BY NISHA SUSAN

The New Indian Male is just a mirage. Though some may condescend to wash the dishes or lay the table, he remains violent, boorish and emotionally clumsy.

A FEW years ago, a group of young men, all Bengaluru-based lawyers, were asked who bought their underwear. Their answer bears out the seemingly arbi­trary nature of this intrusion. Of the five men, all in their late twenties, all well-groomed and intelligent, all given to the unconventional in their personal and politi­cal lives, only one bought his own underwear. For the rest, this was the first time they were thinking about why their mothers were the ones still picking out their boxers and briefs.

In the popular imagination, the Indian male has al­ways been the stuff of nightmare, able to rape, beat and oppress with his hands tied behind his back. Cer­tainly the newspapers and the grapevine are full of such tales. Here is the one who beats his wife everyday. Here is he who rapes his daughters for years, as in the Mira Road case earlier this year. Here is the man who pays to have his daughter’s Muslim husband bumped off, as was alleged in the Rizwanur case. Here is the one secretly buying acid to burn into blindness the schoolgirl who rejected him.

But one could bat that away as just an exaggerated version of the brute Indian male. A decade ago, the same media had tri­umphantly heralded the ar­rival of the ‘New Indian Male’ - gentler, kinder, more in touch with his feminine side. And true to image, in the sliver of Indian society that is upper-middle class, educated and reaping the benefits of globalisation, In­dian men seemed to be un­dergoing big changes in social roles. More and more men cooked, more and more men participated in child-rearing and more and more men were cleaning them­selves up. Or so it seemed.

COCOONED

EVIDENCE is, the urban Indian male hasn’t really changed. He is cocooned as he has always been in a sort of prolonged infantilism - a hatchery protected by doting mothers, fathers, sisters, girl­friends, and society itself. As Mukul Kesavan, author of The Ugliness Of The Indian Male And Other Propositions says, “The Indian male’s bullet-proof unselfconsciousness comes from a sense of entitlement that’s hard-wired into every male child in an Indian household.”

Turn to the men in the lives of People Like Us - fa­thers, husbands, brothers, lovers, colleagues and friends - and Kesavans prognosis looms every­where. This innocuous man never makes the news be­cause what he does is not news. He leverages power so casually it seems to be his by natural right. To him and to others around him, us, it is legitimate for him to exert measured but highly effective violence to protect his way of life. He is the man who is impeccably well-be­haved everywhere but at home, where he throws plates if meals are late. The man who finds it difficult to deal with his girlfriend’s higher income. Who as­sumes all young women are interns or secretaries or have slept their way up the pro­fessional ladder. The one who wears designer shirts, drinks in designer bars but does not flinch from casually slapping his designer wife in spaghetti straps. He is the one who brings the attitude of the thwarted child to any zone of conflict: an accident on the road, a difference of opinion with a spouse or child, an employee not sub­servient enough. The hushed whisper families maintain around the tyrant of the house is uncannily similar to the ones that surround a colicky baby.

So, truth is, the New In­dian Male announced a decade ago was a mirage. The man who lays out the plates for dinner and per­haps washes them - fifteen minutes of haloed domestic­ity - the man in the giddy magazine features is actually a bewildered robot caught in a crisis. He is expected to be new; the new emancipated Indian woman certainly ex­pects him to be new. But he has not been brought up to be new. He has never been taught how to live in an egal­itarian society.

MODERN CONFUSION

PALASH Krishna Mehrotra, author of the forthcoming The Butterfly Generation, a book about urban young men and women between 25 to 35 years old, epitomises contemporary confusions. Changed rules, changed expectations and zero preparedness. He paints a picture of utter pathos. “If I am supposed to cook, why can’t I cry? We men are constantly guessing. Am I supposed to pay for din­ner or not?”

Who, and what, is respon­sible for hard-wiring Indian men into this mess of emotional clumsiness and latent brutality? Kesavan says, “Indian men are ugly on account of the three Hs: hygiene, hair and horrible habits. Despite the way they look, they’re al­ways paired off with good-looking women.” He’s right. The unequal logic of arranged marriages does spin out perversely. Nalini, a 22-year-old student in Pune says, “I have a cousin in New York, a 35-year-old professor. He sent word home that he wanted a beautiful 19-year-old village girl. She had to be musical, highly religious and from a strict Brahmin family. But since he fancied himself as very modern, his wife would have to cook meat for him. Whether or not this would violate her beliefs did not matter. And, of course, his parents found him one.”

So who’s programming this bug in the circuitry of the Indian male? Rahul Verma, 56, trade unionist and Delhi-based writer, is the anti-thesis of smug tradi­tional male or even the be­wildered one wandering about in a newly egalitarian world. Verma, who calls himself a ‘house-husband’, was the epitome of the New Indian Man long before such a phrase was coined. He has kept house, cooked for the family and cared for his par­ents and his in-laws for decades. Ask him how he came to these life choices and he shrugs, “I never thought I was doing any­thing unusual. My parents were radicals. My father lived underground for years.”
Parents - there seems to be a simple equation between parents and the drought of responsible, responsive In­dian men. In the homes of People Like Us, young boys do not automatically learn to cook or even to be grateful to those who cook for them. They are not automatically involved in the care of sib­lings, the elderly or the ill, while their sisters are en­couraged to keep vrats (or fasts) as spiritual general in­surance for the whole family. They are not taught to settle conflicts peacefully or, to use the unfortunate phrase, to occasionally shut up and put up. Indian boys are not just perpetrators: they are victims of the plague of the stereotype.

