television conversation between mother and daughter
Answers
Answer:
-Leila Gautam and Gita Ramaswamy
GR
My university education was in the early nineteen seventies on the Osmania University (OU) campus, at a time of some change. The large numbers of Muslim girls who had earlier come here for higher education had dwindled rapidly, and the upper caste Telangana Hindu gentry that was now sending its sons here was not sending its girls. In my Department of Mathematics, we were three girls to maybe fifty boys.
It was not easy to be a girl on the campus. Parents at home and the ruling masculine ethos at college meant that the girl was responsible for any issues. She had to always move in a group of her own gender, she had to walk without meeting anyone’s gaze, she should not have male friends, she should never stay beyond college hours and she had better study hard. If she faced sexual harassment or what was called, hatefully, “eve-teasing”—the very term demeaning and patronizing—it was no doubt her fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing wrong clothes, with the wrong people and most of all, behaving inappropriately.
LG
My first response to my mother’s idea of what constituted sexual violence was a feeling of disconnectedness. I have never been molested or harassed in Delhi—beyond catcalling on the roads, I have never been pawed or groped on the buses or the metros—and I have travelled on these on a regular basis.
College [for an undergraduate student in Delhi University (DU) is illiberal. I do not know if it is the case all over India, but it was certainly the case with me. We are treated like children, our views not respected or considered. The students asked for an “open campus”—a demand that encapsulated a great deal. Girls were not to be interrogated endlessly when they wished to take “night-outs”—a permission letter from their parents ought to be enough (a contradiction, really, because, needless to say, this was never a requirement for a boy who wanted to spend a night elsewhere). Nor were the girls to be locked into their blocks after ten pm. In hindsight, I wonder how such a demand could have been implemented in the first place—it was so full of contradictions.
The girls’ blocks are something akin to a “zenana.” A brick screen shuts us off from all sides—hiding our verandas and open spaces from public view. We have two entrances—both guarded all day, unguarded only when they are locked from ten in the night to six in the morning. These external, “visible” differences are complemented by internal ones. The girls’ blocks have a warden, whom we apply to for night-outs, for leaves. She is the intermediary between us and the college which “cares” for us.
GR
We learnt to survive in that atmosphere [OU] because education was precious to us, and also learnt to fight, because personhood, even if one was a woman, was no less important, and these were the heady days of the feminist movement. Heady, because it was really only in the head, one had to be so careful outside there. My heroines when I was in college were Satyamma Srinath because she drove a scooter from her house in Tarnaka to Reddy College where she taught and Vanaja Iyengar who taught maths in our Department, and smoked with ease in the staff room. A little later, they were joined (as heroines) by Veena Shatrugna and Rama Melkote because they wore sleeveless blouses. Writing this, I sense how funny it may seem today when women drive scooters and cars and wear a whole range of clothes, but in those days, these were women who were different and proclaimed their difference in public, not inside the four walls of their homes.
LG
It is true that being a girl requires you to maintain/display your body in a particular way—you need to “work” on it. College doesn’t leave much space or time to “work” endlessly on being hairless and slender and all the other different things society’s images of the beautiful woman demand. I am engrossed in my studies, and ambitions, and am (usually) blithely unconscious of the beautiful a