As thousands of middle-class Malayali women migrate to cities outside Kerala, Ashwathy provides an intimate portrait of how they might negotiate questions of home, belonging, and anonymity.
Ashwathy Nair
Once again, I found myself floating in the centre of a crowded bus in Kozhikode. I knew no one. But the big bellies of strange uncles were bumping in my acknowledgement and the aunties hanging by their hands knew where I should be returned in case they found me lost. The coconut oil on their freshly washed heads seeped into their foreheads and activated their chandanakkuris1 to glisten like third eyes. They would communicate with each other to form a network of condescension around me. My limited-edition ripped jeans started to feel impoverished. The French golden hoops on my earlobes and the vintage gold Casio watch on my hand felt utterly misinterpreted. It suddenly hit me that I wasn’t modern chic here. I was their girl on their land.
But isn’t Kerala my land too? I had been living here for about 18 years till I moved to Hyderabad to study and then, to work. Here, the nature of this bustling city, cushioned by the comfort of my friends from Kerala, Hyderabad, and other states too, had lent me anonymity. The autowaalas, waiters, and fellow passengers in the metro would all look, but there were too many things to look at, too many lights, impenetrable buildings that blocked the sky, too much work, too many problems and an extended expanse of space where it all operated, so that there was no time or care to ascertain if a random girl in ripped jeans and French golden hoops belonged to the city or not.
In his essay, ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’, German sociologist Georg Simmel critiques how the glut of stimuli in a metropolis floods the minds of its inhabitants and makes them indifferent or blasé in their attitude towards life and each other, and endows them with a freedom in their own space. I find that this very distance between people, the imposing distractions of the city that force the intellect to protectively cover the emotional and the instinctive (Simmel, 410,411) allows scope for solace as far as the lives of working women are concerned; the male gaze doesn’t linger as it is forced by the city’s opulence to flit onto shiny objects (products, lights, bridges) that one wants to appreciate, buy, or take selfies with.
The city of Hyderabad was used to anonymous women walking on the roads with their friends at midnight. It was good at transporting us through different points within its boundaries and only ask where the drop location was, what the fare was, and if we could afford it. After one such rampage through the city, I found myself seated on the floor of one of my friend’s flats. The long aimless walk at midnight through Hi-tech City had made us all hungry. I looked at my friends and asked if we should order biryani. Ami took out her phone and was placing the order. Aisha was curling into the sofa and scrolling through Instagram, and Ajay found solace in smoking and filling his belly.
I asked them, ‘If you had the option of settling in a city like Hyderabad or settling in Kerala, what would you prefer?’ Ami looked up at me as if this question wasn’t even worth asking, but said ‘Hyderabad’. Aisha said, ‘Hyderabad, probably’ and Ajay blew out, ‘I would rather live in Kerala’. He said, ‘In Kerala, I belong. In any other place, I am an “other”. I don’t speak the language, and when people notice that I do not belong, they treat me differently.’
For the three of us girls from middle-class families, the very setting we were in was extremely unlikely to unfold back home. I would have had to sleep by eleven, only to be woken around three in the morning from the noise of my brother’s Royal Enfield rolling into the front yard and the lights being switched on by my mother or grandmother who had woken up to open the doors for him. As they yawn and take to their beds, I would be glaring at the ceiling, frustrated at how no one had enquired where he had been, how much of my parents’ money he had spent or why he had been so late.
The institutionalised systems of patriarchy in Kerala not only grant men access to any space (public or private) at any time, but also excuses them when they flout the expectations of society, family, and the women around them. I realized the girls in the room were all deep in thought and Aisha said, ‘But women rarely feel like they belong in places where men feel the most belonging. A woman’s belongingness comes from being associated with a man, but cities make us feel like world citizens. I don’t think men really understand, maybe because they take belongingness for granted.’
Our Ajay was, however, a feminist. He was prompt to add, ‘I know that patriarchy and sexism exist in Kerala, but the restrictions, impositions, reservations aren’t limited to Kerala; it’s everywhere. Why leave your hometown to evade a menace that is also present anywhere else?’ We all knew his point was valid, but what escaped him was the flipside of the close-knit secure comfort of Kerala. Simmel notes that the ancient polis or the small town, in its attempt to secure itself from the threatening forces outside of its boundaries, tends to monitor and survey the people within it closely so as to retain a sense of unity and integrity (417). Kerala’s biggest cities, falling far behind any metropolis in terms of economic and developmental growth, are anxious to defend their own integrity against the forces outside their border, unlike a metropolis that is secure in its own power. The state is intrinsically characterized by intimacy (pleasant or not), with its people crammed together by its very geography. Consequently, the smallest units of families in it finds the patriarch pushed to extend the arm of surveillance over the women and girls of the family, hoping to preserve the unity of his own realm of the house, preventing attacks on his autonomy in the broader social realm.
