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An odd kind of freedom
NOV 13 - While attending the international art festival “Separating myth from reality—Status of Women”—which was showcased till Nov. 10 at several venues across the Capital—and looking at the paintings, photographs, prints and installations on display, I was fascinated by the women and woman-centric themes that dominated the works of the participating artists from various countries.
Of course, there was a common thread binding all these works together: in one way or the other, they all celebrated women’s freedom. In one surreal painting, the bare back of a woman is set against the laundry she is doing. In another piece, an installation, male phalluses were sprouting from a clay pot, like tulips about to bloom. What became increasingly clear as one saw more and more of the exhibits was the idea that women were not objects defined solely by their gender.
Now I am not an art critic, so I will not go into details about what the paintings meant or what they were trying to say. I will leave that to your imagination. But after being overwhelmed by these visual delights (and shocks), it got me really thinking about the status of women’s freedom, at least in this country.
Who better to talk to about this, but one’s own lady friends? Which I did. But the friend that I asked was being coerced to agree to an arranged marriage. I, of course, did my utmost to talk her out of it.
“How can you marry someone you’ve never met?” was the classic question.
“Because it’s not easy for us girls, like it is for you boys,” my friend snapped, raising her eyes at me while sipping her coffee at a Kathmandu restaurant. “No matter how independent we may appear to be, no matter how free we may think we are, there is always this tremendous pressure upon us to agree to the decisions our family takes for us and most of times we have to give in.”
I half-expected that the conversation would turn towards “gender freedom”, but I never thought the answer would be along those lines.
She was a ‘modern’ Kathmandu girl who did not in the least looked the type who would forget all about her career, aspirations, dreams—or the guy she was kind of going out with, but whom her conservative family didn’t know about—and happily agree to get hitched with the first Ram, Shyam, or Hari her parents found for her from their own caste and community.
She simply said she just couldn’t go against her parents. It was clear that she was torn between her own desires and her family’s happiness.
I thought about another woman colleague. She went out with a guy for a few years, but he went abroad and settled for his ex-girlfriend, so she took the heartache in her stride and moved on. I had expected to find her a forlorn, heart-broken wreck, like any jilted lover would be. And perhaps she was, but in private. Not like those damsels-in-distress in Nepali and Hindi films who weep and cry or, even worse, commit suicide after being betrayed by their lovers. Sadly, films do sometimes reflect the society they represent: I grew up hearing real life stories of unmarried women who couldn’t bear life after they were left, often pregnant, by the men they loved. Many killed themselves.
Dramatist George Bernard Shaw wrote in one of his books, ‘home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.’ This is certainly true in our society, where we prefer girls ‘of a marriageable age’ to be home by a certain time in the evening. This is why young women who can cook well and take care of most of the house chores including their husband’s needs are considered ‘ marriage-material’.
My two lady friends, both from middle-class Nepali families, were also subject to these considerations, even though both would have liked to stay with their friends or go to a party (and which they sometimes did, despite a deluge of calls from their homes). Both admitted to being bad cooks. Both were also young and I expected them to slowly fit into the mould that society has created for them. The girl who had broken up with her boyfriend certainly seemed to be quite serious about trying to live up to familial expectations. She was willing to settle for any man her parents chose for her.
Still, trends show that in Nepal, arranged marriages are slowly becoming, if not an unimaginable thing, something old-fashioned, a thing of the past. Love marriages, by contrast, connote modern values and lifestyle: of having the freedom to choose one’s life partner. No wonder, boys and girls in our country are increasingly crossing caste and community lines to start relationships with the people they like, and with it, more and more inter-caste marriages are taking place in the country.
Thus, more and more girls are trying to proclaim their freedom in this still deeply-patriarchal society. But the tragedy is that they are torn between two worlds. While housewives and mothers pray for the success and longevity of their husbands, fasting the whole day during festivals and encouraging their daughters to do the same to get loving, caring husbands, they also know that they have to be as smart and hardworking, if not less, as their male counterparts at work to even hold their own in the competitive professional world.
Moreover, society is harsher on women than on men when they make mistakes. Men are always given opportunities to make amends, sometimes even for the worst of crimes. But women are marked for life if they stray even an inch away from their allotted paths.
So even while consciously acting in freedom, the very fact that they have lived in this unrelenting male-dominated society for such a long time means that Nepali women instinctively tend to be afraid of their own freedom and of the responsibilities which this freedom brings with it. Torn, they become unable to take any decision and end up depriving themselves of their own freedom.
My first friend’s dilemma was having to chose between her wishes and her family’s happiness and the complete change in my other friend’s outlook made me think that they wished somebody else would make their decisions for them. For theirs is only a freedom by name.
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