STEREOTYPES

FROM the nineties, Stan­ford University psychologists have conducted long-term experiments that prove that if you can convince children that stereotypes don’t limit their potential, they can per­form wonderfully. But Indian schools are utterly unmindful of this. Girls are widely expected to do better in board exams, and usually they do (albeit for some embarrassingly sexist explanations that suggest girls have a greater and in­nate desire to sit quietly in front of their NCERT text­books). Boys, it is assumed, are naturally restless in class­rooms or, in an increasingly pathologising world, suffer­ing from Attention Defi­ciency Disorder. Both reasons - nature and illness - excuse them from having to take responsibility for their actions.

Outside of school too, presumably, behaviour modifies itself to match ex­pectations. Given the wild largesse accorded to boys then, it is absurd for us to be surprised at the startling ex­cesses of public and private behaviour in Indian men. The odd parent deter­mined to set things right must resort, then, to constant vigil. Take Delhi-based blogger Mad Momma, for in­stance. Well-known for her views on parenting (she has had both stalkers and hostile parody bloggers) and brought up by relaxed hippy parents, 30-year-old Mad Momma runs a tight ship. Her young son and daughter are schooled into absolute polite­ness. MM and her husband have worked out a relaxed and equitable distri­bution of household chores and child-rearing. “Women cripple their sons and hus­bands by doing everything for them,” says she. “I am rab­idly feminist about treating my children equally. But my mother-in-law and even my cook are not. My husband too instinctively asks my son not to cry if he falls down but will hug and kiss my daughter if she does. But we are constantly talking about these things in our house.”

GROWING UP

THE Indian male’s entrapement is more vividly evident than in male responses to that most reviled college ex­perience: ragging. Young Indian men routinely brutalise incoming juniors in colleges and justify it as tradition or socialising. Stripping, beatings, ritual humiliation, the eating of shit and licking of toilets, sodomy - everyone has a story. Worryingly, these stories are told with a grin. Naveen, a gentle, young Chennai-based doctor, for in­stance, says he thoroughly enjoyed a ragging ceremony that lasted hours and ended in his standing in neck-deep mud. Vinay, a 28-year-old se­curity analyst, shifts between saying, “I know it was all bad” and “It was the best years of my life” when talking about the elaborate ragging rituals in Madras Christian College. His room was once egged - covered in eggshells filled with urine - for weeks. But Naveen justifies it by saying it was all about being accepted and liked. Neither Vinay nor Naveen will concede that their experiences are merely a variant of the vi­olence that killed 19-year-old medical student Aman Kachroo in March this year in Kangra. Mary John, Director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, says that the tendency of young urban college boys to talk of Kachroo’s death ‘as the kind of thing that happens out there’, far away from their own realities, fits well with modern forms of masculinity which are inclined to deem overt violence as infra-dig. “The successful man today is one who can get what he wants - power, service and his woman - through con­sent. Overt violence would be a sign of failure,” says John. There are reasons why ragging remains a perversely beloved ritual among young men. Unlike Indian women who are trained emotionally and socially by parents and society to gear up for a time when they must leave their parental home and occupy their space in the adult world, and unlike their self-sufficient counterparts in western countries, there are no major markers to end childhood for Indian men.

When an Indian man goes away from home (if at all he does) he is almost entirely un­prepared to look after himself. Even marriage does not necessarily mark adulthood for Indian men in the same way as it does for women. So, in a sense, ragging in college is the only real initiation rite privileged young Indian men get to pass through. For the first time, they feel the thrill of no pro­tective shield around them. Certainly there are few other things in their lives that was not for their taking. Ironically then, Indian men are unable to break the stereotypes that entrap them and embrace the pleasure of multiple selves precisely be­cause neither parents nor society allows them to expe­rience any markers that end their childhood.

Globalisation itself has brought new complications for the Indian man. At one level, it has encouraged many Indian men to morph into the pleasant-smelling, colour-co­ordinated, high-spending creatures called the metro-sexual. At another, it has hardened some of the tradi­tionally fluid lines of Indian masculinity. George Jose, gleeful father of a three-year-old daughter, and Programme Director of the Asia Society, Mumbai, sums it up wonderfully. “Indian men are no longer going to be able to take their place in the world for granted. They will suffer the anxieties that women have been deal­ing with forever, wondering what is appropriate or inap­propriate all the time. The pity is that in their case there is no women’s movement to light the path ahead and men are too scared to admit the need for such groups.”

But until that fear is routed, the search for the genuine New Indian Male will resemble a quest for a unicorn. The point is, there should be no one unicorn: no new stereotype to replace the first. If there was to be a masculine movement to equal the feminist move­ment that has set large sec­tions of the Indian woman free, the goal for Indian men would be to throw off some of their own deprivations. As Jose says, “Part of the problem has always been language and how men and women speak to each other. You know how the old femi­nist guard gets all worked up when they hear young women today saying, ‘I am not a feminist’? It is as if these young women are un­grateful for all the hard work that was done before they were born, work that paved the way for their individual­istic freedom. But actually it could offer an interesting and intuitive new space. It is as if these women are signalling to the men they meet and saying, ‘Let’s set aside the history of stereotypes that set us apart. You and I, let’s start on a fresh page.’

Excerpted from Tehelka