Notes From surviving Patriarchy
stories from an 'average' household
Summer 1994. The heat of the tropic was harsh. Besides the usual burn, it carries an enthusiasm. India’s post-independence growth was striking. The industrial revolution was gearing up towards a presumptuous end. “Modern India has set its’ foot on the globe” is the statement residing inside the heart of the patriotic youth across the democratic. The revolution arrived as letters in the post to the different states of the country, places that had the raw material for an industrial prosperity responded the fastest. There were others where the revolution was still arriving in small measures, perhaps late. Some places would have to wait for an eternity for a piece of paper to decide its fate.
Madhya Pradesh lied in the middle, as it always does, even geographically. The state being high in vegetation and corruption, had a glimpse of the urban environment across it. Industrial hubs were still establishing themselves. There was a hint of what this place could be, if the local citizens were as enthusiastic as the newly elected democracy. However, when there’s a democracy, for its healthy growth, there must be an opposition. The one that took life in Madhya Pradesh was the doubtful minds of the youth who seem to have been divided between leaving the state for better employment opportunities or being as patient as a tiger to watch the cities grow and wait until some place eventually looks ideal and ready for late-stage capitalism.
In a then small town in the east of this confused state, a young man has 2 letters in his hand. They are job offers. Everybody is congratulating him, the dahi-shakkar that rolls around Indian houses at the start of something new has reached him already. But the young man is confused.
Out of the two letters he has in hand. The first describes a job in the infantry-oriented company, the state’s new obsession. The other is a dream, a declaration of acceptance from India’s second largest employer, the Indian Railways. When the situation seems too good to be true, there’s always a twist, and the young man was probably ready for one.
At the back of the letter besides the usual seal of the railways, there was smaller stamp which had a hint where the letter had come from, a place which was a 26-hour long train journey away from his hometown. A city in the neighboring state of Gujarat named Ahmedabad. Between stagnation and ambition, the young man chose the latter.
That young man is my superhero, my father.
In 1993, Indian Railways had introduced the sleeper and the third-tier A.C. coaches for the first time. The Ahmedabad-Bombay line was at the forefront of this revolution. Famous for its’ enormous trade, it was divided between two parts, Ahmedabad-Valsad and Valsad-Bombay. My father was employed in the Ahmedabad Line.
The stage was grand, new and perhaps a little scary, and the railways lacked performers. Or the better word would be employees. Hence, they hired young men from the neighboring states, Madhya Pradesh being one of them.
If you ask me what makes a man leave his hometown, I’ll save my answer for when I will do so for the second time, because the first was a disaster. For my father, perhaps it was a vision. His kids growing up in this beautiful place where there’s no full stop to dreams. The trait of being a dreamer was not planted inside me on a random Monday; it was long encoded in my DNA from the day I was born. There were little rooms to live from where he came from, ambition had to sleep outdoors. My father is sure a bigger dreamer than I ever will be. From being hardly able to pay rent in an almost rural town to owning multiple houses in one of the country’s largest metropolitans. I’d be lying if I said I don’t hold pride in his journey.
Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh are pretty close states as the borders suggest. Yet if a line indicating capitalism is drawn, the two states would lie on opposite ends. Or at least with a huge gap. Hunting down ambition in Madhya Pradesh was easy, a young guy would glance at the roads surrounding his residence, the elected leaders who put them there and suddenly a thought of leaving would start bubbling up in his consciously aware mind. In Gujarat, or at least the industrial part of it, no amount of dreams and ambition are enough.
People are constantly striving to expand their businesses into a larger economic section. There’s more ambition in the air of Gujarat than there are PM 2.5 particles, I can bet on that.
As I have started noticing more, what fascinates me as a young guy is the vast sense of opportunity this place holds. A dreamer requires two necessities, a space to dream endlessly and a place that holds hope for the dreams to come true. Adding the social support you get in this state upon these two, Gujarat makes a solid case for why any ambitious person would want to settle here.
My grandfather was not a rich man. In his home survival was the bigger priority, dreams had to wait for their turn after dinner. Between the 5 siblings, my father was the second eldest one. And perhaps due to his age, the responsibility of sustaining the household arrived the fastest. There was a considerable salary gap between the two job offers and that became the final reason for him leaving his beloved place.
