Nilanjana Bhowmick

The Indian Women Vloggers Making Visible the Invisible Drudgery of Housework

Through the emerging trend of Indian housewives uploading vlogs of their daily routines to YouTube emerges an increasing awareness of the unfair gendered expectations of Indian middle-class womanhood.

‘I am pregnant’— the title of the YouTube video screamed in all caps. As I press play, the screen fills with the face of a rosy cheeked young woman in a nightie. She is schoolgirl pretty. Face flushed, she rambles on for long minutes before announcing the good news.

Tina, the host of the channel, is a housewife based in a village in West Bengal. Her YouTube channel, ‘My Village Life Tina’, where she posts videos of her daily routine of housework, cooking, and caregiving duties, has more than 156,000 followers.

Middle-class Indian housewives like Tina are among a growing breed of Indian YouTube vloggers, from across the middle classes (lower to upper middle class, and rural to urban) who bring to their followers the drudgery of unending housework and caregiving. These vlogs have been inspiring women from similar backgrounds, mostly other housewives, to enter the space of content creation. Their vlog channels have become complete ecosystems in themselves, standing in for missing support networks in the lives of many viewers. The women discuss everything from their marital problems to the general tediousness of their lives while documenting the sameness of each day. In that sameness, they make visible the invisibility of care work and their role in it.

There must be hundreds of these daily routine vlogs by women who stay at home – women who have never worked but wanted to or women who have given up work after marriage and children, according to their own admissions in these vlogs. Some of them are educated, some even highly-educated, but their lives now are just a maze cooking, cleaning, and serving their husbands and families.

Also read: How Gendered Labour Was Hard-Wired Into Upper-Middle-Class Households

Nilanjana Bhowmick
Lies Our Mothers Told Us
Aleph Book Company, 2022.

They have hundreds of thousands of followers who watch their vlogs where they chronicle their daily lives, which consist of long hours of looking after their families. These vlogs are immensely popular – the majority of the audience appears to be other housewives, as I gathered from reading through comments, women who draw strength from knowing others are going through the same trials as themselves – the comments sections of these vlogs are ample proof of that.

The content of these vlogs also presents a striking sociocultural exposé. They take us right into the heart of an Indian family, usually a space that is closed and guarded, where outsiders are not allowed.

With each of her episodes, Tina lets viewers into her world without any compunctions; she shares every small detail of her life. There are episodes where she attends weddings or visits her relatives, shares her beauty routines or a challenge she’s facing with one of the family members. But most of the content is about her daily life as a housewife – minutes of footage of her cooking, cleaning, or helping her mother-in-law cook and clean. Her day starts early and the grind continues until late at night.

In early 2022, Tina’s YouTube channel had thousands of subscribers. Hers is not a one-off success story, but part of an amazing feat achieved by many middle-class Indian women, one that has created a living document of gender roles within our homes, the unequal distribution of housework and caregiving, and the secondary role of women in their families.

These women, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, are all middle class housewives, who fill up their followers’ screens daily with their mops and kitchen knives, sweating it out in the kitchen, washing and drying clothes, sweeping and mopping and being constantly at the beck and call of their family members, serving their husbands and children – every day. But if you look beyond the shaky videos with choppy transitions and the amateur voice-overs, you will hear the story they are telling.

Do these women know they are documenting the daily misogyny of Indian families that finds place in annual gender parity reports in terms of alarming statistics but has never been worthy of sustained outrage?

They don’t.

But what drives them is a deep sense of injustice that often boils over into their videos. And of course, in their lives with limited choices, these videos have brought a lucrative economic opportunity like no other. With hundreds of thousands of followers, the women don’t just earn from YouTube ads every month but also from product placements.

Also read: India Ranks 135th Out of 146 Countries for Gender Parity, Worst for ‘Health and Survival’: Report

It was early 2020 when I chanced upon these housewife vloggers. During one of my 3 am staring-at-the-ceiling moments, I came across a video by someone I thought was a mommy vlogger. But I was a little surprised because Payal, of ‘Simple Living Wise Thinking’, was not one of those sharply turned-out mommy vloggers, in perfectly matched clothes and make-up, sharing fitness, self-care, and parenting tips and tricks, speaking in perfect English or Hindi.

Payal seemed earthy and approachable, and simple. She spoke Hindi with a heavy Bengali accent and had no qualms about vlogging in her nightie, an article of clothing that screams middle class like no other. And Payal is the quintessential middle-class Indian housewife, although she lives in the United States. She is adorable in her simplicity and her acceptance of her life where she is solely responsible for housework and caregiving. It doesn’t matter that she lives in the US, where there is a semblance of equality between spouses when it comes to housework. She is often self-deprecatory and accepts the sheer drudgery of being an Indian housewife – solely responsible for cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing – with annoying compliance.

