Sukrita Paul Kumar

1) the necessity of a more androgynous identity in writing and in life with reference to the Ardhanarishwara myth. I was impressed that she actually said ‘androgyny’ to this seemingly conservative audience without blinking. I also thought of this when I had to take the bus from Patiala to Amritsar and I chose to wear jeans. I find it extremely difficult to travel in salwar-kameez or saree and I think this has much to do with my associations with these garments as feminine, delicate, and therefore, vulnerable. In jeans, I feel less bound by my gender and therefore less bound by the constrictions placed on it by society. But this meant that I would have to do my reading, which was right before I caught my bus, wearing the same thing. Most of the others were dressed rather more traditionally. This makes me wonder about clothes, how loaded they are with gender constructs, and what a truly gender-neutral garment would look like.

2) the need for women’s writing to be mainstreamed in education as opposed to being treated as a niche subject. It’s astonishing that such a simple thing needs to be pointed out and fought for, but it’s true that women writers are, by and large , relegated to the women’s studies / feminism papers. I remember reading Toni Morrison and Attia Hossain in college as part of exactly such a paper. As if they were not part of the larger literary history / canon but only significant as ‘women’ writers. The other five papers we did, as far as I can remember, did not have a single text authored by a woman.

There was a session on ‘Why I Write’ which had five writers talking about their locus and labours. The common thread here seemed to be that writing is a a compulsion. It has a je ne sais quoi quality, a “I write because I must” sort of motivation. The only voice that was different was Marathi poet and writer Dr Jyoti Lanjewar who was rather strident about the necessity for socio-political engagement in writing. ‘How can I write romances when there is so much going wrong around me,’ she asked. Which was fine in itself but she also seemed frankly judgmental about those who do write said beleaguered romances. I have arguments with that sort of logic. Surely there is space for all kinds of writing. The more various, the merrier. I don’t see why people who live in terrible times and places should be deprived of their romance or fantasy or humour. If anything, they probably need it more. Such prescriptive approaches put me off but gatherings of this sort always bring out the vehement best (or worst) in people. Speech-making is inherently so conducive to extreme  positions that people tend to shear out any tentativeness from tone. But life is tentative at the best of times. (I’m tempted to add an ‘isn’t it’ at the end of that statement but I won’t because of this article.)

There was a symposium on ‘feminism in the Indian context’ in which I read a paper. There were some interesting points made about stereotypes perpetuated by religion, the silences of women affected by partition and so on. We were all coming at it from reasonably various viewpoints, which was good because it meant we didn’t say the same things. Some speakers relied heavily on examples from literature and there were at least two references to Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas. My talk was pretty simple and focused on the need to examine our own prejudices especially towards other women who we perceive as different. I drew more from posts and discussions we’ve had at Ultra Violet as opposed to literary texts–and later wondered why. Perhaps, because UV seems more ‘right here, right now’, a constantly updated motion picture? Apparently, some people in Punjabi heartland found some of my suggestions about sharing public spaces with sex workers and not expecting daughters-in-law to be deferential a bit ‘shocking’. Or so I was told later by one of the Akademi people. Funny because I was actually trying really hard to keep it tame (without actually slipping into bovine). Maybe next time I’ll talk about what I really think of the traditional institution of marriage. That should be fun.

More on the poetry in the next post…

The highest compliment in my grandmother’s book was “What a sweet girl! She keeps her mouth stitched up.” Of course, in Bengali, this has a nicer ring to it but it essentially means a girl who keeps quiet, who is silent in the face of adversity (and torture and ill-treatment), who endures. I grew up hearing this and, of course, consequently thought of myself as a very bad girl indeed. For as a child, I was what is commonly called ‘moophat’ in Hindi, loosely meaning brash and thoughtlessly expressive. Over the years, I mellowed (—or was made to?) and recently, I have sometimes found myself unable to speak even when it is urgently, desperately required.

Now, we know this scenario. It’s an old one. Women stop short of many things because they’re scared of being labeled loud, aggressive, and the dreaded ‘bitch’. Never mind that the reason they’re shrill sometimes is so that they won’t be silenced with a gentle slap from the old boy’s network. Between defiance and apologia is a thin line and we’re constantly scared of falling off. In this article, writer Verlyn Klinkenborg talks about a writing class he held where he noticed this:

Midway through lunch one day a young woman asked me if I noticed a difference between the writing of men and the writing of women. The answer is no, but it’s a good question. A writer’s fundamental problem, once her prose is under control, is shaping and understanding her own authority. I’ve often noticed a habit of polite self-negation among my female students, a self-deprecatory way of talking that is meant, I suppose, to help create a sense of shared space, a shared social connection. It sounds like the language of constant apology, and the form I often hear is the sentence that begins, “My problem is …” Even though this way of talking is conventional, and perhaps socially placating, it has a way of defining a young writer — a young woman — in negative terms, as if she were basically incapable and always giving offense. You simply cannot pretend that the words you use about yourself have no meaning. Why not, I asked, be as smart and perceptive as you really are? Why not accept what you’re capable of? Why not believe that what you notice matters?

