Women's Day: Feminism faces a long road ahead

The arts and entertainment industry, considered more liberal than others, isn’t as gender-balanced as it might look from the outside, says Ramakrishna S R

Many things we take for granted in the arts today are a result of feminist activism, although the term ‘feminist’ may not have existed then.

The presence of women on the Karnatik music stage is so commonplace now that we forget it was taboo for them, unless they were courtesans or devadasis, to perform in public a hundred years ago.

If that convention hadn’t been challenged, we might never have had the opportunity of listening to such greats as M S Subbulakshmi and M L Vasanthakumari at venues considered too sacred to allow women in.

In 1921, Bangalore Nagarathnamma, singer, dancer, violinist and Harikatha exponent, restored the dilapidated samadhi of Thyagaraja in Thiruvaiyaru and built a shrine in honour of the composer. Once the structure was in place, she was refused permission to sing at the annual aradhana on the grounds that she was a woman and a dancer. She said she had no intention of dancing, but the organisers were unrelenting.

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For 20 years, she hosted a parallel event, featuring women musicians, before the men agreed to a combined tribute. Today, men and women sing the pancharatna kritis (five gems) of Thyagaraja in unison, and the sonorous music is a living testimony to feminist courage.

The movement for women’s entry into the Sabarimala shrine hasn’t been as successful. In Bengaluru, the experience of Kanaka Murthy is telling. She is regarded highly as a sculptor of traditional idols. Yet, once an idol she has painstakingly carved is placed inside a sanctum sanctorum, she is refused entry, again on the grounds that she is a woman.

When we look around, we see a hundred other spaces where women are absent. The arts and entertainment industry, considered more liberal than others, isn’t as gender-balanced as it might look from the outside. In cinema, women excel in some departments, but you would be hard put to find women as directors of photography, music composers, and lighting experts. Can you think of a single woman who has made it big as a film lyricist?

At the pubs, often frequented by as many girls as boys, women DJs are rare. Women routinely cook at home, but when it comes to professional chefs, it is the men who reign. The question of whether women can be hired to serve in restaurants serving liquor has taken a long, litigious route, and is yet to be satisfactorily resolved. The initiative to employ women as auto and cab drivers is facing so many odds that adequate representation is still a long way off. Where public office is concerned, the idea of a woman chief minister or chief justice is too distant a dream in a majority of our states.

It will take long years of activism, and the resolve of a Nagarathnamma, to open our eyes to many of these wrongs.