The God of Reading, Writing & Other Things by Tara Kaushal

Ruminating on what my twenty-year relationship with The God of Small Things has taught me.

Photograph by Sahil Mane

Photograph by Sahil Mane

Ah, The God of Small Things. This iconic book and I, well, we have history.

It was 1997, and I was The Most Unpopular Girl in the country’s best girls’ boarding school. Arundhati Roy’s stepdaughter was a couple of years my senior and in my house. She was one of the few people who was kind to me, and I liked her then as much as I do now.

One afternoon, I walked into the dorm to find this girl and her best friend watching TV, outside the prescribed time. I guess they’d been given special permission to watch the news, because she turned to me and said, “My mom just won the Booker!”

“That’s great!” I replied, smiling, feeling many layers of awkward. The main reason being: I did not know what the Booker even was!

Over the next few days I found out, of course, what a big deal it was. I was now dying to read the book and, a few years later, at 17, when I was finally allowed to read this very adult novel, I finally did. Or, more accurately, I tried to. I didn’t understand it, laboured through each page, thought it was slow and boring, and didn’t finish it. Simply put, I hated it.

It was an impression I retained throughout my bachelor’s and master’s in English, getting into frequent battles with an array of professors about why it was overrated and undeserving of the accolades. Not only was it not great, it was positively awful, I insisted. I refused to revisit it, and nothing could change my mind.

Then, at 27, I read it again. I can’t remember why I chose to give it another shot. Was it by chance—a book I happened to encounter in a moment of boredom? Or was it by choice—to see if I thought differently about it? Whatever the reason might have been, I absolutely loved it. The words, the structure, the story—everything. Since then, my admiration for Roy has only increased manifold, as she has put her magic pen to political ethics with which I am completely aligned.

But, beyond the book, this fact—that my opinions had changed, diametrically and dramatically, in 10 years—held life-altering lessons for me, and are ones that I retain to this day. I learnt that you change. That you evolve. That you see things from the prism of your experiences and through your own palette. That first impressions need not be lasting. That you shouldn’t be too quick to judge. And that you should never say never.

As a reader, I have grown to love a book I hated, and also hate books I once loved. [I can no longer tolerate the neoliberal pop philosopher Ayn Rand and her anthems for angsty teens or the racist Enid Blyton; and I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Sidney Sheldon, Bridget Jones’ Diary or a Mills & Boon (ewww, basic).] If this is the case, what will I feel about my own writing over time? What would I feel about my own thoughts and actions? One must examine, re-examine, and do that again and again. Think about who you think you are, what you think you believe, what you think you want to be.

Outgrowing my own writing is a very real point of anxiety on the recent release of my first book. So, although I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember (the earliest my mother remembers me saying it was when I was six!), I am glad I wrote my first book in my mid-thirties. It’s for the same reasons that I recommend marrying later in life—you know yourself, your voice, your ideologies better. Besides, if book writing (and long-distance running) is as Haruki Murakami says it is—a combination of talent, focus and endurance, where the latter two can be “acquired and sharpened through training” and can even stand in for a lack of talent—then a book at 37 has given me time to practice and train. I hope many readers feel about my book as early reviewers have. My fingers (toes and everything) are crossed.

A few days ago, when we lost the Internet (for 36 whole hours!) and I had to cancel all my meetings, I chose to reread The God of Small Things, a decade since I last read it, two decades since I first tried to. Some things, beliefs, goals, relationships, etc., withstand scrutiny and re-examination, others don’t. I raced through the book in a few hours and I loved it more than ever before.


 An edited version of this article appeared on Keeping Zen on 11.08.20.

Nip it in the Boy by Tara Kaushal

Not raising our sons properly is leading to the abysmal gender dynamic and sexual violence against women.  

Nip It In the Boy Tara Kaushal

A few days ago, my spouse, Sahil put up a proud Facebook post about my tenacity through the hard, slow and solitary act of writing. “I lost my spouse to her book,” he said. “I’m not complaining or resentful, not at all, just stating things as they were for these past three years, and feeling really proud.” A friend commented to me, “I know you know how lucky you are, compared to so many that have partners who are jealous and controlling. To have a partner who helps you to attain goals and is supportive is like winning the lottery.”

Oh, I do know how lucky I am, especially as an Indian woman married to an Indian man. Here, let alone a partnership where it’s ‘the man behind the successful woman’, even regular equal, egalitarian partnerships aren’t the norm. Most men always expect to be on top.

We live in a particularly gendered society, with deeply entrenched rigid norms and overarching male bias that are instilled from birth—and often even well before. A version of the blessing ‘may you bear a hundred sons’ exists in many Indian languages. And, although the government has banned sex-selective abortions, they are the primary cause, alongside better nutrition and medical care provided to boys, of India’s sixty-three million ‘missing girls’.

 Around the country, there are many customs and rituals to celebrate childbirth—several of which are not performed or even inverted for the birth of a girl. Case in point is the Kua Poojan, a custom in many communities across North India, that involves welcoming the birth of a male child by worshipping the family well or other source of drinking water. However, when a female is born, some of these communities deposit trash on dustbins instead. The myth goes that if the birth of a girl is celebrated, more girls will be born.

