The Tamil #metoo movement

 These past few days my birth city of Chennai has been rocked by a couple of major scandals. 1) The sexual harassment of female students by a male teacher in a leading school in Chennai 2) The seemingly free pass afforded to one of the most powerful poets/lyricist in Tamil cinema despite 17 women accusing him of sexual harassment. At the outset I have to say that I have not lived in Chennai for nearly 25 years but spent the first half of my life there. I also did not go to the school in question (although I am married into a family in which everyone graduated from the school) and have no direct connections to the movie or literary industry. Thirdly, as anything in Tamil Nadu is an intersection of caste and class I have to state that I grew up in an upper middle class Brahmin family, not financially rich but not poor either. 

With all that out of the way, I wanted to share what it meant to grow up as a woman in the so-called "Tamil culture" in the period between 1975-1995 Chennai. I am not speaking for other parts of India although I am sure that the Tamils are not unique in terms of the reckoning they need to have w.r.t misogyny and patriarchy that is so ingrained and steeped in everything we do that we never had words or phrases we could use to describe the female experience in such a suffocating environment until recently. 

1. Misogyny in everyday life

The Great Indian Kitchen captured this beautifully and this is a story that has been timelessly repeated in every home in India and TN is no exception. Our moms and grandmoms always ate the last despite having prepared the food; there was an expectation that the girls in the family have to help out with chores around the house (how else will we survive when we get married); you can study all you want but when I say it's time, you need to be ready for marriage and marry the guy I ask you to; your wedding will break my bank and back but that's the way it is; put up with any "inconveniences" in your married home; when it's time to raise a child step back from your career. Some classes and some castes might do a bit better on some parts of this narrative but this playbook applies to most women. I personally didn't face much of this at home and this also meant I naively challenged a lot of these issues outside of home and wherever I encountered it and this came with its own side effects as it generally made me angry and come across as a belligerent person.

2. Portrayal of women in our popular art (specifically Tamil movies and songs)

Model women are often portrayed as selfless creatures whose duty to the family trumps anything she wants to do as an individual. Our movies will show women as one of the following stereotypes

a)The shrew who had to be tamed- she had a choice, but unfortunately she chose badly and had to be taught a lesson

b) Angel in the house - she gave up choice and did her duty - this is usually reserved for the mother characters

c) The victim - no choice, just die

d) The sex siren during courtship who turns into the angel the moment the wedding is over 

It is also important to juxtapose these stereotypes against the hyper-masculinity of our heroes in Tamil films as the two go hand-in-hand.

3. A woman's body is not hers.

It is meant to be prodded, pinched, rubbed against and violated in countless other ways everyday and in public. It is meant to be shrouded in 6 yards of mystic beauty - the magical sari which somehow still doesn't guarantee any protection from violations. It has been dictated to in terms of what it can wear or not wear. It was an unsaid rule in my college (1991-1995) that I am better off not wearing jeans and not parking my bike in front of the department so I won't incur the wrath of certain male professors. 

Then there is the concept of a girl attaining puberty that has been celebrated in tamil films and music and is also fertile ground for male fantasy. It never ceases to amaze me how a woman's natural bodily function is simultaneously both celebrated and ostracized.

 The concept of "karppu" (virginity) in tamil cinema has made me want to throw up. Rape is termed as "karpazhipu" (erasing of virgnity), model women in tamil literature are referred to as "karpukarasi" (the queen of virginity). I wish someone does a study of the number of popular movies that have played with these notions, not from the point of view of stepping away from trying to control a woman's body. Modern movies have moved away from explicitly mentioning karppu but I bet you to revisit any movie from even a so called modern film maker like Shankar or Maniratnam and see if you can spot these themes or the 4 stereotypes I laid out in #2

4. Lack of awareness of what sexual harrassment and trauma does to a woman's psyche.

Growing up we had a number of weird phrases "eve teasing", "accused", "jollu party" to describe the predators and perpetrators of sexual harassment, for to even use the word "sex" was a taboo. Most girls and women knew the perpetrators - they went to school with them, study under them, work with them, meet them in family gatherings but very rarely we spoke up and when we did we used the watered down phrases that somehow made it seem harmless. Even before social media, no woman would want to speak up as it brought unwanted attention to her and any small spot to her reputation will be a violation of all the rules laid out in #1. In general there is a lack of awareness that sexual harassment is not about sex. It is about power and the more stratified a society is, the more patriarchal its values are and the more rigid its structures are the power equations don't favor women.

Take all of the above and now let's consider intersectionalities which complicate the picture even further.  Two types of intersectionalities are at play here.

These intersections have made it nearly impossible to get to the truth and bring about change, because everyone is coming at this with the lens that suits them best. Tamil Nadu politicians have always known how to manipulate casteism to their advantage. So any political solution is going to come from that angle. The Tamil movie industry and the associated popular culture is closely intertwined with the political establishment that it is going to take cover under politics. The school in question should be seriously taking a look at its own policies and the protection it owes to its student body. Instead the case has become politicized and as politics = caste in TN it has become a conversation about caste instead of about the children whose well being is at stake. In fact the incident at the school only goes to make my point about the second intersectionality above - if this happens to girls in an upper class, upper caste school, can you imagine what would be the plight of girls who belong to the lower classes and lower castes? (I am cringing to use the phrase upper and lower castes, but in TN we take pride in our myriad classifications OC, BC, MBC, SC, ST - innocuous abbreviations which make everyday casteism more palatable. It is like KFC but for castes).

These days I visit Chennai only for a couple of weeks every other year. Some things are different and for the better. More women seem to be exercising their choices from clothing, to career, to partner choices, but this is still not the norm and certainly this is not true across classes/castes. I don't see a bunch of "road side romeos" (another one of our watered-down phrases) stalking women on sidewalks, but they don't need to do it physically. Most trolling has moved online. I still love Chennai, but being removed from it has allowed me to see its culture honestly. Culture is not simply about the past. It is a living, breathing thing. We can sit on our laurels and talk about Sangam, Thiruvalluvar, Bharathi, Mammallapuram etc but let's look at the lived reality for women today. Let's not forget that just because a culture worships women it does not automatically value them. After all witch burning in the west during medieval times also coincided with the rise of Marian worship. And from where I stand we seem to be stuck in medieval times and have a long way to go before this culture does it right by its women.