Patriarchy — the (not so) subtle structure in the society and impact by the Indian media
It wouldn’t be an outrageous or surprising statement to most that Indian society, in general, is patriarchal to its core root. This blog series over the next couple of months will go through the history, why the power structure is the way it is, the impact it has on the overarching society as a whole, the self-feeding cycle which makes it tough to transform into a feminist society and finally, what can potentially be done to solve this.
As a guy when growing up, I often noticed but didn’t realize how society treated women differently, and some privileges I had solely due to my gender. How common is it in a typical Indian household for men of the house to eat first while women of the house usually ate afterwards, when the food had probably gone cold? How often is it that the finances of everyone were taken care of by the few male individuals - or patriarchs per se? How common had it been that my sisters or my mom used to serve water and food when guests arrived but I was never explicitly asked to?
Living in a society where right from our birth, often before that, our emotions, thoughts and behaviour is shaped by patriarchal notions structurally rooted to the society. Consciously or unconsciously, most of us have fallen prey to some of these — be it accepting gender roles without much thought, or toxic masculinity, internalized misogyny among others.
The quick two minutes video shows the rant of “a brown girl” who just wants to live her life, but can’t go anywhere without her body being sexualized, can’t trust most men — for a good reason, can’t get the identity as being a human first — being expected to rely on men for simple things like walking home. A woman is more than a sex object, something the Indian society, and as this particular blog will focus on, Indian media outright rejects.
There are multiple reasons where this permeates into regular life- primarily of course because of the natural process of how society passes down its ideals over the next generations. But, for this post, we will take a look at an often-ignored aspect, which normalizes the root of patriarchy and makes casual sexism, misogyny and toxic masculinity all too common. That is of course — Indian Media. And media here is an all-encompassing term, it includes the shows and movies we watch, news we read, radio commentary we hear and the songs we listen to.
India is known for its love for movies, and whether we like it or not, it shapes a significant portion of our society. Lately, we’ve seen a lot of more feminist-themed movies, but are they really feminist-themed? Or are they mere lip service? Granted they’re definitely a lot better than most other things in the Indian movie market, but when we analyze it with a modern eye, we’ll realize things are not how they seem. And I’d argue, this covert patriarchal media is much more dangerous than the explicitly misogynistic one.
Let’s take a look at a classic 2016 Aamir Khan movie, Dangal. The movie was raved about across the country, how this was such a necessary movie to break gender roles and stereotypes. And I’ll be one of the first to call bullshit on that.
Was Dangal really a feminist film? Let’s look back at what Aamir Khan’s role was in Dangal. Equality also involves the right to choose what to do with their own lives. And it can be argued, even in this usually referred to as “feminist” film, there was a male patriarch who forced his own passion on his daughters. It is these subtle covert normalizations in the media, that keeps the patriarchal stronghold.
Let’s take a look at another famous movie lauded for smashing gender roles and its feminist theme. Chak De! India. This 2007 film definitely is a good piece of cinema, but does it deserve the accolades from the socially progressive people? The movie was brilliant — but take a look at the core theme. Instead of a movie about a women-hockey team, uniting together to win the world cup for them, the story instead focused on the man who helped the women win. The focus was on how great the coach’s character was than the fact the women were equally, and in all likelihood more responsible for winning the tournament.
Indian media, even the so-called feminist media often have the patriarchal core present in them. And we haven’t even covered the explicitly sexist, and misogynistic depiction of women. Every other film or TV soap will have a woman character whose sole purpose is to be a sex object, or a western spoilt girl because she can think of herself, or worse. Can society progress further when the vast chunk of media a common Indian citizen consumes is overwhelmingly patriarchal and sexist to a certain extent? Can we expect people to change when the official Central Board of Film Certification is not mature enough that they resort to censoring bras, a damn piece of clothing?
It is clear that it is not just the media that is responsible for this, but they play a large part. And they are the lever that we as a society can tweak much more easily, speaking out against the nature of some of the media, getting more female writers in the writing room, and not treating an average Indian as a child, and exploring more sensitive topics about gender, identity, patriarchy and the real problems an average Indian woman would face.
