Dehati aurat’ is the backbone of our country – Shobhaa Dé
Shobhaa Dé
Shobhaa is a double Dé —both words describe her Beautiful, graceful, literate and a giver Like Saraswati on a white swan Her books taught at University of London, students writing scores of dissertations She has the gift of design and the power of her pen 10 million people read her words Founded and edited three magazines Columnist and author of 18 books Fearless, sharp wit, incisive writing, she calls a spade, a spade One of India’s most talented, most trusted Most impactful, most forthright and most fun.
New saris becoming bold icons A new language, a unique meld between two English+Hindi = Hinglish Her columns always readable, sometimes irreverent Politically incorrect— the essence of Mumbai Her hilarious column this week tickling the funny bone “Whose opinion is it anyway?” asked the fly Her columns bring a smile in the morning swamped with scams “Never a dull Dé,” we say. I wish I could be a FOTW — Fly On The Wall When she is planning her grand menu Shobhaa’s dinner table always groaning with Bengali delicacies Pure poetry like her words Her home filled with love and laughter Author, columnist, fashion designer, socialite, publisher, wife and wonderful mother She is successful in all her roles India’s Jackie Collins? Mais Non! She is unique, our very own, a true Mumbaichi Bai She makes our city shine and shimmer.
Shobhaa, we are glad you are one of us. Today, she will talk about the ‘dehati aurat’. It will be scintillating, fellow Rotarians. To hear one iconic woman describe another. Hold on to the edge of your seats. I give you Shobhaa Dé! – Dr. Swati Piramal
Good Afternoon, President Nirav, good friend Swati and friends. Let me give you a little background of the rather intriguing title that I’ll be speaking on. There is a context to the topic “What’s Wrong with Being a Dehati Aurat?” It is in reference to a supposed quote that came from Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. It was meant to be a putdown as far as our country’s Prime Minister was concerned. However, it was never corroborated. We don’t even know if he said it. But that’s media for you today. The comment gained popular coverage and acceptance. Everybody, including Narendra Modi, went into overdrive asking how Sharif dared to call our Prime Minister a dehati aurat.
To which I responded through a column where I asked what everyone was objecting to. Is it the word dehati or is it the word aurat? Or is it the combination that is a put-down? Did our Prime Minister feel insulted? Did Nawaz Sharif even say it in the first place? Even if he did, why should we feel that being called a dehati woman in India is insulting? So I went ahead and said that I am proud to call myself a dehati woman. Because she happens to be the backbone of our country.
But sadly, she is also perhaps India’s new minority. She is a part of the segment that has been woefully neglected by our politicians, at their own peril. Taking off from the dehati woman, I wonder why, with an election round the corner, the narrative for women continues to be non-existent. Don’t they care about the female vote? Or more importantly, don’t they care about the female rupee? It is an important decision for politicians who have the arrogance to ignore it. So I wrote another column and said that they may be ignoring our minds, but by ignoring our money, they are damaging themselves.
We have extraordinary women in extraordinary positions of power in India today including our dehati aurat. We have women who control our destinies in many different ways, starting with Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalithaa. Then we have our ammas, our didis, our mamacitas and many other women in positions that will impact our lives for the next 50 years. I haven’t seen a single political agenda that addresses their issues. And I wonder, if you can take the women of this country for granted, what is our future?
To put this point into a certain context, I will inject a personal narrative. My mother was carrying me when India was declared independent. My father was a district judge at Satara. At the stroke of the midnight hour when the British sahebs, my father’s bosses, brought down their flag and our jhanda went up, the hills around the district court came alive. There were people hiding in those hills with mashaals for four hours, waiting for that speech by Jawaharlal Nehru. That was the kind of atmosphere I grew up in.
The reason I mention this anecdote is because I took freedom for granted. It never occurred to me that a woman was going to be denied freedom at any stage in our country. Our Constitution guarantees it to us. It never occurred to me growing up as a young girl in Mumbai that I was in any way a second-class citizen. I had exactly the same privileges with very limited resources.