Between the bags and the old belongings that he would take with him on his new venture, there was something even larger than himself that he carried along to the city, something invisible that would hurt him and his family members in the upcoming years, a binding force that pretended to hold his broken home together. That mysterious invisible thing was ‘Patriarchy’.
The word ‘Patriarchy’ had been introduced to me by a girl whom I once loved back in 11th grade. The terminology was vast and perhaps a little confusing. She would explain and dissect the constituents of patriarchy like a devout and I would listen to her thesis as a curious child who secretly has a crush on his teacher. If I am being honest, every effort that I had been putting in, was just a selfish attempt to stretch the conversation a little longer than usual. There was a hint of curiosity in my patience with her words and a fact of attraction that made sure every sentence was settling down in the empty corners of my brain. The attraction sure made the inquisitiveness seem feeble. Love is strange, it can make the most boring conversations sound interesting without an effort, through its invisible & magical lens.
Time passed in its usual hurried manner and the 12th boards results were around before any sense of learning could be incorporated. Not to my surprise, my teacher had failed miserably.
I remember how she liked writing random poems the world would never see. Her keen interest in literature would make a glimmer from a firefly look dim. And Sometimes I feel one of my purposes on this little planet is to live by the unfulfilled dreams of the museum of people I have loved, living through the realities my beloved ones could not place themselves in.
The patriarchal gift she was granted due to her poor performance was a beating by her own father, being locked in a room with her phone snatched away and an imposed ban from stepping outside the house, or maybe cage would be the better term.
For month after the results, I had no clue if she was even alive. I doubt my story would have been any different if she had the privilege to step outside, use her phone and probably call me about her horrible performance. The ending would’ve been the same between us, I suppose.
This incident made me realize something. Patriarchy was not just a concept of conversation; it is perhaps the most real system governing the households that I have dared to step a foot in. Patriarchy is entangled with every pillar of the social hierarchy, secretly pulling threads from above in this play we call ‘society’. It may not be visible in the air, as a threat normally would be, but the threats that aren’t clearly visible are sometimes the most dangerous ones.
When my father arrived in Ahmedabad, he loathed the feel of the air this city had. To this day he thinks the soil of Gujarat is corrupted. The belief stems from an old story narrated across generations, the tale of Shravan Kumar and his parents.
The myth says there was an ideal son, named Shravan whose parents possessed blindness and had no option to survive self-sufficiently, therefore relying on their son for their existence. Carrying high expectations from their son, they demand him a pilgrimage across the country’s sacred spots. Shravan being the religiously devout child, accepts their desire as a blessing & decides to carry them in baskets tied to opposite ends of a bamboo pole, while carrying the carriage on his shoulders. In an altered version of the story narrated by my father, somewhere along their pilgrimage Shravan places his foot besides a huge tree, where he decides to leave his parents in the shade underneath. He gets infuriated by the labor and reveals to his parents that he is tired of carrying them on his shoulders, decides to abandon them and starts walking away in a search for ‘something else’, a meaning/purpose of his life beyond the obligation. All of this was heard by his parents and they were quite devastated. Shravan’s father being a wise man, pleads to his dear son to just carry the bamboo carriage to a place little farther from this huge tree. When the irritated Shravan does so, he regains his senses and starts apologizing for his boorishness. Witnessing his agony, his father consoles him by the sentence:
“It isn't your fault Shravan, the curse lies in the soil itself, it is corrupt and vile to enable this thought process within. Never set foot on this place again”
It is said that the shade of the tree was where the Gujarat borders initiated, and what Shravan’s father did was to convince him to set his foot outside of this corrupted land.
Although I cannot find any reference citing the credibility of this part of Shravan’s story, I now know why my father narrated this altered version of the story to us.
My father assumes the soil of Gujarat was the reason of his fading sense of connection with his parents, Shravan’s altered story was a metaphor in his real one. The ‘something else’ was greed and freedom from responsibilities of being a man.
You can tell a lot about a man by the stories he narrates to himself and the people around him. He never told me about this story being connected to him, but it doesn’t take a scientist’s brain to connect the dots backwards.
However as a child, my interpretation was slight different. The story grabbed the narrative of a striking correlation between Gujarat & my father’s inability to display affection for his parents. But there’s a golden rule to correlated events a child has no clue of; “Correlation does not imply causation”
The causation my father had been lacking was a well-known & long established feature of patriarchy, demanding zero vulnerability and a forceful suppression of any emotions by a man.
At that time Fax and letters were the only reliable means of communication. My father would receive a lot of letters from his family, colleagues and relatives. Perhaps the shift was new, therefore people around him were intrigued, some of them did care enough to keep sending letters until the list confided to a handful of family members and friends. His hometown compared to this city would need a ton of superlatives of urban to be compared fairly enough.
The bits of my father’s story I am able to narrate is the result of all the letters that he had received and kept safely. A lot of them are so perfect, they almost resemble a part of a holy scripture, maybe like the dead sea scrolls. The clean letters are the ones that carry his biggest mistakes and regrets. Perhaps a man keeps a better memo of his mistakes when they are evident enough to change the course of his life in a remarkable way.
The recurring theme across the letters was the same, he had been suppressing whatever that was inside him. He always wrote letter late and a lot of the times he didn’t even respond back.
I grew up envisioning my grandmother as an evil woman with her coarse slivers of grey hair strangling around the grumpy face. The fact that she would not talk with my father concerned me every summer we visited her. She wasn’t a great human being; there were a lot of things she could’ve done better. But the problem with her or I should say her curse was expecting her son to be vulnerable and talk about his problems to her.
The request bled a hypocrisy. A child born in the circumstances of a flickering flame of survival decides to hide the storm within him first, to keep the flame intact, and perhaps to escape the responsibility which lies within. She couldn’t understand the circumstances of the broken home my father had escaped was a contributing factor of his struggle with vulnerability.
The quarrel continued up until November last year, when my grandmother took her last breath in a state where she could not speak to anyone. I witnessed my father cry for the first time. Maybe if the tears would have been shed a little sooner, the grief of not being able to have a last conversation with her mother would’ve been a lot less, perhaps non-existent. Such is the power of imposed beliefs, people die defending ideologies which aren’t even theirs, of which they have no clue of origin and relevance.
Growing up cones with having a lot of realizations. Suddenly not everything is as black and white as it seems to be on the surface. The gray in the middle of this perception is ironically the cleanest version of the truth to exist. It may not be comforting; at times it conflicts internally. Yet the closest we get to a plausible consideration of the blacks and whites respectfully, subsists somewhere amidst the ocean of these gray sentences.
At the core of neglecting vulnerability and emotional expression by patriarchy lies a belief. A stone carved sentence that shouts “men are not supposed to weaken themselves and express”. The reason is quite simple, a man perceived as the backbone, the founding stone of a family is expected to hold on and support his family in tough situations. Maybe this is why crying is seen as an external burden on the man, another force to navigate through while performing his supposed duties. But why can’t a man break down even in front of his family members?
The underlying belief that lies beneath the stoicism of a patriarchal man's philosophy, is the perceived superiority over the female gender. A man cannot break down & be vulnerable because a woman is not perceived as strong enough to be able to handle the household in the absence of a man’s emotional stability, either financially or in an ironic manner, emotionally. Patriarchy assumes that the better the container of emotions, the better is the leader.
“घर में एक मर्द का होना जरूरी है”
If you ask me how often this sentence has been poured down my ears, I would have honestly lost the count. This statement is replayed over and over again, in funerals of a widow’s husband, in divorced households and even in places where the marriages are clearly intact. The belief exists as one of society’s recognition of a home. If there exists no man, the home is a fluke at best. There are no social rules that exist for women in patriarchy, the rules are replaced by obligations and prejudices. In being a man and a woman, the potential room for errors is highly ill-distributed, abiding to society’s forsaken testament is a choice for the male gender but for the women, it is a game never resulting in a respawn. Once a social dilemma is broken, the game restarts for men, I suppose it never does so for the women.
The concept of emotional labor is foreign to patriarchal men, excluding the stoicism, which is an exhausting emotional labor in itself. The onus of navigating through a family's emotional chaos is gifted as a problem to the women. A woman is expected to express in the place of a man, for the gender devoid of basic empathy. The burden of emotions is distributed among the women, with an expectation of a magic that solves the turmoil within men which they cannot even comprehend themselves.
When my mother arrived here in 2002, the damage had already been done. Avoidant, arrogant and a carrier of patriarchy, my father had already sabotaged the relations he had with his relatives and family members. He expected my mom to help him re-establish the connection he had with his family prior to the shift he had. Delusion is a weaker word here, I would say he was infected by madness, probably of the system looming above him.
All of the emotional expression, conversations and confrontations were my father’s task to be navigated through, assigning this role to my mother was not a mistake, it was a belief that seeped deep through him even before marriage; “Women either make or break the house”.
It is funny to me how patriarchy assumes that men are the best bricks of the house, and yet when a house breaks or is inflicted upon damage, the fault suddenly masquerades behind the perceived weaker section of the home, the women. If the bricks were really strong enough, couldn’t they bear the damage for their weaker foundations altogether?
In my father’s context, making a house probably meant fixing the prior relations. I am biased towards my mother and I always will be. She had tried her hardest to hold this chaotic psychopathy induced family together. Sadly, her inevitable failure was expected to arrive. It was like equipping a rocket-scientist with a pair of pliers and expecting him to clear the sewage in the sink. The competence was misaligned.
My constant struggle with vulnerability and emotional expression is majorly contributed to the constituents of patriarchy. Part of how my father pretends to hate me, is my autonomy over my decisions. Patriarchy assumes that the leader is the self-righteous and supreme deciding factor of any decision that partakes in the family’s current condition. Any sort of rebellion or denial is viewed as betrayal and mistrust towards the leader. Homes are complex, and patriarchy fails to understand the complexity of each family member that makes a home a place where someone would wish to live into.
The idea of building a home from scratch has persisted inside me from a long time. More than its locality and constituents, I have romanticized the idea of what would my home feel like. Moreover, what would the family members think of this place. I sometimes ruminate whether my future home will just be a negation of all the barriers and blatant ideologies that persisted in my current one, or would it be completely unique to what I have imagined it to be. Whatever the answer may be, I feel my future home will be a place where laughter wouldn’t be considered a noise, autonomy would be blessed, questioning would always be accepted, emotional expression would be considered natural, expectations and obligations would be left to the door of ambition, and no woman would be considered beneath an ideology. I want the kind of home where my kids can bully me for being wrong in a quarrel with their mother, where I am the first one they run to when they need help or advice. No kid should outsource their vulnerability to strangers they do not know completely. Wanting something and actually achieving lie almost on opposite ends of the spectrum. It will sure require a lot of will and determination, probably huge setbacks in the pursuit of a home so tender. Yet, I am sure it will all be worth it in the end.
I believe that there’s nothing new that I have written about patriarchy here, a lot of the internet has already done a great job at dismantling its harmful features. Nor do I think that I am completely right here, there is a plethora of perspectives and ideologies that I have no clue of. The central idea that I revolved around was a critique of patriarchy from a male lens and my personal experiences of the ideology, and I think I have done a small job here.