Payal’s daily routine vlog led me to Tina’s, and to many others like hers. Payal shares recipes, challenge videos, and some tips to better manage daily life but mostly her viewers can watch her chat away while she does her housework. Her videos opened up the world of India’s housewife vloggers for me.

Was I surprised by what I saw? Not really. I grew up in a middle class household. I keenly observe the lives of my mostly middle-class friends.

These women in nighties, cooking, sweeping, cleaning, sharing their beauty routines, sometimes advertising beauty products or clothes or kitchen equipment, their make-up loud, clothes sometimes garish and mismatched, sometimes pretty and simple, their conversations unrehearsed and often abrupt, are everywoman. They are great examples of the conservative modernity of India’s middle classes.

These videos are a living project, a testimony to how the majority of women in this country live, and the inequalities they battle with throughout their lives.

(Excerpted with permission from Lies Our Mothers Told Us, Aleph Book Company)

Mr Narendra Modi, Where Is Najeeb?

I have never attended protest gatherings. But on Sunday evening I was ready to because a time comes when every citizen has to rise up and protest in one voice, or be silenced forever.

It’s been four years since a young, underprivileged Muslim student disappeared from a residential university in India, reportedly after a squabble with some right-wing students. His story had faded from public memory. We don’t talk about Najeeb Ahmed anymore. But the fresh state-sponsored crackdown on Indian universities and police brutality on student protests over the past few days is reason enough for us to start asking about Najeeb again.

On the evening of December 15, I stood among a sea of young faces, eager, fearful, apprehensive, angry, distressed, resolutely chanting “We will not be defeated,” “Long live student unity”, as a wall of police officers pushed against them hard, to make them disperse. Suddenly, two cold and clammy hands gripped mine. I looked around to see two young girls, barely 16, or maybe 17; their faces pale, tensed, hanging onto me.

It is not easy facing off a wall of police officers in riot gear when you are merely pretending to adult. As their grip tightened on my wrist, I turned to the two girls, and asked gently, “Would you like me to take you out of here?” They hesitated and then nodded. No. “Can we hold your hand?” I looked at them, held their hands tighter. I thought of Najeeb on that cold, December Sunday evening, as the crowd of agitated young men and women swelled around me, as I have thought of him almost every day since he went missing in 2016.

I didn’t know Najeeb personally. But the fact that a young man from a minority community, studying at one of India’s most elite universities, should go missing in a democratic country and stay missing for four years despite wide outcry was a huge red flag that we conveniently ignored. Earlier on Sunday morning, as video and audio with pleas for help from students of two Muslim majority universities – Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University – poured in my inbox, my heart ran cold and I thought of Najeeb again.

Also read: Najeeb Ahmed’s Case Bears Testimony to National Indifference to Disappearances

Over the last few weeks, India has been burning over the implementation of the National Register of Citizens – that has already left out lakhs of people, including Hindus and Muslims, in Assam in northeast India, and the Citizenship Amendment Act, which aims to provide citizenship to all non-Muslim refugees but consciously excludes any Muslims who are also victims of persecution in their countries.

On December 15, the Delhi police – which reports to the Union home minister Amit Shah as Delhi is a Union territory – stormed into the Jamia Millia campus, locked it down and beat up students to quell protests over the register and the CAA. In visuals posted on social media by Jamia students, utter chaos and mayhem was evident. The police ransacked university property, beat up and manhandled students studying in the library, including women students.

There were reports of at least two bullet injuries. Later that evening, the police cracked down on another Muslim majority university in Uttar Pradesh – another BJP-ruled state. AMU students posted visuals and frightened appeals on social media alleging that the police had torched their rooms. The police were also seen destroying student bikes in a parking lot in the university campus.

In 2017, students at Najeeb’s alma mater, the elite Jawaharlal Nehru University (known popularly as JNU) – a left-liberal bastion – had organised a protest over the 2013 hanging of Afzal Guru, who was convicted for his role in the 2001 parliament attack. Several students were arrested on charges of sedition. They were accused of raising “anti-India” slogans by the Akhil Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar addresses students after reaching the JNU campus upon his release on bail, in New Delhi on Thursday. Photo: PTI/Kamal Singh

Najeeb reportedly had an altercation with ABVP members before he went missing. In 2017 also, protests had erupted in a Delhi University college where the ABVP had forced the authorities to cancel a seminar on the culture of protest, because JNU student leaders Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid, both of whom played a key role in the 2016 JNU protests, were among the speakers. Over the last few days, students had alleged that ABVP members were working alongside the police to manhandle protesting students.

