Each year, a single day is set aside to celebrate what is, essentially, fifty percent of humanity. International Women’s Day reminds and reassess, celebrates and debates. It takes stock of progress the world has made in closing that yawning gap between genders. Each year, March arrives riding a wave of events and programmes, debates and panels centred on women— a packed month, full and exciting.
And then it leaves, strangely quiet and spent. As if a single day, a single month, were enough.
Sometimes, though, the echoes remain. The two books launched at a women’s day special organised by Harper Collins India are part of that echo, containing within themselves two incredibly difficult problems, addressed head on in voices both intrepid and real. Jaishree Mishra’s ‘A Love Story for My Sister” remembers two horrific, violent crimes— their victims eighteen year olds born centuries apart. Sowmya Rajendaran’s “The Lesson” nudges, out of fiction, the very real issue of a world that lives in disgust of rape and violence against women, but is unable to recognise the gender biases and discrimination it has internalised.
Excerpts from an interview with Sowmya Rajendran:
Tell us How did “The Lesson” come about?
This book started off as a blogpost. The first chapter of the book is actually from there. I had put up these fictional pieces on my blog. The idea for this came when I read this report on the newspaper which said that a judge in the lower courts had actually justified rape by saying that this rapist was staying away from his family. The victim was a child. My way of coping with most things is to deal with it in a sarcastic way, add some humour to it. A lot of people responded to it. Since people seemed to get it, I continued in this vein, and did a few more stories on the blog. And after a certain point, I thought that I should weave it all together and make a plot out of it. That’s how the idea came.
You wrote the post before the Nirbhaya case, which happened while you were writing the book. How did the case affect the book?
The first blogpost was a few months before the Nirbhaya case, in September 2012. I think I completed the book in 2013. What changed for me there was that the parents, in the Nirbhaya case, were not ashamed of their daughter. They named her and did not blame her. I felt that that was a very dramatic point. This plays into my book.
I don’t feel like there is a magic button to stop gender-based violence. I feel what we can change is the culture of shame that surrounds it. Especially change how survivors feel about themselves. I feel in this case as well as in the case of Sunitha Krishnan, Suzette Jordan, these are women who have undergone this but are not ashamed of themselves. That is the kind of voice I wanted coming out of this book.
Also, my masters is in Gender Studies, and I’ve been in the field for quite a while. For me, it didn’t take a Nirbhaya to be horrified or angry. Especially after my daughter was born in 2011, I felt like I had reached my breaking point.
The book critiques gender biases, discriminations and certain institutions by using sarcasm and black humour…
One of the things I critique in the book is the institution of marriage itself. All these things are so tied in with ideas we have about gender-based violence. How a girl is brought up, how her reputation is something we all have to safeguard, because eventually she has to get married. The book talks in a sarcastic way about all these things. The change can only happen when we critique these institutions and people see how all these are tied in. when they see a newspaper report they are shocked, but they don’t understand in what ways they contribute to this culture…I mean men and women, not just men. So these are things the book talks about.
There is no lightness in the text at all. I don’t think I have dealt with it in a haha way. But the reason why I used this black humour technique is because incidents happen, but what we tend to do is to call the people involved animals and distance ourselves from them. My approach is to show that these people are ones who come from us. They are part of the same fabric. This is an attempt to show all the characters in the book as familiar characters. There are little bits which I have introduced in the books which might incite an oh-I-do-that-too moment. The idea is to make them relatable and also show the horror of it.
Whether it’s in bookshops or in discussions and debates, women’s issues have somehow managed to remain women’s issues, and women’s writing is slotted similarly too. How far do you think this keeps the issues from becoming what they really are— human rights violations?
I think it can go either way. You see women’s writing slotted all together. Men hardly go towards that shelf, they feel hesitant, ashamed. I know men who put the books in other covers and read them, since they do find the books interesting.
But I also think that when you talk about women in writing, we cannot exclude the gender angle, not in any profession actually. I would say that women in writing is something like that. For a Jane Austen, the subjects she chose, the life she led and wrote in, with constant interruptions that did play a huge role in her books. So I would say the three books we are going to discuss today are strongly influenced by our identity as women.
I don’t believe in slotting the actual books as for women or men though. I don’t think it serves any purpose. You usually find books on weight loss, feminist fiction etc. all clubbed together under the women’s section, which is pretty funny because the feminist fiction might be critiquing fat shaming.
But do you think it’s imperative that in dialogues about women’s issues, men need to be actively involved?
It’s not like men haven’t been invited to the event, it’s just that it’s convenient for them to ignore it. I don’t think we need to go out of our way. Especially for men in Delhi, where there is so much conversation, so much debate. So I would say that they should also make an effort. I see a little bit of a change, earlier on social media you wouldn’t find guys talking about women’s issues, but that’s happening now.
I would say it’s a very small beginning.
Gender constructs are so ingrained in us that it’s hard to fight them. When a man rapes a woman people know it’s wrong. What they don’t understand is the little ingrained ideas which led to that.
