Dear Indian feminists, you need to take a break

So, these are not great times for the ‘Indian feminists’. If it wasn’t hurtful enough that the government decided to give them a short shrift and go on their own little joyride with the Justice Verma report - making cosmetic changes to a wobbly sexual assault law - now, American feminists seem to have hijacked their agenda. This, at least, they won’t take lying down.

The result is this - a spectacularly snarky post on Kafila, a blog I had come to look forward to over the years.

If we were to translate the sentiment in the post in less academic terms, it is basically asking the Harvard College Women’s Center to go to hell for trying to attempt a study of what plagues Asian societies, the visibly uneven gender equations in the countries and well, here’s the last straw - it dares to suggest that through discussions and sustained studies in their university, they might be able to come up with recommendations to help tackle the issues ‘head-on’.

Feminists in India appear to be finding neo-colonial conspiracies in the move — of the sort where the white woman in shining armour comes running to save their brown, poorer sisters who don’t otherwise belong to their (Ivy) league. And in the process establish how much cooler and smarter they are than their Indian cousins — to put it in plebeian terms.

Yes, this is the same kind of whining Indian designers drowned themselves in when Aishwarya Rai lined up a wardrobe spilling over with the Diors and Guccis of the world, for her trips to Cannes. Only, unfortunately, these are not designers bugged at having missed an international clientele, but names we worshipped as young college students, names which helped find context to teenage angst against gender equations weighed down by stereotypes and names which several in the country fall back upon to bolster their arguments on the gender discourse in the country.

Honestly, I didn’t expect Nivedita Menon or Urvashi Bhutalia’s names to have turned up at the end of an article which basically shreds apart, in a very Miranda Priestley tone, what is still an idea - juvenile maybe, but not a malicious or outrageous one in the least.

Firstly, the intention of this article is not to give Indian feminists a fight on behalf of Harvard. In fact, the idea that the Women’s Center blog  says that, “a Policy Task Force titled “Beyond Gender Equality”, convened to offer recommendations to India and other South Asian countries in the wake of the New Delhi gang rape and murder… Their principal task this semester is to produce a working paper that advises on the implementation of the recommendations from the Verma Committee ”, does come across as amusing. Amusing, yes, revolting, no. It is not something worth taking up cudgels against, really.

Moreover, like a moderator for the group, notes in the comments section of the blog, what we are reacting to is still a brief outline of an idea — an idea that might at worst fructify to non-spectacular results or throw up solutions that have been discussed to death already in our part of the world. On the other hand, it might just also throw up something worth thinking over.

Let’s face it, here’s a bunch of people with resources — that of time and money — and they choose to invest them in studying what ails a part of a society, not their own. Yes, we can read it as a blatant attempt at making a Great American statement. We can, at the same time, dismiss it as how a bunch of people in one corner of the world choose to spend their time and money — a way that hurts no one, literally and otherwise.

Also, studying cultures and societies we don’t belong to and come from, is neither new in academia, nor something that deserves criticism. Are we critical of the thousands of students, plenty of feminists among them, who pack their bags and leave India to study in universities of the West, the first chance they get? Are we critical of the bunch of scholarships India has instituted to help students give indigenous universities a miss and study, again, in the West? We don’t run them down because there’s little logical ground to do it.

Did the Harvard University group declare how they decide to go about compiling their report, did they suggest that voices from contemporary India will be overlooked and not taken into account, did they in fact, try to discredit the study of the women’s movement progressing simultaneously in India? The answer is, no.

Even if they had, it would have been lot more logical a move on behalf of the Indian activists, to write to the Centre and explain their point than go all out on a public platform to blame the University of indulging in the politics of skin colour, literally.