In such traditional families, raja betas are made acutely aware of their superiority in comparison with their sisters and other girls around them. They are taught that they are entitled, first and foremost, to all rights—from food to fun; from education to property; and the world outside the home, at large. They see this paradigm played out in their parents’ and other marriages they see—the patis are the devs, the wives are their slaves, beaten occasionally to remind them of their place.

This ideology follows boys into manhood, where they impose it on women that they know. It manifests in various ways, big and small. When it comes to sex within a relationship, in a conflict between his desire and her lack of it, he gets to choose. When he is feeling angry and disempowered, he gets to assert his power and validate his importance through violence against women, in the home and outside.

I do paint a bleak and extreme picture, of a world far removed from the one you and I grew up in… or so you’d think. Patriarchy cuts across class, and pervades society at large. I know a girl in a top Mumbai college whose brother slaps her to enforce their parents’ patriarchal mores on hemlines/deadlines/boyfriends. I know a now-famous media person whose rich South Delhi family told her, throughout her childhood, that she could only do certain things (as innocuous as making chai for herself) in her ‘own’ (ie, marital) home; whose father would berate her mother for birthing a fair son but a dark daughter. When I gave a talk to a group of elite older women in South Mumbai, feminist activist Kamla Bhasin’s lines—‘Keep your beti in your dil but also in your will’—evoked a long round of applause. After, the women discussed how they had been denied inheritance by their natal families; and how they were trying to fight for their daughters’ rights.

While patriarchy does impact women’s roles in society, it’s not just about women. Restricted by gender norms, boys are discouraged from displaying nuanced emotions and developing empathy; unable to follow untraditional interests and reach their full potential; lacking in the life-skills department, and, therefore, dependent; and forced into the role of a breadwinner. Moreover, indulged, entitled and with unhealthy gender biases, they are often unprepared to meet women on an equal footing as adults. 

Men brought up with this ideology are unprepared for the growing tribe of women who know our worth and rights. Men and women are trying to negotiate these new realities, and fumbling, and the growing rates of divorce is just one of the consequences. A dear friend is a highly educated and successful professional, who, in her thirties, married another professional she met online. They moved abroad, but the marriage collapsed shortly after. “He wanted me to make him a tiffin every day, babe,” she said to me, “and he didn’t want me to travel for work… Why didn’t he just marry some village girl if that’s the kind of marriage he wanted?”

Women just don’t take this shit anymore… which is great! But an easier way to solve the disquiet in the dynamic is to raise feminist sons. From the home environment, education, society, culture and religion, we must focus on the creation of better boyhood and the reinvention of the masculine identity at the seed. The need for such a revolution stems from the greater need to stop gender violence and improve the gender dynamic in adulthood, for the good of men, women and society at large.


An edited version of this article appeared in The Man in July 2020.

Busted: Rape Myths Big & Small by Tara Kaushal

I looked into and busted a few rape myths.

Rape myths abound across the world, and range from the dangerous to the frivolous. I explore a few such myths in the heteronormative sphere.

1. Rape is…

“… sometimes right and sometimes wrong”— Babulal Gaur, BJP leader

“… when there are three-four people or if a man pulls out a knife. But in a relationship between a single girl and boy, such things cannot happen if the girl doesn’t want them to… If the guy can lovingly convince the girl, why not?” —Abbas Mirza, one of my subjects

A few months into my research, my spouse and I were reading our respective books against an ancient wall of the Hatgadh Fort, somewhere in rural Maharashtra. So engrossed was I in my compulsive note-making that I didn’t notice the gaggle of five college-age boys until their shadows loomed above me, peering at my studying.

 “Whatchu doing, bahina?” they asked in Marathi, with the typical curiosity and reverence village folks have for city ones. “Writing a book about what?” Sensing an opportunity to educate and be educated, I invited them to stay for a chat.

 “Problem kya hai ki kissi ko pata hi nahi rape kya hai.” How true! They’d all heard of it on the news, but didn’t know what it really meant. I realised that, as women transition from being possessions to people, there is no understanding of consent and rape, neither legally nor socioreligiously—how can we, when we still have forced-arranged and child marriages? The law is evolving—not so long ago, the lust of the man and the chastity of the woman were used as yardsticks to determine rape. Even currently, there are so many instances of mixed legal signals contributing to this muddle—until recently, a woman who had lived with a man for years on end was allowed to claim rape if he didn’t marry her; the media projected that the Dastangoi performer, Mahmood Farooqui, was acquitted on the basis of the complainant’s ‘feeble no’; child marriage is illegal but recognised, yet sex with a child wife is rape; until recently, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) criminalised anything but penovaginal intercourse even in consenting heterosexual adults….

Throughout the land, from the law to the media to the people, sexual autonomy should be situated in each individual’s human rights; and sexual violence, viewed as a violation of these human rights.

2. The Victim is to Blame for Rape

“The victim is as guilty as her rapists. She should have called the culprits brothers and begged before them to stop.”—Asaram Bapu, ‘spiritual’ leader and alleged rapist

“The rate of crimes against women depends on how completely dressed they are and how regularly they visit temples.”— Babulal Gaur, BJP leader

‘Was she drunk?’ ‘Why did she go with that boy?’ ‘What was she doing there?’ ‘You need two hands to clap.’ ‘She should have been more careful with her and her family’s ‘honour’.’ Variations of these statements and questions, that constitute victim blaming and shaming, can be found across the globe.

It’s time to stop this universal phenomenon, take the onus away from the victims and survivors, and place it squarely where it belongs… with the perpetrators and causes of gender violence. If there were no rapists there’d be no rape.

3. Rape is a Big Crime (against the Woman/Victim)

Rape is a big crime, when seen from a human rights’ point of view—it is the violation of the human rights of the victim.

From the patriarchal point of view, rape is seen as a big crime too, but for an entirely different reason. In the patriarchal reckoning, rape is a crime against the woman’s and her family’s ‘honour’. It is a crime against the ‘owner’ of the woman—with her ‘honour’ sullied, her ‘virginity’ robbed, the goods are spoilt. It is a familial and societal shame.

That ‘honour’ is seen as inseparable from the chastity of women holds true even when she exercises sexual agency. Sex before marriage, for love or lust, is considered a grave crime committed by the boy against the girl and her family. The violation of her human rights—to consent or not, to have sexual autonomy—are considered last, if at all, in the ranking of crimes.

While agents of patriarchy consider rape as a big crime (against the woman/victim), they simultaneously believe…

4. Rape is A Small Crime (by the Man/Perpetrator)

In the ranking of criminals, the opposite of the argument made in point 3, above, seems to apply.

“Such incidents [rapes] do not happen deliberately. These kind of incidents happen accidentally.”—Ramsevak Paikra, senior BJP leader

“Boys are boys, they make mistakes.”— Mulayam Singh Yadav, SP supremo

Agents of patriarchy present rape a minor crime, a momentary lapse of judgement by (good, young) boys (who will, of course, always be boys).

***

These are only a few myths about the idea and causes of rape. Myths about the causes of rape lead and add to myths about the solutions for rape. From the dangerous:

“Rapes happen because men and women interact freely.” —Mamata Banerjee, Trinamool Congress leader and West Bengal CM

“Child marriage is a solution to rape and other atrocities against women.”—Om Prakash Chautala, former Haryana CM

To the frivolous:

“Chowmein leads to hormonal imbalance evoking an urge to indulge in such acts.”—Jitender Chhatar, a local leader from the infamous ‘khap panchayats’

As we know, to solve a problem, you have to understand it first.

This is what I have attempted to do in Why Men Rape: An Indian Undercover Investigation. I sought to critically analyse the real reasons for gender violence, particularly in the Indian subcontinent—beyond the painfully absurd, like “chowmein”; beyond the blame of the woman and her clothes; and also beyond the staple “because they can”, “for sex” or “because, power” —as a step towards solving the problem. As a character in Netflix’s crime drama, ‘Mindhunter’ says: “How do you get ahead of crazy if you don’t know how crazy thinks?”


An edited version of this article appeared on She The People on 22.06.20.

My Sexual Violence Score by Tara Kaushal

In early 2020, I went through all my old writing in order to write the conclusion of Why Men Rape: An Indian Undercover Investigation. Until I did so, I didn’t realise just how much sexual violence I had faced over the years, how much I had forgotten over the years. Thought I’d compile a list.

When you read my book, you’ll realise this is no self-pity or call for sympathy. Just (im)personal chronicling.

The list I remember is coming soon.

I will continue to update it if and when anything new happens (hopefully not!); and if and when I remember or find old writing about something else.

Raging Rage & Gory Gang Rapes by Tara Kaushal

When researching my forthcoming book, Why Men Rape: An Indian Undercover Investigation, I went undercover for up to a week each with nine men who had raped across the country, two of whom were involved in gang rapes. Here’s what I learnt about the phenomenon.

Illustration by DeniLal/The Week

Illustration by DeniLal/The Week

Dipu Raja Yadav knew he was a Very Important Person from the moment he was born. Being the only boy of six children, the much-awaited son after several ‘unwanted daughters’ to boot, he was truly divine, the raja beta* everyone had been praying for. Literally praying—in the stolen moments I got with his ghoonghatted** mother, she spoke of her intensifying despair and the desperate fasts she had kept for a son. So when Dipu was born, “bhagwan ki kirpa se, by the grace of god”, the midwife beat a brass thaali*** in ecstatic announcement. Savitri was finally the mother of a son. And the village pandit**** had been summoned for as lavish a pooja***** ceremony and feast as the family could afford.

Eighteen-or-so years after the momentous occasion of his birth, I had gone to meet this man-child in his village on the border of MP and UP, out on bail for participating in a gang rape.

***

Let me give you some Rape 101: The dominant discourse about the cause of sexual and other forms of violence is that their perpetrators fail to acknowledge the humanity of others. This ‘other’ can be conceived of simply as another individual or group. Or as the philosophical concept of ‘the Other’ in relation to and different from ‘Self’, which Simone de Beauvoir and others after have applied to the man-woman binary construct and sexual inequality.