Hilary Clinton faces a similar problem:

Education researcher Bernice Sandler and linguist Deborah Tannen have shown that women who speak in a conventionally “feminine” manner (soft volume, high pitch, upward inflection) are perceived as less competent, while those who speak in a more decisive (masculine) manner (lower pitch, downward inflection) are perceived as aggressive.

When Hillary conforms to the norms of feminine vocal comportment, she is too careful. When she raises her voice in passion, she is shrill. Lectern-thumping, emotionally charged rhetoric by a female candidate would be dismissed as hysterical. How, then, is a female presidential candidate to speak?

Glamour Magazine gave us advice on how to tackle this conundrum:

“Speak directly to male subordinates. Women tend to shy away from giving a blatant order, but men find the indirect approach manipulative and confusing.” Here women are told to speak directly to men, not because indirectness undermines their authority, but because men find it “manipulative and confusing”.

Firstly, why should we always modulate and modify ourselves? But even if we put that aside for the moment, years of conditioning is hard to break. I catch myself doing it sometimes more often than I’d like–voicing statements as questions, orders as pleas, sounding tentative when I’m not, sounding placatory, apologetic. I’ve noticed other women do it too. We do it because over time we have learned that this ‘manipulative and confusing’ technique is an easier, quicker way to get things done. We have learned to recognize raised hackles and thinly veiled ego bruises. We have learned to pat and smooth and ‘there-there’ our way through boardrooms and bedrooms. Frankly, it’s silly to tell little girls to be polite and sweet and all things nice and then expect them to grow up to be direct-talking, plain-speaking women who state their case without hemming and hawing, and hoping that they will not be labeled terrible things for simply stating their point.

At the same time, I can’t ignore the question and say we shouldn’t care because I’ve seen too often how it affects women in very practical ways. I’ve been privy to decision-making processes where women were excluded from important positions because they were not opinionated enough. Because they would not be able to ‘hold their own’ in a group of men. Because they were doers but not thinkers (in other words, they had not expressed their thoughts forcefully enough on too many occasions). Because they were viewed as terrific second-in-commands but not as leaders.

I went to an all-girls college and I often heard even the strongest, most confident women there say that they liked being in an environment where they could grow without having to compete with men. That they could express themselves better because there were no men around. It is astonishing how many of these really bright people went on to have no career or worklife (maybe out of choice but maybe not). Is it because they had not learned one of the most important aspects of coping with a career—dealing with men? Did they lose their voices when they stepped out of those hallowed pink portals and into grey tube-lit corridors? Or were they like untrained singers thrust onto the stage, unable to find the right pitch?

I wish there were easy answers to this issue of women’s voice, tone and speech patterns but there aren’t. Here are some of the questions instead:

• If women natively have a different speech pattern, why should they have to change it? What are the advantages that ‘feminine’ speech patterns accord women and society? Why should we not try to preserve them?
• How much of this is genetic and how much is created by environment?

What we say and how we say it is inextricably linked to who we are. While some of it may be biologically defined, a lot of it has to do with how we were brought up and who we were to conditioned to become. It would be useful to remove the gender-based environmental conditioning as far as possible and then see whether men and women do speak all that differently. Parents, families and teachers need to stop placing stress on how (and how much) girls should speak. And it is astonishing how much (consciously and unconsciously) we still perpetrate this sort of conditioning.

Things are changing though and those in their twenties now are bolder, less hesitant and reticent, less worried about being ‘polite’–and hopefully—less bothered about being ‘sweet’. (I mean really, what are we? Stacks of mithai at Kanshiram halwai’s?) Certainly, I don’t hear people talking about ‘keeps her mouth stitched up’ as a virtue anymore.

As for me, my real self is still in there somewhere, kicking away every now and then. And at age thirty, my family’s hold on me relatively weaker, I’m (re)learning to let it out more and more. But having grown up with contradictory messages, finding the right pitch is still a challenge. And yes, the original question still gnaws: why is it always us who must work so bloody hard at it?