I had a rather sobering conversation with my grandmother the year I turned seventeen. I was lying beside her, my head resting on her arm, when she asked what course of study I intended to pursue. Before I could make any coherent reply, she asked me to consider the fact that there were only three professions suitable for girls: I.A.S. (Indian Administrative Service), doctor, teacher.
I was spending the summer with my grandparents after the school-leaving exam. It was a quiet house with just the three of us in it. Grandpa spent most of the day reading or writing. Grandma cooked, cleaned, sewed, mended, washed dishes, did the laundry. I spent most of the day reading novels but I was also trying to teach myself to type on Grandpa’s old typewriter. I wasn’t writing anything original, though; I just thought that typing made me a bit more employable.
As a seventeen-year-old middle-class girl in India, I felt remarkably unemployable. My grandmother was literate but never formally schooled and she may have been painfully aware of the importance of a good education. All the kids were sent to the best schools they could afford. She quietly hoped her children and her grandchildren would enter the most highly regarded professions. But for girls, the choices were as narrow as doctor, teacher, I.A.S. officer.
Timidly, I had ventured, ‘There’s also engineering.’
Grandma was not convinced. ‘Engineering is fine for boys,’ she said. ‘They build bridges and dams. But engineers have to be in all kinds of places.’
I heard what she hadn’t quite said. It was not so much that they have to be in all kinds of terrain but that engineers must deal with all kinds of men, and mainly with men. There would be few women colleagues, bosses or subordinates, which made the job unsuitable. What Grandma didn’t quite say was that it might be unsafe.
Most girls in my class said they wanted to be doctors or teachers. A few said engineer, though they must have been aware that studying to be an engineer didn’t mean you actually got to be one. We grew up in industrial townships where nearly all the residents were employed at a factory. There was not one female engineer in sight. The only women who held regular jobs worked at the township school, as my mother did, or at the medical dispensary.
The only other female workers in sight were tribal women who came in from the surrounding villages whenever needed – construction labourers, the occasional milkmaid, domestic workers (cleaners usually, the cooks were often male).
At seventeen, I knew of only the following jobs featuring women:
• ayah/nanny/governess
• sweeper/dishwasher
• receptionist
• typist/secretary
• phone operator
• salesgirl
• hairdresser/beautician
• teacher
• doctor
• nurse
• prime minister
‘Prime minister’ was a curious aside. I was six when a neighbour started teasing me, saying, ‘The prime minister is what you’d like to be, isn’t it?’ I was dimly aware that this was a joke but it was a joke that held a glimmer of the possibilities our nation held for little girls. India did have a female prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who had been recently assassinated.
For all I knew, it was easier to be in parliament than to be a salesgirl. I never saw any salesgirls in local shops. Even in bigger cities like Lucknow, where we went visiting during the school breaks, most of the sales staff were male, even at stores selling women’s underwear. Nor had I heard of women owning businesses, with the exception of Shahnaz Hussain, who started a line of beauty products and salons named after herself.
English novels had informed me that educated girls without an inheritance could become governesses. As for ‘phone operator’ and ‘secretary’, I must have got them from the movies. Few films showed women as industrialists, lawyers or cops, though a television series called Udaan was quite inspiring. The main character was a girl who joined the police force and we followed her trials – from the physically gruelling training process to the problem of wearing a sari just right, lest upper-class women decide that she belonged to the lower middle class – with avid interest. We had never seen any female cops in real life but a few girls had begun to talk about joining the police or the army.
For me, the end of high school was an uninspiring time. I was not interested in beauty products. Nor did I want to build bridges or join the army. I sat for medical and engineering entrance exams since most of my classmates were doing it, but was so uninterested that I drew patterns for dresses on the margins of the answer sheet. Somebody mentioned fashion design and I was toying with the idea. True, all the tailors I’d ever seen were men. But being a ‘designer’ was different, I told myself. Besides, Grandma sewed and so did all the widowed mothers of heroes in Bollywood films. There could be no doubt about the suitability of tailoring.
