Picture Courtesy:
It is often said about women in India, and of
Delhi in general, that the nation they inhabit is not safe enough for them. The
usual way of categorizing and stereotyping Indian women is to consider them as
weak and inferior to their male counterparts. Such popularly held and
superannuated ideas about Indian women are apt to undergo a metamorphosis if
one enters the hallowed portals of the ladies’ compartments in the Delhi metro
trains, for here one is sure to encounter a series of young empowered females
whose very presence and behavior in that no-man’s zone will assure him/her that
indeed the Indian society, despite the innumerable arrows it hurls at its women
citizens, has succumbed to the fluxion of change.
Take a jolly ride in
the ladies’ compartment of the Delhi metro sometime and you’ll get a vision of
New-India. Here you’ll meet students, book-worms holding popular texts, out-of-coffee-house
female-intellectuals discussing books or burning social issues with friends, professionals,
engineers, doctor, social workers in baggy trousers and loose fitting kurtas—together
they will strike you as myriad as the travelers in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. You
can read their aurora-borealic eyes and decipher the layers of dreams that dwell
within. They hold snazzy gadgets, wear revealing clothes, and display badges of
matrimony like chuda and sindoor along with cool anklets or tattoos. They are a
fusion of the old and the new living in perfect harmony. They are assertive
too; let a man walk into the ladies’ zone and you will find one or two of the
ladies’ raise their eyebrows first and regard him with marked annoyance and
then they will raise their voice, “Bhaiya,
yeh ladies compartment hai!” (Brother, this is the ladies’ compartment).
As a daily commuter in
the Delhi metro I have ample opportunities everyday to study the female representatives
of ‘Incredible India’. They strike me as the amazons of a future India silently
professing the radical view that they don’t want be stereotyped, assaulted or
raped. Their words, far from being a kind of gnat-fritinancy, come to me as the
perfumed speech of the New-Women. They always have something to say, they have
their own opinions and they speak it without abashment either into their phones
or with their friends. Once I heard a woman swear profusely and even though
several inhabitants of the compartment looked askance at her, she continued in
her jocular-swearing mode till she disembarked from the compartment. This assures
you that in real life women do swear at times, just like men; that we are no
more the gentle-speaking ladies of the home who think twice before uttering a
swear word.
In general compartments
you’ll often see men sitting in seats reserved for ladies while women stand
without protest waiting for the men to vacate their seats. Most times, they
never get-up and if you tell them to, they will ask you to board the ladies’
compartment. “Ladies’ compartment main
jaiyeh; metro ne aap logo ko ek compartment de dia to general main seat kiyu
chaiye?” (Why don’t you go to the ladies compartment; the metro officials
have provided you with a whole compartment, why don’t you go there.) Such a situation
seldom arises in our ladies’ compartments. One time a group of men entered the
ladies’ coach I was traveling in and one of the commuters who I took to be a
social worker approached them and asked them if they entered the compartment by
mistake or if they did it consciously. They ignored her and continued laughing
among themselves. The other women regarded her without protest. When the next
station came the woman called out to one of the guards who waited at the
station and said we were having a little problem in the compartment. The guard
came into the compartment and literally shoved the befuddled mis-commuters into
the next general compartment. Subsequently, most of the women in the
compartment raised their voices in vehemently rebuking the guys; and few of the
men in the next compartment joined in too. I felt proud that day and empowered
as well. Later when I found the woman alighting in the same station as myself,
I approached her to congratulate her for her vociferousness. She smiled and
said the next time I saw something like that she hoped I would protest; “We
must protect our own space,” she said.
To me the metro-trains
are the microcosms of the nation I live in and the women travelling in them
representatives of the female sex inhabiting our country; their behavior, their
manner of speech, their attitude throws light on the general condition of women
in our country. These days I mostly avoid the general compartments and opt for
the ladies coach for the time I spent therein convinces me that despite the
allegations of unassertiveness, the modern educated women of women are as
cosmopolitan in their ways as the members of her sex in the Western countries. The
sight of many of these women assures me that our generation and the future ones
are more conscious of their rights and their freedom. And even though the cynic
in me tells me that may be I am erroneous in considering the ladies’
compartment of a metro train, a Potemkin village, as a reflection of real-India
peopled with real-Indian women, I cannot but question myself what real-India
means and why these educated women armed with cool-gadgets and carrying
expensive accessories are not females of real-India, whatever that is? The only
answer I get is that they do not fall into closed-celled binary categories;
their social personas beaming with specs of feminism are anything but weak and
inferior; we cannot categorize them. What fascinates me most is the ability of
the women to silently inspire; I often feel inspired by their bibliophilia,
their sense of fashion, their choice of words. Isn’t this how one woman ought
to inspire another? And all it takes to encourage inspiration is to put a lot
of diverse females in compartment embedded in the serpentine body of a
metro-rail!
In conclusion I wish to
say that Alice Walker was right when she said in her essay In Search of our Mothers' Gardens when talking about ordinary women feeding their creative urges: “The answer is so Simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked
high, when we should have looked high-and low.” Indeed when it comes to female
empowerment in India we too casually disregard our pedestrian sisters who
despite being homemakers encourage their daughters to pursue their careers,
women who in their daily lives try to bring in positive change in their society
by allowing their daughters to speak in familial discussions—may be the handful
of women I see everyday are those extraordinary females who have empowered
mothers or sisters and who in their lives knowingly or unknowingly disperse creative
auras that inspire other women to think-out-of –the box. In this sense they are
indeed real-women, the positively real female citizens that India should be
proud of.
Here is a poem I wrote after one of my
daily commutes in the Delhi metro:
The
Train
The train lurches its way to a known
destination
Outside islands-neighborhoods appear and
disappear
The train stops at one station
And then at another
As if to judge the aspect of the
defeated contenders--the island-neighborhood
Inside the train a sea of
gadget holding women tapping their
toes to inaudible music.
And in their middle there I sit
Just another face
thinking of the train and myself
on my way back home
Readers' Response:
Nisha Rana, a poet and a teacher posted his comment on my Facebook page, and I cannot but share it with you all.:
" I can't speak for other women/girls, but travelling via metro in the well guarded, safe territory of the women's compartment has actually made me lesser comfortable in travelling alongside men in the general compartments than I was prior to this reservation. it reminds me of a protective father who has kept his daughter away from any kind of trouble that the society might have to offer. And when the daughter enters the outside world without her daddy being there to rescue her if the need may arise, she is completely clueless. But it is okay. am sure the daughter will make mistakes and learn from them
We are at the first stage of empowerment where we have to provide women with a special treatment to help them come shoulder to shoulder with men. though I sincerely wish for the day to come when women will not be treated any differently than men,well at least not treated as inferior on the basis of those differences that cannot be ignored. I wish for the day when the endangered species will not need to stay within the boundaries of a wildlife sanctuary to be able to walk freely."
Nisha Rana, a poet and a teacher posted his comment on my Facebook page, and I cannot but share it with you all.:
" I can't speak for other women/girls, but travelling via metro in the well guarded, safe territory of the women's compartment has actually made me lesser comfortable in travelling alongside men in the general compartments than I was prior to this reservation. it reminds me of a protective father who has kept his daughter away from any kind of trouble that the society might have to offer. And when the daughter enters the outside world without her daddy being there to rescue her if the need may arise, she is completely clueless. But it is okay. am sure the daughter will make mistakes and learn from them
We are at the first stage of empowerment where we have to provide women with a special treatment to help them come shoulder to shoulder with men. though I sincerely wish for the day to come when women will not be treated any differently than men,well at least not treated as inferior on the basis of those differences that cannot be ignored. I wish for the day when the endangered species will not need to stay within the boundaries of a wildlife sanctuary to be able to walk freely."
