May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (41 page)

All I know is that I will return to Calcutta and be as guilt-ridden as before. I also know that in the end, for me, Calcutta was a case study in how misery and oppression may produce creativity, and how they can sharpen an artist’s insights into society and herself. But it was interesting, and not surprising, that the mightier influence on the three women’s work came from the experience of simply being a woman.

The three Calcutta women I met identified themselves as filmmaker, painter and poet first, but it was undeniable that their experiences as women enriched their lives because they had to be, in a sense, both men and women—professionals, and mothers and wives. Although the partitioning of their lives took time and concentration away from the creative process, ultimately it brought enormous depth to their work. “Women are broken into little parts all the time,” Aparna Sen told me. “It’s very difficult to arrive at harmony, because in this kind of work, you need to give of yourself completely. At the same time, a woman has a tremendous emotional experience to draw on.”

None of the women said they felt a larger responsibility toward
improving the lives of other women in India; they hoped that their work spoke for itself. “I’ll tell you in all honesty that I can’t think of devoting my life to the education of women, because that’s not my scene,” Aparna Sen told me. “But I can make films. Perhaps I may sound awful to you, but I feel that by doing my own thing the way I believe, and not abiding by every single rule that is laid down, I am in a way holding myself up as an example. I don’t presume that I am, but I don’t see what else I can do.” Nabaneeta Dev Sen had told me much the same thing. “Every feminist poem is one woman’s way of speaking of all women,” she said. “Even confessional poetry speaks about a group.”

She paused and smiled. “Don’t you think that every creative woman is a lover and a revolutionary?”

EVERY OTHER WEEK, A NEW ISSUE OF
FEMINA
APPEARS ON THE MAGAZINE
tables of India’s beauty parlors and living rooms, bringing cheerful advice and a touch of glamour to the lives of eight hundred thousand housewives in the country’s middle class. I always enjoyed it. As India’s largest-selling English-language women’s magazine,
Femina
offered such features as the baby-of-the-fortnight contest, an investigation into the quality of laundry detergent, and an interview with the tenacious wife of a philandering husband. That confessional—
ZARINE KHAN: THE TIGRESS WIFE
!—was one of my favorites. The tigress, featured dramatically but somewhat inconsistently on the cover in a blouse with leopard-style spots against a leopard-skin background, was the wife of Sanjay Khan, an aging movie star. Zarine had responded in exemplary fashion to her husband’s well-known infidelities with pouty Bombay actresses: She bucked up, lost weight and started a business that transformed her into “the hottest interior designer in town.” Nonetheless Zarine knew what came first in her life. “She works ’round the clock,
but her children and her home are her number-one priority,”
Femina
approvingly reported. Zarine herself concluded: “I think I am above all an Indian wife.”

It will come as no revelation that such fare, irresistible to housewives, and also to professional women, who pretended not to read it, thoroughly disgusted Indian feminists. One year a group of them turned up to demonstrate against the annual Miss India beauty pageant that
Femina
sponsored. They waved placards and chanted slogans outside the Bombay auditorium, which impressed the media but not the contestants. In that year and the following years, the pageant had more entrants than ever before.

Yet
Femina
had shifted perceptibly in tone, and its content no longer focused on the recipes for samosas and other snacks it had dished out a decade before. Any casual reader could see that the magazine, in its own fashion and in an attempt to ensure its own survival, was trying to wrestle with the dramatic changes in the lives of Indian middle-class women since independence. Admittedly, Indian middle-class women had not poured into the work force the way women had in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, but the visibility of the relative few who had made it created a new standard and forever changed the way a middle-class woman looked at herself. Every affluent Indian housewife knew who the trailblazers were, and a supportive press reported on their exploits with much fanfare.
India Today
, in a July 1988 cover story on women entrepreneurs that was typical of the genre, fell over itself with such enthusiasm that it wound up producing some of the more amusing, and patronizing, prose I had read. “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” began a miniprofile of a successful beekeeper. “Well, life did not really give Sarparveen Kaur lemons. It gave her bees—and has she made honey!” The next page featured a sari and dress designer. “Nalini Sharma looks like your typical girl next door,” that profile began. “But don’t get fooled by those looks. Within there lurks a dynamic businesswoman.” The message was clear. A middle-class housewife was left to feel defensive about the only role society had expected of her a generation ago. It was a familiar story I had watched unfold in America. In India,
Femina
was a particularly revealing window on its permutations.

To learn more, I went to Vimla Patil,
Femina
’s editor in chief, who had helped put the first issue of the magazine on the stands in 1959. In chronicling three decades of the traumas and glories of the Indian housewife, she had become as much of an institution as
Femina
itself.
She turned out to be a savvy and charming mother hen. She received me in her modest office at
The Times of India
building in Bombay, behind a large desk covered with copies of
McCall’s
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
. To her left was a new word processor. “Next week I have to learn how to use it,” she said, smiling weakly. Short, round and carefully made-up, dressed in a cotton summer sari, with her hair pulled back in a traditional bun, Vimla Patil might have been any well-to-do Bombay housewife with time on her hands. She ordered coffee for me, then answered a few questions about her background. She had grown up in upper-middle-class Bombay, and her father, a publisher of English and American medical textbooks for the Indian market, always told her that being a girl was no different from being a boy. After her marriage, her husband, a builder, was transferred to England for a year and a half; she stayed in India and had her second child. “I remember counting the pains and collecting my clothes to go to the hospital,” she said. “When the baby was born I told the doctor to send a telegram to my husband. My state of self-reliance was born that year. I learned for the first time how to do banking, how to handle money, how to take care of crises. In a funny way, my husband never forgave me because I didn’t need him in those days.”