My parents ensured that my siblings and I had exactly the same shot at good education. That was their investment in us. So in that sense, perhaps, I was a little out of touch with the realities of other women till I became a career person. It was then that I got the opportunity to travel and meet women across India. And to find out for myself how lucky I was! I have often said that there is a state of emergency in India as far as our women are concerned. The sooner we acknowledge it as that, the better for us.
I have read interviews of highly successful women in India and elsewhere in the world. I wonder which model we are supposed to follow in order to become successful human beings and personalities without bringing gender into it? For example, I’ll quote an American here, a Tiger Mom, who said, “If you want to be extraordinarily successful and decide that family is more important then opt out of the rat race. Focus all your energies into making your children as successful as you were before you opted out.” Her approach was very aggressive. She wanted her daughters to be champions at the enormous cost of their childhood and smaller joys of everyday life. She wanted them to accomplish all that she had lost out on when she decided to get married.
The other narrative talks about “leaning in” where there are rules for corporate ladies if they want to get ahead in life. The rules include training husbands as well. There was this particular lady with three children. Her husband took full responsibility and raised their children exceedingly well. She acknowledges his contribution and says that she wouldn’t have reached where she is without his support. And then I read Indra Nooyi’s interview.
I got a little scared after reading it. This was when she had just taken over as PepsiCo’s chairperson. There was an interview with her young daughter. The daughter said that she often had to call her mother’s office and ask the team of secretaries to pencil her in for an appointment with her mother. I found it disturbing that a child had to ring up a whole team of secretaries to get 15 minutes with her mother.
I read another interview of a certain Aruna Jayanthi. This is where the dialogue between the dehati aurat and the urban aurat gets more complex. Aruna said when she got married, some of her in-laws assumed that she would leave her job. When she replied “Certainly not”, there was a lot of consternation and shock regarding her work-life balance. The subtext, of course, being that a woman who is successful in her career is somehow going to neglect her family, husband and domestic duties.
Now, in a patriarchal society like ours these are realities that every woman who has stepped out of her house and joined the work force has faced. She has dealt with, confronted, coped with, gone beyond and accepted these realities. The scary part, however, of this lady’s interview came at the end. She said she had come to the conclusion that babies don’t need their mothers as long as they are fed and cleaned. So after delivering her baby, she bounced right back into the workforce and says that it was the best decision she ever made. I am assuming that her baby is cleaned, fed and happy.
With these various signals and quotes coming at us from across the world, I deeply feel that we need to develop a model of our own. Our realities are not the realities of other ladies, whether in Japan or New York. And why should we anyway be taking our cues from cultures and systems which do not reflect us? Moving on to the decisionmaking process in India, I feel very few women are actually represented even at the political spectrum. There are very few women on boards of companies too. The statistics will show that the decision-making process in our country has nothing to do with the opinion of women. It keeps coming back to me that when Hillary Clinton, one of the most successful women on earth, came to India many years ago, she chose to quote a young Indian poet, Anasuya Sengupta. The quote said, “In too many cultures and in too many countries, women speak the same language. Of silence.”
And I came across another wonderful quote which is in fact Mahatma Gandhi’s quote. And he said I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one’s self-respect. And one more quote from Martin Luther King, which also addresses what we have been talking about. It says, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. What today I think matters to me, personally, the most is how we treat our women. Because that is the surest indicator of how we can judge our society or any society. If you don’t respect women, you cannot be respected yourself. So in this 2014 election there are going to be many women. Fighting that election and certainly being spokespeople for various political lobbies and groups. And perhaps getting to those positions of power where they will have the opportunity to make a real and substantial and long term change.
And I certainly hope that this election will be the defining and deciding election not just for women but for men and women together. Because I have always believed that it is not men versus women. It has to be men and women together. So I shall conclude with another marvellous quote by Adlai E. Stevenson, who said, “On this shrunken globe, men and women can no longer live as strangers.”
