-Leila Gautam and Gita Ramaswamy

GR
My university education was in the  early nineteen seventies on the Osmania University (OU) campus, at a time of some change. The large numbers of Muslim girls who had earlier come here for higher education had dwindled rapidly, and the upper caste Telangana Hindu gentry that was now sending its sons here was not sending its girls. In my Department of Mathematics, we were three girls to maybe fifty boys.
It was not easy to be a girl on the campus. Parents at home and the ruling masculine ethos at college meant that the girl was responsible for any issues. She had to always move in a group of her own gender, she had to walk without meeting anyone’s gaze, she should not have male friends, she should never stay beyond college hours and she had better study hard. If she faced sexual harassment or what was called, hatefully, “eve-teasing”—the very term demeaning and patronizing—it was no doubt her fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing wrong clothes, with the wrong people and most of all, behaving inappropriately.

LG
My first response to my mother’s idea of what constituted sexual violence was a feeling of disconnectedness. I have never been molested or harassed in Delhi—beyond catcalling on the roads, I have never been pawed or groped on the buses or the metros—and I have travelled on these on a regular basis.
College [for an undergraduate student in Delhi University (DU) is illiberal. I do not know if it is the case all over India, but it was certainly the case with me. We are treated like children, our views not respected or considered. The students asked for an “open campus”—a demand that encapsulated a great deal. Girls were not to be interrogated endlessly when they wished to take “night-outs”—a permission letter from their parents ought to be enough (a contradiction, really, because, needless to say, this was never a requirement for a boy who wanted to spend a night elsewhere). Nor were the girls to be locked into their blocks after ten pm. In hindsight, I wonder how such a demand could have been implemented in the first place—it was so full of contradictions.
The girls’ blocks are something akin to a “zenana.” A brick screen shuts us off from all sides—hiding our verandas and open spaces from public view. We have two entrances—both guarded all day, unguarded only when they are locked from ten in the night to six in the morning. These external, “visible” differences are complemented by internal ones. The girls’ blocks have a warden, whom we apply to for night-outs, for leaves. She is the intermediary between us and the college which “cares” for us.

GR
We learnt to survive in that atmosphere [OU] because education was precious to us, and also learnt to fight, because personhood, even if one was a woman, was no less important, and these were the heady days of the feminist movement.  Heady, because it was really only in the head, one had to be so careful outside there. My heroines when I was in college were Satyamma Srinath because she drove a scooter from her house in Tarnaka to Reddy College where she taught and Vanaja Iyengar who taught maths in our Department, and smoked with ease in the staff room. A little later, they were joined (as heroines) by Veena Shatrugna and Rama Melkote because they wore sleeveless blouses. Writing this, I sense how funny it may seem today when women drive scooters and cars and wear a whole range of clothes, but in those days, these were women who were different and proclaimed their difference in public, not inside the four walls of their homes.

LG
It is true that being a girl requires you to maintain/display your body in a particular way—you need to “work” on it. College doesn’t leave much space or time to “work” endlessly on being hairless and slender and all the other different things society’s images of the beautiful woman demand. I am engrossed in my studies, and ambitions, and am (usually) blithely unconscious of the beautiful actress on the billboards and on televisions and magazine covers, simply because I encounter her so little.
Our argument for an “open campus” was liberal in that it rested on the basic premise that students, having attained adult age, deserve certain autonomy and certain freedoms—and that these apply equally to both boys and girls. It withered. Partly, perhaps, due to the contradictions of the society we were living in – the girls in Stephen’s certainly do not all belong to one class, and more importantly, have parents who entertain no illusions of the importance of “liberal values” over those of getting a good job and making money. Anything that hinders such a goal is not to be stood for.
Women in the university are controlled to a terrifying extent. They have no flexibility of movement—wishing to stay away from your hostel at night requires endless letters of permission from your parents, your local guardian—to be approved by the warden, and the dean of residence. There is absolutely no question of men being allowed into these sacrosanct spaces; girls with boyfriends are reduced to shameful exigencies, from courting in public spaces to making out in the bushes, exposing themselves to even greater trauma. Girls have been asked where they are really going—why they are going where they are going; one friend of mine was even told to produce the brother she claimed to be leaving with. Like the violence in the streets, this is another way of controlling women. And it produces good results. Women, in my college at least, are largely politically inactive. In all my years in DU, I have never smelt even a whiff of a female candidate in all your powerful student unions.

GR
When I heard about the Nirbhaya rape and assault, I was staggered and distraught by the violence against the girl. At the same time, as the mother of a 19-year-old girl, I was also horrified to hear that Nirbhaya had climbed onto a bus with tinted glasses late in the evening. The bus had five young males in it, and she had probably thought her boyfriend a safe enough escort. Did Nirbhaya have no self-preservation instinct?
Leila studies at St Stephen’s, where only the girls’ hostels are locked up at 10 pm. While I supported their struggle to break down this discriminatory rule, I also understood that many mothers of girls studying in Delhi would feel reassured if their daughters were not roaming Delhi’s brutal public spaces late at night.
In the matter of clothes (as with women smoking in public), it is in today to show cleavage, to reveal all of the leg openly or in tight leggings. In a class-caste riven India where the poor, on the one hand, are systematically deprived of their entitlements, but can easily and visibly see—on cinema, on television, on the roads of metros, in the top-end cars, malls and shopping centres—how the rich live and spend, what do clothes signify? Both middle and rich men and women are complicit in a system that keeps the poor down.
Clothes have the added dimension of a Western notion of femininity thrust upon us – the clean-shaven legs, arms, underarms and upper lip, signifying the infantile unnatural absence of hair, the hour glass figure and both cleavage and legs marking a come-hither stance.

