The male gaze in the Indian household: a legacy of subliminal oppression
By: Riddhi Mukherjee
Tags: Body Image, Indian Society, Gender, India, Male Gaze

For centuries, men have dictated women’s lives in Indian households and forced them to conform to their notions of the ideal female body. Loud voiced, broad-chested patriarchs have prided themselves in shaping both literally and metaphorically the space that ‘their’ women take up in the household. It’s time to explore how these systems of subliminal oppression have a profound effect on the power dynamics of the family and in subjugating the Indian woman in the larger sphere of society.

In her iconic feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes about how every woman needs her own room: a space to think in and write in. This refers not only to a literal space but also as a metaphor for a larger voice and independence that had been denied to women for centuries before her. Although this essay was written almost a century back, this space is still denied to women in several parts of the world including most of India, where women’s opinions are still controlled by male authorities and their bodies judged by the male gaze even in the intimacy of their own homes.

This idea of oppression in the intimate space of the household is not isolated, it is part of a much larger conversation: the idea that the personal is political, which is perhaps the bedrock of modern feminist discourse. The truth is that most of the oppression against women happens in intimate, personal settings: in marriages, in relationships, in the household, both subliminally and overtly, and how people act in these intimate situations needs to be scrutinised to grapple with the larger societal issues of inequality and patriarchy.

To start a conversation around the perception of women in their personal spaces, we must first reevaluate the words used to describe them. We talk about the representation of Indian women in the media- tall, fair, and skinny with long hair down to the waist; about the twisted beauty campaigns which sell creams with bleach in them to young girls who want to fit into this idea of beauty. But we never talk about the systemic body shaming in every Indian household, the comments on skin colour and our weight and the length of our hair, we never talk about the familial pressure for women to look a certain way- dictated either by men or by older women who either knowingly or unknowingly become gatekeepers of the patriarchy that was forced on them when they were younger.

There is a funny story in my family that I’ve always found rather strange. It’s the story of how a senior male family member called my mother and my aunt “bhoot”, the Bengali word for “ghost” when he saw them, commenting on how these two children (not more than seven or eight years old at the time) would never get married. These two children are now my mother and my aunt, who laugh heartily every time someone brings it up- both strong feminist women who discount the comment as light-hearted fun. Except it isn’t. It’s just one of the countless times they were shamed for being darker skinned because my grandmother was so fair, one of the countless times the idea of skin colour and a marriageable appearance was choked down their throats tens of years before they got married, the same way it is choked down girls’ throats today. Nothing has changed in the way appearance in perceived in the Indian context, either in the media or in common discourse. I don’t think I’ll be mistaken when I say that every girl, sister, mother, wife in India has been a victim in the familial space of the toxic masculine energy that tells women that they are fat or chubby and that it’s unhealthy to look that way even when it isn’t. India has normalized a culture of commenting on a girl’s weight the moment you see her as if nothing else matters apart from the size of her waist, and this is ingrained in every single girl from the youngest possible age, which develops into eating disorders and lowered self-esteem and has lasting traumatic effects on the girl’s relationship with food and her body.

But the larger conversation here is about how men decide which bodies are attractive and which ones aren’t. Men subliminally keep telling women that they need to be smaller and take up lesser space, that they need to be fairer or taller to be married off faster and they use this to hold power over the women in the house: the power that they will never have to conform to the same standard or be judged based on their appearance alone, never feel the need to be fairer or skinnier. The women of India have shrunk themselves smaller and smaller in their homes for generations, conditioned themselves to believe that the ideas of femininity and beauty that men have imposed on them are a natural truth. Urban women even in the generation directly before mine have lived their entire lives in the shadow of their husbands, learning to keep their voices down and their opinions to themselves even at home- something they learned from their grandmothers, who learned it from their grandmothers. The oppression of women is so rooted in global cultural history that it hides from collective memory an experience of not being subjugated by men, not having to dress or look or talk the way men dictate for a woman to. This conversation is more than just power dynamics in households, it is intertwined with toxic masculinity and colourism and the arranged marriage system that treats women like cattle. We have certainly come a long way from how women were treated in the 19th century, when in Bengal women of lower castes were given the surname “dashi” after marriage, directly translating to “slave”. We have come a long way from women being immolated at their husband’s funeral pyre. But these experiences are far from forgotten and have paved the way for imbalances and power inequity in modern 21st-century households.

Nowadays, although my mother discounts her own experiences of familial body-shaming, dismissing them as either “well-intended comments about her health” or “harmless jokes”, she stands up for me whenever somebody in our family comments on my body, which is quite often because of my eating disorder resulting in frequent weight fluctuations. At first, she used to tell me not to think about what other people said- that it is a normal part of growing up in India. But now that she knows the toll these comments have on my mental health, she speaks up for me, telling everyone who comments on my weight when they see me after years that I am now in an excellent college studying my dream course, that I read and sing and am so much more than my body- and I love her all the more for it, even if the fact that she never stands up for herself the same way pains me. I try to remind myself that if I am a victim of the patriarchy, then so is she. And when there is so much silence, one voice becomes a lot more powerful than you’d expect.