India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (23 page)

The first section provides a review of local newspaper stories. The Amnesia attack, it would seem, was just one of many such vigilante incidents. Accounts abound of private parties being
raided or couples being yanked from buses and beaten up. One irate article even describes Sri Ram Sena activists threatening the ‘skimpy-dressed’ participants of a beauty contest. The heated stand-off only calmed after the photographer consented to delete all the ‘vulgar’ images from his camera. The attackers’ actions pass without comment. The article instead highlights the ‘tragedy’ of parents that allow their daughters to take part in such shameless events.

I flick though to the concluding analysis. Lying at the root of the violence, the authors argue, is the widely held belief among Hindu traditionalists that India’s majority culture is being diluted. Comments from regional Sri Ram Sena chief Pramod Muthalik certainly give weight to the interpretation. ‘Pub culture is not our culture,’ the right-wing Hindutva leader is on record as saying. I’d heard the same in Kolkata about divorce. Muthalik also objected to ‘taking drugs and dancing naked’. (According to the girls’ testimony, they consumed only fruit juice and they were most certainly clothed.) The political leader did issue a muted apology, although only after television footage of the pub beating began circulating on national news. His backtracking came with a qualification. ‘It is our right’, the Sri Ram Sena frontman told the cameras, ‘to save our mothers and daughters.’

I look around the juice bar. A boy has his arm stretched out across the top of the girl’s chair next to him. His fingers touch her shoulder. His head rests against his upper arm, not far from her neck. His body position is designed to look casual. It is anything but. He’s hugging her without hugging her. Is that grounds for an attack? What if they were to kiss? They don’t. But what if they were to? Would that push things beyond the pale for the moral police?

Needless to say, Muthalik’s comments riled the likes of the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women. Sri Ram Sena are ‘fascists’, they say. Renuka Chowdhary, a senior female government minister at the time, even accused the militant group of ‘Talibanising’ India.

The Karnataka-based group is by no means isolated, though.
Their anti-Valentine’s stance was borrowed directly from the Shiv Sena, a powerful Hindutva group concentrated in Mumbai. This is the same outfit that said Pakistani cricketers should not be selected for the Indian Premier League. They also called for Rohinton Mistry’s book
Such a Long Journey
to be removed from Mumbai University’s syllabus because of allegedly derogatory comments about Maharashtrans.

Both sides have over-simplified the issue in Mangalore. A perceived threat to the town’s sexual morals certainly stands at the forefront of the debate. Behind it, however, lurk other local tensions. Invariably the attacks involve couples of mixed religion, for example. The notion of Hindu girls fraternising with Muslim or Christian boys strikes Sri Ram Sena as particularly worrisome. They even have a name for it: ‘love jihad’. According to this slippery-slope logic, a trip to the cinema today will become a religious conversion tomorrow.

Exclusion also forms part of the picture. Many of Sri Ram Sena’s foot-soldiers in Mangalore herald from lower castes, particularly the Billavas and Moghaveeras. Some of their antagonisms are locally specific. The Moghaveeras work as fishermen, for instance. That puts them into regular conflict with Beary Muslims, who dominate the fish trade.

Wider trends are also in play. For all its down-at-heel appearance, Mangalore is actually coming up in the world. Banks, IT companies, private hospitals and commodity exporters have all set up shop here in recent times. Most of the new jobs that this has created have been snapped up by the better-educated Christians, as well as high-caste Hindus. Such ‘inequitable development’, the report ends, explains some of the ‘tremendous alienation’ and ‘disgruntlement’ felt by the upwardly mobile elements of the town’s lower castes.

Churches feature among the more popular targets of the cultural police. Official records cite dozens of recent complaints by Christian groups of vandalism and intimidation. So it is a relief, when I eventually arrive at the St Aloysius chapel, sweating and
out-of-breath, to find its fabulous wall-to-wall frescos in perfect order.

Outside, sitting in the college courtyard in the shade of an arching Indian cork tree, I spot four students. They are talking among themselves, shooting the breeze. I wander over. As I draw close, I observe that the tree’s Latin name (
Millingtonia hortensis
) is printed on a small wooden sign fixed to the bark. The plaque reveals its originator as well: a Dr Smitha Hedge, of the laboratory of applied biology. The tree’s test-tube birth contrasts markedly with the chapel’s biblical motifs. The disparity strikes me as interesting, but not odd. New India is beginning to accustom me to the close proximity of polar opposites.