I was trying to imagine what life would be like if I returned to Kerala, but Ajay had more to add. ‘I understand that you girls do not feel as comfortable in Kerala as in a city in a different state such as Hyderabad or Mumbai, but if you feel you are treated unfairly in your own hometown, I would expect all my female friends like you, who have understood independence, to fight against it, to stand up for yourselves. I mean, only then will we see change.’ Before I could, Ami responded, ‘But what do you think this fight for change entails? The fight then means resisting the looks that assert we are under their control, taken care of, and protected. It would mean gathering the courage to walk through the city at night to go to a friend’s house. It would mean defying social setups, neighbours, colleagues, the watchmen at the society park, the uncle who is always sitting and reading the newspaper in front of the public library, the 60-year-old auto driver who commands extra respect, the boys who like to sit on the fence and sing at us—basically, everyone.’
The fight for space, belonging, and freedom, as legitimate as they are, is a full-time job. Each time a woman dares to step out of the regularised norms or questions them, we become what Sarah Ahmed calls Feminist Killjoys. In her essay, ‘ Happy Objects’, she uses the example of the female protagonist in the 2002 English movie Bend it Like Beckham to elucidate how standing up against social expectations to prioritise marriage over their passions (in this case, football) makes women appear as an encumbrance to the conception of family as a happy entity. In any setup that believes that happiness is sustained only if women adhere to certain norms, that include certain regressive expectations, women like us who resist are seen as a threat to be managed. At the end, we become fruitless wounded soldiers who, by resisting the normative, are only further othered by our own people.
Aisha added, ‘It is not only a fight against the systems in Kerala, but one that is against home and the people who love us.’ Hyderabad, by caring less, had allowed us as young working women to not only find our footing, but to distance ourselves (though only temporarily) from the looming expectations from home that discreetly suggest that we speak in mellow tones, ignore the male gaze on streets and buses (or else you are overreacting) and accept with shy complacence that certain spaces and times of the day are just not meant for us. When given the choice between being constantly surveyed under the pretext of protection and being independent in the comfort of anonymity, isn’t it only natural that one who has known freedom from the former would choose the latter? When our lives are already packed with fights against our bodies, the workload, the general sense of being looked down upon, is it a fair call to ask us to also take up this consistent, never-ending, all-consuming fight against the implicit sexism in the place we call our home? Especially when it insists that we can belong to Kerala only by being belongings of Kerala? And even if the question of ‘why not stay and fight’ is fair, most of us who start with the fight are soon coerced into accepting norms, since resisting the ubiquitous terms of happiness of a group only ends with you feeling like a killjoy…alienated by the very people you were seeking acceptance from.
Ajay had finished his cigarette and we, the three anonymous girls fuming in the hall of a rented flat in the centre of Hyderabad, were once again silently nitpicking through anxious thoughts about being home. Just then, Ami’s phone rang. She answered and asked the delivery person to come to the second floor. It occurred to me that I had forgotten to call home. My parents would have slept by now and they must have had for dinner the rotis, dal and fish my father liked. And when I call them the next day, they will have the same question to ask: ‘When are you coming home?’
But the calling bell rang. For now, we could all have biryani and sate our hunger.
Footnotes
I would like to thank my friends Molly, Akash, Devi, Anjitha, Krishnapriya and Aravind for the many discussions that have helped me draw out the conversation fictionalised in the article.
Works Cited
- Ahmed, Sara. 2010. ‘Happy Objects’. The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29-51. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Simmel, Georg. 1950. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. In K. H. Wolff (Ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 409-424). New York: The Free Press.
About the Author: Ashwathy Nair is pursuing her PhD at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mahindra University, Hyderabad. Her area of research for her doctoral work is stand-up comedy and she is interested in the impact that the art form has on society. As a part of her research, she is also engaged with the various theoretical frameworks of cultural studies, performance studies, and social psychology. She has an undergraduate degree in English from EFLU, Hyderabad and a Masters from Calicut University.
Editor’s Note: This article is one of six articles written by participants from our 2022 Writing Workshop, and part of Ala’s fourth-anniversary specials: Issue 49 and Issue 50.
