Travel - Shashank Saini and Ashley Tellis
The article by Michaela that went viral on social media networks has produced predictable responses. Indian men are sending her more and more repulsive public apologies, some of which amount to forms of harassment themselves. Perhaps something will come of this if we ask different sets of questions.
A better set of questions to ask, for example, would be what kind of psychic formation produces the kind of account of India that makes it starkly marked by the two poles of her experience: exhilaration and sexist torture.
How would she write an account of her home country the US?
Would there be no sexual harassment and no exhilaration?
A woman is raped every few seconds in the US. As people who have lived for long periods in the US, both authors can testify to serious public harassment of women.
One of us is gay and has been sexually harassed repeatedly in New York. Would we produce accounts of the US that are marked by two extreme poles of exhilaration and horror. Most likely not.
Would this be because we do not have little understanding of the US? Would it be because we did our research before we went there and we were and are careful when we are there and, finally, would it be because there is no market for sleazy stories about the US back here in India?
Image: Foreign tourists pose in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, 08 July 2007. (AFP)
This is not to suggest that what Michaela experienced was not horrendous or that she was deliberately distorting her experience here with its twin poles.
It is to point out how young, naive and ill-informed she was/is about India. The stuff about the sheer beauty of India is wince-worthy and almost as embarrassing as the horror at the sexism and abuse.
We can’t help asking: What was this silly young girl thinking? What was she expecting? Adventure? Nomadism? (to quote her own words and blog).
Why did she come to India at such a young age with no idea of what to expect?
Is that culturally sensitive for a student of South Asia?
Would even we – as two men from the region – just go into a Jaat village in Haryana and talk about gay rights?
Would we go to Kashmir University campus and start talking about feminism?
Highly unlikely. What training is US Universities giving these students before they take their year out travelling to exotic India?
What is the point of the few warnings that the venerable Professor Chakrabarty of Chicago University talks about students being given?
Perhaps in her imagination Michaela wanted to escape the stubborn dispositions of gendered expectations of place (the US as much as India) by being such a nomad. What does this tell us?
The gendered subordination of women is not solely an Indian problem, nor is it only a Middle-Eastern problem.
It is a problem the world over, and the only difference is that it takes different forms in different settings, and the work we all need to do is try an understand the relationships between the subordination of women and the structuring of class, caste and race in different geographies whether it be the US or India.
Another set of questions to ask would be how can we use Michaela’s narrative to examine what Indian women face on a daily basis?
She suffered a mental breakdown. How is it that Indian women are not suffering such breakdowns?
Or are they suffering them and we do not know. Such horror would traumatise any woman, black or white or brown.
What are the women of India pretending they are immune to every day?
Some scholars working on South Asia have responded to this incident by saying that India has a ‘culture’ of sexual violence and a ‘culture’ of patriarchy.
As anthropologist and literary scholar respectively, we believe that cultures don’t exist in silos, as definite entities that can be fixed and labelled.
Let us proceed however, to ask, that were it true that India has a specially patriarchal culture, what are we doing about it? How do mealy-mouthed and slimy apologies exonerate us from that charge? What can be done about it?
Our final set of questions is around how to understand the culture of sexualised violence in India. This is by no means an easy task. The rapidly morphing landscape here makes it difficult to even map what’s going on, let alone understand it.
The men filming Michaela show the use of technologies in policing and reproducing images of women in today’s India. SMSes, MMSes, videos, all of these are part of the scene.
Stalking is the Indian man’s idea of love and Hindi films, among many other things, have taught him this. Indian politicians have recently endorsed this as romance.
Masturbating on travelling women is Indian men’s favourite pastime for some time now. For each of the things Michaela describes, high profile Indian cases involving the same activity can be offered.
The ‘boiling point’ becomes the attempted rapes. Rape is our favourite newstory here every day. Further, Indian conceptions of white women are well-known.
Given this heady mix, based as it is on sexual ignorance, the complete lack of sexual education in schools and colleges, the complete disregard of sexual violence by the Indian police and courts across region, and the humiliation of women ever since they are born in this country if and when they are allowed to be born, what is to be done?
Is the answer to refer to offer Michaela pathetic apologies or to work at every level to redress this sickening mixture of ignorance, misogyny and the absence of a culture of equality and rights?
Is this story fated to be anything more than jerk-off material for Indian men?
If it is, it will only happen if we use the precise nature of the crisis and breakdown-based narrative she produces to disentangle the messy, filthy narratives that constitute this relentless hysteria around the sexual from men that is driving women – white, Black and brown – and all over the world – to have breakdowns.