The students – Pravisha, Prajwal, Gautham and Noel – stop talking as I approach. I ask if they’re happy to chat and they readily acquiesce, inviting me to sit with them on the low brick wall surrounding the tree. In their early twenties, they are all final-year students. They are identically dressed, in jeans and short-sleeved shirts. Pravisha and Prajwal even have the same style and brand of trainers. Their breath smells of alcohol. It’s not quite noon.

I explain that I’m interested in understanding more about the dating scene in college. They giggle and bury their heads in their hands. Noel, a good-looking Goan with curly long hair and a sculpted goatee, is the first to speak. The religious authorities of St Aloysius do not prevent relationships between students, but nor do they overtly condone them. Campus closes each day in the mid-afternoon. So, while they would no doubt like the student body to remain modest and virtuous, the college’s religious-minded authorities remain realistic.

After class, the four classmates sometimes head to all-day drinking spots such as Night Flight and Pegasus. ‘We drink whiskey sodas generally,’ Noel clarifies. ‘Beer is for old people.’ Sometimes they’ll bunk off school and head to the mall or travel out-of-town to the Manasa amusement park. Noel prefers the nearby Summer Sands beach. He goes ‘roaming’ with his girlfriend there. ‘When her parents are in,’ he adds. ‘Otherwise, we go to her house.’

Pravisha interjects. He is keen I get a balanced view. Unlike Noel, who comes from a Protestant family in Goa, Pravisha and the others hail from Mangalore itself. All three live at home with their parents. Their Hindu households are run on traditional lines: home by eight o’clock, no womanising, and no ‘boozing or fagging’.

‘We never get caught,’ Pravisha assures me. ‘If we go home stinking of alcohol or cigarettes, we brush our teeth or chew gum to hide it.’

It is Noel’s picture of girls that his course companion primarily wishes to clarify. Many of the female students may be ‘loose’, Pravisha admits. Yet, from his perspective, there under the cork tree, such behaviour is neither commonplace nor appropriate. Mangalore girls, he insists, are ‘good girls’. They obey their parents and cede to their wishes. Most of the girls Noel is talking about – those who go out drinking or ‘go with guys’ – are from out of town. ‘Their parents are in other states or countries even. They stay in hostels and their parents don’t know what they get up to.’

I suggest to him that Mangalore has to have some girls that fit Noel’s description. If there are, Pravisha says, it’s because of money. ‘It corrupts them.’ He knows a number of poor and middle-class girls from university who have chosen a boyfriend just because he can buy them clothes or because he owns a car. As Babu would say, it’s a status thing.

On a roll, Pravisha reveals a number of other things that he doesn’t think are appropriate. One is dress sense. ‘Girls should be decent,’ he says. He approves, for example, of the campus ban on skirts and bare shoulders for girls.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘When girls wear miniskirts, it tempts boys. They feel like having sex with them. That leads to rape and all.’

I begin to get an inkling of the ingrained prejudices against which the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women are fighting.

Pravisha’s views on gender equality are similarly regressive.
‘Girls’, he says, ‘should not have the freedoms of boys.’ Not in the workplace, he clarifies. At home. ‘Women in India are there for caring for the family and for motherhood.’ If they are going out to bars and having boyfriends, the lines will become blurred. For Pravisha, the outcome promises not to be pretty: ‘What boys do, girls will do also.’

The hypocrisy riles me. ‘Sorry, help me out here. If it’s okay for the guys to mess around but not the girls, who exactly are the boys messing around with?’

The question elicits no direct response. Prajwal, Gautham and Noel merely look at me, blank-faced. I can’t tell if it’s hostility they feel or bafflement. Pravisha, on the other hand, knows exactly what lies behind my question.

‘We don’t like Western attitudes,’ he responds, deflecting my questions with an undisguised counter-attack.

Sensing that he might have been too abrupt or that his argument sounds bigoted (by my standards, not his), he pauses. Then, the alcohol in his bloodstream kicks back in and he repeats his opening salvo with a second round of fire.

