[IndyMedia Bombay] INDIAN MASCULINITIES

[Mangesh Kulkarni]

RECONSTRUCTING INDIAN MASCULINITIES

                                                                         - 
Mangesh Kulkarni
   Convener,
   Forum for the Study of Indian Masculinities,
   Mumbai




The quest for women's liberation has slowly but surely changed the context 
and substance of men's lives. This quest may be traced to Mary 
Wollstonecraft's pioneering work Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), 
which was a product of the intellectual ferment generated by the 
Enlightenment and its political fallout, the French Revolution. In the 19th 
and early 20th centuries, the feminist project was continued by women such 
as Margaret Fuller, Tarabai Shinde, Emmeline Pankhurst and Simone de 
Beauvoir.   The 1960s and the 1970s witnessed the rise of the 'second-wave' 
feminist movement and the allied discipline of Women's Studies, which 
foregrounded the notion of gender as a constitutive category shaping human 
thought and practice in almost every significant sphere. They pointed out 
that unlike 'sex', the biologically based distinction between men and women, 
'gender' involved the socio-cultural construction of male/female identity, 
that gender constructs were seen as natural and served as the ideological 
props of a ubiquitous regime of power designated as patriarchy.

Patriarchy is said to secure the subordination of women and the empowerment 
of men. Thus, women are considered to be essentially passive/emotional, 
suited to child-bearing and home-making. Hence they are confined to the 
private or domestic sphere, resulting in their marginalisation. Whereas men, 
who are thought to be naturally active/rational, are accorded a prominent 
role in the public or political sphere. Quite logically, feminists have 
subjected the patriarchal construction of femininity to a penetrating 
critique.

The male response to feminism has often involved indifference, if not 
outright hostility. But this is not the whole story. Many men have treated 
the cause of women's liberation with sympathy and solidarity. If one were to 
prepare a short list of such men over the last two hundred years, it would 
include stalwarts like J. S. Mill, Friedrich Engels, Jotiba Phule and 
arguably, M. K. Gandhi. In his seminal work, The Subjection of Women (1869), 
Mill gave a feminist slant to liberalism by advocating that women be granted 
equality of citizenship and civil liberty in the public realm. In The Origin 
of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels showed the 
relationship between women's subordination and the introduction of private 
property, modern monogamy and the patriarchal family. Phule valiantly fought 
to end the oppression of women inherent in the traditional Brahmanical 
order. Gandhi revalorised femininity and mobilised women on an unprecedented 
scale.

A more self-reflexive continuation of this tradition may be found in the 
profeminist stream of the men's movements triggered off by second-wave 
feminism. Profeminists have been interrogating the dominant constructs of 
masculinity. They are engaged in critiques of male socialisation and gender 
roles with the objective of helping women secure socio-economic and 
political parity. They particularly seek to reduce male violence against 
women, children and other men. Another major concern of profeminists is the 
elimination of various expressions of sexism such as rape, pornography and 
homophobia or hatred of homosexuals. In the U.S.A. this tendency is 
represented by the National Organisation of Men Against Sexism. Its local 
counterpart is the Mumbai-based group MAVA - Men Against Violence and Abuse. 
MAVA conducts several awareness-raising programmes geared to gender justice. 
Especially noteworthy is its annual Marathi publication Purush Spandan that 
it brings out in collaboration with Purush Uvach - a like-minded group in 
Pune.

A different response to feminism has been articulated by the men's rights 
movement in the U.S. It focuses on modern constructions of gender, which 
place unfair legal and psychological restrictions on men. It particularly 
targets legal and social realities that place the male at a disadvantage: 
military conscription, the judicial tendency to favour mothers in child 
custody suits, as also higher rates of suicide and violent crime among men. 
It deploys feminist methods in the analysis of gender from a male viewpoint. 
Its extremist fringe, however, rails against 'feminist excesses’ and the 
'social overvaluation of the female', and may therefore be seen as a 
backlash. An Indian example of the men's rights tendency is the Nashik-based 
Purush Hakka Samrakshan Samiti, which seeks to safeguard the interests of 
harassed men who are said to be under constant threat from misuse of certain 
sections of the Indian Penal Code by women.