Either way, the core idea behind this belief is that one can perpetrate crimes on others only because we do not see them as human, but as different from and less than human or equal. In the masterly article ‘Beastly’ in The New Yorker, Paul Bloom discusses this notion with respect to literature about slave owning and the Holocaust, quoting the psychologist Herbert C Kelman, “‘The inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion.’” We therefore talk about the ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘objectification’ of women—the denial of women’s autonomy, agency and humanity—as the cause of sexual violence.

“The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal,” says Bloom while introducing a new wave in critical theory about violence. “Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.”

This school of thought—that much violence is because of, not in spite of, the recognition of the humanness of the victims—is worse. “The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.”

The feminist philosopher Kate Manne applies this theory—that “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings”—to sexual violence in her ground-breaking book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Where feminist theorist Catherine A Mackinnon asks “Are women human yet?” while listing the atrocities committed against our sex, Manne proposes: “often, it’s not a sense of women’s humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem.”

Here I offer a humble contribution to the discourse on violence: both ways of looking at victims, dehumanised or all-too-human, are causes of violence. It depends on the individual perpetrator’s agenda with that individual victim in that particular instance.

***

In what is arguably the most important book on the psychology of rapists, the psychologist Dr Nicholas Groth says that in all rape, three components are present: power, anger and sexuality, their hierarchy and interrelationships vary. I find myself correlating the power-anger versus sex theories to the contradictory theories on whether perpetrators dehumanise their victims or see them as all-too-human. Here too, I propose that all motives, for sex, power and anger, are causes of rape; and that it depends on the individual perpetrator’s agenda with that individual victim in that particular instance. For instance, in marital and relationship rape of the garden variety (ie, sans violence or anger), they objectify and dehumanise their victims for sexual fulfilment. When in doubt, he asserts his personal interests over hers. He is the entitled, superior human; she is denied the right to make an autonomous decision about participating in sex, and human rights in general.

But the reverse is true in the cases of public gang rape….

***

It was a regular “fun” evening for the boys, like many others, that started with Dipu Yadav hanging out and getting drunk with his older, history-sheeter cousin Arjun. However, this evening a year before was to not end like their other habitual outings, but with a gang rape and subsequent police complaint that would alter the lives of the cousins and their two friends (and, obviously and primarily, the survivor and her family). The boys moved on to a gambling game in the village, where they got drunker. Some friends called and invited them to a gathering at a local den—where they went to eat some rough, rustic food and drink even more. It was now ten-11, late by village standards. Some friends had left, some had stayed. Someone suggested they call it a night. Arjun said he needed to collect some money he was owed from a man called Pintu, who had been avoiding him. “We told him that if we go at this time, we would cause a fight. But he insisted.” So a carful of them went to this Pintu’s house.

Pintu snuck out the back as soon as they arrived. His wife, who used to be a dancer, opened the door and said her husband wasn’t in. This enraged Arjun and, under his leadership, the four of them had raped her at her doorstep. When the husband reappeared, they beat him up too. No one dared stop them.

Both factors that Dipu identified as causes of this gang rape are well documented across the world. Dipu told me it was “a consequence of company.” He had been unable to withstand the pressure from his older cousin and the others as he risked being ostracised—as tends to happen with young people within the dynamics of a group. And because they were all drunk.

***

The idea had been to punish Pintu through the gang rape of his wife, the premise being that the honour of the family lies in the vaginas of its women. That ‘honour’ is seen as inseparable from the chastity of women holds true even when she exercises sexual agency. From a patriarchal perspective, rape is a crime against the ‘owner’ of the woman—with her ‘honour’ sullied, her ‘virginity’ robbed, the goods spoilt. It is a familial and societal shame. This is a lingering legacy from times as old as the hills, of religion, of Gandhi. (The Mahatma believed that Indian women who were raped lost their value as human beings; and argued that fathers were justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honour.) In What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali, a survivor of gang rape in Mumbai who wrote about it unabashedly in the eighties and then again over 30 years later, says of rapists who hurt the woman while the man watches helplessly (as had been the case with her): “The whole scenario is a toxic blend of machismo and cruelty, a neat way of pressing every button related to what it means to be male and female…. If you want power and control, and all the research says that is what much of rape is about, then, if you manage to rape a woman and bring a man to his knees at the same time, it must be a double victory.” Pintu’s punishment for delaying the return of four-five thousand rupees to Arjun was the public gang rape of his wife. (I’ll allow you a moment to take that in.)

Here, it is apparent that the survivor was seen as fully human, and power assertion and anger were the perpetrators’ primary motivations. It is the same when, beyond the personal dynamics, rape is used as a tool of politics, war and civil conflict, deployed against countries and communities—as it was during Partition and the Gujarat Riots. Called ‘genocidal rape’, it can also be seen in the Kathua Gang Rape Case—apparently, the perpetrators wanted to distress and displace the eight-year-old girl’s nomadic community through her prolonged disappearance and the ultimate discovery of her brutalised body. But, through all these instances, there is no denying the sexual pleasure derived by the perpetrators. The police chargesheet of the Kathua incident reveals the nauseating detail that one of the accused, policeman Deepak Khajuria told another to wait “as he wanted to rape the girl before she is killed.”