‘We’ve not been to these countries. We only see it on television and in the newspapers. But practices like eating beef and wearing bikinis, we don’t approve of these.’

The conversation is taking a nasty turn. I raise my eyebrows, doing so in a way that I hope indicates continued interest on my part, not judgement.

Not all that ‘they’ say is correct, Pravisha continues in a more concessionary tone. The arrival of this mysterious third person into the conversation occurs quite naturally. I had not mentioned the Amnesia Bar incident nor Sri Ram Sena’s cultural-policing activities. Yet the presence of both has hung over the discussion since we started talking. My questions – indeed, my very being in Mangalore as a foreigner – speaks of them.

I persist with the game, comfortable that there is no doubt of what and about whom we are speaking. ‘Such as . . .?’

‘Their opposition to Valentines, for instance. They say that more condoms are sold on Valentine’s Day. On that day, they say
men don’t propose love, they propose sex. They are wrong about that. It’s not a sex day.’

Given the growing tension in the air, I fight to stifle a laugh. But the urge to chuckle passes almost immediately. What initially struck me as absurd suddenly seems sad. Pravisha is trying to prove himself magnanimous, perhaps even enlightened, in identifying Sri Ram Sena’s claims as exaggerated.

The idea of Pravisha giving the statement enough weight to consider them worthy of rebuttal is what kills my humour. It implies others might consider them serious too.

I thank them for their time and get up to go. As I do, Prajwal pipes up. He has yet to speak. Unlike Pravisha, his voice has a softer, more tentative edge to it. His classmate speaks for all of them – for all young men like them in Mangalore – he says. I must understand that they are all resigned to their parents’ wishes. ‘We will all have arranged marriages with girls from our own caste.’ He is neither apologetic nor confrontational, just matter-of-fact. ‘These things are organised. For us, love comes second.’

Love comes second. What a sorry thought. On reflection, though, we tell ourselves in the West that we marry for love. But how many folk are urged down the aisle by something other than Cupid’s arrows? Money, status, fear, desperation, loneliness, children (born or unborn) – all are motivations that can lead to an exchange of rings. Perhaps Pravisha and his friends have a point? Maybe these young men from middle India are just more honest about how relationships work? So the element of choice falls predominantly with their parents. So courtship is a thing to be organised rather than left to chance. Are such things so bad?

Instinctively, I tell myself ‘yes’. Young people should have the right to choose. They should have the right to fall in love and marry their childhood sweethearts. Despite a diet of Bollywood romances and television soaps reinforcing such an opinion, millions of adolescent Indians continue to think otherwise.

Back on campus in Manipal, meanwhile, Sunny’s giddy with excitement. He has a girlfriend.

The two have been dating for a little under a year. She’s from
Bengaluru, where she is living with her parents and studying for a post-doctoral degree. They connected via Orkut, the social-networking site.

The site hosts a chatroom for pupils at one of his former schools. Alumni would post notes and comments, while Sunny would write amusing ditties that he hoped would make him stand out from the crowd. Their online community also hosts a gaming function. The boys would take on the girls. His girlfriend acted as the Orkut equivalent of a house prefect, seeing to it that the girls won. Sunny would do his best to ensure that they didn’t. Their online rivalry resulted in a ‘friend request’, which opened the door to lots of late-night ‘chatting’. After a month or so, Sunny formally ‘proposed’ by email. It took six months for her to accept his online invitation to become his girlfriend.

Sunny’s romance might be predominantly virtual, but it lacks none of the usual trials and tribulations of young love. Why did she make him wait so long? She had told him that she loved him. Or, at least, she had typed as much. But, in those early months, she’d worried it might be infatuation. So she’d told him to wait. Even now, she ‘comes and goes’ on him. Every other day, she cuts off mid-chat. Sunny’s heart skips a beat every time her rosy little ‘online’ icon disappears. Is it something he said? Has she gone for good? Or is it her mum again, interrupting her at her computer. She’s always doing that. Or so his girlfriend says.

The relationship is ‘serious’. They know each other’s passwords: Facebook, Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, everything. In the world of modern relationships, there exist few greater testaments of true love. Sharing confidential data is what opening a joint bank account used to be: the surrender of singleness, a declaration of an entwined future.