Recovering From The Colonial Hangover

Today, this French professor guy came to college and talked to us about Comparative Literature - and how he thought Indian literature was an excellent starting-point and viewing-glass to look at world literature, and how the Euro-centric approach to literature was a failed one.

Two hours later, my Indian lecturer in class commented with a snide smirk, that it was funny how 'those who colonized us and told us their books were superior to ours were now coming back to tell us how great our own literature is'. I immediately told her that that sounded ridiculously racist. She replied with a laugh and said she was only returning the favour. We all laughed it off and the lesson began.

But this really got me wondering about the continued modern repercussions of our old colonial rulers. Will we ever get over it? Must we? How did we manage to get over something as magnanimous as the enslaving of an entire nation, of an entire culture, of the great big colonial bully pissing on his new found land to mark his territory? - did anybody from the British or Spanish governments ever really apologize for it? But even if they did, what good does an apology do after what's done is done? The English Queen's lovely crown still has jewels stolen 'procured' from colonial conquests all over the Indian subcontinent - but then again, what does it matter today?

What's done is done and what matters is we are colonized no more, right? Every now and then though, you see some remnant of the old days having seeped its way into today, some modern interpretation of the White Colonial Master's supremacy lodged in the brain of his Asian subject who after centuries of being told so, has now himself started believing that his Master is indeed superior.

"Welcome to WHITE Ceylon", says the caption beneath. "We are proud to present an innovative new day spa focusing on luxuriously skin whitening rituals to pamper guests from head to toe." 

I did a double-take when I saw this, because it's so goddamn in your face that it's almost funny. WHITE Ceylon, because Brown Ceylon is too bourgeois. It's not just this place that I point the finger at, but countless, countless others - in Sri Lanka and predominantly in India. Every day, there is a new advertisement on TV here in Delhi, informing men and women of some new amazing product can make them look whiter - and therefore - more successful, and awesomer in general. And why are they getting away with selling racism in little pink tubes at the supermarket? Because that's exactly what the masses want. Being dark skinned is bad, in India and in Sri Lanka; you can hear the tone of disapproval in an aunty's voice when she goes 'oh you have grown dark...' or the compliment in someone's voice when they say 'you've become fairer!' 

It's such a sordid affair. I remember telling a friend once that Colombo sometimes reminds me of this properly fucked up rape victim, who after having been assaulted by her colonial abuser day after day and year after year, and being told again and again that she is worthless and he is better than her, begins to believe it. Later she grows up but you don't get over that kind of trauma easily, so instead she starts dressing like him and behaving like him, because the years of standardized abuse has ingrained in her the idea that the person she truly is - is not worth being, and like a child who associates 'parent' with 'protection' at an early age, she associates power and success with her colonial abuser because those are the things he projected in her presence for centuries. The woman's got a serious identity crisis, you see. 

Anyway, my weirdass allegories aside - I think this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed ASAP. Because we need to get over that shit. It's all connected - our love for fair skin, with our love for emulating Western clothing, a Western lifestyle, a Western accent (like someone cleverly commented under an album of a premier event by Spa Ceylon's WHITE offer: "oh look, it's a bunch of brown people who want to look white!") . And I don't think we can just throw it all away, and suddenly wear reddha-hatas and everyone burn all their English books - that's just silly, and globalization has even made some of our Western universality relevant - but there needs to be discussion about it, campaigns, forums. Because as long as a Sri Lankan man looks up in awe at the white man who has come visiting from England (and believe me, I have seen these looks of worship not just among the working class but even and especially in the faces of the upper middle class as they are greeting some foreigner to their gala with their lips puckered to kiss his white posterior) - national 'Independence' may as well have never happened at all. 

Rape: Clothing Matters

Let me start off by stating the most obvious: rape is nobody's fault than the rapist's - and the death sentence for a rapist is letting him off easy, if you ask me, he should be castrated first. Choosing to pin a woman down and physically and emotionally violate her, to take from her by force, is the worst crime a man can commit and it takes an utterly heinous mind to make that choice, and honestly when someone goes 'oh maybe it was because of something she did' as though it was a justification of the act, I just get all:

Having said that, I realized something important today while talking to a friend in college. We were on the lawn soaking up the faint afternoon sunlight which is so rare this winter, and we started talking about what we could possibly do if hypothetically three men tried to attack one of us while we were walking down a pavement.

I live in Delhi - so this wasn't exactly the 'if you were on an island in the middle of nowhere'-sorta hypothetical situation. Women get raped all the time, women were being abducted and attacked in this city long before the infamous gang-rape case was blown up by the media. Because we were talking about what-we-could-do in reality, it all came down to real preventive measures. My friend raised the issue of clothing.

At first, I reacted the way almost every woman in my social circle would react to this - a woman should be able to wear whatever the hell she wants, why should clothing ever factor into a possible rape situation? The problem is with the man - it's with the culture - it's with society's mindset - it's with the law - etcetera etcetera. She agreed with all this too.

After a long discussion however, I came to realize something that hadn't occurred to me before. When it comes to real life preventive measures, and trying to make yourself least vulnerable to an attack - clothing does matter. Firstly, I am talking strictly in Delhi-terms here, because the problem is very real and current here, the stats are such that most girls I know feel there is easily at least a 40% chance they could get attacked on the way home today. Second, I am talking of rape by a stranger, not domestic issues. Thirdly, please don't confuse this notion with the notion that 'if women dressed conservatively, they wouldn't get raped' - these two are different notions, entirely. The terrible ugly bottom line is that women will get raped, and one woman would have worn a short skirt, the other a long unflattering gown, one would have been married, the other single, one may have been a teenager, another a child, another an old lady, one would have gone out with her boyfriend, another with her girl friends, another alone -- and rape would have had no logic and made victims of them all. 

In the same vein, I think that though we can never reduce our vulnerability to these animals in the streets to a minimum zero level -- there are still precautions that, if you're lucky, could reduce your chances, at least by some degree. A psychologist (I spoke to one in particular, for a sexual-harassment project I was a part of) suggested that psychologically, a very drunk man (whose sexual desire is consequently at its peak... FYI, drunk men make a considerable percentage of rapists), or a man in search of forced-sex - in several cases, looks for an easy target: meek individuals, easy to overpower, and whose clothing looks easy to rip off (this last point along with other pointers is making the rounds lately on a popular Facebook post), and he also stated that little or scanty clothing can heighten and enthuse this drunk or violent, horny man's perverse cravings. 

Now, this is obviously not an ideal solution -- far, far from it. You could dress like an ugly hobo and just bump into the wrong crowd - and because these animals are senseless, they could just rape you for the fun of it. There is no easy escape - and in the long run, the main root of the rape problem is made of societal mindset, culture and patriarchy. Fixing these problems is the ideal solution. But this is not an ideal world. It's end-of-days shit when children are being raped and women are gang-raped and others watch and do nothing. So till we, one day, hopefully, manage to tackle the true heart of this issue - it is important not to blind ourselves from reality with rhetoric. It's true that it does not even make sense to try to curb the potential victim's actions instead of the criminal's -- but shall I tell you what else doesn't make sense? The fact that Jyoti, the young medical student got gang-raped in a bus, and her male friend was attacked by iron rods - the fact that apparently (according to my Indian colleague), some of these men here in India, are more prone to sexually attack a woman because she is travelling with a man - a boyfriend or husband, because it suggests she is 'open' to sexual behaviour. 

Till we manage to cage these animals, I think it is a very stupid thing to do to kid ourselves into thinking that wearing a low-neck blouse and small skirt and travelling by foot in the evening -- or even in the daytime if you're in a high-rape-rate city like Delhi -- does not at all affect your chances of being attacked by a horny, drunk savage or a group of them. Yes, it is completely fucked up that we - the women, should ever have to reassess our clothing, when the real problem comes from these rapists. But till we find a way, God help us, to get rid of rapists, to communicate with these wild, horrible creatures - don't be foolish. Don't be foolish enough to throw caution to the wind and think you are doing a great thing by exercising your freedom and liberality by wearing little clothing when you don't have to, in a city where girls fall victim at random every day. This is definitely no guarantee, and certainly not the fix to the rape problem, but it is a temporary preventive measure. I think this is a good wake up call for all of us, a necessary jolt to our repugnant society's senses: How did we get here? To this point where our daughters must wonder if their sense of wardrobe is more or less likely to attract rapists?