Almost. To actually have your own Twitter-gate you’ve got to be Tharoor. At least.

OK, to cut the cackle, this is what happened:

Early one morning last week I was gulping down breakfast (which usually happens in my office, poor me) while checking out some favourite haunts online when I saw this tweet from N Ram of The Hindu:

Read ‘India’s cultural pluralism its best defence’:http://bit.ly/167YOa: on Vande Mataram & what constitutional secularism entails

The article he’d linked to was an op-ed in his newspaper on the BJP’s predictably knee-jerk reaction to the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind’s decision to uphold the Deoband clerics’ 2006 fatwa on singing Vande Mataram. Exasperated and disgusted by the piece (I’ll get to why in a bit) I tweeted the following to N Ram:

@nramind About http://bit.ly/167YOa: Secularism is Vande Mantaram being insignificant – both the singing and the not-singing.5:28 PM Nov 4th from web

Pat came the reply:

@LavanyaK: Q:’Secularism is Vande Mantaram being insignificant[?]‘ A: Read the Indian Constitution & Supreme Court’s Bommai judgment.5:35 PM Nov 4th from web in reply to LavanyaK

And:

@LavanyaK: If you don’t like ’secularism’, try ‘uncompromising protection of cultural pluralism’ & respect for ‘the idea of India’.5:37 PM Nov 4th from web in reply to LavanyaK

So there it was folks, my moment of defamation — accused of being a Hindu/ BJP sympathiser who knew nothing about secularism, much less the Constitution of India!

He’d clearly misunderstood my tweet as a sarcastic question about whether Vande Mataram was so insignificant as to be trifled with. Whereas what I’d tweeted was a straightforward comment, a statement, that Vande Mataram really is so insignificant that both singing it and resolving not to sing it are meaningless acts that shouldn’t matter to anyone. Should I explain the semantics of it, I wondered. But the prospect of doing it in 140 characters was just too daunting.  (I think it would make a good academic paper — The Pedagogical Uses of Twitter. What say, folks?)  So instead I just had some fun and posted some more provocative tweets:

@nramind Secularism is an integral part of the Const as the Bommai ruling held. But singing & not singing VM are unrelated to secularism.5:59 PM Nov 4th from web

@nramind To connect secularism with VM is nonsense.5:44 PM Nov 4th from web in reply to nramind

@nramind Plenty of people cannot sing VM. For various reasons. I suppose they are not part of the idea of India. 5:43 PM Nov 4th from web in reply to nramind

I seriously don’t get it. How does resolving to sing or not sing anything prove your secularism/patriotism/ any effing ism?5:29 PM Nov 4th from web

But maybe he’d cottoned on by then.

I remember my dad telling me that there was a time many decades ago when the national anthem used to be played in cinemas after the movie’s end, but that the practice had to be stopped because people usually didn’t stand in respectful silence or join the chorus; instead they merely jostled to get out as quickly as they could. Naturally. What’s respect got to do with it?! The powers that be realized, I suppose, that respect cannot be forced! After all, the Hindu majority has rights, doesn’t it?

Personally I don’t much care for either the anthem or Vande Mataram and am always restless when expected to stand up for the anthem. Many of us feel no urge to prove our loyalties, if any, and certainly don’t wear our patriotism on our sleeves. It seems to me that the resolution about Vande Mataram  is merely an attempt to score god-knows-what points. I wonder if the ordinary Muslim really cares about Vande Mataram, its being sung or not sung. It’s an issue for the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and the Deoband clerics precisely because education, employment, healthcare and the like are not issues. And it’s an issue for the BJP because it’s much-needed oxygen for them.

For the likes of N Ram, India is divided into two neat categories: those who support the BJP’s ideology and those who are against it (and therefore support the Congress’ ideology).  People like me don’t exist — people who see merit in neither ideology, who see both parties as equally exploitative, who see religious leaders of all hues as equally self-serving. No indeed,  that would mess up the neat binary, wouldn’t it?

But what baffles me about that op-ed is that its self-righteous attack of the BJP is couched in a thinly-veiled paean to the UPA and the Congress. (See the first four paragraphs of the article. ) What is one to make of this:

It is clear that with the United Progressive Alliance government emphasising its commitment to secular governance and the preservation of cultural pluralism, the minorities, especially the Muslim community, find little conflict between their civic identities as Indian citizens and their cultural and religious affiliations.

The Congress likes to claim that India was a secular heaven before the BJP erupted on the scene and that they’re now leading us back into that heaven. But as I’ve said before, the insecurity of minorities in this country is as much a legacy of the Congress as it is of the BJP.  So when I read claims like the above, and from a widely respected newspaper, I wonder: do I and N Ram and Malini Parthasarathy live in the same India?

