in Oxford and in public.

Many of the other members of the listserv commented on how common it is for young female poets to have to deal with sexual harassment in class. I personally know two people who have suffered sexual harassment at renowned British universities and I’ve heard of many others. There’s no reason to believe that poetry courses are any different. Turning a blind eye to allegations or dismissing them as rumour probably stems partly from our eagerness to believe that poets are somehow nobler human beings above such mortal evil. But such ridiculous myths should not come in the way of justice and fair play. In most other situations, allegations of this sort would have affected the person’s chances, I imagine, and rightly so. Walcott’s withdrawal from the race is hardly a mark of sacrifice or deserving of pity. It’s probably a sign of common sense on his part because he realised that the protests would gain momentum.

An article in The Hindu about the women’s vote:

The importance of the women’s vote is not confined to the three States with prominent women leaders. The evidence gathered by National Election Study series at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies shows that this vote makes a difference all over the country. An overwhelming majority of women say that they take their own decisions when they vote. The evidence also shows that their voting pattern is different from men.

The women’s vote famously worked for NTR in Andhra Pradesh and Bansi Lal in Haryana, when prohibition was an issue. A reckless excise policy in Rajasthan may have led women to vote in a big way against Vasundhara Raje. If the Congress is the overall national beneficiary of this ‘gender gap,’ the picture is variegated at the State level: women voters favour the Left in West Bengal, the TDP in Andhra and the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. More than the presence of a woman politician, what attracts women voters is the ability of a political party to address some of the issues that affect them. In an election where a small one per cent vote shift can lead to 15-20 Lok Sabha seats changing hands and upset all equations for government formation, small changes in the women’s vote can be decisive. If this vote does not feature much in discussion on counting day, it is not because it did not matter — it’s only because it remained invisible.

One of the challenges of writing for a foreign media product is that context-setting eats up a lot of words  and one has less space for actual opinion. So here are some related thoughts. Before writing this, I asked a whole bunch of urban, educated women whether they had taken gender issues into consideration while voting. Most said they hadn’t–either because they did not feel that any party really addressed gender issues or because they didn’t think the government could do anything / was  responsible for gender issues. The latter surprised me because I tend to look at safety, for example, as a governmental responsibility. Ensuring that streets and other public spaces are safer for women is certainly something the government can do. BUT some said that they had not voted for the BJP because of the party’s regressive gender stances. So there was gender motivation at play even if in a roundabout way.

This article reminded me of the defensiveness attached to writing from my location as a middle class, educated, privileged woman. Some usual reactions: ‘how dare you talk about Mangalore when there are so many worse things happening’ or ‘look at women in Saudi Arabia’. I often write about the urban, educated women because a) I know the most about it and b) I believe we need to be more involved in thinking, engaging and demanding more in terms of gender rights. To put it simply, we have more time and energy to do so. Nor are we unaffected by gender issues. After all, domestic violence, sexual assault or female foeticide are not restricted to the poor and rural. It’s amazing to me how many women are a bit blinkered when it comes to this, or don’t see the patterns of gender violence in their own lives because they are privileged in other ways. At the very basic level, female foeticide causes there to be many more men than women just about everywhere. This cannot be safe or healthy for anyone, at any level. Not all of us can work in the villages or at the grassroots level. Nor am I advocating that women in corporate jobs give up their perks or salaries and become activists. But all of us can think, write and vote. And we should.

In related news, something rather scary happened recently. I was returning from a friend’s place late at night when a man on a motorbike started driving alongside me, leering through my window and trying to get to me to stop. I was scared because I realised that if he stopped his bike in front of my car, I would be forced to stop as well. So we participated in some kind of bizarre road race with him trying to overtake me and me trying to stay ahead. When he turned into my lane after me, I was shaken. I stopped outside my gate and honked madly. The security guard came running out and the man whirled about and rode off. I wonder what he had in mind and why he bothered to follow me up to there at all. Perhaps, if I lived in an independent house or in a darker lane, he would have waylaid me once I got out of the car. I am grateful to Ganesh, who has a thick moustache and quick feet, for saving my day. The next day, I bought a pepper spray can. Now, I’m primed for the people who will say ‘but, think about how much worse it could be’ or ‘be thankful you have the money to buy pepper spray’ or ‘you have a car? you have forfeited your right to complain about anything ever again’ — because that’s exactly the sort of argument some do offer. Which is bs of the highest order. I have every right to go out and not get followed. And no I don’t have to be okay with it because women in Saudi Arabia are so much worse off. And no, I don’t have to wait until after I get raped to protest.