Clothes weren’t my thing, though. Books were. For college, I moved from Science to Arts. My grandmother must have been disappointed but she assumed I’d end up teaching. Some people even held teaching to be the ideal career for girls. You could do it in any community and could move wherever your husband moved; you’d have time to cook since you wouldn’t be expected to pull late nights at work; you’d have vacations at the same time as your kids; the kids might get discounted or free tuition. More than once I heard people say, ‘At least teaching helps to pass the time.’
The assumption was that as a girl – and future wife – I’d be supported or subsidised by a husband and therefore didn’t need a well-paid job. But my own mother was raising two kids alone, and many teachers at school were either single or subsidising their families. I also knew that teachers were barely keeping their heads above water (some private schools, even now, pay teachers as little as INR 5000 per month1). I had no overwhelming desire to be poor, nor did I fancy being stuck in a roomful of kids, day after day. So what was an ‘Arts’ girl to do?
In my final year of college, Mrs Mathew, one of the English Literature lecturers, pulled me aside and asked if I had a plan. I didn’t. But I was starting to write, and was co-editing the college magazine. According to Mrs Mathew, journalism would be the best way for me to make a living.
I was pleasantly surprised at her interest in my ability to make a living. It was often assumed that the girls (particularly Arts girls) were not very invested in careers. One of the senior-most professors had said as much in one of her famous talk-downs: Most girls just come to this college because it improves their chances at marriage.
It made us squirm, as there was a grain of truth in it. We attended a well-regarded ‘convent’, exclusively for girls, and the matrimonial columns in newspapers did carry advertisements for prospective brides with ‘Convented’ listed among their many virtues. It was also true that some of my batchmates were resigned to arranged marriages. But many of us were also applying for a Master’s degree in something or other. Some tried to crack the highly competitive C.A.T. (the entrance test for an M.B.A. degree at the highest ranked institutes) and once again, I found myself sitting for an exam only because my friends were.
I should have known better by then. A major clue was how I was conducting myself at this time. We had to travel to another city for the C.A.T. exam. It was a bigger city, with bigger, better bookstores. Instead of prepping, I spent nearly all my money on expensive goods like The Collected Works of Saki and didn’t have enough money left for a bus ticket back to college. Mrs Mathew was right. I just didn’t believe her yet.
Meanwhile, some of the girls in college were swirling in more glamorous currents of ambition. In the late 1990s, Miss Indias began winning Miss World and Miss Universe titles. They bagged modelling and acting jobs. They were on TV and in the newspaper. Their parents – many were middle-class professionals – looked proud. Girls began to want ‘portfolio’ photographs, even in smaller towns like Ajmer. One of the local photo studios was run by a man who had the rare distinction of being allowed into our strict convent to take pictures of cultural events. To him the girls went, armed with a change of clothes and diffident make-up.
The portfolio included one sari snap: a full-length picture showing a girl in her traditional avatar. She would often be holding the loose end of the sari on her left wrist, extended, to show off the rich fabric, just like the models in women’s magazines. Then there was a close-up snap – a portrait where she smiled (but not too much). Finally, a ‘Western’ snap, for which a girl would put on a cobbled-together version of a business suit: black trousers or knee-length skirt with a blazer on top. Some just wore their school uniform blazer; some borrowed a black coat from their dads.
The photos, in soft focus that took away all blemishes of skin, served a triple purpose. First of all, we wanted to hold on to this version of us – young, hopeful, more attractive than we actually were. Secondly, the photos could serve as ‘proposal snaps’. Parents didn’t mind having a picture handy to send out to potential grooms. The third reason was professional. Some had secret modelling dreams and others wanted to be air hostesses. India had just permitted privately owned airlines to operate and there were advertisements in the newspaper asking for applications along with photos. The job was not only well paid, it was a symbol of great freedom. You got to travel without a chaperone. You could be out and about at any time of the day or night!
It was an exciting thought, but not necessarily for parents. A friend’s father was working with an airline himself but he discouraged his daughter’s air hostess dreams. I was thinking of applying although I had heard comments from family members about how air hostesses were just ‘glorified waitresses’.