A third strand of masculinism in the U.S. is spiritual revisionism, also 
known as the mythopoetic men's movement. It has roots in the 
counter-cultural tendencies of the 1950s. Like the men's rights tendency, 
the revisionists are deeply dissatisfied with the traditional male roles, 
which cause men to suffer alienation from their bodies, emotions, work, 
other men, women and the earth.  They seek to overcome this alienation 
through a spiritual and psychological transformation of men. Their therapy 
involves attention to the individual self and the disorders of the soul, use 
of myths and rituals originating outside the industrialised Western world, 
small support groups, weekend retreats and workshops.

Socialists in the men's movement view the construction of masculinities as 
part of the larger economic processes, and are aware of class differences 
between men. They generally take a profeminist stance. African-Americans 
broaden the agenda of the movement by drawing attention to the question of 
racial injustice. The gay rights movement seeks to end discrimination 
against homosexuals through political activity. It emphasises the adverse 
effects of homophobia on men, which include alienation and insidious forms 
of self-hatred. Both the socialist and gay tendencies are present in India. 
While the former has a diffuse presence, the latter has vocal and 
media-savvy spokesmen like Ashok Row Kavi, fora such as Bombay Dost; and 
Penguin has recently brought out an anthology of gay literature. The 
African-American tendency could find an echo in the dalit movement, 
particularly as dalit women have already articulated the need for an 
autonomous space of their own.

It is clear that many of the above-mentioned currents overlap. Most agree 
that traditional forms of masculinity, which valorise self-centred, 
unemotional, competitive, aggressive and sexually promiscuous behaviour, 
require serious reevaluation for enhancing the well being of both men and 
women. In the West, this ferment has led to the development of Men's Studies 
- an interdisciplinary area of inquiry akin to Women's Studies. Men's 
Studies has acquired an impressive following in the U.S., resulting in the 
formation of professional associations and journals devoted to the 
discipline. The resulting investigation of masculinity from historical, 
political and socio-psychological perspectives has yielded a rich harvest. 
In India this remains practically virgin territory. Recent years have 
witnessed the publication of important studies of Indian masculinities, but 
these have come mostly from NRI or foreign scholars.

An early attempt to understand the construction of masculinities in India 
can be found in the writings of social psychologists like Sudhir Kakar and 
Ashis Nandy. Kakar has inquired into the specificity of the normative 
matrices, family structures and socialisation processes which shape the 
psyche of Indian men. Some of his views on the subject are sampled elsewhere 
in this issue. He has also examined Indian masculinities in the context of 
sexuality, popular culture and communal violence. Nandy has provided an 
influential account of the impact of British rule on the restructuring of 
masculinities in India. He argues that the hyper-masculinist British 
imperial ideology warped the fluid gender identities which characterised 
pre-modern Indian society, resulting in the inflation of the Kshatriya model 
of masculinity, which had earlier occupied a limited social space.

However, this thesis has been recently challenged by two historians - 
Rosalind O'Hanlon and Mrinalini Sinha. The former has underscored the 
centrality of martial masculinity to society and politics in the late Mughal 
period, while the latter has pointed out that 'British manliness' and 
'Indian effeminacy' were conjointly constructed within the imperial social 
formation. Other important insights of historical and contemporary relevance 
have come from Joseph Alter's anthropological study of wrestling and 
nationalism in North India, Sanjay Srivastava's study of the Doon School, 
and Thomas Hansen's analysis of communalism. But this is only a beginning; 
the dark subcontinent of Indian masculinity still awaits exploration.

The feminist movement has acted as a catalyst stimulating a wide-ranging 
interrogation of masculinity over the last few decades. The reconstruction 
of masculinity along emancipatory lines must therefore proceed in tandem 
with feminism. But masculinism needs to repay its debt by pointing out and 
seeking to correct the flaws in the latter. This is particularly true of 
misandry - a belief that masculinity itself is responsible for most of the 
world's woes - which sometimes raises its ugly head in the women's movement. 
Moreover, it needs to develop an agenda of its own.

Some elements of such an agenda would include the salvaging and 
strengthening of fatherhood, encouragement of healthy male-bonding and 
mentoring to generate new forms of solidarity, defeating the 'machine man' 
archetype so as to achieve true physical and psychological/spiritual 
well-being, and establishing a nurturing and creative relationship with 
nature. A great deal of study, soul-searching and organisational initiatives 
are required to translate this agenda into practice. In the process, men may 
lose more than their chains, but they surely have a whole world to gain.

(Source: May 2001 issue of 'Gentleman' - a men's magazine, published from 
Mumbai, India)

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