A version of this is up at Guardian Cif. (The headline and tagline there are not mine.)

As India went to elections over the last few weeks, a small section of Indian women exercised their vote to protest against regressive gender stances. A recent spate of attacks on women by Hindu fundamentalist groups in Karnataka probably brought home the need to do so. The vigilante groups are widely believed to enjoy the support of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which explains why some women among India’s educated middle classes adopted an anti-BJP ballot philosophy. A first-time voter said, “Certain parties have more absurd ideas about what women should or shouldn’t be doing than others. The sort of thing that happened in Mangalore worries me and I kept it in mind while voting.”

Another expressed similar antipathy on her blog: “The one party I would absolutely not vote for is the BJP because I believe their Hindutva ideology is regressive to the point of slotting women in historically repressive domestic roles and they’ve taken the country back to the dark ages, with their heinous crimes and divisive rhetoric.”

Noted feminist author Ammu Joseph said: “I did choose to vote for a candidate I perceived as on the whole progressive and possibly ‘winnable’. I have long ruled out ever voting for a certain party (the BJP) because of the whole package that they represent in terms of ideology and attitudes towards women as well as other sections of society.

Meanwhile, some candidates of other parties addressed issues such as women’s freedom, mobility and safety this time. Even if this was just a way to strike at the opposition’s knees, it is a welcome sign that such issues found space in political discourse at all. In India, there is usually little on women’s issues in party campaigns and manifestoes. Most women vote without taking gender-related needs into consideration.

Among the poor and rural, other factors—caste and religious affiliations or more basic needs—trump gender. The urban and educated seem sceptical about the government’s ability to ensure safety or freedom, or resigned to the fact that they are a minority demographic. In a country where many lack basics like food, water and electricity, there is also a certain guilt associated with asking for anything more. But given our dismal tract record in terms of gender development, women’s problems need to be given more attention. And it’s time the country’s elite realised that they should take the lead in demanding this for all women.

At the other apex of the gender-and-politics conundrum, gender skew remained a cause for worry but there was some hope in the form of a candidate like dancer and activist Mallika Sarabhai. Sarabhai, who faced BJP head honcho LK Advani in Ahmedabad, was eagerly cheered by liberal intellectuals across the country. In the past, Sarabhai has used art to focus attention on gender bias and communal hatred. Her choice of logo—the harmonium in red and purple—is careful of what it reflects. Purple is the international colour of women’s rights and red, she explains, is the colour of human blood, regardless of faith, caste or wealth. Cast and communal politics typically play a huge role in determining who India’s largely poor, rural and immensely caste-conscious vote bank will choose. By putting women at the centre of her campaign, Sarabhai departed from the general trend.

There are other signs that women in India are preparing to play a larger role in politics, either as voters or as candidates. In some places like south Karnataka, there were more women voters than men. Then, politics has long been viewed as too dirty or corrupt for women to enter but now in small towns, many women are wetting their feet in local political bodies. In the coming years, they are likely to become a stronger force and enter national politics. All these are small arrows hurled in the right direction. It’s too early for unbridled optimism especially in the context of low voter turnouts but perhaps these ripples of change will become a whirlpool at some point. One lives in hope.

It’s still hanging over our heads: the neat hair argument. I remember when the hair-straightening craze started a few years back, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with my hair which is wavy and temperamental, the opposite of neat. (No silky waterfalls here.) It was all those adverts. Plus the nuns I grew up with had drummed into my head that hair must always look neat. It seemed like the adult world complied with such ridiculous notions.

I couldn’t bring myself to endure the unhealthy manipulation of permanent straightening. So I settled for using the hair-dryer and brush rather fiercely.

But it was tedious. And what a waste of time! And after one too many person had said, ‘oh your hair looks different all the time,’ I just chopped it off.

Now I’m growing it back, without interference. It is being given free run and every time I see it being its not curly-not straight, hyperactive self, I feel a little surge of pride like I’m bringing up someone particularly well.

Of course, I don’t have to go to places which demand strait-lacing of any kind so it’s easy. I wonder what I would do if I still had to attend client meetings, board meetings, weekly meetings and other such in some stuffy office. The pressure on women working in mainstream professions can be formidable. In a setting where you’re fighting to be ‘taken seriously’ most waking hours of your day, you’re unlikely to do anything that detracts from your cause. Add the public face element like in tv news or public relations or a host of others, and you’re even more screwed because they can actually demand you look a certain way. Between losing your job and losing your waves / curls, most women would choose the latter.