I still remember the sting of that phrase. Glorified waitress! It was inconceivable for an older generation of parents that a girl may actually want a job waiting tables. Nor did they think that travelling without family in tow was any kind of incentive. Anyhow, I was saved from having to argue about the suitability of air hostessing when I realised I wasn’t tall enough to apply. I did want to do a bit of waitressing, though. I had read about girls in foreign countries waiting tables as they put themselves through college or struggled to become artists. But the fact was, I had never actually seen a waitress in any cafe I’d ever been to.
At twenty, my list of professions featuring Indian women was not much longer. The following items had been added:
• air hostess
• fashion designer
• film/theatre actor/director
• banker
• hotel manager
• journalist
I enrolled at a mass communication institute in Mumbai and worried about finding work. I often scanned the classifieds for Wanted ads. Several ads encouraged female graduates to apply for secretary or receptionist positions. A friend, studying for a Master’s degree in English Literature, wrote to say that she worried about being unemployable.
I bravely responded, ‘Well, we can both teach the primary section at school. And we speak English well, so we can be receptionists, at the very least.’
My friend was not consoled. If she showed no higher ambition, her family might ask her to sit at home until she got married. It would be hard to refuse an arranged marriage, especially if we couldn’t support ourselves. At twenty-one, we couldn’t even support our own correspondence. When my friend wrote, her handwriting would grow tinier and tinier as she squeezed as much into one blue inland envelope as was humanly possible. My letters were the same. Very rarely, on birthdays maybe, we’d call from the neighbourhood phone booth, one eye fixed on the red blinking electronic digits. Every sixty seconds, a beep scolded us: Enough! Enough!
While still studying towards a journalism diploma, I found work at a new web portal. Things started to look up. Grandpa being a writer meant there was more acceptance at home for journalism as a career. But I’m not sure my family had any inkling of what journalism actually entailed. The first time I was asked to take a night shift, my mother and older brother showed up at the office, ostensibly with my dinner. Mum was dressed formally in a crisp sari and had her stern face on. She asked if I was actually needed at the office through the night. The question was not addressed to me but to a male co-worker, the only other person on duty. My co-worker nervously shrugged and said he didn’t know. My mother said, ‘Well, then, she can go home, right?’
Home I went, and was never again assigned the night shift at that web portal.
A few months of editing and rewriting awful copy and I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough. I wanted to write, and not just the feature stories that the website editors encouraged me to do. I wanted more, though I wasn’t yet sure what the nature of ‘more’ would be. I figured there was ‘more’ wherever there was more newsy stuff happening. As soon as I had my diploma, I began to apply to newspapers.
Newspapers paid badly, worse than web portals, but I took a pay cut for a job at a city tabloid. This time around, I did my share of the shifts, same as the male reporters. An early morning shift meant getting up at 3.30 am, chewing toast with my eyes still half-shut at 4 am, standing at the platform to get into a train before 5 am. The graveyard shift ended well after midnight and I didn’t get home until past 1 am.
Even at those hours, there were some women out and about. Fisherwomen with leaky baskets nodded off in the train on my predawn commute. During the rush hour, we were crushed like sardines into the ladies compartment. Women stood waiting at bus stops. Women sold flowers and fruit and snacks on the streets. There were homeless women with kids, sleeping on the pavement at night. On the last train home, I’d travel in the ladies compartment along with bar dancers, still wearing the evening’s glitter, teenage boys trying to sell make-up, hair clips and household appliances, and older women lugging bags full of snacks, like samosas and vada-pao. There was a lot of laughter around.
I felt bolder, surrounded by women with loud voices and bold eyes, all of them intent on making a living. But outside the train station my sense of safety dissipated. One night I was nearly ambushed by two men on a motorbike. I was heading home in an auto-rickshaw when they began to give chase, peering into the rickshaw and asking the driver to stop. I persuaded the driver to drive faster than the bikers and ultimately got home safe. But not before the auto-rickshaw driver had demanded a kiss from me. En route, he had begun talking, wanting to know what I did for a living, and refusing to believe that I was a journalist. According to him, I looked like I was a bar dancer.
