Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

This supremacy of the maternal ethos might appear strange. But it was no mean supremacy. In Hinduism, the dynamic and productive energies of the universe were female, not male, and in the act of procreation, individual mothers channelled the totality of these cosmic forces. Their motherhood drew on the same raw energy of the goddess that gave India’s political ‘mothers’ — Indira Gandhi and all the monumental female politicians who came after her — such awe-inspiring stature. Mothers might have stayed home, but in their sons’ minds especially, they were anything but meek. It was they who supplied all the motive energy for their sons’ achievements, while also protecting them from the evil forces with which the outside world teemed; and if north Indian men frequently reiterated the words of Rudyard Kipling — ‘God could not be everywhere, therefore he made mothers’ — it was by no means emptily.

Conflicts between wives and mothers therefore terrified men. Many men, in fact, listed as their most important criterion in a prospective bride that she respect his mother as he did, for they knew they would be ripped down the middle by these two female forces should they go to war. Men sympathised with both women, but it was like that popular visual trick of ‘rabbit or duck?’: they could see each perspective separately but not both at the same time — and they were often not capable of any kind of synthesis. They might agree with their wives that there were mice in the house which sometimes chewed holes in clothes, but when their mothers showed them the hole in their T-shirt right above the heart, they could not deny it was evidence of the foulest black magic. Being a man in their mother’s eyes and in their wife’s eyes were two mutually exclusive things, and they were under immense pressure to choose one or the other. The fault line between these two positions cut through the most primordial, inarticulate parts of their being, and when the split happened it could take men beyond words. They leapt, very often, to the maternal side, because betrayal of mothers was more impossible to conceive. And they often turned to blows, gentle and violent men both, for they had no words with which to counter their far more clear-headed and articulate wives.

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This new outbreak of punishment of women in the home was only part of a more general intensification of misogyny during this period. Nowhere in India was this so acute as in the north, and particularly in Delhi. If there was one crime that supplied an image for the twenty-first-century capital, it was rape. The newspapers dubbed Delhi India’s ‘rape capital’, and women from other cities feared going there because of the city’s reputation for sexual aggression.

It was not that rape was new, of course: it had always been around, as in the rest of the world. In Delhi, however, the primary locale had historically been the household, and the facts and extent of rape had therefore been considerably veiled. What was novel in the early twenty-first century was the very public spectacle of rape, combined with a terrifying sadism. Each rape case seemed to dig deeper and deeper into the depths of brutal possibility, and sensational sexual violence occupied more and more of the city’s media and conversation. Women were abducted and raped in quasi-ritualistic fashion; some of their victims were left in the street in such mutilated and abject states that one was put in mind less of sex than of retribution, extermination and war.

And this was just the point. What was going on in Delhi was precisely that: a low-level, but widespread, war against women, whose new mobility made them not only the icons of India’s social and economic changes but also the scapegoats.

Rapes were the most dramatic manifestation of this offensive, but a similar retributive menace could be seen in quite ordinary transactions. Women walking alone in the street huddled up and looked at the ground so as to avoid the massed stares of men, which were calculated to cow them in just this way. Sexy pictures of film stars and models on media websites regularly received comments such as, “Tell me why we should not rape women who dress like you? Is this what your parents brought you up for?” — which were duly signed by their male authors, who apparently saw no indignity in visiting those sectors of the internet in order to comment on them in this fashion. Women walking alone in the city at night or sitting alone in a bar were regularly approached by men asking, “How much?” In these and so many other situations there was a redoubling of men’s efforts to remind women that their place was in the home, even as such a battle had become absurd in the context of the society they now lived in.

But this idea of women in the home carried a very specific and potent significance in India, which derived from the country’s colonial history. During the nineteenth century, a stark division of roles had grown up between the genders. Colonial control of commerce and politics meant that men were obliged to compromise their Indian way of life in order to conduct their affairs — bending, when outside the home, to British law, language, dress, technology and social customs. It became the nationalist duty of women, then, to preserve on everyone else’s behalf a pure and undiluted Indian existence — and this meant staying out of the corrupted public realm. Women were to remain in the home and maintain it as a bastion of spiritual purity: a defence against the colonisation of the soul, and a refuge in which married men could regenerate themselves. In the colonial context this was not necessarily a passive idea of women’s roles; as one historian writes:

We are tempted to put this down as ‘conservatism’, a mere defence of ‘traditional’ norms. But this would be a mistake. The colonial situation, and the ideological response of nationalism, introduced an entirely new substance to these terms […] The world was where the European power had challenged the non-European peoples and, by virtue of its superior material culture, had subjugated them. But it had failed to colonize the inner, essential, identity of the East which lay in its distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture. That is where the East was undominated, sovereign, master of its own fate. […] In the entire phase of the national struggle, the crucial need was to protect, preserve and strengthen the inner core of the national culture, its spiritual essence. No encroachments by the colonizer must be allowed in that inner sanctum. In the world, imitation of and adaptation to western norms was a necessity; at home they were tantamount to annihilation of one’s very identity. 13

A very extensive emotional and historical network was held in place, then, by the idea of the spiritually pure — and confined — Indian woman, which was why this image of womanhood was sacralised in Indian popular culture throughout the twentieth century. For some, it was the foundation of India itself, for if women were to abandon their role in the home, its culture would become indistinguishable from the irreligious rest of the world — which would amount to the “annihilation of one’s very identity”. And crucially, men could not maintain this distinction for themselves: they derived their sense of self, in a sense, not from what they themselves possessed, but from what was held in trust for them by their mothers and wives — who could at any moment, also, allow it to crumble away.

Perhaps in this light it becomes easier to see why the unsentimental abandonment of the domestic sphere by great numbers of middle-class women might have turbulent repercussions. The 2000s were a period, after all, when Indian middle-class life was assailed by more general questions of identity — for many of its rhythms had become indistinguishable from the ones in those foreign lands against which India had traditionally defined itself — and it was felt in some quarters that the cosmos would go up in smoke if domestic traditions were not strenuously asserted. It was a period, too, when many older male entitlements were done away with by the new ethos of risk and competition, and when many men therefore suffered a disorienting loss of status and certainty. Everything, then, was in flux, and even men who were doing well in other respects often felt that the society around them was headed towards some kind of catastrophe, and they understood this as a problem of values, against whose loss they railed endlessly. Women — particularly women out in public — received the backlash. Retaliations in the home were only part of a generalised male attempt to take out these anxieties on young women, whose new independence and mobility was seen as a destabilising cause.