 "Sati Savitri vs Hunterwali: Why Jaya Bachchan’s good girl-bad girl remark should be debated widely")
Last weekend, I was invited to attend a live television event in Mumbai for a national news network with a generous sprinkling of Bollywood celebrities. It was a last minute thing and since I had an early morning flight and was to scurry to Film City where the shoot was on, straight after landing at the airport – I opted for a sari. You may wonder what the big deal is – so much so, that I use such trivial and almost banal information as an opening, almost, pickup line.
I don’t know how to tie a sari, on my own. So, my sleepy-eyed house staff obliges me, expressing her doubts on whether this carefully pinned up, contraption would last the whole, exhausting day that lay ahead.
Surprisingly, for a woman who only travels in functional denims, I was more than comfortable in my silk linen sari – even winning a lot of compliments on my ensemble. The occasional lustful stare – that as an Indian woman seems commonplace.
My bare back. My ample bosom. My circular navel. My bare ankles with a sliver of a gold anklet. Not the nine yards that covers my frame.
Surprisingly, on the flight, packed like sardines, I notice how few women actually wear a sari. Women my age, mostly, I assume business travellers, probably making a frenzied work trip to the maximum city, show up in corporate workwear – read – trousers, long-sleeved, formal shirt and blazer and pointed, shiny, shoes. I stick out.
As I wait outside the airline toilet, the captain of the aircraft walks out of the cockpit and checks me out. I move aside, settling a stray strand of hair behind my ears.
‘Some sari, Mam’ he smiles, casting a glance in my direction, staring a tad longer than the comment merits.
‘Strange…I get so many compliments for our national costume, sported by a majority of this country’s women…and yet, I see so few of them actually wearing it…sari is the ultimate power dressing, according to me…the most versatile…’ I murmured, easing into a natural flow of conversation.
The airhostess is pushing back her trolley laden with snacks and juices.
She laughs.
‘Even Jaya Bachchan is asking the same question!’ she shrugs her shoulders and adjusts her short skirt, crossing her ankles, awkwardly.
“I feel very unknowingly we have accepted that the Western clothing gives that man-power to a woman. I’d love to see a woman in woman power. I’m not saying, ‘go wear a saree’. But in the West also, women used to dress in dresses. This whole thing changed much later when they started wearing pants,” the veteran actor smirks on her street smart granddaughter Navya Naveli’s popular podcast, where on every episode she entertains a heart to heart with Mrs Bachchan and her own mother, Shweta Bachchan, who makes a rebuttal, harking back to the Industrial Revolution.
“They had to wear pants because you could not do all the heavy machinery work. It is because of ease of movement. A lot of women today are not just at home, they are going out, they are getting jobs. It is easier to pull on a pair of pants and a t-shirt than it is to maybe drape a saree,” she counter argues.
I think of all the house staff we have had in our two and half decades of living outside our home state of West Bengal and how all of them – have always worn a sari.
Traveling by bustling local trains, carrying bawling babies at their hip, scrubbing soiled commodes and oil stained utensils. I think of construction workers carrying precariously balancing sand and bricks. Climbing unfinished, steep stairs. Sometimes, with their infants tied to their shrunken chests. Their collarbones, prominent. I think of women who toil relentlessly in fields, who carry water in earthen urns, walking kilometre after kilometre.
I think of my mother, a young widow who woke every day at 5 am, to sort out medicines for her ailing, ageing father, who fed her only daughter and got her ready for school and made tiffin, unfailingly. Who then sat cramped in the backseat with me on her side, a satchel stuffed with correction papers and textbooks, at the back of a ramshackled ambassador carpool – who mounted three flights of stairs, in a plush convent school, the same way she had done when she was nine months pregnant and working till her delivery on a cold, December night – all the while, clad in a sari.
All these women – class benchmarks, aside – including, my very middle class mother wore and still wear the proverbial pants, ran homes, raised babies, singlehandedly, worked relentlessly and more. But, the larger question, is whose body and choice is it, anyway? And, why this slanted inference at a woman choosing her own ensemble to work as a sign of moral and cultural degradation, and, even if, she were to ditch the sari for trousers or a skirt –as insinuated in Mrs. Bachchan’s condescending tonality – a high browed, regressive attack on a woman’s physical and emotional and intellectual agency – what a woman wears is her decision and hers, alone.