It was that experience that led naturally to
Femina
. “All along, I would say, it has been a middle-of-the-road magazine,” Vimla Patil said. “It does not tell women to fight irrationally. There are all kinds of injustices, there are all kinds of hurdles. But no one with the stroke of a pen can change a country.” The middle class in India was changing so rapidly, she said, that unreasonable demands were suddenly placed on housewives to be things they were not. The last thing she wanted was to add to those demands. “When there is so much pressure already on a woman, is it right to give her more insecurity? Is it fair to tell a woman that she has to become a doctor, or a lawyer?” The typical
Femina
reader, Vimla Patil said, was a middle- or upper-middle-class woman, educated in English at least through junior college. She was married to a banker, a businessman, a professor, a civil servant, a doctor, an engineer or a member of the military. Her husband made about three hundred dollars a month, a good middle-class salary. She had an awareness of Indian politics, wrote lots of letters to
Femina
and channeled her ambitions through her offspring. “Whatever she did not have, her children must have,” Vimla Patil said. “She will struggle for an education for her children, and will tutor her children and will see to it that her children learn dance and music. She is shrewd and smart
enough to entertain the right people for her husband. She is not at all an imbecile. But deep in her mind there is the envy of the woman who is self-reliant, a woman who has her own field of interest. She sees this woman as luckier.”
Femina
never hectored, only gently encouraged. In doing so, it reached the kind of women—90 percent of
Femina
’s readers were full-time housewives—who never would have responded to the feminists who had demonstrated outside the beauty pageant. “I didn’t want the magazine to be a constant cribber,” Vimla Patil said. “So we found a manner by which women could taste success.”

The June 23–July 7, 1988, issue of
Femina
, which had been on the stands the week before we talked, was a classic example of the Patil “You, too, can do more than the dishes” philosophy. Although there were the usual recipes (Chinese-style prawns), decorating tips (how to create better lighting for your home) and sewing features (make a bunny schoolbag for your toddler), there was also a much larger section called “Career Counseling,” which included articles advising women on how they could find jobs in science, graphic design, textile design or as secretaries. The article suggested that women ask themselves a number of important questions before embarking on training for a career, including this crucial one: “Will your family permit you to work at night, or to travel frequently, or to live away from home? If not, will you be able to effectively deal with their resistance?” Anticipating that the answer in many cases would be no, the article suggested that there were many things a woman could do at home, such as designing pillow covers—“or if your home has a fairly large balcony, you can start screen printing of scarves.” In the same issue there was a profile of a housewife who started her own bakery, and a story about another housewife, Malti Munsif, who “so desperately wanted an identity of her own, her own place in the sun” that she set up her own business selling silver-plated pots and pans. When the business dragged her into a lawsuit with a landlord, she learned,
Femina
told its readers, how to fight her own legal battle. “I coped with the case myself and gave no tension to my family,” Malti explained. She was determined to do it all. At the end of the article she happily concluded: “It is a pleasure for me to meet customers from various well-known families and get to know them. I would have definitely missed out on this rich experience had I been a housewife satisfied with a life of luxury.” Superwoman may have died in the United States, but she had been reincarnated in India. In another issue of
Femina
, a
beauty makeover of a “busy career woman” had the headline
HOW TO JUGGLE HOUSEWORK, CHILDCARE, CAREER AND STILL LOOK GLAMOROUS
.

Femina
owed its success, and in fact its very existence, to the emergence of the Indian middle class, probably the most important social transformation that has been occurring in the country. Not only was the magazine’s editorial content designed for the middle-class housewife, it was also supported by pages of advertising that promoted Indian-produced middle-class products—casserole dishes, vacuum cleaners, sanitary napkins, nail polish, skin moisturizer, vacation resorts, aluminum foil, baby powder, quartz watches, refrigerators and instant french fries—which had flooded into the market in the last two decades. The middle class had risen out of the prosperity created by the “green revolution” in agriculture and modern farming methods, chiefly in the northern state of Punjab, and the industrialization that had been spreading in the country since independence. Much of the middle class was made up of the children of the first generation of Indian civil servants who assumed power in the government after the British left. Again, the term “middle class,” as it is used in India, refers not to those in the middle but to the people in the top 10 percent, who can afford to buy the products advertised in
Femina
. But 10 percent of India is eighty million people, a consumer market the size of a European industrial country. Many in this elite are impatient with the socialism inherited from Nehru and the asceticism of Mahatma Gandhi and believe that the accumulation of wealth is in itself not bad.

As any reader could see from the pages of
Femina
, the women of this new middle class were beginning to face the dilemma of balancing career and family that had become so familiar to women in the United States. These Indian women had no new answers, and their husbands seemed to me Neanderthals when it came to sharing chores at home, but the women did have some distinct advantages over their American counterparts. The more affluent ones had full-time ayahs, or nannies, as had been the practice in upper-middle-class families for generations. These mothers, for better or worse, did not seem to be as filled with guilt as many American women were about leaving the baby with others. If there wasn’t an ayah, there was often a live-in mother-in-law in the extended family who could look after a child. Neither, of course, was a perfect solution. A young working woman I met in Ahmedabad left her toddler all day with an ayah, but had to endure the busybodies in her apartment complex, all housewives, who told her it was very bad for her son that his mother was not at home. The young woman
worried constantly that maybe these women were right. As in America, freedom had not come without difficult choices.