Nilanjana Bhowmick: ‘Middle-class homes are secret laboratory of patriarchy’

Nilanjana Bhowmick is an independent multi-award-winning journalist based in Delhi. She has worked for some of the world's leading media publications over the past two decades. She is a former BBC producer and a TIME Magazine correspondent based in Delhi. The focus of her work has been on gender through the intersectional lens. Her work on gender and social justice has been awarded by the European Commission and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK. She was featured by the National Geographic Magazine in their 2019 Women of Impact issue. Her book Lies Our Mothers Told Us examines gender inequalities inside India’s middle-class homes.

wknd. spoke with Bhowmick to get a sense of how Savitribai Phule, Mahasweta Devi, Amrita Pritam, Medha Patkar, Kamla Bhasin, and countless others have, since the 19th century, fought for and won equal rights for Indian women in diverse walks of life — universal suffrage, inheritance and property rights, equal remuneration, prevention of sexual harassment at the workplace, and others.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

Explain how your book is a close look at the gender inequality that forms the bedrock of India’s middle class?

Lies Our Mothers Told Us digs beyond the loose top soil of middle-class India’s ‘progressiveness’ and unearths the solid rock of the patriarchy and persistent inequalities hidden underneath. I come from a middle-class family, and I grew up believing this garb of progressiveness. I did not find it problematic that I was “allowed” to do certain things. I didn’t find it problematic that there was always an underlying, unsaid narrative that I must be grateful for those freedoms – which by virtue of their definitions should not come with any preconditions of gratitude or pay-back. Middle class homes are a secret laboratory of patriarchy — it is where patriarchy has thrived and continued to thrive. It has escaped the scrutiny that was required because the lives of middle-class women are not interesting — it’s average. They have everything and yet nothing, but they hide the nothingness well. They have some frivolous freedoms for which they accept patriarchal impositions on their lives — they willingly drop off schools and the work force (or accept low-paying jobs with flexible timings) to look after the home, they submit to marriages arranged and approved by their parents, and then submit to various abuses – emotional and physical in their marriages, and so on. We have had many occasions to turn the spotlight inside middle class Indian homes – but we haven’t. We have ignored the suicides – something that the Lancet called a public health emergency. Thousands of women are killing themselves in our country every year – but where is the outrage? These faceless women are the face of the gender inequalities inside middle class Indian homes.

Tell us more about the suicides.

Indian women accounted for 36 per cent of global female suicide deaths in 2016. In 2018, the Lancet had called this a public health crisis. In India, as elsewhere in the world, the number of men who die by suicide are higher than the number of women but there are two distinctive factors here. One was identified by the Lancet study that while the proportion of global suicide deaths in India since 1990 has increased for both sexes, it was more for women than men. The other was identified by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in its annual accidental and suicide deaths reports. In 1997 and again in 2007, the NCRB had noted that while the reason for men’s suicide deaths were mostly owing to social and economic causes, women’s suicide deaths were almost always attributable to emotional and personal causes. The reports also consistently reported large number of deaths among married women – something the Lancet pointed out too – especially over dowry or physical violence. It was in the mid 1990s that the NCRB began to track housewife suicides as a separate category because the numbers were growing at a steady pace every year. In any other country, these would have led to solid data collection, studies and reports and solution hunting — but in our country they have just remained annual statistics on pieces of paper, hoping some would take note before it’s too late. Many experts have told me there’s no quality data on depression or suicides among women in India. If we were ever to have that data — middle-class women would probably emerge as the largest group of victims (given the size of the class and the simmering but well-concealed inequalities inside these homes).

What was the inspiration behind writing this book?

I observe life around me very keenly – as a storyteller, that’s my inherent calling. I guess it all began with trying to understand my mother, her life and to just figure out why she never laughed or smiled. And then it just became a part of me — trying to read emotions and understand not so much what is being said, but what is not being said. I have always been surrounded by strong, passionate women but also women who are struggling to keep it all together beneath the veneer of strength. I have always been a repository of stories – women have always entrusted me with their stories. They have believed that I would tell it to the world someday and tell it in a way that would matter. I have always wanted to keep my work gender-focussed but unfortunately gender is still not a priority in mainstream media. So, although I would have liked to, I couldn’t really tell the stories that I wanted to tell and the only way to tell it was to write a book. And I embarked on this journey very unwillingly because I already had a lot on my plate — but these stories needed to be told.

How much of it is a lived-in experience?

joydeep@khaleejtimes.com