Apu’s World

Coincidentally, two much covered rape cases have both had verdicts handed down today - two different verdicts and two different courts. In the Pratibha Srikantamurthy case, where Pratibha, a young BPO employee was raped and murdered by a cab driver, the accused has been found guilty. In the TISS case, where six men were alleged to have raped an American national, all accused have been acquitted on grounds of insufficient evidence.

I don’t want to speculate on the judgements and whether they were right, particularly in the second case, but it is a good time to point out on what slender threads the prosecution of a rape case in this country hangs

Read on and share your thoughts at Women’s Web…

apu Women & Feminism

So, it’s been 4 months now since Women’s Web was launched; it’s been good going, but there is SO MUCH MORE to be done! I’m at present working on identifying some of the weak spots and also, to understand what readers like/dislike about the site.

And that’s where I need your help. If you are a regular or occasional reader of Women’s Web, please take this real-short 5-question survey - it will much help me gauge what is working/what needs to change. Thanks so much (and again, don’t forget to take the survey!)

apu In General

How many of you have watched the many “family movies” of the 70s and 80s? I’m talking about these melodramas involving large families, scheming mothers-in-law, “modern” daughters-in-law, “henpecked” fathers-in-law, helpless husbands torn between all the other participants,

and always, always, always

One very evil mama. (For any non-Indian readers here, a mama is a maternal uncle in most Indian languages).

The mama character was usually depicted as a shiftless fellow leeching off his sister’s household, the sister being the all-powerful mother-in-law of the family. Being jobless, his main focus would be to try and drive wedges between other family members and especially between the new DIL and others. His ultimate objective would be to keep his own position as his sister’s advisor secure and thus guarantee a lifetime of living free off someone else.

I have to wonder - why was this mama so popular with film-makers and by inference, audiences?

My guess is that this mama figure succeeded well for so many years because he tied in deeply with people’s notions of what “family” means. Traditionally, family always referred to a man and his parents, his wife, his children. For a married woman, family refers to her husband, her in-laws and her children. Of course, women did not abandon ties with their natal homes, but there were very strict rules about the limits that had to be maintained.

Daughter visiting parents - good. Daughter visiting parents too often - not good. Parents visiting daughter - good. Parents visiting daughter too often/staying with daughter - not good at all. (There are Indian matriarchal/matrilineal communities too, but they are an exception).

Staying at a married sister’s house is a gross contravention of these societal norms, and interfering in her family - even worse. Such a mama makes for a ready villain, indeed.

Could there always have been deeply-registered fears in Indian minds about forces that could break up a family and by extension its land, its wealth? Perhaps undue influence by women’s’ natal families, represented by the mama character, was seen as one of these forces.

That is worth thinking about when you consider that two of the great villains of Indian tradition - Kamsa from the Bhagavatam and Shakuni from the Mahabharata - were both mamas.

apu In General, Women & Feminism

2 Reads: Shefaly Yogendra’s excellent post on “Women in Tech: what gives?”, and my own post, “Empowerment begins at home”, where I take one of Shefaly’s ideas and run with it.

Update: Excellent discussions going on at both these posts, so do check it out if you haven’t already.

apu Women & Feminism

I love the epics - the Ramayana, the Mahabharata - and all the hundreds of stories related to them. I love the way in which you can have different versions of them and say, oh, but in this version, Rama doesn’t really send Sita away. The epics have other uses of course - they are the stories that tell us what we (as a people) value, and how people should live.

The epics are in a sense the lessons that our ancestors have passed down to us. How wonderful is it that we should be able to draw on the learnings built up by people over a few thousand years of civilization? Few other peoples in the world today can boast of this. This is the sense of wonder that the epics evoke in me and make me proud to be Hindu - not in the narrow-minded sense of Indian culture is the best and we have nothing to learn from anyone else.

Recently, I gifted my dad a copy of Gurcharan Das’ ‘The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma’, a book that I plan to borrow. It is a book that (I think) draws on the Mahabharata and places its moral lessons in the context of contemporary times.

Which set me thinking, is there a way to draw lessons from the epics in a more nuanced, less literal way than is normally done? One of the ‘big lessons’ of the Ramayana is that of absolute obedience to one’s parents, a lesson that must cause discomfort to most individuals living in modern times. Dasaratha exiles Rama to 14 years in the forest, in order to keep a pledge that he makes to Kaikeyi years before, and Rama obeys. Without question. Sita follows him into exile, although after much argument.

From a feminist perspective, it is possible to look at this episode as the maintenance of a patriarchal order where son obeys father and wife follows husband (rarely do the epics look at obedience to parents from a woman’s perspective).

Yet, another way to look at it is through the lens of affection. Does Rama unquestioningly accept exile not just because that is a son’s duty, but because of his love for his aged father ? Because that love does not allow him to let his father be an oath-breaker? Does Dasaratha’s own love for his son (which the epic mentions repeatedly) compel its reciprocation? From this perspective, the lesson is not so much about implicit obedience as about the power of love, although the former is what is usually taught us as children.

I have no ‘point’ to this post really, except that it is really possible to read the great epics in many more ways than one.

apu In General