I remember looking down at myself – at my loose, long, chequered kurta and salwar, no make-up, flat slippers. I used to try to dress down for work, afraid that taking pains with my appearance would be held against me somehow, that sources would take me less seriously and withhold information or, worse, that they would take too much of an interest in me. That night, the auto-rickshaw driver’s insistence that I looked like a bar dancer was based on his assumption that a dancer has no right to reject any man’s sexual advances. I shudder to think what would have happened to me if I was, in fact, a bar dancer.
I never filed a complaint about that driver, partly because I did not want to see his face again, and partly because I didn’t want to go to the police station. I was afraid I’d have to listen to the cops discussing my appearance or question the necessity of my being out at night. I had done the court beat and visited police stations. There were very few female cops on duty. If the male cops misbehaved, I did not trust their female colleagues to stand up for me. In retrospect, I think what I was most afraid of was that fear and shame would settle deep into my bones, killing my desire to go out and do my job.
The last thing I wanted was to stop reporting and settle for something tame. Reportage was very hard work, especially for an afternoon paper. I didn’t cover press conferences. I couldn’t file stories that the ‘morningers’ were likely to break. I had to aim for six exclusives a week. But the quest for unusual stories was taking me to unusual places. I was tagging along with cops for a midnight raid on a brothel. I was putting myself in a wheelchair to document the city’s accessibility barriers. I was calling up sleepy constables in at least a dozen police control rooms across the city, asking the same question over and over: Do you have something?
None of this was exhilarating. It was exhausting, frightening work and I was underpaid. But I kept at it, partly because I was figuring things out about the city, about human beings in general, and partly, I suspect, out of obstinacy. I wasn’t going to be chased out of my job by random men who went about harassing girls. I wasn’t looking to be tamed.
Harassment wasn’t a new thing anyway. Girls across India confront the full spectrum – from groping and grabbing to suggestive comments being whispered in your ear to rape threats, stalking and unwanted attention from colleagues. I was experiencing it on the streets, in buses, in trains, in broad daylight, even in that safest of cities, Mumbai. But I rarely talked about it, never at home. My family had slowly got used to me being out at all hours. If I told them, they might panic and start pressuring me to quit, to move into a different line of work. Something that didn’t require me to be out so much. Something that didn’t require me to be out where all kinds of men were.
The commute was tough, the deadline pressure insane, harassment was a possibility that lay in wait at every corner. But my greatest worry was not finding a toilet when I needed one. Which was several times a day, every day. The city seemed to be lurching along anyhow, kidding itself that women didn’t get out much and, if they did, it was never long enough for their bladders to fill up. Mumbai was rumoured to have public toilets, at least at train stations, but to my dismay and fury, I found that most toilets were either non-functional or locked up, especially at night. The official excuse was that women didn’t use them anyway and that if toilets were open, they might be used for ‘other’ purposes.
Aside from a near-bursting bladder, I was mostly all right. I spent a few years working in Mumbai, then moved to Delhi. There were times I hailed a cab or auto- or cycle-rickshaw before sunrise, with the stray dogs still barking down the empty street, and it was all right. I travelled alone into villages and small towns where I didn’t know a soul, and it was all right. Every other week, I was off on a train or bus, meeting new people who were – men as well as women – patient, generous and respectful for the most part.
However, I did look over my shoulder when I was out after sunset. I did cross the street to avoid a parked car with more than two men sitting inside it. I learned to gauge the safety quotient of a bar, restaurant, movie theatre, based on how many women were visible. Zero was not good. One was better than zero, but it still meant being in a state of high alert. Two was a relief. It meant I could stop exchanging nervous smiles with the only other woman present. Five was almost normal.
The more I travelled, the more I began to notice women’s absence from public spaces. Over four years spent travelling to small towns and villages in central and north India, I met only one female reporter on the field. I met a couple of female I.A.S. officers, but no female peons in government offices. None of the budget hotels in small towns had a woman at the front desk. Forget drivers and mechanics, there weren’t even any female cooks at highway eateries. Certainly no waitresses.