May 23 Will Not Be a Defining Moment in the History of Secular India

If Modi wins a second mandate, it doesn’t mean that our democracy is irrevocably broken. If he doesn’t, it unfortunately won’t mean the converse is true – that our democracy is safe.

Exit polls on Sunday evening predicted a second landslide win for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, renewing a question that was asked repeatedly over the past few weeks: whether India can handle another five years of Modi. Here’s the short answer. Yes, it can. There’s a long answer too.

While he used it as a poll plank, Modi’s first mandate was never supposed to be about development or the country’s economy. It was spoken about in whispers in inside circles, but nonetheless was an open secret that Modi was brought in to replicate at the national level the Gujarat model of Islamophobia and religious polarisation. It was about mainstreaming the “othering” that the BJP and its mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been carrying out clandestinely pre-Ayodhya and not-so-clandestinely post-Ayodhya.

Also Read: On May 23, Will We Turn to the Darkness or Will We Reach For the Light?

“It is therefore the duty of every Hindu to do his best to consolidate the Hindu society,” Keshav Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, had said in the RSS mission statement. He added that the aim of the Sangh was to mould the minds of the youth to achieve that cause.

According to a report in The Hindu, 58,967 shakhas (RSS branches that spread Hindutva propaganda) were operating at 37,190 places across the country. In 2017, the number stood at 57,165, up from 39,396 in 2014. So, yes there are thousands of Indians who have bought into this idea of a ‘Hindu India’. How do you wish that away?

The RSS is working at saffronising Indian politics. Modi’s second mandate at the Centre is less dangerous than say anointing Yogi Adityanath, a rabble-rousing, Islamophobic monk, as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, or the mainstreaming of Pragya Thakur, a prime accused in a bomb blast near a mosque in Malegaon in Maharashtra in 2008. The blast killed around 6 and injured over 100. Thakur has been fielded from a seat in one of India’s largest and most populous states, Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP was defeated in state-level elections end of last year.

Modi is a great actor. More than divider, he is distractor-in-chief, with his discernible lies, his ‘non-political interviews’, his hundreds of thousands of photo-ops.

Pragya Thakur. Credit: PTI

If Modi wins mandate, democracy isn’t broken

Our democracy is in danger, but it extends beyond Modi. If Modi wins a second mandate, it doesn’t mean that our democracy is irrevocably broken. If he doesn’t, it unfortunately won’t mean the converse is true – that our democracy is safe.

India has a multi-party system. Often in democracies, political parties come to power in rotation. The BJP is one of the largest parties in India. It is almost utopian to think they would not want to politically validate their Hindutva agenda. The RSS wants Hindus to wallow in this feeling of victimisation, it allows them to slice through our secular values that much easily.

Minorities in this country have for long been preyed upon by parties who pay lip service to their interests but who do nothing to improve their lot. Since these parties have over time only weakened them as a group, this is not the time for minorities, and especially Muslims, to feel demoralised. This is the time for minorities to fight for their rights, building alliances and partnerships with all those who have been, and will be, marginalised by the march of Hindutva politics and policies.

Also Read: More Than EVMs, It Is ‘the Hindu Mind’ Which Has Been Effectively Rigged

In the last five years, while India’s economy nosedived, and hate mongering and Islamophobia rose, something else happened too. As the Modi government went on a spree to destroy institutions and target dissidents, and bought over the mainstream media, it also created an alternative set of institutions and more robust dissidence. It has seen the emergence of independent, impartial media, of young and committed politicians, including a new political party in Kashmir, headed by a former bureaucrat. Shah Faesal, who resigned from the Indian Administrative Service to protest the “unabated killings in Kashmir and marginalisation of Indian Muslims“, has said his party would pursue the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue. That’s the kind of resistance coming out of the last five years of Modi’s rule.

You just can’t wish away a major political party in one of the world’s largest democracies. But you can keep fighting its divisive agenda.

In the past five years, we have become less complacent of our democracy. Looking at May 23 as a defining moment in the history of secular India would be mere fear mongering.

I beg to differ, but our democracy is stronger than ever.

Nilanjana Bhowmick is a Delhi-based journalist. She tweets at @nilanjanab.

Not a Martyr: Dim the Halo Around Rape

Romanticising the rape and murder of Nirbhaya, the eight-year-old in Kathua, and countless others, and making martyrs of them, is no better than victim-blaming or shaming. They were raped and killed. No halo is bright enough to hide that.