***

Stranger rapes are no more than five or six percent of the total number of rapes; stranger gang rapes are even less frequent; and stranger gang rapes and murders are rarer still. Although stranger gang rapes and murders are not the norm—quotidian marital, relationship and acquaintance rapes are—this is the type of rape that gets our attention, from the Delhi Gang Rape to the recent Telangana and Unnao cases. This is problematic, because episodic news coverage and selective outrage is part of the problem. It muddies the water when it comes to the idea of rape and consent. It takes a law and order approach to solving the rape crisis in India. It has a caste-religion/class angle to stranger rape—the Shakti Kapoor idea of rapists, ‘the Other’ loutish men lurking in bushes, waiting for ‘good’ Savarna women to come along. But I digress.

Stranger gang rape happens, of course. An incisive report titled Women’s Safety in the National Capital Territory of India published in 2018 proposed ‘migrant anxiety’ as one of several reasons for increasing incidents of gang rapes and groups engaging in violence against women in public spheres of Delhi. Migrants feel “othered” by insiders; further, “[u]nemployment in the city creates a sense of isolation and powerlessness… exacerbated by constant exposure to an unattainable lifestyle.”

“The nature of public rape is changing,” observes Dr Abhijit Das of the global NGO MenEngage. India has been deeply hierarchical for millennia and, for all that time, most rape tended to follow class lines, top-down—men targeting women of their class or lower—except when the power dynamic was occasionally subverted. Explains why, when a friend was molested in public by a man not of our milieu, her friends caught him and demanded: “Teri aukaad kaise hui? How dare you touch a woman above your class?”

Top-down gender violence continues as it always has, in public as well as private spheres. These are some leads I did not pursue, shared by a cop I spoke to over a couple of years: the son of a taxi driver became a doctor in Mumbai, and also married a doctor. When the couple visited his village in UP, the local Thakur and his sons tied the wife to a tree and raped her in front of her husband because they “couldn’t handle a poor taxi driver’s son being an MBBS.” Although apparently reassured by her husband, she jumped from the train near Igatpuri and died. Another: in order to usurp a poor farmer’s land, a powerful landowner got five-six men to gang rape the farmer’s wife and two daughters. The family left the village….

But public rape now includes another dimension—lower-class men targeting upper-class women. “The poor uprooted rural man, exponentially disempowered in the city, is lashing out at those he thinks are the reason for the problem,” says Dr Das. This type of rape carries elements of genocidal rape—asserting power, instilling fear, expressing anger and, of course, sex. These perpetrators also fit the ‘Anger Rapist’ category of the Groth Typology. For them, the rape experience is one of  “conscious anger and rage, and he expresses his fury both physically and verbally. His aim is to hurt and debase his victim, and he expresses his contempt for her through abusive and profane language…. Sex becomes his weapon, and rape constitutes the ultimate expression of his anger”. And we seem to be breeding mobs of them.

***

Aside from the rage resulting from migration and money issues, the report on women’s safety in Delhi also lists the clash of cultures as a major reason for the city’s problem of stranger gang rapes. Migrants are unable to distinguish the public roles of city women from that of rural women. “A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night…. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night,” says Mukesh Singh, one of the Delhi Gang Rapists in India’s Daughter. Physically and metaphorically, these migrants bring ideas and norms of what is accepted and acceptable in the hinterland to the urbanised modern world—where patriarchy and misogyny in thought, word and deed collide with women’s empowerment; as do social order and civic order; old and new; rural and urban….

Ankur Vikal, the sole male actor in Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya, the extraordinary play about sexual violence, describes the piteous lives of these migrant men as such: “They come from the village without their women, and live ten-to-a-house somewhere on the outskirts. They get jobs where they are in extreme close proximity to women, as tailors, guards, drivers….” He goes on to describe the clash of cultures and clothes that they experience, not to mention the porn they are watching, and the accompanying urges: “They probably all resent staying together and are missing their wives, and they are measuring women’s busts or they are guarding them or driving them in autorickshaws on extremely secluded streets….” My cop resource too ascribes some rapes to the poverty and “majboori”****** of migrants.

***

There are no quick or easy answers to the rape crisis unfurling in India today. The solutions are hard work. They include but are not limited to introducing comprehensive sexuality education; reducing economic inequality; changing the police and legal systems; revolutionising social structures; etc. But whatever the masses may think about it, the solutions do not, by any stretch of imagination, include the police murdering rape accused in their custody.

* Raja beta: King son
** Ghoonghat: A veil worn by some Hindu women to cover their heads and faces
*** Thaali: Plate
**** Pandit: Hindu priest
***** Pooja: Prayer
****** Majboori: Need


An edited version of this article was the cover story of The Week on 14.12.19.

Raja Betas in the House by Tara Kaushal

Yet another reminder that Indian men need to be better, do better.

Karan (second from left), Sahil (centre) and I with some friends at Elsewhere on a previous occasion.

Karan (second from left), Sahil (centre) and I with some friends at Elsewhere on a previous occasion.