Remember in 2016, Union Culture Minister, Mahesh Sharma’s sexist remark, “for their own safety, women foreign tourists should not wear short dresses and skirts… Indian culture is different from the Western (culture).” The resulting outrage led to sharp reactions with Congress leader Manish Tiwari terming them as “most uncultured remarks” and then Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal saying that the comments revealed a very “horrible and pathetic mindset”.
Defensively clarifying his stand, Sharma had issued a counter statement, “It is a country with different cultures, different eating habits and different dressing senses which change on every 100 kilometres. We have a tradition (of saying) Atithi Devo Bhava (the guest is almost like God). Such a ban is unimaginable. I said this as an advisory when going to religious places. Like when we go to gurudwara, we cover our heads, when we go to temple, we remove our shoes. I am a father of (two) daughters. I have not said what one person should wear or not wear, neither is it desired nor am I authorised to say so. I have only said this as an advice when they visit to religious place.” Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had also famously taken a dig at Sharma, “Women had greater freedom to wear clothes of their choice in Vedic times than they have in Modi times!”
A woman’s modesty is mirrored in her physicality – singed in her skin, as if, like an indelible tattoo. In a country where Draupadi was publicly disrobed and Sita was forced to prove her purity – our body is our bane – never ours, really.
Madhya Pradesh Congress leader Satyadev Katare’s scathing comment plays on my mind, “Jab tak mahila tirchi najar se nahi dekhegi, tab tak purush use nahi chedega (No man will harass a woman till she looks at him in a suggestive manner).”
But this is not the first time an elected servant/sevak of the people has blamed women’s personal choices for something as heinous as sexual assaults. From finger pointing at short skirts, for rapes, to even suggesting chowmein must be banned to curb such ghastly assaults — let us not forget RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s words that villages that embody the spirit of “Bharat” rather than “India” don’t produce a culture of rape. Assuaging that Western culture’s poison has seeped into Indian souls, most notably in urban areas.
Babulal Gaur, senior BJP Minister from Madhya Pradesh openly said foreign culture was detrimental for India. “Women in foreign countries wear jeans and T-shirts, dance with other men and even drink liquor, but that is their culture. It’s good for them, but not for India, where only our traditions and culture are okay.”
The Anjuman Muslim Panchayat in Salumbur town in Rajasthan had decreed that girls should not use mobile phones outside their own homes or dance at weddings so that “they do not get involved with boys”.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who aspires to turn her decadent citadel into glittering London, had also opined, “Earlier if men and women would hold hands, they would get caught by parents and reprimanded, but now everything is so open. It’s like an open market with open options. Rapes happen because men and women interact freely.”
This deadly cocktail of poisonous venom that places sexual crimes with a woman wanting and having every right as an Indian citizen to dress as she pleases – this narrow, barbaric mindset that literally blames my sex for giving up their pracheen Bharatiya Sabhyata (ancient, Indian culture) and switching sides, almost like a treacherous traitor, if she were to display a preference for Western outfits, is the real rot that lives and breathes in the name of sanskaar (tradition) and shiksha (education) and samaj (society). No is spared from the holy trinity.
In 2019, an ugly incident erupted when a group of girls walked into upscale Nukkadwala cafe in Gurgaon that went viral on social media, when a middle-aged woman publicly shamed a girl called Shivani Gupta for wearing ‘provocative’ “rape inviting dress,” (short dress), exposing her thighs.
India has one of the highest populations in the world – here, every 11 minutes, a woman is killed by her intimate partner/family member – and here we are, in the 21st century, still hushing about ‘dhang ke kapde (decent attire),’ and ‘sar dhakke chalo (cover your head),’ and ‘tange mat dikhao (don’t show your bare legs),’ blah, blah and blah.
What do these orders even mean, anymore?
Who gets to decide…
Where will I be free?
Podcast?
Panchayat?
Parents?
Partners?
Politicians?
Patal Lok (hell)?
Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .
