No Country for Young Women . . . Still
Cult of the Mother but No Cult of the Woman
Some time ago, I wrote a personal essay called No Country for Young Women.
You can read it at the bottom of this page. but don’t do that now.
Right now, if you can and will, please join one of the protests happening imminently against yet another young Indian woman brutally raped and murdered while performing a night shift as a government hospital doctor.
Right now, if you can and will, sign and share this petition with everyone you know.
Right now, if you believe in prayer, pray for justice for the victim.
West Bengal, where this happened, has a fiery and respected female Chief Minister.
West Bengal’s revered mother goddess Durga is coming home soon as she ritually and annually does every autumn to her faithful.
The cult of the Mother or Maternal is well and alive in India. The cult of the Woman is, as always, under serious threat.
No Country for Young Women
Nandini Bhattacharya
On September 5, 1987, I left India for the United States, embarking on a voyage whose trajectory—thirty-two years today and still counting, if one’s counting, that is—I couldn’t then have foreseen by any means.
We were traitors to our country, me and my cohort of other young men and women who left India for ‘the States’ that year, and the year before, the year after, and in the years to come. We were the fevered gully of the ongoing brain-drain that defines the late twentieth century: money and skills moving in one direction, need and misery moving in the other. We’d chosen to flee rather than stay and fight. Each of us had been asked at the US Embassy if we planned to return as our visa applications said we would, trailing behind them loads of evidence in the form of family, relatives, land and prospects—geo-piety beribboned by ticker tapes of bank accounts, property, inheritances, legacies, and whatever else one could dream up and present on paper.
Thirty-five years later, young women are still leaving India for the United States, for Canada, the UK, Australia. Daughters of friends, acquaintances, people I don’t know. Everyone leaving. For ‘Higher Studies,’ generally, as otherwise the Consulates of the countries with now even shinier cities on the hill—New York, London, Montreal, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Boston—wouldn’t even let them stand in queue outside their high walls.
But they’re a special kind of refugee now, my young countrywomen. One of them gave me an unexpected answer when I asked her why she had to leave at sixteen, straining her parents’ middle-class resources, for a cold, faraway place called the Maritimes of Eastern Canada. At the time I just found her answer a bit precocious, maybe a little opportunistic. Maybe a little self-righteous, a little narcissistic, I thought then. Oh, she’s leaving because she can, I thought, and then she wants to put a little political spin, a little feminist rage, around it.
She said, “Because this is not a country for young women.”
Two years later, thinking about a country I left at twenty-two, to which I return at times with the fury of a daughter toward a mother who couldn’t protect her if needed, I remember my young friend’s words. Recently, a twenty-seven-year-old veterinarian in the modern Indian city of Hyderabad was gang-raped, strangled, set on fire, and left dead by four men. The men were manual laborers and transportation workers who slashed the tire of her motorbike and lured her away on the pretense of helping her when she returned to it after dark. They left her corpse fifteen miles away. They were caught, jailed, and then ‘encountered’ by the police ‘force’ who, inexplicably, with no press coverage, had returned the four to the scene of crime one morning before dark, and shot them dead as they fatuously tried to escape. That’s the story.
And six years ago, one murky December night in Delhi, another young woman, Jyoti Singh, had been attacked on a Delhi Transport Corporation bus by four men—also laboring transients, also in the mood for mayhem and maybe a little class warfare. She was raped, tortured, and left for dead at the end of the hour-long fraternal frenzy; later, she died in hospital. She’d even had a male friend with her, but the rapists beat him and threw him off the bus which then went on its way, the driver taking his turn in the communal feeding upon a female body that seems to be the mottled imprimatur of this gender-violent moment in ‘India Shining.’
The next few weeks were blurry. My mother was dying in hospital of cancer. In the waiting room of the hospital relatives of patients sat watching television footage of protests rocking the country, especially in the capital Delhi, myself, my father and sister among them. In Bombay, outside, the protests were milder. Bombay has long had a reputation of being a somewhat safer city when it comes to sexual violence. But the scene on the screen of women nationwide speaking out against the horrific crime, against the indifference and perhaps complicity of law enforcement when it came to gender violence, was quite fantasmatic.
Some of them were students and employees at Jawaharlal Nehru University, then still one of the premier, uncensored spaces for academia and activism in the country. They were eloquent, impassioned, angry. They were urban, urbane, incisive. Their critique of the status quo was dead on. But they were alive. Jyoti Singh was dying. She would die in hospital a few days later.
As my young friend said, “Because this is not a country for young women.”
How does a woman’s body incite so much inhumanity—I consciously decline the word ‘bestiality’ here for such action by persons who were undeniably male humans—when it’s so familiar already in the image of mother, sister, wife or daughter? What laughter, what groans and yells, erupt from human throats engaged in such butchery? To what muster does the male body, weaponized against another body, respond at such moments?
No one spoke in the waiting room. No doubt in many hearts and minds there was already the sickening thought of another dying body nearby, a loved one tormented by disease. There is no philosophy in a cancer hospital’s waiting room except enduring the unendurable. But though maddened by my helplessness and medicine’s powerlessness to shield my mother’s body from storming by disease and ‘breakthrough’ pain, I couldn’t fully disengage from the story on television. My anger had a peculiar texture to it. It was mingled with hope against hope and furious grief. I wanted my mother to recover. I wanted Jyoti Singh to survive. I knew neither would. And I couldn’t stand it.
Jyoti Singh passed away a few weeks before my mother. But my mother’s last days have never, in my memory, been separable from the memory of that national anguish. And of a country, though mine, that seems not to be for young women.