Naak naak, who's there?

[So, Kindle magazine asked me to do a piece for their cover spread about women “reclaiming” their bodies, and I obliged with this series of vignettes about the Nose. (The essays in the issue are about various body parts.) Still a bit unsure about what I was trying to do exactly, and it reads like a mix of personal anecdote and po-faced social commentary from the “look-at-me-I’m-such-a-sensitive-male” catalogue. But hopefully it isn’t a complete... stinker.

Post title courtesy that adroit punster, Baradwaj Rangan]

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My favourite photograph of my wife Abhilasha is, of all things, an X-Ray - a profile of her face that shows the outline of the nose and the jaw clearly enough, but with one tiny, jarringly non-organic substance visible in the nasal region. You feel like you're looking at an embedded metallic chip from a dystopian story about people being monitored by a totalitarian government.
 

Illustration: SOUMIK LAHIRI

Learn the context though, and it becomes funnier. Two years ago Abhilasha had a nose encounter of the weird kind. She had been wearing one of those small nose-rings that looks very compact on the outside but which comes with all sorts of complicated paraphernalia that lies just out of sight: a tiny cap screw, a bolt, and for all I know a warehouse supply of ball bearings and rotating-gear wheels too. Anyway, over time the little screw somehow got embedded in the wall of the nose, with the skin closing over it – and she discovered this only when she managed to remove most of the ring and realised something was still lodged inside, where only a surgeon’s delicate tools could reach.

Hence the X-Ray. Hence a quick appointment with the local clinic, where all of us had trouble keeping a straight face. (Surgeries involving a family member are not normally things to be laughed at, but.) Hence the giggling doctor – and I tell you, a big burly Sikh surgeon teehee-ing like Tinkerbell as he exits an operating theatre is a rare sight. Eventually Abhilasha came out looking sheepish, a small bandage-gauze awkwardly attached to half her proboscis. “Aaj tumne hamaari naak kaat ke rakh di,” I told her with the sternest expression I could muster.

It seemed the obvious thing to say. After all, we are the smugly liberal ones, right? We have grown up hearing – and superciliously shaking our heads at – those melodramatic pronouncements in Hindi movies. We feel we can use them in humour, even though we know they so often assume much darker expression in the real world: as condemnations, to suppress rights and freedoms; that they can even be a matter of life or death. A few months earlier, we had read the story about Bibi Aisha, the Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by her husband and in-laws when she tried to escape them after years of abuse. Aisha did eventually gain a measure of freedom – and became a poster-child for commentary on sexual oppression when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine – but one can safely assume that thousands of other women aren’t as lucky.

However, this attempt to construct otherness – to not acknowledge the large spectrum that links our own presumably enlightened lives with the uncivilised lives of "those" people – is self-deceptive. Years earlier, Abhilasha herself had been on the receiving end of a more serious “naak” denouncement. It was during one of her first stints in journalism. An unexpected “graveyard shift” happened to arise during a week when her parents were out of town and she was staying at her maasi’s house. Destined to be stuck in office past midnight and reluctant to disturb a household that had old people living in it, she decided to stay over at a friend’s who lived nearby – after having informed her aunt, of course. It was the practical thing to do in the circumstances. But the next day, when her mother returned, hell broke loose: there was screaming, there were wails and imprecations. What were you thinking? What will they think of us? What kind of a job is this? And that damning sentence: “Naak kaat di tumne hamaari.”

Two things worth noting here: one, that her parents seemed less concerned about what she had really been up to the previous night, and more concerned about what their relatives would think; deeply upset that the situation had been such that others knew. And two: Abhilasha’s mother had once been the principal of a small school and had in her younger days written short stories that might be described as feminist laments for the ways in which women are made to live in the shadows of men. Her apparent volte-face when it came to her own grown-up daughter seems like a classic case of a victim of patriarchy becoming absorbed into the system.

Here was an urban family that hadn’t thought twice about giving their daughter the same level of education as their son, and about encouraging her professional ambitions. But that didn’t erase the Lakshmana-rekha: it was untenable to stay out this late, to fail to be the Good Girl treading a straight path from office to home.

*****

The other “lakshmana-rekha” in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother made across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion. It’s easy to see why this ambiguous episode has lent itself to so many literary retellings and alternate psychological explanations. In a short story titled "Surpanakha", for instance, the novelist and poet Amit Chaudhuri casts Rama and Lakshmana as posturing bullies, unable to deal with the idea of a woman as a sexually autonomous being. “Teach her a lesson for being so forward,” Rama tells his brother chillingly when Surpanakha propositions him; the words echo “punishments” meted out by patriarchal societies to women who dare express sexual desire.

Lakshman came back; there was some blood on the blade. “I cut her nose off,” he said. “It,” he gestured toward the knife, “went through her nostril as if it were silk. She immediately changed back from being a paradigm of beauty into the horrible creature she really is. She’s not worth describing,” he said as he wiped his blade.

