Social erasure of women

Let us take a break from the daily exchange of disgusting barbs being flung by our venerable political leaders at each other. The level of political discourse has sunk so low by now that short of using actual swear words, rival candidates have tried everything else. So, a resolute silence over who will win and who will lose the 2024 elections! As far as I am concerned — and I’m sure there are many like me — we have all lost. Pity this proud democracy and its citizens for having such a useless bunch of leaders.

That said, let me take you as far away from this muck as I can by recommending a film that needs to be seen and discussed for many reasons. Called ‘Laapataa Ladies’, produced by Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao, it is now available on Netflix for those who missed it in cinema halls. Long, long ago, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a story called ‘Nouka Dubi’ (The Boat Capsized) that had a similar theme. A barge carrying two sets of newly-wed couples capsizes, and in the melee that follows, the brides get exchanged. The story was made into a film and although I never saw it, it always tickled my fancy.

After all these years, Kiran Rao has picked up the same dilemma and brought it up to the present times by including some interesting twists in the plot. ‘Laapataa Ladies’ is set in the rural backwaters of the Hindi heartland, the last bastion of Hindu orthodoxy and patriarchal families. Like many of us, Rao says she always wondered what life in those sad-looking stations that trains pass by must be like. Dotting wind-swept fields and often a mere cluster of mud jhuggis with thatched roofs, they belong to an era that the rest of India left decades ago. Dusty, dismal, with no visible signs of modernity (such as electricity pylons, Internet towers and pucca buildings), life here seems frozen in a time warp. As we whizz past them in air-conditioned coaches, munching snacks and sipping fruit drinks, it is difficult to register this forgotten India that we all prefer not to see or think about, and ever visit.

The main plot of Rao’s film is a variation of the Tagore story, where two brides — their faces covered by veils — get mixed up in the confusion of alighting from a train and end up with the wrong husband and wrong villages. One finds a home in the wrong sasural but the other — the really lost bride — has neither a home nor a sasural and ends up sitting on the platform of a tiny railway station, hoping that her husband (whose name she does not utter) will find her. The efforts of the kindly station master and the local thanedar come to naught for Phool (this laapataa bride) cannot remember the name of her native village or that of her husband’s village. Let me not say more about the delightful twists and turns that are negotiated by the scriptwriter and give the plot away, but here are some points that moved me.

Tempting as it must be to resort to stereotypes when creating low-level government characters, Rao manages to mine their softer side to reveal that humanity is still alive and kicking in India. Missing people are not just grainy photographs published in a remote corner of our newspapers, but lives that have an individual story that can shake one. That orphans, beggars and those with the least to offer are often the most generous among us, and that goodness is not yet completely buried by greed, goons and government karamcharis.

Beyond this, the curious case of a girl who doesn’t remember her own name brought to my mind those countless women in our part of North India whose names were erased by their roles. So, bahu, bahurani, so-and-so ki amma, bitiya… all these were ways of making young brides forget that they had an identity of their own. Years ago, my nieces decided to create a family tree of the women in their father’s family. They were young feminists who did not like the idea that the official family tree they were shown had only men in all the branches. So they decided to ask their grandfather (the oldest person in their family) to help them fill in the blanks. Shockingly, he did not know his mother’s name because she had passed away when he was just three. His own sisters, surrogate guardians after his mother’s demise, were known as Choti Di, Bari Di, and referred to as only that. Other loving female relatives were Chachi, Bua, Mami and so on. Their names were laapata! When our family panditji conducted any shraddh or puja, he only asked for the names of the males on either side (the paternal and maternal) to be recited. No woman was ever remembered in such rituals after she died.

PN Haksar’s beautiful memoir (‘One More Life, 1913-1929’) is dedicated to all the nameless women of his family who gave him such a memorable early life, but who had no names other than the titles they were given in the family.

Think about this social erasure of women and remember that many women are still laapataa. Worse, they don’t even care to find themselves.