Battle of the sexes: Are families simple?

A Bengaluru techie’s suicide puts focus on the idea of ‘simple families’, gender equations decreed by tradition, and loopholes in law

MUMBAI: Middle class families like to speak of themselves as “simple families” or say, “we are simple people.” But are families simple?

While the contours of marriage might be shifting, it is still viewed as non-negotiable and as per the Lok Foundation-Oxford University survey 93% of marriages in India are arranged.

Earlier this month software engineer, Atul Subhash, 34, took his life in the midst of a messy divorce after he left behind a video testimony of how he felt persecuted by an adversarial and corrupt Indian legal system as well as the animosity of his estranged wife Nikita Singhania’s family.

His video testimony throws up an emotional portrait of contemporary social life, of how the idea of ‘simple families’ becomes a denial of human complexities. This denial undergirds how parents expect children to fulfil social roles and destinies. Nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in the anxiety and desperation that surround marriage.

While the contours of marriage might be shifting, it is still viewed as non-negotiable and as per the Lok Foundation-Oxford University survey 93% of marriages in India are arranged.

Like so many Indians, Atul Subhash and Nikita Singhania matched on a matrimonial portal, and wed soon after. However, while on their honeymoon in Mauritius, Singhania told Subhash she had never wanted to get married. Her father’s ill-health and his desire to see her ‘settled’ before dying had led to family pressure on her to get married.

One can imagine that for a newly married couple this is a terribly wounding moment. This is not the expectation of honeymoon intimacy, but the honeymoon, now a standard part of wedding ritual, is often the first time that a couple really encounters each other as individuals. And when choices are made on the basis of affiliation, not affinity, things can get complicated.

The conversation of what it means to be with another person is absent or muffled, because anything which might make space for the individual is seen as a threat to this world of ‘simple family’. Personal desires, friendships, interests, ‘timepass’, career preferences, romantic desires—all that makes one an autonomous adult—are seen as betrayals, met with tears, threats and drama.

One can exist only through splitting oneself—playing a role, while hiding one’s individual self. The guilt or shame when this self emerges in love, sex or intimacies can lead to lashing out at those very people who ‘pressured’ one into those glimpses of freedom. When a partner reveals their real self which is outside expected norms, social, sexual or material, it creates an identity crisis—and can sometimes be expressed as revulsion rather than curiosity or engagement.

Atul Subhash and Nikita Singhania met little before they married. In their conversations, he reported, she spoke very little. He took this to be a sign of ‘being wise’, a trope of sorts in which womanly wisdom is seen as calming masculine turbulence and bringing stability to life. In fact, Singhania later told him that she had been told by her mother and aunts to say little because speaking too much, revealing one’s real self, can cause engagements and marriages to break. The account of this marriage, even heard from just one side, is one of deep incompatibility and alienation. In many cases when confronted with such a chasm, there are pressures to adjust or have children to save the marriage. Neither party has the emotional or social resources to consider ending it with some mutuality, to imagine personal happiness instead of social conformity.

But there is an incremental change. Once the term ‘innocent divorcee’ was commonly seen in the matrimonial columns for someone looking to marry again after divorce. It indicated that they were victims of someone’s iniquity. Left to themselves they would never actually desire something like divorce. The divorce rate in India, though still miniscule, has doubled in the last two decades. This is in part driven by a shift in women’s lives and roles. Women are more expressive, they aspire to pleasures, material and personal.

A trap set up for men

Romance is often spoken about as a particularly female fantasy – and a female foolishness. In truth, the fantasy of romance holds at its heart a fantasy of liberation and individuality for many women. Brought up to always be judged for their suitability, romance symbolizes being loved for who you are and an escape from social realities. For men however, romance becomes another iteration of the masculine role, tied up with pursuit and conquest, a symbol of their success.

We mock the romantic fantasies of women. But men too are bred on a fantasy which we do not acknowledge as one: the fantasy of Masculinity. It is patriarchy’s crafty sleight of hand that men confuse supremacy for freedom.

Families bring up men to imagine they will always be central, decision-makers. They are also constantly reminded how much is riding on their success, how all the family’s resources---emotional and material—are being poured into him. It is a debt he must repay by being a real man. And to be a man means to succeed in every way, to be invulnerable and beyond reproach. The anxiety and loneliness of such a life goes unremarked.

This often creates an inimical and secretive relationship with families. Disguising their vulnerability, suffering alone, feeling anger for the burden being loaded on them and at the same time a sense of helpless pathos about betraying their families if they choose something that makes them happy.

In this context, intimate relationships come under inordinate pressure to be an automatic solution for alienation. Intimacy, by nature complicated, uncertain and full of reversals, far from that much touted simplicity, becomes an abyss. The encounter with vulnerability and lack of control becomes unbearable. That is why romantic failure leads to so much violence in men – either to themselves, or to others. There is a reason the character of Devdas feels emblematic for generation upon generation of Indians. In the old days when marriages did not work people were told it takes time to adjust. That the adjustment was primarily from women went unsaid. In today’s time the idea that relationships take time, requires a shift in masculine mindsets-- a commitment to an uncertain process that they may not be groomed for.

For decades, struggling with these strictures, we turned to popular culture to experience our individual emotional complexities. Love stories, family dramas, questions of choice between honour and happiness mirrored emotional experiences and gave them psychological validation and catharsis, across genders. While older films are often criticized for their stereotypes, these narratives created some space for both, atypical men and the diverse nature of emotional life.

The pains of love, the compact and refuge of companionship, the acceptance of loss, and the re-emergence of hope, the deep interiority of personal life once expressed in songs, is entirely absent from a culture where visuality and instant meaning govern our lives. Social realism is the only arbiter of truth be it public, private or personal.

The emotional segregation of our society is reflected in the gender segregation of our films. Women-centric films feature women’s reality mostly in terms of violence and sociology, for instance ‘Thappad’. Male-centric films focus on the masculine wound, which either ends in death, as with the old Bachchan films, or with men unable to break out of the loop of violence as in ‘Animal’. This gender deadlock perhaps needs something infinitely tender to break and heal it. Something like love, whose vitality lies in that it provides new meanings each day on how to make room for another without drowning oneself.

The prevailing discourse on masculinity has unfortunately failed to address these internal crises. The flat description of toxic masculinity often stigmatises underprivileged men. The victim narratives promoted by the Men’s Rights Activists only push men deeper into these gendered destinies. New age-y discussions on masculinity ask men to embrace the emotional and vulnerable self, cook a meal or two, but never really question the imperatives of social and economic success on which masculinity is based. They leave out swathes of men struggling in an economy that cannot give them jobs that conform to social fantasies of what men ought to be.

The death of Atul Subhash doubtless reveals terrible flaws in the legal system and the misuse of laws. But these flaws and this misuse is not limited to gender issues. Many people are disenfranchised by the nature of our legal system. The argument for its reform is therefore wide-ranging. To harp on one law, created to protect women from the violence of dowry, cannot really help men, no matter what the claim.

In fact, the most compassionate response to the tragedy of a death is to recognise the concentric tragedies in which it is embedded. As families become nuclear and as people migrate in a capitalist world, we have to learn to form connections as individuals, beyond identities. A humane cultural revolution which can recognize this emotional juncture we find ourselves at is needed. But for that we need both, an emotional politics and an emotional education.

(Paromita Vohra is a city-based writer and filmmaker.)