Only Words

[Long post alert]

As nearly everyone knows by now, The Telegraph published an image on the 22nd of July that many found distasteful and contemptuous of women. I will admit I wasn't exactly delighted by the piece myself, but more than offended, I was surprised and a little bit pleased. I had thought The Telegraph smarter than setting themselves up in such obvious fashion--after all, no one with half a toe in contemporary reality could have failed to forsee the backlash. In fact, so obviously did the newspaper make a sitting duck of themselves that I wondered whether this could have been a publicity stunt (not that The Telegraph needs it). After all, no long-term or even short-term regular reader of the newspaper could seriously accuse them of being a misogynistic or sexist publication.

Of course, this contextual analysis does not in any way diminish the disappoinment, distaste or anger the image may have inspired in the article's female--and, one hopes, male--readers. Their concerns are perfectly valid. However, their reaction to the image hauls to the spotlight, I think, a linguistic and cultural tension that I have personally felt for some years now.

Language is inherently biased towards the location and culture of its origin. In other words, language--particularly idioms and folk sayings--is inherently ethnocentric. And in so being, it nourishes and sustains certain aspects of a cultural identity as a norm, even when in actual practice the ethnic group's lifestyle has become more flexible. For example, the Bengali baagdhara or idiom "Kaw-awkkhor gomangsho" indicates illiteracy by identifying the first letter of the [Bengali] alphabet with beef. That the origin of this idiom is Hindu is immediately obvious, because only in Hinduism is beef a forbidden meat. Thus for as long as this saying is in circulation, one--quite possibly unconsciously--affirms the socio-religious prohibition on beef, and in so doing also affirms a Bengali Hindu society as the source of this particular saying. An acquaintance suggested Buddhism as a possible source, which again goes to show how our own cultural beliefs influence the way we think. After all, to a Bengali, giving up 'non-veg' is a great gastronomic sacrifice--and what greater sacrifice than a gastronomic one? So naturally, a religion preaching non-violence and sacrifice of personal pleasures must advise vegetarianism, no?

And therein lies the trouble, I think. Being, on the one hand, a... 'non-western', shall we say?... participant in an economy, education system, and workplace that originated in western Europe and the US has made us accept and internalise certain western ethical parameters to a very large extent. Undoubtedly this is largely an excellent things (although that would be a 'westernised' urban Indian's opinion) . But this immersion in a western--or now, 'global'--way of life has also recently given us an extra push towards establishing our 'ethnic' identities firmly, lest we only exist as half-baked second-best westerners. There is a great deal of talk of cultural revival and going back to one's roots--the pipe-smoking pucca shaheb has gone entirely out of fashion.

To be fair, of course, one should add here that being thusly 'ethnic' has currency only amongst those who have already established their global credentials--there is no element of 'close to my roots' when our cook makes us payesh, but when a neighbour's AB[C]D son-in-law made the dessert for her, the lady nearly wept with the double exotic pleasure of a America-born man preparing such a "perfectly Bengali" dish for her. I know for a fact that Indrani Sen's voice held special appeal for a friend of mine from the day she discovered the lady is a professor of Economics at one of the better known--and British-sounding--city colleges. And I think it was Dipta who once said vernacular swear words achieved a certain ethnic coolth once the urbane urban female population started using them. He was rather floored by LMG women calling someone a gandu, if I recall right.

On the other hand, returning to one's roots implies returning to the decided datedness, the pre-PC quality to our mother tongues. It is especially complicated in cases like India, where the same language is spoken by a cross-section of religions and sometimes even ethnicties. I've been so well 'sensitised' by my more global persona that I bite my tongue when idioms such as "tate ki Mohabharot oshuddho hoye jaabe?" ("Will it render the Mahabharata impure?"; roughly, a caustic "doing this little thing will have earth-shattering bloody consequences, eh?") present themselves, opting instead for the safer, "tate ki peter bhaat hojom hobe na?" (will it stop you from digesting the rice in your tummy?). Because unlike pork and beef, rice has been left alone by the scriptures and is therefore unlikely to offend. Unless, of course, one belongs to the Cult of Tortured Thinness.

And so every time I feel indignant when a man booms, "come on then, I haven't worn bangles on my wrists have I!", indicating his undilulated masculinity, I cannot help but recall having used the same trope to vent my disgust at fellow commuters a few years back. An emptyish bus, mostly full of men, had an excellent view as a frisky drunk tried to paw me, then collapsed on me, and finally grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to shake me when I managed to push him off. After I'd commanded (I can be quite effectively imperious for brief periods) the conductor to stop the bus and throw the man off it, I turned my fury towards the men (the only women on the bus were three old ladies). "You lot should wrap your precious selves in a sari and stay locked up at home", I had snarled, and had never for a second felt disempowered for saying it.

For the bangles and the sari insults, at least to me, convey a certain rights-deprived, economically dependent and socially powerless idea of the female that was a historical fact (and often a contemporary one, behind closed doors), which contemporary language recorded and preserved as a collective cultural memory. Therefore when I advise a makeover to a group of ineffectual fellow citizens, I am not suggesting that their spinelessness makes them prime candidates for contemporary womanhood; I'm implying that they embody that state of existence that women experienced for centuries on end, and were socially conditioned to accept as 'natural' to them. After all, I could easily have called those men bleeding cunts or colossal pricks [which, as an insult, falls completely on its face], and I doubt I would have been accused of misogyny or misandry.

Again, this does not excuse The Telegraph's visual for those that found it offensive. But it does indicate the delicate jugglings we do every day in an effort just to keep off people's toes, and such effort deserves a mention.