Day 3: Samaj kya kahega?
Imagine musical chairs, with one, simple rule change: more than one person can sit on a chair at once when the music stops (thanks to our friends at Swaraj University for teaching us this game!) How might the game change?
For one, there’s no reason for anyone to get out. Except, when we played, one of our swayam seekhis insisted on taking himself out of the game, even though we told him that he could continue playing. His logic? He felt that someone had to lose, and he was the last person standing, so, rather than sharing a chair, he removed himself. Secondly, there’s no real reason for people to fiercely compete, since it’s not a game of winners or losers. However, people continued to push and pull each other as if their survival depended on it (see the video below):
Forces. Invisible forces. Pulling us down like gravity. Hard to discover and realize their effect, because they’re omnipresent, and therefore, normalized.
The most common example of this in rural Bihar is what I call the “samaj kya kahega” (what will social say?) fear. While there are many examples of samaj, or society, as a vicious force, like a caste-based riot or a decree from a local leader that two young Hindu-Muslim lovers should be punished (and I don’t mean to downplay such oppression), it is often much more subtle. In fact, samaj often times does not even consist of any real, tangible people; it’s like anticipating a nightmare that prevents you from even falling asleep and dreaming in the first place.
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A close friend of mine from rural Bihar — say her name is Zareena — was recently forced to get married to someone who she really did not want to marry. For months, we spoke on the phone, often times through tears, about what she could do. She tried to explain to her parents that she did not want to marry this boy, but they refused. Why? Because samaj would comment if she didn’t get married, as she was now 23, considered old for a girl to me unmarried. She considered running away, but ultimately did not. Why not? The biggest reason, she said, was that it would then be hard for her younger sister to get married later on, because — yes, you guessed it — samaj.
Again, I don’t mean to undermine these pressures, or to ignore other factors; for example, it would have been easier for her to take a different decision if she was financially independent. Or had a support network. Or if the laws of the land worked better to protect women. But what I meant to highlight is how samaj — this time as a force and ideology of patriarchy — underlies all of these different reasons. Both structurally and in much more subtle ways.
Zareena resisted until the last day, until she could resist no more. Literally. During her entire wedding, she bawled and bawled, passing out at one point from exhaustion. She had to be shaken and woken up so that she could finally regurgitate out her vows — qabool…qabool…qabool — like a forced false confession, cementing her fate in a life she did not deserve.
Within weeks, her mother-in-law began physically and verbally abusing her. She eventually threw Zareena out of the home as well, effectively leaving her homeless — though thankfully her family has brought her back in for now. However, her future is uncertain.
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So, who is samaj? Everyone or no one? I’ve come to realize that we are all samaj. And everything we do is samaj — either strengthening or resisting the status quo. When we gossip about people doing something different just to pass the time, causing pain and subtly blocking future divergence, we are samaj. On the other hand, when we resist marriage or break stereotypes, then we are also samaj.
We act as though we have no role in creating the world we live in, when, in fact, every single thing we do builds our world. True, we are often times simply a conduit through which the forces of samaj can be acted out and expressed. But we are not so powerless. Once we become conscious of our own actions — why we are doing what we are doing and what the impact is — then we become much more powerful to change ourselves, and through ourselves, to change samaj.
