As we know, in India, parivar or family is the living reality of which elections are the dream. Congratulations mothers and young daughters of India! You are now a major part of the dream in the 2024 elections.
Mothers and youngsters are the new MY (Muslims and Yadavs) factor – a glorious combo whose collective votes shall bring a massive victory for the ruling party.
The earlier version of MY pales before it.
Motherhood and youth have always been the subject of exquisite poems, sculptures, and paintings, mostly created by males. The impact of these timeless works of art is strong. Under slogans about women being ‘Shakti’ and the youth being our collective future, several unexamined assumptions have always gone undebated.
Firstly, why do images of young men predominate whenever the youth of India is being discussed? Why are young women projected as part of a total identity package labelled as mothers of the future, who will raise wonderful sons to serve Mother India? Is a young mother, who mostly spends all her days and nights caring for her children, isolated from the rest of the world and well-paid jobs, the most enviable soul upon the Earth? No one pauses to check this for a fact with MY-2?
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
A mysterious assumption is that our young virtuous mothers by their very definition are selfless. So, raising children is its own reward.
However, men fall under another category . They provide the seed and move on to work leaving the mother to care for the progeny. If asked why it must be so. The standard answer is, ‘Shall I leave my job then? Who will put food on the table?’
Women are great because they set men free.
The underlying assumption is that a mother’s love is unconditional. She only gives, never demands anything in return.
Let us talk sense for once around MY as it really is.
The first memories we all have of warmth, security, sensual tenderness, and being nourished come indeed from our mothers. But what is equally true is that as children turn into youthful creatures, intense feelings and shows of affection peter out. Most youngsters, especially sons, at some point begin to find mothers’ love chokingly possessive. There are scores of jokes about whiny snooping mothers who rub your noses in guilt and need unstinted attention. This is also less visible but true in the case of young daughters. As they turn teenagers, mothers seem to them like gloomy prophets talking endlessly of male predators and the drudgery of a married woman’s life.
To daughters, whose thoughts are turning into thoughts of romantic love, mothers’ quips sound irritating to say the least. Frank talk between mothers and young daughters about love, sex, needs for privacy is carefully pared down. And mothers deem it fine for family males to chaperone young daughters and/or monitor their outings, mobiles, and reading material, which they consider totally acceptable.
The heterosexual version of motherhood in traditional Indian families is supported by the presently dominant political ideology, and demands that, as girls, we transfer our feelings of dependency, sensuality, and mutuality to the male authority in control of that particular area.
This, few realise, deepens the rift between young women and older ones further. It is not surprising, therefore, that eminent women who have come up in the world, mostly credit fathers for encouraging and mentoring them. Men get the credit when daughters top the merit lists, but mothers mostly appear as shy withdrawn figures feeding laddoos to toppers or smiling wordlessly on our TV screens.
This constant belittling of ageing mothers and the ambitions of young daughters automatically promotes notions of aggrandisement of men.
Their unquestioned supremacy within families and politics helps young men, on the other hand, and makes them idolise the father and lends them a positive assertive self image girls are denied. Male ambition is deemed admirable and assertiveness is valued as a virtue.
For young girls, when they seek to empower themselves, suddenly everything becomes a cautious “ask your brothers, fathers, or uncles for guidance.” ‘Sab kuch papa (or bhai or uncles) se pooch kar karna hai!
So, before the ruling male cabals lump MY-2 as a faceless body of votes, and promise them free education, cheaper cooking gas, money in the bank and free laptops, they need to realise this alone cannot lead to empowerment. Young daughters know, as they grow, it is the mother who is sold to her as her role model. But how many of them wish to sacrifice their independence and free will to the men in their lives: father, husband, employers?
With the undeniable rise in crimes against working women in streets and offices, the word in the street is working women are paying for their ambitions. Young working wives risk constant social disapprobation and even ostracisation for being different to other compliant bahus: “Ladki ho ke bhi apne ko bahut bada samjhati hai!”
As a mother and daughter, my writer mother and I always exchanged unspoken knowledge about the impending erosion of a mother’s authority as a parent as career choices loomed. And I saw time and again how the family would stand by the father and elder men to decide young girls’ and mothers’ work choices through an old list of dos and don’ts created for daughters by traditional family men. But skilled manipulators that they were, the don’ts were transmitted through mothers and grandmothers.
Show me a woman in my generation who, when she obviously outshone other candidates for a good job, wasn’t asked the appalling question: “Is your family okay with you working?”
Still there has been progress and there is hope. Even decades ago, a subliminal, subversive, but preverbal knowledge passed between me and my mother that “this is so wrong!” It was almost as though I was still within her, floating in the amniotic fluid. Many of my family opted for peace but my mother stood by me worried but firmly supportive of my silent refusal to bend my will to others.
Today when I think of the impossible conditions under which my mother rose to be a literary figure in the 60s in India, despite the impossible societal expectations of homemakers, my father’s distaste for women performing on stage, his quiet rage at my mother occasionally travelling on her own to Lucknow and broadcasting her works on the AIR, my anger against her dissolves into sadness followed by a strange but ancient unexpurgated anger of a young daughter: Why was she so diffident? How could she make it sound to her children like a joke or just a prank? What would have happened if my mother had tried to be a “good mother” like her female relatives, accepting the near impossible demands made on women of her generation and turned into an anxious, worrying puritanical keeper of her daughters and their virginity until good boys had been found for all of them by the men in the family and they went off to their “own house”?
I want to laugh about those anxious days, but a part of me still refuses to forget a period when one felt unprotected, unmothered and alone in a male dominant media. I never forget before feminism formally entered working spaces, how transitory, fragmented, and wordless the world seemed to young women globally. The timeless stories of the mother and daughter bond and their forced separation, the price we paid for finding our own voice and vote. We have managed over time to claim our experience as underestimated paid workers and of mental and physical abuse as real and got many old laws revised and made more women-friendly. These are some of a million silent mutinies to be still recorded. So do not try to turn us into MY-2 good Sirs, we’ve come a long way!
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
Such empty eulogies notwithstanding, ‘mothers and sisters’ in everyday India spend their lives as second-grade citizens in most, if not all, spheres of life. History bears testimony to the fact that mothers, and women on the threshold of motherhood, are not spared sexual violence in any form of conflict. In fact, they become cherished victims of war for men to fight over.