Unfortunately, in our lives, even in our immediate domestic lives and homes, it is how we deal with the men that is important — be it our fathers-in-law, our husbands and most importantly, for us women, how we deal with our sons. If we cannot influence and convert their minds or if we cannot project true equality in our lives to them then there is really no future other than a very dim future for those boys.
Most of you have extremely successful children. And like all change, as Gandhiji had said, begins with yourself, with your home and with your immediate environment. lived it in my own family. I have two sons and four daughters. The sons often complain that it is a case of reverse discrimination and that I favour the girls more than them. So I said after centuries and centuries of living with discrimination here’s a comment that goes entirely the other way round. Because often, the birth of a son in our country is met with joy and we distribute pedas. Whereas the birth of a daughter is generally when women weep because they dare not take a baby girl home to their in-laws. So I think the time to change that mindset begins with us. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Excerpts from a Q&A session:
Q: The Indian sub-continent has a whole history of women leaders. But as you mentioned, why haven’t those women taken up the cause for their brethren instead of getting involved in men’s issues like in the movie Disclosure?
Shobhaa Dé: The ladies that you are talking about in the subcontinent have more or less been token leaders. They are there because their husbands have been assassinated or they are victims of a personal tragedy. Some of them are there to represent men. I will quote Aung San Suu Kyi here, whom I deeply admire. She made an interesting comment, especially for the subcontinent. She says when women acquire power, they forget that they are women. And they start to clone the worst aspects of male behaviour instead of the better aspects. We have seen this in our own lives and our own country. It used to upset me when they talked about Indira Gandhi being the only man in the cabinet. As if being a woman in the Cabinet was somehow of less value. The stereotyping of women has been happening over centuries. The world is patriarchal, not just India. It is going to take a long time for women leaders to come into their own and represent other women. So that we can live in a better world. I hope and urge the new leadership, after the next election, to make the narrative of women at the centre of their own narrative. It is important for us as a country and for the women of this country.
Q: You gave examples of corporate women and political leaders. You also said they have to be successful in bringing up their children and keeping the household in order. So what is your idea of a successful woman and balance?
Shobhaa Dé: You took the words out of my mouth. I think balance is the key. However, achieving that balance is not easy. It means giving up a lot to gain even more. Each woman has to find the definition of balance within her. The dynamics have changed and so has the family structure. We have a number of successful mothers raising their children. How do they do it? Unfortunately, there is no magic mantra. It is trying to achieve that balance — not at the expense of anybody. It is a tall order and very difficult.
Q: I would like to talk about rural women. I think some of the most powerful women that I saw were in the Chipko Andolan and in Andhra Pradesh where 10 lakh women have taken up non-pesticidal management. They have brought their families out of debt. What are your thoughts?
Shobhaa Dé: I have met those ladies in Andhra Pradesh. One of them said something so profound that I would like to share it with you all. An illiterate woman had become selfsufficient with a business of making papads and pickles. There were almost 50 women who were working together in this cooperative. She said, “The longest journey a woman ever needs to make in her life is from the thali to her mouth. The day she can feed herself, she frees herself.” I can never forget that.
Q: Thank you for a lovely and thought-provoking talk. I feel that women in the house are more against working women than men. Do you think there needs to be some kind of awareness among women?
Shobhaa Dé: I agree. The bigger tragedy is, all the money that these ladies take home is handed over to their husbands and mothers-inlaw. They generally have very little access to their own salaries. It is a very complex issue that we have to tackle at a macro level for things to change.
Q: This debate of men and women is unending and superfluous. Long time ago, I read a book called Light on the Path in Theosophy. It said, “Intelligence has no sex.” I would like you to comment on it.
Shobhaa Dé: Thank you, Sir. I would like to add that though intelligence has no sex, opportunities, in fact, do!