On April 24, the Indian Supreme Court said rape victims, whether dead or alive, have dignity and cannot be “named or shamed”. The court was ruling on whether the identity of rape victims should be disclosed, following the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir, that has roiled the country in the past few weeks. The victim, right from the beginning, had been identified in the media by her name. According to the Supreme Court, that is problematic.

“The dead also have dignity,” the ruling said.

It said that even in cases where rape victims were alive and were either minors or of unsound mind, their identities should stay hidden as they have the right to privacy and cannot live under such a “stigma” throughout their life.

Words like shame, dignity, stigma abound through the ruling that attempts to view rape and women’s response to it through the problematic lens of a woman’s dignity. Naming is not shaming. Not in abuse cases at least. Which is why we all participated in the #MeToo campaign, right?

Wrong! Because even as we all enthusiastically participated in the #MeToo campaign, we were still calling Jyoti Singh, the 23-year-old paramedic who was raped and killed in 2012, Nirbhaya. Not her name but a decorative epithet imposed on her in the days following her rape, when she lay in hospital fighting for her life.

This despite the fact that both her parents had revealed her name and urged the media to use it.

“My daughter’s name was Jyoti Singh and I am not ashamed to name her. Those who commit heinous crimes like rape, their heads should hang in shame, not the victims or their families. You should take her name too,” Singh’s mother had unequivocally told the media on the third anniversary of her daughter’s rape and murder that had shocked the world and arm twisted the Indian government to strengthen its women safety laws.

This was two years after Singh’s father had asserted the same. In January 2013, not even a month after the incident, Singh’s father had told the British media her name.

“We want the world to know her real name… My daughter didn’t do anything wrong, she died while protecting herself… I am proud of her. Revealing her name will give courage to other women who have survived these attacks. They will find strength from my daughter,” he had said.

Singh’s parents wanted her to be known by her name. For them, she was a flesh and blood human being. They felt her pain and struggle, while the rest of India romanticised her death and turned a heinous crime into a tale of heroism, because of course, it helped us cope better as a society.

So, we called her names like Jagruti, Damini, Amanat, Delhi Braveheart and India’s Daughter. It touched our emotions, it outraged us because we can only feel for a woman when we mould her into a relation – mother, daughter, sister – or into a overtly courageous avatar. More than 90 women are raped in India every day. But we need epithets to feel outraged. We need to characterise them on their levels of gruesomeness, to feel outraged.

Why do we insist on calling Jyoti Singh Nirbhaya? On that December night, I am sure she was feeling far from courageous. Her fear and helplessness can only be imagined. When she screamed and cried for help, courage was far from her mind. When she fought for her life in the hospital for days, it was not a choice.

We romanticised her plight well. And in that we made her a martyr, her predicament a tale of heroism. When we call Singh Nirbhaya, we are hailing her personal courage as if to redeem the horrific crime. But there is no redeeming rape. Whitewashing victims of rape stems from the social conditioning to hide the shame – coalesced with a woman’s honour in this part of the world – and is no better than victim-blaming or shaming.

When we call Singh, Nirbhaya, we are putting a halo around her suffering. We are deifying her and her “lost honour”. If the Indian Supreme Court manages to ban rape victims from being named, they are going to fuse forever the concept of rape and lost honour. It is going to institutionalise the response of women to abuse.

Singh was not a martyr. The eight-year-old was not a martyr either. They were victims of a heinous crime. Their bodies were abused beyond human comprehension. They were raped and killed. No halo is bright enough to hide that.

Nilanjana Bhowmick is a Delhi-based journalist. She tweets at @nilanjanab.

Militant Hinduism and the Reincarnation of Hanuman

Hanuman 2.0 is not benign. The smile on his face has been replaced with strong frown lines. He radiates mean energy against a black and saffron background.

Last Sunday, I was stuck in traffic on my way to Noida’s Sector 18. Craning my neck, I saw a sea of saffron ahead of me – men in saffron kurtas and turbans, on motorbikes, carrying swords, tridents and knives. They chanted ‘Jai Shri Ram’, ‘Jai Hanuman’ and ‘Hindustan Humara Hai’.

My taxi driver, a young man named Mustafa, said it was a procession by the Bajrang Dal to celebrate Hanuman Jayanti.

“But Hanuman Jayanti was yesterday?” I asked. Today was Easter.

“It doesn’t matter. They can do what they want, whenever they want. Look at those police officers,” he said. “They are standing there laughing with them. They are providing them security, not us.”