Yesterday, a friend, Karan; Sahil, the spouse; and I went dancing to Elsewhere. It's the only club we regularly visit on the Gold Coast, where we currently live, with phenomenal tech house music spun by an array of international DJs and a happy, inclusive vibe.

Demographically speaking, Indians have been between two and four percent of the crowd on the days that we've visited. Some black, some brown, the rest are white—how many local or interstate Australians or from overseas, backpackers or millionaires, I don't know. We are, after all, in the city that is best described as the Goa of Australia.

At some point last night, the three of us ended up in a line—Sahil in front by the DJ, then me, and then Karan behind me. A guy came up from behind and put his arm on my shoulder. "Indiaaaaa!" he screamed, and started dancing side-by-side with me. I laughed a polite hello.

"Why you laugh?" he asked. He could have been Middle Eastern, South American, Indian—I couldn't tell exactly from his looks or voice in the dark and loud club.
"Just, coz I'm having a great time," I said.
"Are you from India?"
"Yes."
"Kahan ki ho? (Where are you from?)"
"Bombay," I replied. "Aur aap? (And you?)"
"Main bhi Bombay se (me too)," he replied. I caught a distinctly Punjabi accent.
"Great, where in Bombay?" It's always nice to meet a fellow Indian, a person from my home city at that! It's on the dance floor at Elsewhere that we first met Karan from Bhopal a few months ago.
"Nono, just kidding, I'm from Punjab," the man said.
"I knew it!" I smiled.
"How?!" he asked in mock indignation, slapping my butt casually for emphasis.

Things just got serious. I shoved him away, turned towards him and wagged my finger in mock casualness. "Do. Not. Touch. Me," I said in a low tone. "Just dance, okay? Peace." I got back into the groove.

Karan noticed something was up, and said something in his ear from behind.

The man was back talking to me. "That guy just said you are married. Is he your boyfriend?"
"No. He's my friend."
"Then why did he say you are married?"
"Because this is my husband," I said, putting my finger in Sahil's back.
Sahil, who had no idea what had been happening, turned. The guy took two steps away from me, did an elaborate apology namaste to Sahil and stayed away... until a moment later, when Sahil turned back toward the DJ. Then the man was back by my side again.
"I just wanted to be sure that he's your husband."

It was time for a lecture on consent. "That's irrelevant, dude. Whether or not he is—and he is—you have to listen when I say no. No means no." I went on above the music, above his protests of "But I just wanted to confirm..." (Karan too got the somebody’s versus somebody lecture after the party—that women have a right to say no because they are somebody, not because they’re somebody’s wife/girlfriend daughter/possession… He's young and a new friend who I am only just indoctrinating into feminist thought. But there is something to be said about the fact that it was apparently the right approach with the creep.)

The man left me alone. Later at night, Sahil would have to slap his hand away from some other girl’s butt he grabbed unsolicited.

As on the other four nights we’ve visited this particular club, I got hit on by about 30 people, both men and women, last night. Happens, when I'm dancing in a roomful of people 10 years younger on average—the exotic older woman meets the hormones, intoxication and bravado of youth. True to today’s hookup culture, everyone is making out with everyone here, sometimes with several people through the night. But the underlying vibe is definitely of respect and consent. This Indian man was the only person from the 150 wannabe dates and/or mates I’ve encountered here who: a) touched me on a 'private part' and b) persisted beyond 'no'—three/four times. And, worse, he apologised to the husband for touching me, not recognising my ownership of myself. What are the odds?!

Global Shame

A telling comment on our country’s reputation for violence against women.

A telling comment on our country’s reputation for violence against women.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s global poll of experts voted India the world’s most dangerous country for women last year; worse than in 2011, where we were the fourth worst after Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan. Speaking to women friends provides enough empirical evidence that Indian men are among the worst behaved in the world—from one who felt “invisible” in Japan because “no men were staring!” to another who had an epiphany in a concert in Europe: “I realised it was the first time I was surrounded by towering men and wasn’t afraid.”

A few years ago, I posted this update on Facebook after my first night out in Mumbai after an international vacation: “14 days in Thailand; going from rave to rave; walking over isolated hills and on deserted beaches in the pitch dark; in various stages of intoxication and undress; sometimes with Sahil and others, sometimes alone; and... nothing. 

Five hours dancing at Kitty Su, and I'm felt up (by a guy who I proceeded to punch, hard—and then continued having a mind-blowing night/weekend anyway).

What the fuck is wrong with Indian men?!”

So, What’s Wrong with Indian Men

This is a complex answer, and I explore over a hundred reasons in my forthcoming book, Why Indian Men Rape, out later this year. But in this case the reasons were quite apparent.

This man, like many Indian men, held strongly patriarchal ideas and did not understand that a woman had agency. That I had the right to choose for myself who I wanted to date, mate or even dance with. That I had the right to be offended when he disrespected my boundaries. And that it was I who was owed an apology when he was caught offending—not the man who ‘possessed’ me, my father, brother or husband!

