A boy was battered to death the other day because his sister was a divorcee. When hoodlums harassed another girl, the neighbours said she invited trouble by coming home late. A third girl is the target of wolf whistles and derisory comments because she wears jeans and tops.
Ironically, all three instances are from Bengal where Rammohun Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar strove to educate people and raise the status of women. But worse abuses are reported from other states as well. Not everyone can easily accept manifestations of the transformation India is undergoing.
I am not talking of the extreme rich or the extreme poor. One reads of the shackled quarry worker in Karnataka whose employer charges him to have the iron fetters round his ankles welded over, and of top people shivering in flurries of artificial snow in the cool room of a 27-storey architectural fantasy. They are exotic exceptions. It’s the broad middle classes, whose numbers are constantly expanding because of the intake from below, that are being convulsed by new ideas and new ways of living. Social stability depends on the guidance they receive in managing change.
Some will scream, dredging up evidence of female infanticide, that the three incidents reflect traditional persecution of women. Others will thunder that all abuses and all the distinguishing marks of social hierarchy – education, class and lifestyle – flow from financial disparity.
There is truth in both claims. But men who defy the conventions of their milieu also arouse bewildered antagonism though, being male, they are better able to defend themselves. Nor is money an absolute determinant. I once watched a well-dressed member of an august club squirt a jet of red liquid into the bathroom basin and walk away. More glaring cases of primitive thinking at the top (like honour killings) reinforce the conviction that different countries though they may be, India and Bharat are not geographically separate. They overlap.
Fashionable hostesses glittering in diamonds and chattering about their card winnings are murdered by servants whose Bharat is not some idyllic Vrindavana where Krishna’s flute charms cows and gopis but the festering slum round the corner with overflowing drains instead of running water or legal electricity. Masters and servants are separated by wealth but may also share certain traditional prejudices.
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It’s an alarming thought that India is hurtling towards physical modernity without the necessary mental preparation. Development (if that be the right word) is too patchy for social equilibrium. The three incidents reflect the compulsions of an age when girls work late in call centres, find sarees expensive and inconvenient for long working hours and crowded public transport, and when enhanced economic and sexual freedom means that unhappy marriages no longer have to be suffered as a binding sacrament.
Glancing at the society gossip in our newspapers, one fears that the journey that began in 19th century Bengal with barristers and civil servants reinventing themselves in England’s image may be in danger of going astray. Those social pioneers were meticulous about the bridge they built joining two societies. They lived at home exactly as they did outside so there was no dissonance between private and public life. Civilised minds matched acquired sartorial elegance so that the man in a three-piece suit and sola topee read Dickens and quoted Johnson without forgetting Bengali and Sanskrit.
Today – indicator of the limitations that underlie social tension – a young person dressed in the height of European fashion may speak only Hinglish.
Indira Gandhi once claimed that Kamalapati Tripathi was a modern man. Noting my surprised look, she added, “Don’t be taken in by those marks on his forehead. His mind is modern!” I had no occasion to put her claim to the test but it’s self-evident that modernity need not mean Western clothes or English speech. But there’s a dangerous imbalance when the outer and inner selves are sharply at variance.
The prejudice that killed the boy with a divorced sister is not confined to the uneducated lower classes. Two senior civil servants – both smart whiskey-swilling, English-speaking IAS men – whom I asked about a female colleague’s current posting didn’t reply to my question but sniggered instead that she was a divorcee. Their mental blinkers are their business. But what kind of direction can society expect from such stunted thinking? Education and enlightenment to bridge the gulf of centuries will not come from administrators who are stuck in the mindset of the dark ages despite their party glibness and academic and professional achievements.