The Uber driver was in a chatty mood on the trip from Delhi to Gurgaon. He was a philosophical whiner: life is but a river of crap one has to sail through. The subject at hand was the deviant female hedonist. The night before, a young woman who had ridden his car to a Delhi nightclub had re-booked him at around 10 pm. As he waited outside the club, she didn’t show up for half an hour, which soon rolled into a whole hour. Calls to her went unanswered and pleas to the company were met with the order that he must wait or just somehow find her. Finally, she came out two hours later, so drunk that she could barely walk. A man put her in the cab and asked the driver to take her home. The driver did as was told, the woman alone in the back, “practically unconscious”, to be finally received by her anxious mother waiting at her doorstep. Our driver felt tempted to say a few things about the behaviour of her darling daughter but decided to keep his mouth shut.
Less than a week later, another Uber driver, this time driving through the narrow lanes of northeastern Calcutta on the way to Newtown, evoked déjà vu. A young woman, drunk as a lord and hence nothing like a lady, had landed in his car. Trying to light a cigarette, she realised she had no spark. She asked the driver for a light. “Now,” our driver told me in a tired tone, “I don’t smoke and have nothing to do with lighters.” But that virtue had no traction with the drunken lordly lady, who insisted that he get out and get a lighter from a shop. “Now tell me,” I could hear the sound of his eyes rolling, “Is that my job? Drink, smoke, do whatever you want, but who are you to send me on an errand?” After I made sympathetic noises, he slid into his next story, where another woman, also drunk, kept asking him to speed up and go way beyond the permitted speed limit. “I don’t know about you, lady, I wanted to tell her,” the driver said, fatalistically resigned, “but I do have a family waiting for me for whom my broken bones are of no use.”
“Don’t you get male passengers who misbehave?” I asked him. “Or is it only women who do such things?” He laughed. “Of course, men are already known for their misdeeds. But no one talks about women doing these things. That’s why I’m telling you.”
I remember hearing stories like these before, often from taxi drivers. Perhaps male cops and bus drivers also make it a point to wax eloquent about misbehaving women. Unless one is ready to assume they are lying or exaggerating, the tales they tell are distressing indeed. But is it really important to reiterate the stories of misbehaving women, particularly under the influence in the late hours? A chilling suspicion hangs like a cloud — does this reiterating voice legitimise hostility and violence against women in a slow, insidious way?
But I remember Lynndie England. I was a student at a US university when this army reserve soldier set off explosive debates in the world of American feminism. She was one of the 11 members of the infamous 372nd Military Police Company charged with war crimes connected to prisoner torture and abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison in the Iraq war. Her methods of prisoner abuse, which I will not revisit for the sake of our sanity, were particularly shocking. The underlying ethical question was a perverse dimension of the issue of gender equity. Why was England so infamous when there were male soldiers who were just as much, and possibly more, abusive? What does it mean to feminism when we have a female serial killer, or a woman soldier who tortures prisoners?
Several feminist thinkers have celebrated women and the female sensibility as embodying a finer, more creative, and humane modality of being. A book I teach regularly is Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, which looks at the public and the professional spheres in modern Europe as made with the spectacle of male vanity and violence. I understand that book’s most radical vision to be a plea to remake this war-ravaged, dictatorially-dominated public sphere in a feminine image following a universal liberal education. The consequent world is shaped by a spiritual androgyny, the best of which is represented by the bisexual Woolf herself. But in Woolf’s arch-androgynous work, Orlando, turned into a magnificent film by Sally Potter, Lord Orlando, living through 500 years and turning into a woman halfway, does not meet Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian countess accused of torturing and murdering 650 women between 1590 and 1610. When she was finally arrested, horribly mutilated girls were found imprisoned and dying on her estate. Rumours had it that Báthory had made it a practice to bathe in the blood of virgins, making her a contender for the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula, along with the Transylvanian-born Voivode Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia, also known as Vlad the Impaler, and several other historical and fictional characters.
Nevertheless, Woolf’s claim, while factually wrong, is spiritually right:
“[S]carcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us.” It’s hard not to see enhanced narratives of female deviancy as part of the continuous history of violence against women. They prepare the moral ground for more physical forms of hostility. The behaviour of these women described by the drivers, while far from being destructive, was offensive, as it would be regardless of the protagonist’s gender. But holding on to them so as to circulate the stories just because they were done by women is a far more dangerous failure that has become an increasingly pervasive reality in India today. It may very well be a fallout of our perpetually uneven project of modernity that provokes class and gender differences in the most explosive ways. But whether casual or determined, such sexist judgements legitimise pathways for domination, suppression — and ultimately — aggression against all women who dare to defy established norms and structures of power, often for the right cause.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony
