Women's Day: Happy Institutionalised Patriarchy Day!

This International Women’s Day, it’s time to question the idea of sacrifice imposed on little girls like hand-me-downs from mothers, grandmothers and aunts

“They don’t celebrate mine or my sister’s birthdays like they celebrate my baby brother’s,” quipped 13-year-old Priya (name changed), nonchalantly during one of my mentoring sessions with her, almost brushing aside the idea like it was a non-issue.

You couldn’t miss the glimmer in her eyes and the excited squeak as she went on to share with me the details about a birthday bash planned for her younger brother. The whole deal – cake, balloons, snacks, guests, surprise gifts and all the other regular birthday hubbub, not once complaining about the fact that none of that was done for her.

Who is Priya, you ask?

Priya was an 8th grader who entered my cushioned world three years ago when my 20-year-old self had an intense urge to change the world. Typical 20-year-old stuff. The next few days were spent looking for a cause until I ultimately zeroed in on a mentorship programme with an NGO in Mumbai. The NGO which had tied up with local vernacular-medium schools, connected me with the 8th grader who loved to cook, watch movies and despised math as much as I did when I was her age.

In the next one year that followed, Priya and I spent a couple of hours every alternate Saturday afternoon studying, talking and playing in the library of her Hindi-medium school close to her chawl in the northwest suburbs of Mumbai.

Through the course of our afternoons filled with me reading out A A Milne poems and translating them to Hindi for her, I learnt that while Priya and her elder sister were enrolled in a Hindi-medium school, the brother went to an English-medium school nearby. Priya was struggling to string together a simple sentence in English, a language that her parents thought was more important for the son of the house to be fluent in.

Just like she’d skirted the birthday conversation and had shrugged when I’d asked her, I vaguely recollect her saying, “Didi, it’s okay. He’ll know how to read and understand English,” when I asked her how she felt about not going to the same school as her brother.

Here was a child, born and brought up in a tier-1 city, being made to believe that it was all right to not be treated the same way as her brother. It had been ingrained in her and internalised by this 13-year-old that being denied things her brother was given was normal.

And that is problematic.

So when Deepika Padukone says – “‘83 (her upcoming film) for me in many ways is an ode to every woman who puts her husband’s dream before her own...,” it is a little problematic.

Why?

Because words like those coming from Padukone, a celebrated actress who is known to be vocal about causes dear to her and even women empowerment at many occasions, have a wider reach and a higher chance of being taken in ways that she may not have meant it.

In whatever vein it was said, women sacrificing for men was the prime undertone which, in some sense, however distant, pushes an institutionalised idea of patriarchy where the notion itself is hidden behind the label of ‘sacrifice’.

Sure, some sacrifices are purely personal decisions made by women but there is still a section in 21st Century India, a massive section that cuts through socio-economic backgrounds and across cities and the hinterland, where the idea of sacrifice is imposed on little girls like hand-me-downs from mothers, grandmothers and aunts. It doesn’t even have to come from men directly.

Women’s Day would be happy in the actual sense of the word when Priya understands that it isn’t normal that her birthday isn’t celebrated and that she doesn’t get to go to the same school as her brother.

I’ll celebrate this day when we cut a cake on her birthday.