Fast Clothes, Slow Clothes
By LUCINDA NELSON DHAVAN
W
hat is the image of the Indian woman in Western eyes these days? I’m not sure. It is possible that the very word “Indian” conjures only the image of someone who can explain your computer to you, whether it is a man or a woman. Or do people picture a girl sitting in a call center in cyberspace, trying to answer questions fired at her in angry English? Do they see a determined immigrant behind the counter of a convenience store, motel, or Dunkin’ Donuts?
When I was young, the image was much more glamorous. Perhaps because very few of us had met Indian women, we concocted an image from Around the World in Eighty Days, Hollywood, and books. An Indian woman, we thought, would be draped in a sari, probably with jewels to boot. She might be a princess. She would be elegant, graceful, and mysterious like the women who walked on stage behind Ravi Shankar, holding their accompanying instruments like sacred vessels.
Such an image obviously had little to do with the reality of Indian women. A woman bent double, planting rice in mud, is not very elegant. She’s sweaty and tired, and her sari is hiked up around her thighs to keep it out of the way. A woman running a biotechnology firm in Bangalore is not very mysterious. She’s businesslike and wears nice pants. Women and their ways of living are as varied here in India as in the rest of the world. The image someone might conjure of an “Indian woman” could only be true of a miniscule minority of the population.
However, women do try to live up to certain images, always and everywhere—just as men probably do. The year I married, women in the America that I left were trying on a variety of images—Gloria Steinem, Joan Baez, Twiggy. Women in the Indian middle-class circles that I moved into were thinking of images not very different from the one described earlier—sari-clad, elegant, graceful. Young women spent a lot of time collecting saris. For at least a year after their marriage, brides dressed as princesses whenever they went out in public, draped in jewels, displaying their family’s wealth and taste. Even those who weren’t blessed with baubles carefully applied black kajal around the eyes, flowers in their hair, and a bindi—the dot on the forehead. They wanted to live up to the ideal image of the Indian woman.
So did I. It was an attractive image, and physically not quite as demanding as the Western one. No matter how radically I dieted, I was not going to look like Cher in this lifetime. Indian beauties were expected to have more generous dimensions. I had even heard of a South Indian film star described as looking like an over-stuffed sofa—and she was still a wildly popular star.
I adopted the sari, attempting a degree of elegance in its drape and fall. I wore jewelry, as expected of a married woman, and flowers in my hair. My father told me kajal made my blue eyes look like two burnt holes in a blanket; one of the few things we agreed on then. However, I did like bindis.
I had always thought the marks in the middle of the forehead had some mystical meaning, since they were applied where the mythical third eye was supposed to be—the eye that could see into spiritual realms, while the other two eyes only saw the real world. Some people said that they touched the spot with red powder as a part of morning prayers, to remind themselves that there was more to life than what they saw on the surface. Someone else, though, told me that the various styles of marks were more like the brands on cows—they showed what gods you worshipped, what sect you belonged to. Most women, though, never gave the bindi a second thought. It was just a “beauty mark,” something Indian women, at least Hindu Indian women, always had worn as part of their distinctive look.
The traditional red powder dot, I found, leaked out across the forehead and down the face in hot or rainy weather, making me look as if I had been shot between the eyes. I moved on to the more modern “sticker bindi,” a circle of velvet textured material that sticks to the forehead with glue, like a self-adhesive postage stamp. Everybody uses them; they’re so convenient.
The first time I opened a package of the most popular brand, I read a line inside the cover that made me laugh: “Dedicated . . . to the most gentle, the most tender Women in the World, The Women of India.” By that time I had moved on from thinking of what an Indian woman should look like, to wondering a little more deeply about how women thought of themselves—Indian and others. “Gentle” and “tender,” I thought, sounded like what men wanted in women, but how did women feel about it?
Both popular and traditional images, I found, projected Indian females as gentle, loving mothers and women who tenderly care for their men. Women try to live up to this basic part of the image. “Smart,” “competent,” “sexy,” and “resourceful” lately crept into the popular image of ideal womanhood, but “caring” remains fundamental.
It is odd, the way that all of this gentle tenderness sometimes is perceived as passivity. The highest compliment one could pay an Indian woman, traditionally, was to call her a “real Sati-Savitri.” Somehow this came to mean a loyal wife, chaste and completely devoted to her husband and his family. Perhaps people only thought of the word “Sati” as it is used to refer to a woman who throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, rather than live without him.
The original Sati was not such a wimp. She was the adored wife of a great god, Shiva. When she and her husband were not invited to a big event at her father’s house, Sati willfully insisted on going alone, though Shiva advised against it. When she got there, her father mocked her husband’s ascetic, unworldly ways. She set herself on fire with the power of her own anger; she said she couldn’t bear to live in a body that had been sired by such a stupid man.
Sati was not exactly the picture of docility, then, and when she was reborn, she won the grieving Shiva as her husband yet again. She compelled him to wake and notice her by the sheer force generated by her yogic austerities. Now that is a Woman!
As for Savitri, she was a princess raised so well that she learned every art and science. Her parents could find no match for her and sent her out to select her own husband. She fell in love with a prince who lived in the jungle because his father had been banished by a usurper. Everyone tried to persuade her that she never could survive in such wretched surroundings, and finally a Seer told her that the young man would die in a year; it was written in his fate.
She married him anyway. She lived happily in his hut, along with his blind father and aged mother. When the day of her husband’s predicted death came, she refused to leave his side. As the god of death dragged off his soul, she followed his terrible path to the underworld. On the way, she gave the god such witty answers to his questions that he gave back everything her father-in-law had lost, as a reward. Ultimately she tricked him into giving back her husband’s life, too, even though it was against divine rules to return a soul from the land of the dead.
Familiarity breeds contempt, of course, and modern Indian women have heard the term “Sati-Savitri” used too often, too thoughtlessly. For them, it now means some simple village female, shuffling along behind her husband with her head covered. These ideal women are much more; they are as complex as real women—loving and caring, but willful and passionate as well. As images of womanhood go, the image of a woman who can debate with Death and win works for me. If we must have images of women to inspire us, why should we settle for anything less?
BIO: LUCINDA NELSON DHAVAN first went to India on a Fulbright Foundation grant, immediately after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. She is still there. After several years devoted to domestic bliss, child rearing, and learning Hindi, she joined the staff of a regional newspaper. She now feels she may have learned enough to write fiction, and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.
Contact Lucinda at: ldhavan@yahoo.co.in
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