Ownership with Grace

On the recommendation of a women's studies professor at the University of Mysore, I've been watching the Netflix series "Stories of Rabindranath Tagore" and there was recently one episode where a married man has an affair with the lead of a play. He is a wealthy landlord who constantly acts and speaks with ownership and entitlement. It got me thinking about power dynamics in relationships, efficacy and agency.

A shot from "Stories of Rabindranath Tagore"

I had my first day at the internship today and visited one of the centers to record the girls working in the apparel design class. They had just completed the assignment of designing and manufacturing a burka - looking at the current trends, sketching, buying material and sewing. Before we went, Gayatri (the head of this particular program) was briefing me on the program's mission, and this batch of young women. She reiterated the impact of the course as providing healing for them, as the creative process can be so cathartic. She mentioned that three of the girls in this year-long class had been arranged to be married. They are 18 or 19 and their families wanted to get them moving on to the next stage. Throughout the course of study, they decided to postpone the marriages. Not forever, she said, but when they realized they could do more than be a housewife, they wanted more time to hone their skills.

Another girl made a dress that I saw today, and afterwards I was told that she essentially sorted trash in basement, looking for useful things to sell. Initially very ashamed of this, she was shy away from talking about herself or her home. Yet this past project she used the materials that she found to make the garment. It was a colorful collage of an A-line dress, and she was so beaming and beautiful talking about it and her design process. I thought about my mother's found-objects art, and reflected on the power of recycling - for the environment and for the soul.

I think there's a big and challenging bit of misinformation that threatens feminism, but can be extended to any humanistic community. Just because we can easily translate words and phrases, we assume that their connotations are also one-to-one. Yet just as a one person's trash is another's treasure (literally), so too can societal roles and expectations differ on the ground. "Just a housewife" really is a scary concept when the person in this role doesn't know that any other option is available to them. It's a beautiful and righteous choice, when it is a choice. Yes there are portrayals of women doing anything anywhere etc etc. But it really is distributed unequally throughout the world. When that information is on a screen, it may be a screen that is wholly inaccessible, or incomprehensible or held in another person's control. If it isn't, it's still just an illusion.

I went on a walk yesterday for my first day in Delhi. I spent 2 hours in my room giving myself pep talks and scouring maps to figure out where to go and how to get there. Still I ended up in dirty, crowded streets, lost and desperately trying to look found, lonely and clinging to a fading facade of pride, and completely unsure of how to escape. I stepped in puddled of unknown liquids, paid too much for paneer and got stuck in the rain when the sprinkled streets don't smell like fresh grass and there's only crumbled pavement to balance on. I didn't get to the Lotus Temple yesterday like I planned. There are some goals that are just too far for right now. Some dreams that need more time to incubate. Some visions of what could be that are too evolved to be morphed into immediately.

And I think that's what happens when we don't shed light on the ladders out of cycles that oppress. And I think it's unreasonable to assume all our ladders are the same height. So if someone wants to stay at home and proudly tend to a never-ending list of necessary tasks, there should be a space for them to do that with dignity. But I'm not so sure that dignity entails a lack of education. It definitely doesn't look like forcing someone into a life without breathing room.

A student in the apparel design and fabrication course

In the "Success Stories" portion of the Adharshila website (the NGO I am working for), one woman talks about how after taking the design course, her husband wants to open a shop for her to run. Empowerment doesn't need to be wholly revolutionary, to break everything it wasn't before, to tear things down without a trace. In some cases that may be necessary, but ideally - and perhaps more sustainably, it seems more pervasively - it is supportive and small scale. It looks like horizontally organized "self-help groups" of wives and mothers in South Indian villages becoming their own banks. It looks like gaining skills to support the household and have a say in how the money gets run. These solutions don't have to threaten the pre-existing power dynamics if the parties are willing to flow with the changes.

The TV show is all Indian characters, naturally, but gives a beautiful insight into the human condition; passion, love, greed. Being away from my country for so long has really got me looking sideways at it - with skepticism and concern and love. Especially around the new government, and the growing machismo that is being welcomed into our sense of national identity. Without flexibility, rigidity finds an easy home. A gust of wind takes down a wall much easier than a swaying tree. A quote from "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf" really struck me when I heard it last night -

"And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must…eventually…fall."

I hope we can keep cultivating grace for the journey ahead.

A picture taken at a park in Bangalore