But there are enough women who don’t need to change their natural looks because of their profession but do it anyway. The urge to look like role models, the urge to fit in, the urge to belong — all hefty forces. But can we start fighting them, please?

Also, please read Nisha Susan’s story (in Tehelka again) on how we are creating an army of clones.

***

Also, Jeanette Winterson reviews Alice Oswald’s new collection and talks about the role of nature in poetry, even today.

We can expect poetry to be relevant to our lives, but our lives include the inner and the mythic, the creative and the inventive. Our lives are lived on Earth, however much tarmac gets between us and the soil, and our lives are lived with the Moon and the stars above our heads, whatever the street lighting. Tarmac and street lighting are not more relevant than the estuary marsh or the Moon, only more pressing, which is a good reason for poetry to remind us of other truths.

***

And this is what it looks like when the sea explodes.

In Kakkabe, high up on a mountain at the foot of Thadiyendamol, I meet E. Girl-woman who’s into peace and climbing peaks. I fall in love with the way she speaks — I think I keep her talking just to hear her form words. E is  from Moscow and wants to live in Nice some day, by the blue sea. She’s currently studying yoga in Mysore. She runs a tourism business through the internet using her smartphone. She could be a cliche but she’s not. She’s rather cool, in fact, though her enthusiasm for doshas and chakras is (ironically) alien to me.

We get lost a lot. On our way up to Thadiyendamol and back, we try shortcuts, jump the wrong walls, run up deeply mossed steps to the other side of the mountain. There is a feeling of constantly traveling sideways. Then there are the women. At a dead-end in the forest, a bland white house and in the verandah, a woman who fixes us with her mad eyes as if she knows our deepest secrets. Later, after a crossing of streams, a tribal woman who smiles in relief as if she likes unexpected guests, gives us water from her groundwater tap. I am struck by our differences, all of us, women standing on the same small bit of mountain.

About E, what stays with me are not the specifics so much as a ‘mood’, the air she carries about her — of adventure bordering on foolhardiness, and the kind of innocence that Indian girls must lose pretty quickly. E is not wary, furtive, careful, or cold around men she passes on the streets. She smiles, says hello. They look bemused, shy or amused depending on their age and general proclivities. When I am with her during these exchanges,  I look away, am often caught between grimace and smile. You see, I’m not used to such warmth with strange men. I’m more the ‘look through – look down – look sternly ahead’ kinda girl. This difference in our behaviour makes me think of the places we grew up in, the ways in which we grew up.

I wonder what it would be like to walk down a road and not see men as  potential trouble. To not shuffle or scuttle or sidle by.

***

After I got back, I rather instinctively googled  ‘russia women’ to find out more about gender constructs in modern-day Russia.  I say ‘instinctively’ because if I had stopped to think, I would have remembered the stereotype and expected the gadzillion dating and marriage sites I was hit with. Of course, I quickly modified my search with ‘gender relations’, ‘freedom of mobility’.  But I discovered little because the sea of dating sites and other stereotypes swamped everything else.

There were more putrid examples like this, but also reasonably innocent-sounding ones. This blogger talks about this phenomenon in some detail:

According to Google, all Russian women strive for one thing: a marriage with a foreigner. The first link that came up stated “All Russian Women Want to Escape from Russia” –  with an only intention of finding a foreign partner, of course….The ‘Russian woman’ as been turned into a brand by the internet.  I am surprised no one has registered the Russian Woman trademark yet. (Or has someone?)

Clearly, we have no other desires but to popularize ourselves with handsome foreign strangers who will whip out their cyber guides, make us borsch, and will then whisk us away from our homeland. Do women in other cultures have a better digital reputation?

So using the same, rather loose attitude-mapping tool, I googled ‘India women’. The top link was something about ‘100 beautiful Indian women’ but most of the other links on the first page dealt with women’s problems in one form or another — an article on the Mangalore bar attacks, a UN report on women’s status, a dated, bleak census report on women’s health. And I wondered if all of us are just traveling sideays after all, in our own corners of the world.