Five years ago when I joined the teaching profession, I was nervous about making my first-ever course outline. Therefore I pored over the outlines of courses taught over the years to see how they were done. One course that is still taught to this day is Modern Indian Thought, a course which includes such luminaries as Bankim, Tagore, Vivekananda, Gandhi and Nehru. Naively I asked “Why isn’t Ambedkar a part of this course? And if he isn’t, then how is it Modern Indian Thought?” The horror is not just that such “thought” is perpetrated; there are young men and women who seek it. There is no protest because those communities that should protest are so poorly represented that it’s easy to pretend they’re invisible. This is a sample of what our institutions of higher education are pedlling; what does it say about the dignity of minorities?

One is not in the least bit surprised that the BJP makes capital of such resolutions, to prove their “nationalism.” But did the clerics or the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind realize that the Congress and its official, unofficial, and undercover mouthpieces would be quick to jump into the fray, and lay claims to fighting their battles for them and upholding secularism?

Yourself

Everyone must fight their battles themselves

You must win your battle yourself

With your blood and your marrow

You must forge your sword and shield yourself

The real unjustness

Is someone fighting your battle

The real injustice

Is someone making you your sword and shield

Always your battles were fought by others

Begging you

They crafted battle-codes for you

Drawing you to their hearts

They framed principles for you

Bullying you

They bore arms for you.

Even if it means defeat

Everyone must fight their battles themselves

If they win the battle for you

You’ll be engulfed

Defeated forever.

— Sudha

(The original in Telugu here.)

This poem was first published in the Telugu daily Andhra Jyothi. It is now part of an anthology of women’s poetry titled Neeli Meghaalu (“Blue Clouds”, published 1993) compiled by the well-known Telugu writer P. Lalita Kumari who writes under the pen-name Olga. Unfortunately the book carries little biographical information about Sudha, other than that she lives in Hyderabad.

I will refrain from commenting on the poem itself because I think its message is universal enough to be appreciated. But a note, instead, on translation troubles. Telugu is a highly inflected language, unlike English which is weakly inflected. (In this sense Modern English is distinctly different from Old English, or the language of the Anglo-Saxons, which was highly inflected.) What this means for translation is that while in Telugu you can deftly change form and meanings by changing word-endings,  translating such terse, pithy lines into English requires ungainly prepositions and determiners. Which is why the English version doesn’t sound quite the same as the Telugu. The difference in ’sound’ is probably also due to Telugu being a syllable-timed language, unlike English which is stress-timed. Form, I think, is the toughest thing to translate elegantly.

Oh and my son liked this poem, which pleases me enormously. Though I have a vague feeling that I should be worried — swords and shields and making them yourself and fighting your own battles ….

Ahem.  A little tooting of my own horn: I’ve started a blog in Telugu, which is however limited to selections from Telugu women’s poetry.  Why? Because very few people (even those who read Telugu poetry) know of them.  And because it’s the only kind I thrill to.

I’m posting here a translation of a poem I put up there, by my favourite Telugu poet, Jayaprabha, perhaps one of the most important feminists in India. It’s from an anthology of poems, with the same title as this poem, written when she was teaching at the University of Wisconsin.

Original in Telugu here.

Whence come the rain-bearing clouds?

Human selfishness draws boundaries

Not leaping streams

Not forests or waterfalls

Who can say whence

come the clouds bringing rain here!

Religion and ritual

break up the earth’s expanse

into bits and pieces.

If  the world’s boundaries were erased

(we’d see that)

Earth, water, air are everyone’s

Not separated into seven continents.

Although this isn’t a feminist poem in the strictest sense, I’m drawn to it because of my fascination for people whose imagination blurs boundaries.  Like that nameless narrator in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, the little boy whose imaginative universe extends far beyond the Calcutta he grows up in, while for his globe-trotting cousin, the world is a series of airports.

My introduction to Jayaprabha was her M.Phil dissertation on women in Telugu Romantic Poetry, now a book titled Bhaavakavitvamlo Stree. It’s a work similar to Gilbert and Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic and Ferguson’s Images of Women in Literature, convincingly showing how celebrated Telugu Romantic writers simply perpetuated the woman-as-object motif of the earlier prabandha genre in a different garb. While earlier she was object of desire, for the Romantics she became an angelic object of devotion and love.  To paraphrase Velcheru Narayana Rao, earlier woman was just body with no heart; and for the Romantics she was just heart with no body.

