Subir Roy: Gender War has begun!

Heaven knows India remains far behind in achieving any kind of gender equality. But no one can say the country is not trying. And as befits a federal democracy, each corner of the land is charting out its own unique pathway to the goal in keeping with its distinctive culture and tradition.

Earlier this week train movement on a suburban railway line came to a standstill just before peak office hours because of what happened at Khardah station, barely 15 km from Kolkata. Why? Women passengers were up in arms. A Matribhumi Ladies Special train, one of those introduced by Didi, aka Mamata Banerjee, during her stint as railway minister, which are reserved entirely for women, rolled into the station with, you will not believe it, men in as many as three of nine compartments which has been relabeled "General" from the earlier "Ladies".

The women, who loved the trains not just because they were relatively uncrowded but also because it gave them a sense of it being "theirs", were having none of this. They immediately got down from the train and squatted on the tracks, stopping all train movement on one line. The men who were travelling by the general compartments were equally outraged and to protest against the protest, squatted on the other line, thus stopping both up and down train movement on the route.

When something like this happens, violence can only be a "stone's throw away", wrote one reporter in a paper the next morning with or without realising what a lovely literal and metaphorical meaning it carried. As for stones, railway tracks, with their ballast (stone chips along the tracks), can offer an unlimited supply. The women, before long, started to pelt those stones, sending those on the platforms, mostly men, running for cover.

The police, as is their wont, came after some time but made up for the delay by sporting a great variety - RPF, GRP and RAF (the last are the riot police!). Then followed something that is unique to the public ethos in West Bengal. Men and women, after protesting against each other, on the arrival of the police, switched targets and turned on the police. No newspaper reporter was of course astute enough to notice the few odd men, who must have been there hiding behind some protective cover, having a laugh of a lifetime at this turn of events.

But all good tamasha must come to an end and the tracks were eventually cleared after four hours of disruption leading to the cancellation of 20 trains. Several policemen were injured, their cane shields proving inadequate in deflecting the stones hurled by the women with such passion and fury. A few arrests were made, including, one report said, that of a woman. The railway authorities, naturally consisting mostly of men, who had made the initial change as these special trains were less crowded than the others, retreated and announced that the old arrangement would continue.

Now such a momentous event cannot happen in a historical or cultural vacuum. All right, it was not quite equal to the storming of the winter palace at Petrograd (now St Petersburg) by the women's battalion in October 1917 signalling the Bolshevik revolution, but as a show of women's power against unilateral male action the event does quite well. It illustrates how the tradition of public protest in a left-inclined part of the country has transformed class war into gender war along with historical evolution.

Latter day historians say that the significance of the storming was exaggerated and a legend was made out of a non event (the palace was virtually deserted and unguarded), aided not the least by stills taken from Eisenstein's film depicting the official Soviet version of what had happened. West Bengal, with its tradition of serious cinema, can be relied upon to make a memorable film depicting this blockade as the beginning of the war of gender equality by the good women of Khardah, thus making a legend out of a four-hour action, give or take a few minutes.

Of course, the political tradition of public protest should not be overdone. There is a longer and perhaps more deep rooted social tradition in the state of women refusing to be intimidated by men and standing no nonsense. As well established as the genre of left-inclined serious cinema, there is an equal tradition in popular commercial Bengali entertainment of men being depicted as somewhat terrorised by women, the quintessential image of this being a housewife, broom in hand, glowering at the husband who cowers in another corner of the stage.

subirkroy@gmail.com