LG
A wide-spread claim is that violence against women is somehow a class phenomenon. That upper-class women dress “provocatively.” Of course, the justification offered this time is far more nuanced than what is usually offered. It is that working-class men are constantly exposed, through cinemas and hoardings and television, to images of women—and that these women’s bodies become the site where class-antagonism is manifested (this is separate from the critique that upper-class women are bound by Western notions of femininity and beauty). I see my fight against such popular culture the same as the fight against an illiberal college space.
I agree that popular culture in India goes a long way in re-enforcing patriarchy. But who produces these cinemas? Who produces all these images that objectify women? (I have watched Bollywood movies in theatres that have an audience composed exclusively of working-class men. Both the images and ideas that appear on screen, and the responses, shocked me. Women are never displayed as anything other than sexual objects. Or the butt of sexual jokes and innuendos). Who are these actors? Who are these filmmakers and producers? Who are these people sitting on the censor boards?
A professor of mine, one whose intellect and erudition I held in awe, told me how much the demand of an “open campus” would cost the college. Just imagine, he told me, boys from “rowdy colleges” would flood the campus if the girls are not locked up, the cost of maintaining guards and CCTV surveillance cameras would shoot up. Can you expect girls, he asked, to pay for this extra cost of the safety? Freedom, for girls, therefore, comes at a prohibitive cost—that was the most “liberal” argument of all, I encountered. It is all relative of course: we had our Principal say in an address at a student general body meeting that girls and boys are as different as eggs and stones, or apples and oranges, how on earth can they be treated the same?

GR
War has always been fought on the bodies of women. Girls feeling comfortable, expressing themselves in shorts and low necks, forget the war zone outside. Are they forgetting self-preservation? Am I implying that one can step over patriarchy’s boundaries inside four walls, but not in public space? If clothes were a matter of froth and not substance, why did I, when I was 19, admire those women who wore sleeveless blouses?

LG
I understand my mother’s view better now. Going out in public is dangerous if you are a woman, period. For a rich, privileged, upper-middle class woman, freedoms and opportunities are far greater than those of a working-class woman, and, in a place like India, far greater than those of working-class men as well. How could I compare the “violence” I face—if any—to that of the rickshaw-puller who takes me to and fro, who is forced to use his body to ferry me from place to place for a mere pittance, simply because he had the misfortune of being born into the wrong class.
Curiously, however, I have never felt disadvantaged or violated in the public sphere—like I mentioned earlier, I never encountered any harassment while out on Delhi’s roads. Even less so in other “public” spaces: like the classroom, for instance. Not once have I felt that my sex works against me.
In my most private space—my room—I experience this every moment. My room, and my hostel, while I am in Delhi, is effectively my home. It is the place I retire to, the place that is my refuge when I am upset, where I study and sleep and think. And in such a space, I am constrained almost unbelievably. I accept that there are rules that one needs to follow while living under an institution—like a college hostel—and I abide these rules, sometimes reluctantly, but I have grown to accept that rules enable smooth functioning. But what I am confronted daily with, instead, is the reality of my male counterparts who face NONE of these rules.

Is it good that women are locked into their rooms at night to prevent “incidents” from happening? Is it good that women aren’t allowed to bring men into their rooms? It isn’t good. These may be small freedoms—but these are greatly valued by their male counterparts who have no such rules. And the taking away of these apparently small freedoms is yet another way of controlling and subjecting a group that already has few choices to begin with. Your hostel room, the small space you inhabit: it is important to feel yourself to be in control of that.
There are six hostel blocks. Three of these are screened, locked, and closely supervised. The other three are open, free, and if any rules exist, these are only on paper (they are never enforced—how could they be?—when the boys’ blocks lack wardens altogether, and all the close supervision that goes with it). This state of affairs is taken as being “natural.” The Principal lauds it, the Professors I respect the most laud it, the Administration lauds it.
I think the most traumatic and scarring things happen from sources very close to home. Aren’t the rapists mostly known to the victim beforehand? Leave rape. Talk about any kind of sexual oppression. Don’t women face it from their husbands or their family or their friends? Where then did this spectre of the stranger jumping out of the darkness to rape you come from?
There is something else that is very curious—the balance of power. When I overshoot my ten o’clock curfew by even a minute, or bring a guest into my room—bringing a non-resident girl is forbidden, as is bringing a boy (why, I believe a girl who dared bring a boy into her room would face the equivalent of a lynch-mob)—all the usual power relations are overturned. Suddenly, a warden who is poorer, less educated, has the power to shame me and hurt me. A guard who earns a pittance everyday has the right to rebuke me and shout at me. It is not that they cannot shout at boys as well—it is just that when it comes to these matters that differentiate “good” girls from “bad,” they have the power to actually make you feel shamed and hurt.
This is the contradiction I face—as an upper-middle class person, who has all kinds of privileges and advantages. I thought my version of reality contradicted my mother’s, but it doesn’t, not really.
[This ‘Conversation’ was composed by juxtaposing two articles written by LG & GR separately—Editors]

Gita Ramaswamy runs Hyderabad Book Trust.  Leila Gautam studies at St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi.