warming up to mush

The early nineties saw the country’s entry into the new liberalised age, the entry of Valentine’s day into the nation’s vocabulary and my entry into teenage. The concomitant entrance of the first two was not a coincidence, though my foray into teenage was. As Valentine’s day became more popular, my ire against it grew at the nauseating celebration of patriarchal romantic love, stigmatisation of singlehood and the unbridled commercialism to which it was put to use. In those years nothing could be so irritating as red roses, red heart balloons and chocolate wrapped in glossy red paper on that day. And I do dig chocolates, balloons and roses. This continued till I started teaching and interacting with students for whom the day meant so much. The meaning seemed to have changed subtly, though it retains all its consumerism and patriarchy, since my time. Or is it because I was dealing with a different set of students than my classmates in school and college.

A recent piece in Indian Express pointed out that understanding the Mangalore pub attack on women required an examination of class. It cannot be done purely in terms of gender. This is a valid point but we need to ask what is in this moment that the ‘liberated woman’s body’ has become such a target for the right wing. After all there have always been ‘modern’ Indian women who drink, smoke, frequent bars/casinos/discs, dance with abandon and wear revealing clothes. Every self-respecting hindi film till the late 1980s had the vamp character who was the embodiment of the fallen woman; never mind she was the only woman having so much fun. The liberated woman has become a threat at the same time when the vamp has been rendered obsolete in the hindi film with the heroine taking over her role. As long as the liberated woman was a vamp and her life safely distant from the aspirations of the ‘normal’ ‘respectable’ women she raised no fury among the protectors of culture. But it is precisely the smudging of the boundary lines between the vamp and the girl-next-door that has raised their heckles. She and her life is dangerously close to ‘ours’. She is definitely a product of class, but a product of the mobility and affluence of middle class and the spread of middle class aspirations to the smaller towns and mofussil areas of the country, some part of which is a result of liberalisation.

But that is just one part of the picture. If we look at our films again, the language of love changed in the decade since the inauguration of economic reforms. From the long duree where love -especially inter-caste, inter-community, inter class- inspired rebellion and unconditionally justified defiance of the family/community our films moved on to define socially sanctioned and permissible love. My students, when asked about their preference for love or arranged marriage, come up with ‘love-cum-arranged’ as the first preference. Our films and our middle class now endorse this seemingly oxymoronic category which effectively sees inter-community and inter-caste marriages as violative of community honour, parental affection and Indian culture. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Hritik Roshan pleads with the Patriarch (Amitabh Bachchan) to forgive Shah Rukh Khan but admits that ‘Unhone galti ki hai, Unhone pyar kiya’. A far cry from the proud defiance of ‘pyar kiya toh darna kya’ and its innumerable variations.

But love as defiance flourishes among the young, but not our metropolitan upper middle class elite, but rather in the small towns, suburbs and the edges of urban India. For this generation of youth, the promises of liberalised India overlap with hope for a liberal India. They are ready to risk life and futures for love. Many do not manage to convert their romances into choice marriages. Many are posthumously labelled victims of ‘honour killings’. For them Valentine’s day is special. They may not relate to the language of the Pink Chaddi campaign but do concur with its content. They dot campuses, parks and shopping arenas holding hands with cards, roses and balloons. Many see this day and this time of their lives as the only opportunity they have to give vent to their desires and can later remember with fondness. I find my fully formulated critique of Valentine’s day still valid but unable to capture the import of these happy giggling faces. So I wish them back, and give them a day off.