Living with ‘women’s issues’ in a men’s world

AS I watched the Biblical deluge from my window this week, I rejoiced that I did not have to venture out in this weather. The pot-holed road that shook your spine as you found that your car was stuck was only one horrible memory from my working life and commuting days. Others included long traffic snarls, diversions into unknown areas and — worst of all — a call of nature that could not be ignored. My male readers may not be able to understand exactly how we women suffered in the absence of a clean public toilet. So let me count the ways in which women handle the shame that goes with being a female whose body leaks fluids that are seldom acknowledged.

Advertisement

Public health and hygiene have always been topics that make us squirm; no one likes to speak openly about menstrual health or safe toilets for the women in our low-income urban and village areas. The stench of the open common dumping grounds where bands of women were forced to go to relieve themselves has hit the nostrils of every visitor to such a settlement, yet no one did anything about it. Today, in my little neighbourhood alone, there are clean, free public conveniences that have made life easier for the poor vendors and shop assistants who work on the road or in the shops that service our colonies. Why does no pollster take this into account when detailing how many houses were built or roads extended?

More than 30 years ago, three eminent women activists were chosen by the National Commission for Women to study women’s public health problems and the state of our maternity and primary health care centres across the country. Later, the McArthur Foundation gave Mrinal Pande, one of the three panelists, a grant to write a book from her diary notes and encounters with individual doctors and patients on her travels through the country. First published in English as ‘Stepping Out’, it was later translated by her and published in Hindi as ‘O Obbiri’.

Naturally, the book was not noticed as the subject was not sexy enough to draw readers, nor did it feature the travails of our well-off women characters whose personal and domestic problems would titillate readers of magazines that catered to ‘women’s issues’. The books are a chilling account of personal stories of women who have no agency over their reproductive rights and worse, who are doomed to hold back their tears as well as their bodily waste until the male-mandated hour is reached. Any gynaecologist will tell you that the majority of women’s health problems have their genesis in this social taboo.

Recurring urinary tract infections, unclean practices to deal with menstrual cycles and post-natal neglect account for nearly all health problems that women face later in life. Co-morbidity is not related only to lifestyle diseases such as diabetes or high blood pressure, but to the inner plumbing of women.

Going further, have you ever reflected on the fact that there are no socially acceptable words to describe female genitalia? We have either highly Sanskritised terminology (yoni, for example) or the filthy gutter-level slur words (that I cannot write down here) where women are described in the language of the whorehouses where it probably evolved from. Faced with such formidable barriers, can you understand now why women — particularly uneducated and poor women — are unable to even articulate their health issues? There were few maternity clinics manned by women at the time the McArthur Foundation report was written. Given the veiled life of women in large parts of North India, how could a young girl (who had five children by the time she was 19 years old) muster up the courage to confess that she had a serious urinary or bleeding problem?

Some stories in her book trace a common problem that a female doctor recounted when she had to negotiate a set of clues given in shy whispers by a young girl in the presence of her husband or older female in-law. Decoding the ailment was like an exercise in solving a crossword puzzle that had just cryptic clues to it.

This brings me to the question of why Modi’s popularity remains unshaken even though recent opinion polls point to a significant erosion of his voting base. He has the uncanny ability to translate the secret longings and aspirations of our common folk in ways that earlier do-gooders failed to do. The Right to Education, Food and Information were laudable but did their authors ever go down to see how they could be translated into actions that mattered on the ground? If our social conscience is unable to cross the municipal limits of our safe and well-settled urban spaces, how can we even begin to dream of an India that is equitable? Where all women enjoy the same conveniences that we in our posh colonies demand of our representatives.

Sadly, even those politicians who arose from slums and backward villages soon forgot the land that they once stood on. Today, there are few voters who will support those so-called champions of social justice who ask for more privileges in the name of equality. Is this simple truth not visible to those who have accumulated huge wealth and property in the name of social justice?