Do you think that women in India are changing much faster than the men? I asked this question last week at a talk organised by the Chennai chapter of the Sindhi Women’s Club. I was taken aback by the impassioned responses. Everybody nodded, shouted out yes, wanted to share stories…. What provoked my question was a lady telling us how, although she was from a conservative family, she had insisted on putting her daughter through Med school. She was now matchmaking for her daughter, a practising dentist, and she said, ‘What’s the point? The boy’s family does not ask about her degrees but whether she can cook’. Of course, there were a dozen suggestions from the audience to find a boy from another community, but her rather valid counter to that was ‘Why can’t I expect the men in my community to also change?’
What she was saying, obviously, did not mean that men have not taken to fashions, smart phones or fancy tech; her question was more layered — she was asking, first, why men have not changed in relation to the ways in which women have. And second, why our men are finding it so difficult to cope with women adopting new ways. Much of the tension today is caused by the differing pace at which men and women are responding to the rapid social changes around them. Women are embracing the brave new world enthusiastically because even the smallest thing they adopt is an improvement in the quality of their lives. Something as trivial as a salwar kameez instead of the sari is a leap in convenience and mobility. A cell phone means help or information is a call away. Instant noodles means less work in the kitchen. The average man sees each of these transformations as a threat. Every tiny way a woman modifies how she looks, behaves, earns, interacts with family and society, or exercises her potential and power displaces the existing status quo — and is a strong perceived threat for men.
This challenge from a section of society that the man did not have to take seriously, from a section, in fact, that he could actively debase, has come as a shock and fills him with resentment and baffled rage. Think of a lower middle class boy, trained from birth to think of himself as God’s gift to his family and friends, think of him as peon or driver, dealing with an educated woman who might be a manager, who earns ten times what he does, who might step out for a drink, in clothes that proclaim she doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Can you imagine the fury that could consume such a man, ingrained to think of women as inferior creatures made for his pleasure and service?
His impotence against the inevitability of change erupts as unspeakable violence, but he blames the instant noodles or jeans, the agents of the change. What these men are fighting for has very little to do with preserving culture or mores , and everything to do with preserving their power and territory. And the social churn will continue till the men catch up.
