» Editor’s note: be a feminist is a biweekly column featuring personal narratives documenting the emotions, vulnerabilities, and innermost contradictions each feminist encounters as she attempts to enforce varying degrees of patriarchy in private, professional, and public spaces. You can email your entries to shahinda@feminisminindia.com
In a post-pandemic world with changing perspectives and cities, I moved to New Delhi for my graduation from the University of Delhi in 2022. With ever-present homesickness and the optimism of a small-town middle-class family, it seemed to me like a giant dragon about to devour everything in its opulence. Negotiations with the dragon are still ongoing. Still, there are moments when the generosity of flickering streetlights and crowded buses crushes the small town’s optimism about claiming a place in it for me. This city’s gated colonies regulate my mobility, transportation, and even my clothing.
In the women’s section of the subway, I once overheard a woman telling another younger woman to “choose bridges over subways and always carry pepper spray” and reintroduce the norm that “Delhi is not safe for women.” or rather the connoted meaning that Delhi does not belong to women. The longer a woman lives in this city, the stronger the argument becomes that walking from the subway station to your hostel at 11pm is a political act in this city.
Amid this dystopian reality, a classroom at an all-women’s college became a radically transformative space for discussion, student-teacher bonds, sisterhood, and laughter. In contrast to the classroom, in which the lecturer was at the center of the discourse, the English department classrooms initially theoretically distanced the reader/student from the hegemony of the norm. Binaries became pejorative terms and anything that seemed like an apolitical, everyday existence came under scrutiny in a classroom full of people angry feminists.
In an introductory lecture for an “Applied Gender Studies” course, the professor began with a quote from Kamla Bhasin’s non-governmental organization Very which reads: “Me sarhad par khadi deewar nahi, us deewar me padi rhi darrar hu.” (I am not the wall that divides, I am the crack within those walls) Such courses should ignite a spirit of questioning that is not on our answer sheet and our semester assignment, but should be reflected in our way of life. Maybe it was the texts and the discussions surrounding them that cemented the camaraderie between you on your hospital beds.
Yet despite these discussions of intersectionality, inclusivity, feminism, identities, and a longer familiarity with all of these lexicons, the definition of feminist literature has remained unclear. However, the effects remain profound. It was material in the moments when a professor cries during her final lecture and reads an excerpt from Urmila Pawar’s lecture The fabric of my life; when professors are ousted and the complaint is a collective loss of the department and even when in the last lectures we share not only more and more readings but also food with those radically “unacceptable” professors who taught us that life lies beyond the hetronormative Norm and capitalist aspirations.
The madwoman left her attic to explore areas of this city in “restricted” time zones and carve houses apart. A walk through the lanes of Malviya Nagar at 3:00 am, followed by a trance state in which we honestly strengthened each other and broke the norms of bourgeois morality. Transgressions became a way of life and performance became a topic on the fringes of normative discourse, questioning identity before embracing it.
The classroom taught that embracing intersectional inclusion, giving voice to historically shaped identities and supporting movement from the margins to the center, might be a more politically correct approach to renewal. Furthermore, the edges need to be continually shifted and emphasized to challenge the very concept of a center. Inclusivity holds the power to provide alternative mainstream and unconventional representations, and the possibility of an unimaginable society.
As we read, discussed and wrote, we realized that emancipation was a shared longing. How do you draw a line between the everyday and the macrocosmic? These boundaries became blurred as we criticized thinkers from Plato to Freud; They mocked her, laughed at her misogyny, and participated in a place where agency was not an issue of the patriarchal state.
In one of these lectures we read Plato’s Republic. According to him, all kinship and family relationships must be broken for the state to function optimally. He imagined a world ruled by a philosopher king and where children belong to the state. In this condition, it is necessary to ensure that a nursing mother does not regularly breastfeed the same child, otherwise a mother-child bond may develop between them. This gave us goosebumps as the professor said, “How fragile is your republic!” My love will destroy it.” We discarded the classics and read Sapphic verses at our leisure. We choose authors who said: “It is a thousand times a shame never to say what you feel.”
The aura of hysterical laughter that could have led to the persecution of these young women a few centuries ago was a resilience that petrified many people. This bond and camaraderie between students and teachers created a space in which agency was articulated throughout life. In discussing the work of Babasaheb, Chinua Achebe, and Toni Morrison, it became clear that the diversity of the classroom was more than just a safe space. As I learned the lexicons of political correctness and undid the silent oppression of the household, the joy of expression became a means of self-discovery.
Looking back on this journey, I think it was what Plato feared: a camaraderie that has the power to challenge patriarchal republics, spaces that defy norms, and classrooms that breed rebels.
