I always loved that opening scene of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali . Little Apu running around the house while his long-suffering mother chases him around trying to get him to eat his rice. But it was not until I saw it with someone who was not Indian that I realised there was something a little odd about it all.
“Is that usual?” my friend asked incredulously. “Do Indian mothers just run behind their sons like that trying to stuff them with rice?”
“Um,” I said. “Well at least Bengali mothers…” I trailed off sheepishly.
He looked at me as if that explained a lot about me.
It’s no surprise that for so many Indian men, even the ones that consider themselves woke, the #MeToo movement has come as such a shock. Our sense of entitlement wraps us like a hand-knitted cocoon. The daily barrage of #MeToo updates just yanked it away and doused us with cold water.
In the “safe space” of my school old boys WhatsApp group, I would see ha-ha jokes all the time about women with the memory of an elephant keeping a hawk’s eye on straying husbands. Now the joke is on the men as they realise women remember transgressions from a decade ago in vivid harrowing detail, transgressions they did not even count as transgressions.
In a world where the boys have been in charge forever, it’s amusing to see men suddenly floundering, their membership in the old boys club no longer granting them the impunity they once enjoyed.
A recent article in Scroll.in categorised the reaction of men accused in #MeToo into different groups — the Indignant, the Progressive, the Wronged. The Indignant blustered about a #MeToo “viral fever” and sued. The Progressives complained their hippie-go-lucky disregard for archaic social norms was being misunderstood by a new liberal moral police. The Wronged wailed about being treated like a convict and sentenced without trial and due process.
But those who have not been accused come in several different shades as well. There’s the ‘Yes, But’. They are against sexual harassment but they just worry this is going too far, lumping Chetan Bhagat’s wooing skills with full-on assault and that this will harm the greater cause in the end. They are just thinking of the women, of course, when they advise them to cool it a bit.
There’s the Statute of Limitations crowd. They don’t want to hear about anything that’s more than five years old because if you didn’t bring it up then, you are just opportunistically jumping on the #MeToo bandwagon now.
How ’bout a drink?
There’s the evergreen Boys Will be Boys group. What’s a good desi mard without a wolf whistle or two? Anyway, Bollywood has always taught us that na-na-na just means try-try-try again. These days that group is less vocal and has mostly retreated to the confines of their WhatsApp groups to grumble about how men will not be able to ask a woman out for a drink anymore (or stick a tongue down her throat if she accepts that drink invitation).
Of course, as always, there’s the What About group. What about Sanjay Dutt, they ask. He was actually convicted of a criminal offence. No one is asking producers and directors to boycott him. How come the #MeToo vigilantes are demanding a boycott of the Sajid Khans and Vikas Bahls of the world, just on the basis of accusations? What about the woman, who went out for a drink with her boss after hours, who went into that hotel room when the editor was in his underwear? What about her accountability?
Lurking somewhere behind all this is the WhatsApp Forwarding group. They do not pipe up much because they believe discretion is the safer part of valour these days. But if they find an article, especially one by a woman which says strong women don’t wait 10 years before dealing with a harasser, they are quick to forward it. They are not defending it, of course, just forwarding it because it’s “interesting”.
What it all boils down to is a great feeling of unsettled-ness, something men are just not accustomed to. We live in a world that says women should always pay for the weaknesses of men. Religion dictates that women should not show their hair to men in case they inflame their passions. Men can run around shirtless and scratch their privates in public. When a rape happens in Gurugram, the city fathers declare a curfew for working women at night, again in women’s own interest, of course.
#MeToo is not going to turn that old order upside down overnight. But it’s a welcome change that for the first time men are having to think about whether they should be the ones behind a Lakshman rekha sometimes instead of it always having to be Sita.
The writer is the author of Don’t Let Him Know , and like many Bengalis, likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