“समाज के नियमों के अनुसार पुरुष पुरुष ही रहता है, भले ही उसकी ज़िंदगी की हर किताब के पन्ने पर पाप के धब्बे ही क्यों न हों। लेकिन वह औरत जो सिर्फ एक बार जवानी के भारी भावनाओं के प्रभाव में या किसी लालच में या किसी पुरुष की जबरदस्ती का शिकार होकर एक पल के लिए अपने रास्ते से हटी, वह औरत नहीं रहती। उसे अपमान और नफरत भरी निगाहों से देखा जाता है। समाज उस पर वे सारे दरवाजे बंद कर देता है जो एक पुरुष के लिए खुले रहते हैं।”
-सादत हसन मंटो (translated from Urdu to Hindi)
वर्षो पहले मैंने मुंशी प्रेमचंद की लघुकथा ‘बड़े घर की बेटी ‘ पढ़ी थी। प्रेमचंद की उन कहानियों को मैं किसी धार्मिक ग्रन्थ समान अपने ह्रदय में समा कर रखता था। अंग्रेजी में हाथ थोड़ा तंग था और आदत अभी बानी नहीं थी, शायद इसीलिए मेरी मातृभाषा में बने शब्दों के उस संजोग ने मुझ पर गहरा प्रभाव किया था। कहानियां ज्यादातर दिमाग मैं आश्रय तब लेती है जब उसके किरदार आपकी आंतरिक विचारधारा को नुमाया या अचंभित करदे, ह्रदय रूपी किताब पर एक ऐसा प्रकाश डाले जिससे उसमे लिखित सारी घटनाए उत्तेजित होजाए। एक कहानी के किरदारों के बिच अक्सर मैं कहानी के बजाय अपने आप को ढूंढता हूँ, शायद इसीलिए मेरी पसंदीदा कहानियो में मेरी पीड़ा और जिज्ञासा की एक सूक्ष्म छवि दिखती है।
अगर में अपनी दृष्टि से लेखक का बनावटी पर्दा हटा कर नज़र डालूं , तो मुझे ‘बड़े घर की बेटी’ में अपनी माँ की धुंधली परछाई नज़र आती है। केवल ४ पन्नों में बसी इस कहानी का तात्पर्य यह है की ‘एक बड़े घर की बेटी सब संभाल लेती है’। मेरी माँ का घर बड़ा नहीं है। लेकिन अगर किसी घर के कढ से उसकी महानता मापी जाए तो एक मिट्टी के टीले में पल रहे, प्यार से भरे परिवार की ऊंचाई को और एक आलीशान महल के निवासी दैत्य प्रवत्ति के मनुष्यो के अकुशल व्यव्हार को, बोहोत चालाकी से नज़र अंदाज़ किया जा रहा है।
मुझे लगता है प्रेमचंद की परिभाषा में एक बड़ा घर वह होता है जिसकी प्रचलित विचारधारा इस दिखावटी दोगले समाज की असभ्यता से प्रभावित न हो। एक ऐसा घर जो अपने उसूलो का पुजारी न हो। यकिनंद मेरी माँ का घर प्रेमचंद की परिभाषा अनुसार काफी विशाल था। लेकिन पितृसत्ता समाज का वह अमर कीड़ा है जिसको मार ख़तम करने की दवाई का इस देश में निर्माण अभी पर्याप्त मात्रा में नहीं हुआ है। समाज के इस जाल में मेरी माँ ऐसे फसी जैसे एक सुनहरी मछली किसी खूंखार मछुआरे के जाल से अचंभित ही गयी हो।
इस संक्षेप को लिखते समय मैंने यह निर्णय लिया था की समाज की बुराई और मेरे माँ के सपनो और मीठी बातों को अलग अलग बिखेर के प्रस्तावित करुँ, लेकिन यह समाज के काले धब्बे मेरी माँ की हर एक चमकती साड़ी पे चिपके हुए है, कभी कभी तो मुझे लगता है क्या मेरी माँ की साड़ी में कुछ चमक बची भी है? या फिर इन काले धब्बो ने वो कर दिखाया जो ये समाज हर महिला से चाहता है, एक महिला के अस्तित्व का घुटना, तड़पना और आत्म समर्पण करदेना?