“Horrible creature...not worth describing.”

To see that Time photo of Bibi Aisha is to be reminded of why the nose is so key to our perceptions of human beauty as well as personal dignity. Try looking at the photo with your finger awkwardly blocking out the missing organ, and you get a hint of inner radiance and poise; you see the forthright, proud gaze of someone who survived an ordeal. And yet, without the nose, the illusion becomes difficult to sustain – the organ is, to put it simply, central. With a gaping hole right in the middle of the face, the resemblance to a death-head is inescapable, and we are uncomfortably reminded of what we are beneath our hubristic ideas of our own beauty.

The nose is also, of course, the breathing apparatus – directly associated with the most fundamental activity of human existence. And in the “naak kat gayi” context, it can be an uncomfortable reminder of what existence is for so many women around the world. It means being the repository of a family’s or society’s “honour”, someone whose “transgressions” – real or imagined – can shame everyone around her. It means being custodian and possession, goddess and slave, at once. It means you have no identity as an individual, only as a symbol or as an object. As Nivedita Menon points out in her fine new book Seeing Like a Feminist, the obsession with a woman’s “honour” lies at the heart of the belief that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus, she is a blot that society must purge itself of. (Or even marry off to the rapist so that a non-consensual sexual act is retrospectively legitimised.)

Something else Menon’s book discusses at length is gender performance: how women have internalised aspects of behaviour expected of them – keeping their eyes averted, focussing inward, occupying the least possible space in public places. Interestingly, an inversion on the Pinocchio story – Pinocchio’s Sister: A Feminist Fable, written by Abraham Gothberg – features a girl whose nose grows longer when she tells the truth, a metaphor perhaps for how women are often forced into living up to an ideal rather than being true to themselves.

*****

I offered a morbid view of the nose-ring at the start of this piece, which is perhaps unfair. Nose-rings can of course serve graceful decorative purposes, enhancing a woman’s aesthetic appeal (and why not a man’s too?) and making life more colourful and attractive generally. But beauty and ugliness can go hand in hand, in much the same way that many festive rituals can be celebratory fun while also being subliminal ways of maintaining a regressive tradition. I have friends – women among them – who cluck their tongues exasperatedly when I say that the large nose-ring worn by Indian brides in certain traditions reminds me of the rope threaded through a buffalo’s nostrils, used by its master to lead it about. And apparently I’m being a wet blanket and a grouch when I spell out my feelings about customs like the “nath atarna” – the removal of the nose-ring – which is often a euphemism for the end of a woman’s virginity. Or the sight – so touching to many eyes – of an adult woman sitting on her father’s lap during a wedding ceremony (the nose-ring prominent on her face), an object waiting to be transferred from one man to the other.

Of course, in many such cases, the custom is “harmless fun”, containing a sense of irony, with young people joking about the implications of what they are doing even while they are doing it. But it is useful to be aware of how firmly embedded certain ideas are in our social framework; how they become part of our everyday lives and assumptions, and are propagated by even the most innocent-seeming aspects of our popular culture. Consider the suhaag-raat scene in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, with Shashi Kapoor removing Raakhee’s ornaments one by one as she sings in memory of a lost love. On the face of it, this is a tender scene from one of our most beloved romantic movies, and the film is trying hard to present Kapoor’s Vijay as a caring, sensitive man. (It’s a terrible performance, incidentally – the actor has absolutely no clue how to play this scene, and can one blame him?) But think about what is really going on here and it becomes a little icky: a woman, who is in love with another man, is about to be bedded by a husband whom she barely knows (and in the patriarchy, deflowering is of course code for “possessing” – she is now his). The last ornament he removes is the nose-ring, as the song ends and the scene fades to black; it is as obvious a symbol as all those Hindi-movie shots of bees buzzing around flowers whenever two lovers draw near each other.

Metaphors for virginity aside, the author-mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has noted the many ways in which a woman wearing a nose-ring may be perceived. “The scientist said it has no scientific basis. A rationalist mocked her for mutilating her body in the name of beauty. Another rationalist pointed out that it was an ancient acupuncture technique. A feminist said she was sporting the symbol of patriarchy. A secularist said that made her a Hindu.” And so on. At the end comes the kicker: “Everybody saw the nose-ring. No one saw her.”

In a better world we would be able to see the whole person, as opposed to a cluster of disjointed parts. Perhaps it will happen one day.

On "liberal extremism" (and soft oppositions to freedom)

I’ve had a cordial relationship with Chetan Bhagat for a long time; there are things I like about him, as a person and – yes – as a writer too. I once faced flak in literary circles for saying mildly nice things about his early work, and I still often have arguments with friends who make condescending remarks like “Why has Chetan Bhagat been invited to a literature festival?” But I’m deeply disturbed by the position he has adopted on the Salman Rushdie-Jaipur issue, especially his repeated endorsement of the bizarre idea that the whole mess was jointly caused by “extremists on both sides”.

