Trust Manto to take up a subject as unusual as the forcible interaction between sexes – what we call eve-teasing and molestation in India – and write this long essay on it.
What strikes one on reading this pre-independence essay is how playful Manto’s mind was before Partition. His title is a reference to Ghalib’s couplet ‘Yaar se chhed chali jaye ‘Asad’ (Ghalib’s early pen-name), Gar nahin vasl to hasrat hi sahi’.
Manto uses the Indian word chhed, meaning to annoy. It does not have the fully negative sentiment of ‘molest’, and retains some of the playfulness of ‘tease’.
Chhed khubaan se chali jaye ‘Asad‘, by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Aakar Patel
If not the ecstasy of union, then the sorrow of unrequited love.
And so, till men have no access to union with women, they will continue to harass and tease women, and to molest them.
So how did all this actually begin? Who was the first man to have teased a woman? History books are silent on this for some reason. It’s possible that in some thicket of Eden’s garden, or in the shade of one of its trees, Adam began this tradition.
Saadat Hasan Manto. Agencies.
It cannot be for nothing that he was booted out of that paradise.
But even if we were to assume it was Adam who began this pleasant tradition, it’s not easy to figure out how it happened. His attempt could have been crude, or it could be that he was extremely elegant in his approach – it’s difficult for us to say which. We have little knowledge of those times.
We can’t even say what reaction this produced in Eve and how she responded to the masculine overture. Many things come to my mind when imagining it. What’s imprinted is something resembling a scene from a nudist club in America. Adam as a white man and Eve his madam.
If not the ecstasy of union, then the sorrow of unrequited love.
In Europe, which is living out an age of civilisation and culture, there is more union and fewer sighs of unrequited love. But even so, teasing and harassment is commonly to be found there too.
Their women, uncovered of face and often of body, are stared and ogled at just as we stare in India at whatever bit of our women is on display. And Europeans are bolder in their approach than us. This is counter-intuitive, but the hunger for flesh cannot be sated just by having one’s fill.
As long as men are put next to women, this harassment will happen. There might be a time when women’s existence is no longer necessary for men and this will stop of itself. But not before that time is it going to end.
The other day Gandhiji wrote of the educated girls of India that “Each of these Juliets has a hundred Romeos behind her.” At this there was such an extreme reaction in Lahore that the heavens trembled.
Ms Mumtaz Shahnawaz and other girls gave a strong response to Gandhiji. For many days, even veiled women wrote essays in India’s papers against this half-covered man. But Gandhiji did not soften his opinion. He wrote another piece, addressing boys and targetting them with his ahimsa-tipped arrows. He said to them: “When you walk in the bazaar, keep your gaze down. Wear a hood so that your eyes don’t light upon the faces of young girls. Thus you’ll hold on to your virtue.”
Gandhiji’s hold on India is intact. But alas, his essay had little effect on India’s young men. Pretty women continued to be teased and molested. The censor could not control the young men’s eyes. Their horny nature remained intact.
Gandhiji’s attempt was as much of a failure, in fact, as that of the Congress to impose prohibition in Bombay.
But if it had succeeded, think of what a change Gandhiji’s advice would have brought to this country. We would have seen our young men walk around the streets with hoods on their heads and with their gazes lowered. There would have been chaos in traffic.
Accidents every day caused by this. And the victims would all be men. Hood on head, eyes down, directly in the path of cars coming at them. With young girls, ungazed at, walking about here and there. Horns being sounded even louder than they are now. The hospitals would soon be filled up with wounded young men. And there too the poor fellows would presumably be hooded so as to not accidentally catch sight of the young nurses.
Anyway, let’s put this hood-wood business behind us. It would have made life immensely boring. Passions, like still water, would not stir. All excitement would come to an end if men were physically stopped from engaging women. There would be no spark that’s produced between two strangers. The intoxication of youth would sober up. The world all around would turn serious and grim. Faces would become longer. Their glow would vanish. Deprived of an essential motivation, men would turn sluggish.
We would also destroy our culture of poetry and literature. This didn’t happen because it is impossible for it to happen.
Every adult man, each adult woman knows why this sort of teasing happens. It happens because it isn’t unnatural. It won’t be out of place here for me to reveal information I got from interviewing some young men on this subject.
These are the questions I asked the men:
1) Why do you tease girls and women? Can you tell me a reason you do this?
2) What particular type of girl or woman do you target?
3) How do you go about it?
4) Do you think the girls and women like to be teased in this manner?
5) Tell me an episode of teasing that has stayed on in your mind.
I put these five questions to 12 boys who were between the ages of 16 and 24. Seven of them could not give me a coherent reply to the first question. The other five answered and their answeres resembled one another’s. More or less, they said this:
- We harass girls and women because we enjoy the act of doing it.
- In particular, harassing those who cannot or do not protest, who keep their anger silent. It’s impossible to describe the joy in engaging with them.