में खुदको लेखक मानु या नहीं लेकिन एक पुत्र जरूर मानता हूँ, और शायद यह ही मेरे जीवन की आपदा है की में अपनी माँ से केवल एक रिश्ते से बंधा हुआ हूँ। अपनी माँ को मैंने उनकी साड़ी, रोटी और सिन्दूर से परे जानने की कोशिश की तब पता चला की मेरे अंदर पल रहे साहित्य की इस रूचि के पीछे एक बोहोत बड़ा बलिदान है। मुझे इस बात का दुःख है की मैं कभी अपनी माँ को उनके रिश्ते के परे नहीं जान पाउँगा, मैं उनका मित्र होने का ढोंग कर सकता हूँ लेकिन उस मित्रता से जुडी जवानी को मैं वापस नहीं ला सकता। बनने को में उनका अंग्रेजी अध्यापक बन सकता हूँ लेकिन उस समय से बंधी रसोई को मैं उनके दिमाग से नहीं निकल सकता। बनने को कितना कुछ है इस दुनिया में लेकिन जब परिवार की परछाई किसी महिला के पीछे पद जाए, तो उन सपनो पे ये समाज एक अल्पविराम लगा देता है। एक महिला को केवल घर की चार दीवारों में घेर कर रखने को, उसके जीवन का उद्देश्य समझने वाले समाज को में पूरी तरह से नकारता हूँ।
मेरी माँ को भी कोई पकवान ज्यादा पसंद होगा, वो भी किसी किताब के बारे में सोचती होगी, किसी जगह से उनके दिल की तारें उलझी होंगी और शायद किसी साड़ी की चमक को भी वो उसके धब्बो के बावजूद निहारती होगी। जितना हो सके इस पितृसत्ता जैसी विनाशकारी विचार धारा से दूर रहने की मैं कोशिश करता हूँ, लेकिन में कोई भगवन नहीं। मुझसे भी गलतियां होती है, में भी अपनी माँ पर कभी थोड़ा ज्यादा चिल्ला दिया करता हूँ, कभी उनकी बातों को अनसुना करदिया करता हूँ, परन्तु इस समाज और सत्ता के प्रति मेरी घृणा इस मुकाम पर पहोच चुकी है, की मैं अपनी गलतियों को आज कल होने से पहले पहचान लेता हूँ। मुझे कभी कभी खुद के व्यव्हार से चीड़ सी होने लगी है, क्यूंकि ये पितृसत्ता का बीज मेरे अंदर आज से नहीं बल्कि जबसे मेरे कान सुनने लायक बड़े से हुए है, तबसे बोया गया है।
मैं मानता हूँ की मेरी माँ का पुत्र होना मेरे लिए किसी भी प्रभु के वरदान से सर्वोच्च है। लेकिन यदि रास्तें में चलते प्रभु मिलगये तो में उनसे पूछूंगा की नारी का जीवन इतना कठिन बनाने से वह उनसे किस पाप का प्राश्चात्यताप करवा रहे है। क्या एक प्रभु इतना स्वार्थी है की अपनी उपासना अर्थात वो मनुष्यो को पीड़ा के अनिवार्य चक्रव्यूह में फसा दें?
मुझे तो इसका उत्तर नहीं पता, क्योंकि में तो प्रभु को नहीं मानता, किसी दिन मेरी माँ से चर्चा हुई तो अगले संक्षेप में इस विचार पर और प्रकाश डालूंगा।
मैं सभ्यता और समाज की चोली क्या उतारूँगा जो पहले से ही नंगी है। मैं उसे कपड़े पहनाने की कोशिश भी नहीं करता, क्योंकि यह मेरा काम नहीं, दरज़ियों का है।
-सादत हसन मंटो (translated from Urdu to Hindi)
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I had this saved so I could read it in peace after my exams were over.
Such a beautiful introduction for your father. The prose at the beginning really draws you in, I kept wondering where you were going with it, and that slow unfolding really set the tone right. I’ve really been enjoying these more personal essays you’ve been writing. The way you transitioned from keeping patriarchy at the edges of the story as just a word, to gently coaxing it into the centre of the prose felt so natural. The Shravan Kumar reference teleported me straight back to my childhood, and the act of keeping the letters reminded me of Anne Frank preserving proof of her suffering.
Also, your use of “stoicism” makes me want to digress for a minute (apologies in advance for the looong comment) because Classical Stoicism was about responding to circumstances with inner discipline, not about emotional repression. It’s internet culture and often patriarchal conditioning, that has flattened it into this idea of men not feeling at all.
And omg, “If the bricks were really strong enough, couldn’t they bear the damage for their weaker foundations altogether?” was so incredibly thoughtful. I’m so glad that you pointed it out in the right context.
Also, it’s not about writing something “new.” These themes have existed forever, it’s mainly the way you portray them that matter, Ayush.
Also omg finally, Badi Ghar Ki Beti mentioned!!
Beautiful piece, as always, looking forward to reading more <3
Jab bhi likhte ho, sona ugalte ho!
The Shravan Kumar reference was on point, I always love learning when I am reading something, even in personal stories. Your articulation is stellar as always. I feel like I was moving from one place to another while reading this!