I hope to be able to translate more of Jayaprabha’s poetry in subsequent posts. Meanwhile, here’s a fairly comprehensive survey of Telugu women’s writing.

+ This is my first translation, and I’ll readily admit that it comes nowhere near capturing the essence of the original. For instance, I find the word “viswarupam” untranslatable and had to make do with “expanse”.

+ +Thanks anu, for egging me on to this!

The oral contraceptive pill: few women would deny its role in female emancipation because of the control it provides over reproductive choices. A post over at the Gender Across Borders blog (a recent find, and one of my favourite haunts of late) on contraceptive advertising in the US set me thinking.

Contraceptive ads in India have come a long way since the antiseptic, sanitized ads of Nirodh and Mala D—government products, freely available at all public health centres, and probably still the only affordable choice for the lower and middle strata of society. The ads centred on family and spacing children. Which is not surprising, given the audience they targeted—people who would probably not be comfortable with any public discussion of birth control. (Anyone from that pre-remote-controlled-TV generation will have plenty of fun memories of squirming parents and other elders, of forced loud conversations, deliberately and hastily started to drown out the ads … while children giggled.)

The 1990s saw a radical change in contraceptive advertising, at least as far as condoms were concerned. Kamasutra (and Pooja Bedi) started it all off and others followed—Moods, Kohinoor. The focus of these ads is unmistakably on the pleasure of sex. Instead of the “anti-pregnancy device” rhetoric that Nirodh projected, they play upon “attitudes toward sex” and promote the condom as “an intricate part of the pleasure of sex”.

Fine. But hold on to that bit about pleasure. Remember that condoms are male contraceptive devices.

What about the pill? Well, after Mala D, I remember seeing ads for several other brands of pills, mostly in women’s magazines such as Femina. And they emphasized the ‘hassle-free’ life pills promised. That is, their focus was on unwanted pregnancy: with control over pregnancy, women had greater freedom to do other things in life. I don’t recall any that spoke about the pill making sex a pleasurable act for the woman.

Today we have the emergency contraceptive pills—Unwanted 72 and the I-Pill. Ads for both these pills clearly target the modern, urban woman. One depicts a distraught young woman rushing, furtively, to an abortion clinic, and the other shows young women crying their hearts out because “they didn’t take precautions”. In both cases, the message is clear: use the pill if you want to avoid messy abortions and unwanted pregnancies.

There’s no denying the fact that the fear of pregnancy weighs heavier on a woman’s mind than on a man’s, since it’s an unequally shared burden, but is this a stereotype being promoted here? (Apparently there is already opposition in India to the way in which emergency contraception is being advertised: that it will encourage promiscuity,  that its message of a “tension-free” life is misleading, that it sends out wrong signals about abortion.)

Advertisements for the pill seem to promote it as a lifestyle drug. As the GAB post puts it: “as whimsical and enticing as any for clothes, shoes, or makeup,  showing pictures of young, smiling, healthy women,  and how much easier their lives are with the pill.”  There are even ads in the US depicting the supposed benefits of pills, such as cures for acne, PMS, etc.

The trouble is, as GAB asserts, “the pill is not a shoe, or mascara, and it is never a choice made in a vacuum.”

Also, ads for both condoms and the pill deliberately do not show the other side of the coin. While promoting the pleasure of sex, condom ads are silent about the risks of sexual behaviour. Similarly, oral contraceptive ads that speak of an easier life for women say nothing about their side-effects which all women who use pills know exist. But that’s the way ads function I guess.

What really bothers me is that the underlying rhetoric of contraceptive advertising  is gendered: pleasure for the man and protection for the woman.

Why? Why is contraception portrayed as a means of ensuring pleasure for the man, and as protection from the havoc of pregnancy for women?

Because pregnancy is the woman’s headache?

Because women have to think about sex in terms of procreation, not pleasure?

The nine nights.

When God is a woman, and every woman is a goddess, we are told. Even if they’re violated, abused, humiliated, and unacknowledged by their men who genuflect before the Goddess.

Some break free and surge, like Ganga, towards new worlds, raging against the meshes of male expectations and guilt over unkempt homes.

And then there are the lesser goddesses. Who wake up at the crack of dawn, cook and wash for their family,  walk three miles to clean Ganga’s house (so she can surge and rage) and then go home for some abuse.

Not all women are goddesses. What’s sauce for Draupadi and Kunti isn’t for Soorpanaka.  She has to be taught a lesson.

To be a goddess, you have to suffer like Sita, not Urmilla.

Oh, and last year along the same lines . . .