This man, like many Indian men, did not respect the word ‘no’. Blame it on the Raja Beta** syndrome, on a cultural paradigm that establishes that women will always play hard to get, on our low-trust society that thrives on rule breaking and jugaad***, on Bollywood…. In 2015, an Indian man accused of stalking two women in Australia escaped conviction after arguing he was influenced by Bollywood movies to believe that doggedly pursuing a woman would eventually cause them to fall in love.

This man, like many Indian men, did not comprehend the nuances of consent across cultures. With everyone around him dirty dancing and casually making out, he did not see the line of consent he had to cross to touch someone, and that too an intimate part of their body. In this environment, he did not understand that consent, through verbal or non-verbal communication, was always asked—and often freely given.

It’s 2019. Our men need to be better, do better. Because we expect better.

**Raja Beta: Literally, ‘king son’. The India ‘son preference’ means boys are spoilt rotten.
***Jugaad: A flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way.


An edited version of this article appeared on She The People on 14.06.19.

From Our Lips to Men’s Ears by Tara Kaushal

#MeToo makes our experiences—with our bodies, consensual and non-consensual sex—public. And that’s a good thing.

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There have been so many wonderful fallouts of the global #MeToo movement, one of which has been language—the way women are being able to articulate, publically, what would have previously been ‘private things about private parts’. In India, where flowers kissed instead of actors barely a generation ago, children aren’t even taught adult words for their su-sus and pee-pees, and families by and large serve as agents of society, silence and sabhyata, talking about sex with consent is hard enough. Without consent, even if you’re aware that the blame/shame is not yours, it has an added layer of reliving trauma.

Yet, #MeTooIndia has seen women display body comfort and talk explicitly about how their nipples, breasts and vaginas have been violated by hands, lips, semen and penises. This has not been easy. Although I have been talking and writing about sexuality and gender violence since college (my forthcoming book is even called Why Indian Men Rape), when Faye D’Souza asked to me to narrate, on camera, my #MeToo experiences I had written about that morning, I surprised myself by stuttering and stammering.

But speak we will, and it will be worth it. When women femsplain body parts, both male and female, and their consensual and non- encounters, it can change the mindsets of men.

In the absence of comprehensive sexuality education in schools, the onus of teaching children about their bodies is on families. Girls receive advice around two topics: puberty, where their mothers usually explain to them what happens to their bodies and why, and safety. Without such points of intervention for boys, they tend to receive their knowledge from proverbial locker-room talk, from friends as clueless as they are, and from porn. When a 25-year-old male domestic help saw the pads I had bought for my cook, he thought they were nappies!

Healthy knowledge about and the language for their own privates, the bodies of women and sex stay more inaccessible and taboo for men than women. Through these open conversations, men can learn these absolute basics.

When women talk about their consensual sexual escapades, it establishes that women have sex lives, get over it. They challenge patriarchal notions of honour and shame, and the angel-slut binary. This is good for women, of course, but also good for men.

When I was undercover in rural Madhya Pradesh with a man who had gang raped, a subject for my book, he told me of another rape he was accused of. He described a consensual relationship with an older girl when they were teens; when she got pregnant, she and her family accused him of rape. “But that’s not rape, she agreed!” I protested. “Yes, but would she ever admit to it?” he scoffed.

It all made sense when a village elder told me he would behead his daughters if they had pre-marital sex or married for love. In this milieu, it is easy to understand why the girl would cry rape rather than admit to consensual sex.

A criticism of #MeToo is its cultural and English elitism—but it could only be spearheaded by empowered, often English-speaking, women! Far from preventing less privileged women from telling their stories, we are paving the way, creating an environment of solidarity and support for them. Once the movement and the conversations it has engendered trickle down to other languages, from urban to rural, they have the power to change cultural norms.

(Almost) All women I know have been sexually violated, often more than once. A 2007 survey by the Ministry of Women and Child Development found that almost one in two girls (42.70%) was a victim of sexual abuse in one or more forms even before she turned 16. When I would tell male friends this, I was met with grudging belief. All women? Really? Then last year a friend sent me a message: “This #MeToo thing is exactly what you’ve been talking about, eh?”

When women talk about their negative experiences, it could broaden men’s understanding and empathy, making ‘the Other’ less alien. It could make them understand our preoccupations with safety. Women you know, beyond your mother-sister, have everyday experiences that are different from and more complex than yours. Those that think that women get preference at job interviews because the bosses want to ‘use’ them (read on Twitter) may understand that these ‘compromises’ are not ‘dues’ that working women want to pay.

It may further educate men about the nuances of consent and courtship, so far informed by the stalk-her-until-she-catapults paradigm of our film industry.

And, whether or not men have a collective epiphany about the humanity and human rights of women, they can certainly no longer count on the silence that has allowed gender violence to breed. Where once there were no consequences for their actions, particularly in the workplace, there can now be socioeconomic if not legal ones. Even if MJ Akbar has escaped the axe for now, some serving journalists have had to go and many others—not just journalists—are facing the heat. These are important precedents.

I believe in the power of words, of language, to change to world. (I’m a writer, I would.) #MeToo will prove that the pen is mightier than the penis after all.


An edited version of this article appeared on Firstpost on 15.10.18.

A Call for Caution for the Success of #MeToo by Tara Kaushal

We must acknowledge and address the weaknesses of the #MeTooIndia movement for it to have maximum impact.