These absences were exhausting in a way that’s hard to describe. They didn’t register as gaping holes in my consciousness, nor was I afraid all the time. But whenever I ran into female activists or officials, relief flooded my bloodstream. It was like throwing off an invisible suit of armour. Perhaps they too felt the same way. A food security activist once told me that when she travelled alone at night, she would pretend to dial a number and have a long conversation – loud enough for the auto-rickshaw driver to hear – where she mentioned that she was related to a senior police officer. Just in case the driver had assault in mind. One of my bosses gifted me a can of pepper spray. Just in case. I had to deal with all sorts of men, after all, and mainly with men. My grandmother would have sighed and shaken her head. Indeed, she had told me so.
It wasn’t as if there were no female workers. They laboured on construction sites, brick kilns, farms, stone quarries. They fetched water and chopped wood. They wove baskets and garments. But I rarely saw them in jobs with a pay slip and an office attached. The few who had regular jobs were often teachers or nurses. A smaller handful were doctors, I.A.S. officers and activists.
Even in the national capital, Delhi, women were not driving taxis or auto-rickshaws. There were no bus drivers or conductors, no female cops patrolling the streets at night. Nearly every vendor out there – subzi-wala, peanut-wala, gajak-wala, chaat-wala, ice-cream-wala, momo-wala, chik curtain-wala – was a man. The butcher, the baker, the tinker, the tailor, the soldier, and yes, even the underwear seller were still men.
I was very surprised one night when, looking for an auto-rickshaw at Delhi railway station, I discovered a female auto-rickshaw driver. During the ride, Sunita told me that she had to go to court to fight for her right to wear a vardi (government-approved and licensed auto-rickshaw drivers wear a uniform). The male drivers refused to let her work at first and they wouldn’t allow her to join their union. She persevered and muscled her way in, but Sunita was the exception, not the norm. I have never seen a woman driving an auto-rickshaw since.
On one assignment, I had gone to meet a group of rescued child labourers in Delhi. Both boys and girls had been subjected to violence, even at so-called ‘non-hazardous’ jobs like domestic work. The rescued kids were being schooled and offered vocational training so they could find jobs later in life. The girls were being trained to work in beauty parlours or to use sewing machines. The boys were being trained to work as electricians or mechanics.
I remember pausing, notebook in hand, thinking: That’s how it’s done.
That’s how they – perfectly well-meaning folk – perpetuate ideas about what girls can and can’t do. That’s how strengths and talents are kept in a box where women are not likely to deal with men. It’s a different kind of purdah2, a new sort of zenana.3 I could have bet anyone anything that those rescued girls were being taught to sew only women and children’s garments. They wouldn’t learn to sew a man’s suit. They wouldn’t be taught how to measure a man. I suddenly understood the secret of the respectability of the widowed mothers of Bollywood films – they only seemed to sew frocks and blouses for women, and they always worked from home.
It is not as if nothing has changed since I was seventeen. In 2002, I stepped into a cafe in Mumbai and, for the first time in my life, saw a girl behind the counter. Over the next decade, there was a visible shift in our cities. New coffee shops and supermarkets sprang up where young women wore the same t-shirts and caps as their male co-workers. A few years ago, I spotted women working at a petrol pump in Mumbai. With security checks becoming mandatory, women are now hired as security guards at shopping malls, cinemas, airports, hotels, metro stations. There are more salesgirls and billing clerks too.
One of the significant changes at the turn of the millennium was the rise of business process outsourcing (B.P.O.) firms that took on jobs that foreign firms outsourced to cheaper labour markets. B.P.O.s employed tens of thousands of young men and women who worked through the night to cater to different time zones. This was a radical shift of the professional landscape for educated young women. The job didn’t require a very high degree of skill and the money was good. Employees were dropped off home in buses or cabs. And yet this didn’t guarantee their safety. In 2005, a woman called Prathibha Murthy, employed at a B.P.O. in Bangalore, was raped and killed by a taxi driver. In 2007, another B.P.O. employee was raped and killed in Pune.
There have been several reports since of women being attacked by drivers, security guards, deliverymen (pizza, cooking gas cylinders, mail). This is in addition to assault by partners, colleagues, family members, acquaintances and strangers. There have been brutal rapes not only at night but also in the day, not only outdoors but inside homes. On one occasion, a rape was reported to have taken place in a moving train, in plain view of passengers who were in the next compartment. In another case, the accused was a policeman.