Image: A Rajasthani women passenger waits to board the Thar Express train as Indian Border security Forces (BSF) look on at the Indo-Pakistan border in Munabao, 18 February 2006. (AFP)
Text: Sify
Image: AFP
The article by Michaela that went viral on social media networks has produced predictable responses. Indian men are sending her more and more repulsive public apologies, some of which amount to forms of harassment themselves. Perhaps something will come of this if we ask different sets of questions.
A better set of questions to ask, for example, would be what kind of psychic formation produces the kind of account of India that makes it starkly marked by the two poles of her experience: exhilaration and sexist torture.
How would she write an account of her home country the US?
Would there be no sexual harassment and no exhilaration?
A woman is raped every few seconds in the US. As people who have lived for long periods in the US, both authors can testify to serious public harassment of women.
One of us is gay and has been sexually harassed repeatedly in New York. Would we produce accounts of the US that are marked by two extreme poles of exhilaration and horror. Most likely not.
Would this be because we do not have little understanding of the US? Would it be because we did our research before we went there and we were and are careful when we are there and, finally, would it be because there is no market for sleazy stories about the US back here in India?
Image: Foreign tourists pose in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, 08 July 2007. (AFP)
This is not to suggest that what Michaela experienced was not horrendous or that she was deliberately distorting her experience here with its twin poles.
It is to point out how young, naive and ill-informed she was/is about India. The stuff about the sheer beauty of India is wince-worthy and almost as embarrassing as the horror at the sexism and abuse.
We can’t help asking: What was this silly young girl thinking? What was she expecting? Adventure? Nomadism? (to quote her own words and blog).
Why did she come to India at such a young age with no idea of what to expect?
Is that culturally sensitive for a student of South Asia?
Would even we – as two men from the region – just go into a Jaat village in Haryana and talk about gay rights?
Would we go to Kashmir University campus and start talking about feminism?
Highly unlikely. What training is US Universities giving these students before they take their year out travelling to exotic India?
What is the point of the few warnings that the venerable Professor Chakrabarty of Chicago University talks about students being given?
Perhaps in her imagination Michaela wanted to escape the stubborn dispositions of gendered expectations of place (the US as much as India) by being such a nomad. What does this tell us?
The gendered subordination of women is not solely an Indian problem, nor is it only a Middle-Eastern problem.
It is a problem the world over, and the only difference is that it takes different forms in different settings, and the work we all need to do is try an understand the relationships between the subordination of women and the structuring of class, caste and race in different geographies whether it be the US or India.
Another set of questions to ask would be how can we use Michaela’s narrative to examine what Indian women face on a daily basis?
She suffered a mental breakdown. How is it that Indian women are not suffering such breakdowns?
Or are they suffering them and we do not know. Such horror would traumatise any woman, black or white or brown.
What are the women of India pretending they are immune to every day?
Some scholars working on South Asia have responded to this incident by saying that India has a ‘culture’ of sexual violence and a ‘culture’ of patriarchy.
As anthropologist and literary scholar respectively, we believe that cultures don’t exist in silos, as definite entities that can be fixed and labelled.
Let us proceed however, to ask, that were it true that India has a specially patriarchal culture, what are we doing about it? How do mealy-mouthed and slimy apologies exonerate us from that charge? What can be done about it?
Our final set of questions is around how to understand the culture of sexualised violence in India. This is by no means an easy task. The rapidly morphing landscape here makes it difficult to even map what’s going on, let alone understand it.
The men filming Michaela show the use of technologies in policing and reproducing images of women in today’s India. SMSes, MMSes, videos, all of these are part of the scene.
Stalking is the Indian man’s idea of love and Hindi films, among many other things, have taught him this. Indian politicians have recently endorsed this as romance.
Masturbating on travelling women is Indian men’s favourite pastime for some time now. For each of the things Michaela describes, high profile Indian cases involving the same activity can be offered.
The ‘boiling point’ becomes the attempted rapes. Rape is our favourite newstory here every day. Further, Indian conceptions of white women are well-known.
Given this heady mix, based as it is on sexual ignorance, the complete lack of sexual education in schools and colleges, the complete disregard of sexual violence by the Indian police and courts across region, and the humiliation of women ever since they are born in this country if and when they are allowed to be born, what is to be done?
Is the answer to refer to offer Michaela pathetic apologies or to work at every level to redress this sickening mixture of ignorance, misogyny and the absence of a culture of equality and rights?
Is this story fated to be anything more than jerk-off material for Indian men?
If it is, it will only happen if we use the precise nature of the crisis and breakdown-based narrative she produces to disentangle the messy, filthy narratives that constitute this relentless hysteria around the sexual from men that is driving women – white, Black and brown – and all over the world – to have breakdowns.
Text: Sify
Image: AFP
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