Two exhibits. First, some samples from Chetan’s Twitter feed:

“When extremists on both sides turn a festival into an activist venue, there's a security risk.”

“In a fight between extreme fundamentalists and extreme liberals, the sufferer is the beautiful jaipur litfest, the gainer an appeasing govt.”

“Extreme fundamentalists. Extreme liberals. Extremely difficult to deal with either.”

“If you are truly religious, you believe in forgiveness. If you are truly liberal, you respect other points of view. Sadly, don't see it much.”

A response to that last Tweet: sure – if you’re truly liberal, you respect other points of view. (Since the meaning of “respect” is often hazy in this context, a clarification: it means that you believe people should have the freedom to peacefully express their views, no matter how strongly you disagree with them.) What you emphatically DO NOT respect – or condone – is the demonstration of those views through threats and violence, which curtails the similar rights of other people. And it’s the religious extremists who have been curtailing rights in the Rushdie case; the “liberal extremists” have been responding to the bullying with non-violent protests. This is an important distinction. Even if you find it convenient (for whatever reason) to think of strong-voiced liberals as extremists, do have the grace to acknowledge that there is no equivalence between these two forms of “extremism”.

Exhibit 2: this CNN-IBN video featuring Chetan, Ruchir Joshi (who was one of the four authors who read from The Satanic Verses in Jaipur) and Asaduddin Owaisi, who called for the arrest of the writers.

On view here is Chetan as the “balanced” diplomat-cum-moderate who is willing to listen to both points of view and who badly wants the two parties to find a middle ground – “because otherwise this whole controversy is kind of useless”. I will not comment on individual actions, he starts by saying. Then, “As an artist you have full freedom to write whatever you want to. However... Should you be exercising the right to hurt people?” And to Owaisi, “I request you to withdraw your case”, followed by this astonishing statement: “We are all Indians here – we will not let someone who is not Indian [meaning Rushdie] affect our unity.”

“This is a great issue to unite the country,” he says – apparently “uniting the country” means ensuring that no one says or does anything that might be perceived as offensive to any community’s God, be it Allah or Krishna or Saraswati. “We Indians are believers. Our value system is not the same as London or Paris or Amsterdam.” (Incidentally, Amsterdam was where Theo van Gogh was murdered by a religious fanatic not so long ago because he made a film – and it should be clear to any thinking person that no corner of the world is safe from the extremisms of the “value system” Chetan is so proud of – but let that pass for now.)

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In this piece, Chandrahas Choudhury lists three types of opposition to freedom of speech in India. The third of these, he says, is an “insidious kind of muzzle on the genuinely free expression of ideas”:

“... what one might call a soft opposition, or self-censorship [...] that honestly doesn't understand what individuals have to gain by rocking the boat of a particular religious order, and believes that ‘religious sentiments should always be respected’ and art has no business to question or mock what is held by some to be sacred”

I have had dozens of encounters with “soft opposition” of this sort. These typically involve conversations with well-meaning family members or acquaintances who might very loosely be described as “liberals” (or at least as “cool” or open-minded people). When the subject of an artist offending religious sentiments comes up, they usually say: “Yes, but was it necessary to write that article/do that painting/make that cartoon? Couldn’t he have been more sensitive?” Or “I agree that he has the right to do or say this. But should he have done it?”

This type of conversation sometimes reaches a critical point if you reply: “Agreed - it might have been nicer/more sensitive to do things in another way. But what if the artist politely hears you out and then says he has chosen to disregard your advice – that he will go ahead and do this anyway? What will your response be then?” I've found that the mask of unequivocal “liberalism” can slip off very quickly in this situation.

It’s worrying that so many people in India seem not to understand what good art can be all about, and the conditions necessary for its meaningful survival. As Ruchir Joshi writes in this piece in The Hindu (bold-marks mine):

I have memories of writers, artists, film-makers being pushed into narrower and narrower pens by people who had no interest in literature, art or cinema other than to use these as excuses to expand their own illiterate, illiberal, poisonous power under the guise of identity politics...

And Amit Chaudhuri in The Hindustan Times:

In India, I get the feeling that the liberal middle class is only dimly aware of the importance of the arts, and how integral they are to the secular imagination, except in a time of media-inflated crisis, when it becomes a 'free speech' issue. Indians know how to talk about writers, but not about writing.

Little wonder that artistic liberty is among the first things to be held hostage (or made conditional, which is the same thing) when "sentiments" are deemed to have been hurt. A friend told me not to write a post about Chetan Bhagat because “he’s such a soft, easy target”. Well, maybe, but here it is anyway, because I think his stance tells us something about the level of discourse around us today. It’s a pity that one of India’s most popular writers seems unwilling to acknowledge that one of the oldest functions of art is to disturb people and encourage them to look with new eyes at everything they hold sacred. We already see too much of that apathy and ignorance in people who don't work in the creative field.