Women keep trying to barge into professions that didn’t look like options before. Along the way, our lives get twisted into painful, contorted shapes as we try to avoid rape and molestation. At the very least, to avoid the insinuation that ‘she had it coming’. But the brutality of the gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey (commonly known as the Nirbhaya case) in 2012, shook us up in a different way. Our collective fear finally turned into public rage.
Jyoti was a young woman dreaming of a good job and a measure of independence. Our parents and grandparents have groomed us to become this kind of woman. People are sending daughters to schools and colleges in the hope that they will find work, find their feet, and will not be doomed to eternal dependence and poverty. The violence done to Jyoti was a violence done to all our hopes, and the grief and rage were so powerful that even the government seemed to be frightened by them.
The Nirbhaya case, as well as the 2013 gang rape of a reporter in Mumbai (known as the Shakti Mills case), was covered extensively by the media. Down the years, there have been some changes in response to women’s safety concerns, particularly in services that are accessible to, and affordable for, middle- and upper-class women. Shetaxi, a fleet of taxis with female drivers, was set up to target solo female customers. Commercial services like Uber and Ola have started opening up to the idea of female drivers. There are reports of female bus conductors and metro train drivers. There is talk of hiring women to deliver flowers and food.
However, e-commerce entrepreneurs have expressed a chicken- and-egg difficulty in interviews. They would like to hire female couriers but who would guarantee the safety of their employees? Hiring a male chauffeur or security guard to trail the courier would inflate costs and make their business inefficient. Besides, the way the Indian government has reacted to sexual assault cases, they fear the business may be forced to shut down, as Uber was in 2014, after a female customer was raped by a driver.
Politicians are not helping women feel any safer. Some leaders have cited the eating of chow mein or meat as the cause of sexual violence. States like Haryana were already subject to pre-independence era laws that forbade women from working in establishments that serve alcohol. Mumbai has banned female dancers from bars, and also banned lingerie-clad mannequins. Governments, at both central and state levels, refuse to acknowledge the core problem: women do not feel safe in spaces where they are vastly outnumbered by men.
According to the 2011 census, women form 25 per cent of the working adult population in India, but the figures drop to about 15 per cent for urban areas. This means that for every one hundred people you see working in markets, factories, public service institutions, offices banks, only fifteen are likely to be women. The chances of them being outdoors and visible after 8 pm are negligible. Delhi, incidentally, has the lowest participation of women, at just 10.6 per cent. Delhi is also notorious for being unsafe for women. Coincidence? I think not.
Two decades after that sobering conversation with my grandmother, I am now forced to revisit the question of suitable jobs.
In neither Delhi nor Mumbai could I hope to hail a passing taxi and find that the driver is a woman. All the food and book stalls at railway stations are run by men. The street outside the apartment complex where I live in Mumbai is lively in the evenings, bustling with food stalls and neighbourhood stores. But no public toilets. Fruit and vegetables, sold by men. Medicines and milk, dumplings and dosas, sold by men.
There is a playschool, a dance class, some beauty parlours around. Women work there, of course. A doctor’s clinic has a woman’s name on it. One lone woman sits on the street with a sewing machine, altering clothes. But she’s gone before evening falls.
There is one new development in town. In the ladies compartment of Mumbai’s local trains, after about 9 pm, an armed railway police constable is deputed to travel. Sometimes, I am the first passenger to step into the compartment. I look at the cop and feel a mix of relief, sympathy and nervousness. I don’t like guns. I would prefer a female cop. But then, who’d guard her?
Sometimes I wonder if I’d be a better writer if I ran into more female professionals. Would it make me bolder? Would I have deeper, more spontaneous conversations with strangers? Would I give out my phone number more easily? What stories would I tell if the auto-rickshaw driver, bus driver, mechanic, cobbler, plumber, packer and mover, deliverer of newspapers, fixer of gadgets, mason, gardener, carpenter and house painter were women? Would there be stories of pretend-talking on a mobile phone and pepper spray? And would I finally stop looking over my shoulder?
1. Approximately US$75
2. The Hindu or Muslim system of sex segregation, practised especially by keeping women in seclusion.
3. The part of a Hindu or Muslim house reserved for the women of the household.