I look out of the window and spy a lone police officer laughing and chatting with a Bajrang Dal activist, leaning against a coach.

As I tried to take a video, another car inched towards us. It had two men leaning out of its windows and one on the roof, brandishing a sword. As he saw me handling my phone, he swiped at the window of my taxi. I had never seen a sword from such close quarters. The sudden gleaming steel surprised me and my phone dropped from my hand. I was glad I had not rolled down the window. I also suddenly realised that these were some very aggressive-looking young men with weapons bared and save the lone policeman, not a police escort in sight.

Mustafa asked if we could turn the cab around and if I could please let him go. I agreed. We turned back.

The population of Noida, in western Uttar Pradesh, a satellite town of the Indian capital, is a mix of economic migrants of all classes and local farmers, who now play in millions and billions after selling off their farmland to the government or to private developers. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been conducting its experimental indoctrination project here for years now.

After 2014, however, the saffronisation of Noida has been more in your face. They can be seen in the Hindu flags that flew high in balconies of various apartment complexes ahead of the ‘Hindu New Year’ that fell on March 21, and which the RSS celebrated with great fanfare this year to unite Hindus. The group asked all Hindus to hoist flags with the “Om” symbol in their houses and to light diyas on the day. Traditionally, the Hindu new year falls on different days for different states and nationally is celebrated on Diwali, a festival with secular overtones.

Shakha members marching aggressively on the roads in their khaki gear with sticks in hands, shouting ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, is also a common sight in Noida over the weekends.

These visuals are a disturbing assertion of a resurrection of the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, and an indicator of how in the last few years militant Hinduism has grown roots in India.

Today shakhas have mushroomed in some of the newer and upscale sectors in Noida. A messaging group on Telegram that includes nine sectors of this glitzy town has 1.1 k members and has been key in mobilising volunteers for the RSS’s recently held rally in Meerut in February.

Credit: Nilanjana Bhowmick

“We are happy to announce that more than 400 swayamsevaks from sector 74 to 79 are on their way to attend the Meerut rally,” a message on the group says, adding that out of the three lakh who are expected to attend the rally, 40,000 were from Noida.

These groups are also used to organise various RSS gatherings all over Noida. In one of the messages, the admin boasts that there are shakhas in almost all sectors between 74 and 79 in Noida.

“If you oppose the shakha members, you are opposing the BJP. I was told this in my face,” a resident of Sector 79 tells me on condition of anonymity.

The Hindutva groups are, however, not just targeting upscale apartment complexes in Noida. The proliferation of Hindu extremism can also be seen in an image that has been glaring at us from bikes and autorickshaws and the rear windows of cars for some time now: the transformed face of India’s beloved monkey-god Hanuman.

In car bazaars in Noida, the Hanuman 2.0 stickers gleam in the sun. Designed by a Mangalore-based artist in 2016, Hanuman 2.0 caught on almost immediately. The artist himself was taken aback when the sticker – which he considered only half-finished – first went viral on the streets of Bangalore.

Hanuman 2.0 is not benign. The smile on his face has been replaced with strong frown lines. He radiates mean energy against a black and saffron background. His thunderous expression spells danger, and makes it clear he is no longer a server but a destroyer.

The Bajrang Dal was quick to co-opt this image. It appeared on its flags in rallies. And on the cover for its new theme song – a catchy, modern tune – Hanuman is depicted as aggressive, indomitable, single-mindedly slaying his enemies.

The sticker has caught on like wildfire in Noida, where it adorns almost every second or third car. The reason for this popularity lies in this town’s demography. It is common to see young men joyriding on their bikes or swanky SUVs, or dancing to DJ music in trucks in the middle of the road. Locally known as Gujjar boys, they sit on the pile of money their parents made from land acquisition. Their days are spent body building in gymnasiums or akharas. The machismo of Lord Hanuman is a huge influencer in their lives. They are more aggressive, they want more power and influence, they want to flex their muscles and be counted. They have the most expensive smartphones, designer clothes, swanky cars, and more money than they know what to do with.What they do not have is proper education.

The Bajrang Dal has reincarnated a new version of Hanuman to reach out to this youth brigade; to give them a Hindu icon to be proud of, a more aggressive version of the god they already revere. The new iconography in turn helps the Dal resurrect its own relevance – on the wane since after it burst onto India’s communalscape following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and despite its campaigns against Valentine’s Day and so-called ‘Love Jihad’.

Noida is the new India. And the enormous success of Hindutva groups here is a warning that we will do well to pay heed to. And soon.

Nilanjana Bhowmick is a Delhi-based journalist. She tweets at @nilanjanab.