It was 12 and a half years ago when Gautam Adhikari, the Editor-in-Chief of DNA pushed me, a 22-year-old interviewee, against the door of his cabin and kissed me, tongue et al. When Sandhya Menon’s accusations against him became a foundational moment in the #MeToo movement in Indian journalism, my closest friend, who knew of the incident at the time, called to tell me he had been outed. This was the time for me to tell my story.

Although I have always intrinsically known that the blame/shame for any kind of sexual assault in not mine/the woman’s to bear, one does nonetheless consider it intimate, a bad thing that happened to you that isn’t for public consumption. I didn’t do anything then—as a young starving freelance writer, there were economic and power considerations at play. And when I fled from an assault in the hotel room of ad executive Navroze Dhondy in 2013, I wrote about the experience but without his name—if I wasn’t going the law enforcement route with my complaint, I didn’t want to deal with a potential defamation suit. My silence allowed my perpetrators to get away.

#MeToo has allowed women to take strength in solidarity and tell their stories. In the absence and distrust of a due process, survivors of sexual assault have taken to naming and shaming their abusers. But the question has been: what next? In capitalistic society, here’s where organisations can play a major role. There can be no legal retribution; in its absence, social and economic consequences will have to do. ‘It is getting to a point where men can’t do something awful without being accused of having done it.’ About time their #TimesUp.

But, there are a few things that can derail this movement. One is, obviously, false accusations. If the trial is going to be in the court of public opinion, we need to have some basic believability filters in place. Is an anonymous account created yesterday tweeting unverifiable broad statements about someone? Although Shivam Vij has argued in a piece that right-wing trolls will not try to co-opt this movement because it does not align with their overall ethics, this is what seems to be happening with the accusation against the Editors of The Wire.

Did the men in question respond in a timely and upfront way—like writer Varun Grover and HT’s Kunal Pradhan have? Who is the survivor, who is the accused, are there political or monetary agendas? Are there multiple survivor stories? Saving for the actual incidents (that understandably had no witnesses), every detail around my stories from all those years ago can be corroborated. So can many other accounts, including Tanushree Dutta’s against Nana Patekar; those of the 10 (at last count) women who have come out against former editor MJ Akbar; etc. We need to judge for ourselves.

Next, the women who accuse as well as the judging public must “separate scandal from harassment” (in the words of Doorva Bahuguna). Without commenting on the other accusations that have emerged against Chetan Bhagat, in the first one—where he is “wooing” a work contact over WhatsApp messages—one must separate our moral outrage at a married man flirting with someone, from harassment. Lust, love, sexual and romantic interest are an intrinsic part of human existence; when does flirtation cross the line to persecution? Doorva continues, “A guy asking you out (married or not) is not harassment. Him persisting after you say no. Him using his power to affect your life after you say no. Him shaming you after you say no. That’s harassment.”

My rule: I am forgiving of people who try their luck with me (sans touch) as long as they back off when I say no. This equation is not so straightforward in the workplace, where complex power dynamics may be at play.

Further, one must acknowledge nuance and grey on the scale of harassment. While women have all rights to tell their stories big or small, and the way each experiences trauma is personal (some people drown in three feet of water, others survive the ocean), all crimes cannot be treated the same. A hug that went on a moment too long < sustained harassment, worse with unwanted physical contact < rape.

The conversation around consent and the human rights of women has swung to such an extreme at the moment, that all transgressions are currently being treated the same. This is only natural, after years of repression, but it is dangerous. It allows those defending men to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It creates a for men/for women binary, but interpersonal relations, even harassment, don’t exist in binaries. Perhaps those calling for reason are being misunderstood when they say ‘not every bad date is rape’, but you must know what they mean…

Once one recognises the greys, the punishments must fit the crimes. One of the things I predicted about the recent POSCO amendment proposing death for child rapists is that there will be less reporting. ‘Would a child be able to identify his/her grandparent or uncle or aunt as the perpetrator if s/he knows this will send the person to the gallows? Would parents take things forward?’ I asked. In a similar vein, in this black and white view of harassment where the impact of revelation could far outweigh the impact of the crime, women may choose to stay silent again. Like my mother did in the 1990s, when she didn’t file a complaint against a man who set out to rape her in consideration for the man’s wife and children.

Is Tanmay Bhat—who was told of Utsav Chakraborty’s harassment but didn’t do enough—as wrong as the perp himself? Perhaps not. Yet, both have left AIB, same-same. By that measure, Seema Mustafa—who knew of Akbar’s harassment a woman and has recently written an indefensible piece defending his actions—should be removed from the website she edits too, right? As for Akbar, currently the MoS External Affairs, let’s see how the government reacts once he returns to the country.

Regarding my own harassers: Gautam Adhikari has stepped down from his role at the Center for American Progress and this is what he will be remembered for; that is enough. Since Navroze Dhondy seems to have faced no social or economic consequences, I am going to complain about him to the National Commission for Women.

The #MeTooIndia movement is of supreme importance to the conversation on gender violence in the country. Let’s make the most of it.


This article appeared on Firstpost on 12.10.18.