It’s cool. It’s cheeky. It’s clever. I’m talking about the Pink Chaddi Campaign. Women all over the country are gathering pink chaddis and sending them to Muthalik as a Valentine’s Day present. The plan is to strike disgust in the teensy little non-heart of our chief moral guardian — and to loudly assert the fact that the bogeymen of morality, dignity, chastity etc cannot be used to take our freedom away. Gifting panties may seem like a softer option than dung bombing his house but it makes a strong statement on our collective lack of ’shame’, the one quality he’s trying so desperately to instill in us.

And apparently, the organisers have planned a press conference to announce this because the point is also to generate talk. By cleverly using the media, these hoodlums have been spreading their propaganda far and wide. Time to pay them back in their coin, what?

So, pitch in with your panty power. The collection point is:

BANGALORE
The Pink Chaddi Campaign,
C/O Alternate Law Forum,
122/4 Infantry Road
(opposite Infantry Wedding House)
Bangalore 560001
Karnataka

Contact person: Nithin (9886081269)

Oh, as an aside, female underwear has been used as ammunition before.

The blogging resolution seems to have flagged already. But in my defence, I finally moved to my own domain. It’s been a bought plot lying vacant for a while so I’m feeling a real sense of achievement about this. Heh. Small pleasures. I’ve also been traveling. Last week, I was in Coorg and Kabini on work (yes, really) and then we drove through the Waynad hills down to Kannur on the Kerala coast. I haven’t really had time to wade through the 700 photos I’ve taken, but a few are up at Flickr.

With coffee bushes and sea shells on my mind, I had boycotted newspapers for a while so I was jerked back to rude reality on my return. A protest meet had been organised (quite on-the-fly) against the Mangalore incident on Tuesday by organisations like Vimochana, Alternative Law Forum and HHS. The turnout was smallish because it was so spontaneous. They’ve prepared an open letter to the government which is up at Ultra Violet.

As someone pointed out to me, acts of hooliganism against women happen every day in India. Yes, which is why we must protest each one that we can, especially when it happens close to home. When the BJP came to power in Karnataka, I remember many of us felt a palpable sense of fear. And increasingly, it is being validated. The fact that cultural identity is continually being closely tied to such beastly violence also means that we need dialogue on what our culture is, what it means to most of us, and how it’s changing. This is something that a statement by feminists like Sumi Krishna and Ammu Joseph points out. An extract:

We believe that the Mangalore assault was not an isolated episode by self-appointed “moral police” and their sympathisers who criminally took the law into their own hands, but that it is part of a pattern in the profoundly contested political struggle over what constitutes Indian traditions, religions and cultures. It is evident that in this instance the attackers were emboldened to carry out the unprovoked assault in a political environment that supports a particularly narrow and fanatical view of Indian culture as also a repressive attitude towards women.

And:

We strongly believe that the State and democratically minded citizens must stand up to the violent targeting of women and re-affirm our commitment to the human rights and civil liberties of all people. There can and should be dialogues on what constitutes “Indian-ness”, but regardless of the interpretations of Indian culture and traditions, the beating and molesting women cannot be condoned.

You can read the entire statement at UV and leave your name, location / affiliation in the comment space if you want be added to the signatories. We will collect them and send them to Sumi.

And here are some of the reactions from politicians. All from here.

“Women should not try to imitate men. Progress does not mean becoming males,” said Mridula Sinha, member of the BJP’s national executive. Bijoya Chakravarty, BJP’s national vice president, said in Assam that “it is not good for a young woman to go to a pub”.

In Jaipur, Gehlot told reporters: “It was being propagated that young boys and girls looked very good while going around the pubs and malls by holding their hands. I want to end that culture.”

“India is not Europe. Mushrooming of pubs is not part of the Indian culture,” said Communist Party of India state secretary Manju Kumar Majumdar.

Bring on the veils already.

Also, my post at Guardian Cif on this.

My first post for the Guardian blog,  ‘Comment is Free’, is up. Do read .

It’s about something fairly talked about here, which is the whole point. I also chose to talk about this — yet again damn it — because nothing is changing. I think it’s time to start yelling in chorus.

Interestingly, I hadn’t anticipated a particular type of response, which is the ‘why is it our business?’ from some (clearly) British readers. When Jess from The Guardian wrote to me saying they want to highlight Indian issues, particularly because they also have Asian readers, I thought the logic was pretty sound. I also imagined that most educated readers are interested in global issues now that the world is shrinking yada yada. Anyway, thankfully, such comments are in the minority.