Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

Pay for pilots is based on seniority and flying hours under strong union agreements; it is one of the rare professions in India where there is no gender pay gap.

Vanity murders vulnerability, it ensures the end of all authentic feeling.

there are broadly four theories to explain why they drop out of the workforce in India in such large numbers. An income effect—as incomes rise, even once-cash-strapped families start to believe that they can do without women’s earnings. A more hopeful theory is an education effect—fewer woman in the labour force as a result of more women in school. The third is an underestimation effect—women are working but in ways that are not captured by standard surveys.

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Finally, there is the theory that women are dropping out of the workforce predominantly due to the structural transformation of the economy. What does that mean? In plain speak, job creation over the past two decades has taken place in sectors in which women are less willing or able to work, while job opportunities have reduced in industries that usually employ women.

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Women who enjoyed their financial independence said their access to jobs and wages depended on ‘maryada’. In its most common usage, maryada, or modesty, connotes social traditions and boundaries, the mores and norms a woman must abide by to earn love and respect from her family and immediate community.

Maryada maps the boundaries of what is appropriate or ‘normative behaviour’ for a woman, what she ought to do and be, demarcating the possibilities for her spirit and self.

Informal workers are those who do not receive traditional office-based benefits of paid leave, medical support and employee-financed retirement pensions, usually working ad-hoc jobs without any written contracts.

In 2018, even among women engaged in regular salaried or wage-earning jobs outside agriculture, 66.5 per cent had no written job contracts while fifty-four per cent were not eligible for social security.

A 2013 Oxfam report found that eighty per cent of farm work in India was done by women. Yet the popular image of a farmer in India remains sturdily, enduringly masculine.

‘If women’s unpaid work were properly valued, it is quite possible that women would emerge in most societies as the main breadwinners—or at least equal breadwinners—since they put in more hours of work than men.’

The results echoed previous analyses, finding that men had eight more hours each week for sleep, leisure and recreation. These findings have been consistent across time and place in India.

Research on working women and women’s collectives tell us that familial ‘permission’ plays an immeasurably important role in south Asia. What the film shows is that freedom is won through incremental negotiation, that dialogue amongst loved ones can be a path towards social change. The fact that we must invest significant effort to bargain for these freedoms is sad, but also reflects our social realities across class.

When scientists and historians felt the problematic techno-rationalist impulse to categorize tribes in India based on their distinctive anthropometric measures and facial features, they took note of the Santhal nose. Three tribal groups were broadly identified.

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First, the Dravidian or Negrito strain of tribes, such as the Jarwars or Kadars living in the Andamans. Anthropologists described these tribal groups as ‘broad-headed people from Africa’, considered the earliest inhabitants of India.

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The second group comprised Proto-Australoid or the Australian strain of tribes with ‘broad and flat noses’. This group included the Santhal, Gond, Kurka and Munda tribes often found in the central and eastern regions of India.

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The third tribal group were Mongoloids living in the northeastern parts of India.

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Tribal populations, also known as Adivasis, are often considered the most vulnerable and victimized groups in independent India. Data released by the United Nations’ multi-dimensional poverty indicators show that fifty per cent of tribal households...

The Santhals, though, are one of the larger, more politically prominent tribes of India. The Austroasiatic Santhali language is the only tribal language notified by the Indian government. Its unique script, called Ol Chiki, was invented in 1925 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu.

If being a feminist means equality, then I’m not one. I believe women should be more than us. If you’re looking at being equal to us, your aim is too low—you’re belittling yourself. From creating life to taking so much shit in your daily life and using it as your strength—the simple act of boarding a local train, being leched at, not getting a job because of your gender—it’s shocking how much a woman has to take every day. As men, we should all experience what it is like and still stay strong.

there is no meaningful dimension of well-being on which men and women are equal in India. None. Within each class and caste bracket, women fall far behind men. All the data on gender in India, despite progress since Independence, confirms that our country is profoundly unequal and that the gap between male and female achievement and access to resources continues to grow.

The child sex ratio, measuring the number of baby girls born for every thousand baby boys, has dramatically declined from 964 in 1971 to 918 in 2011. Women’s literacy levels have increased, but more men are literate and men study many more years than women.

‘Women’s status, as you call it, is not a unidimensional thing and much depends on what you look at—say, women’s education levels (which are rising, and certainly contribute to their empowerment) or workforce participation rates (which are declining). In India, social change also tends to be class and caste specific.

‘gaps between men and women remain. The key worry for us is that women’s access to independence and public life remains curtailed. They barely earn wages for all their labour. Very few have good jobs and even fewer have managed to find success in public life—be it in politics or business. And while I don’t think economic liberalization has created this growing male–female divide, liberalization has opened more opportunities for boys. Girls struggle to access these due to strict control from their families. The conversation on freedom for women within families is yet to change radically. Women must speak up. That’s key.’

The Nobel-winning economist Abhijit Banerjee said to me that it was ‘hard to overestimate how much damage this history of objectification and oppression has done to the self-esteem of women. Many women have no sense of their own possibility both because they have never had a chance and also because they bear the weight of so much cultural and physical intimidation. Education, media and affirmative action will probably all be key in trying to get them to feel that they can take on the challenges thrown at them by the economy and our very broken society’.

To think that social inequalities aren’t driving even privileged women up the wall, to presume discrimination doesn’t surface in one’s everyday relationship with oneself, to believe that a sense of unworthiness and shame doesn’t creep into the way we navigate our romantic lives, to pretend that our interpersonal relationships with partners, fathers, brothers and mothers are immune to structural inequalities and are somehow havens of perfect equality is plain idiocy or, worse, a sinister silence.

According to a study published in the Lancet in 2018, suicide rates amongst young Indian women have reached an all-time high. Thirty-seven per cent of all women who died by suicide in the world are Indian; the suicide rate for Indian women is twice the global average.

According to the WHO, Indians are the most depressed people in the world and women are fifty per cent more likely to suffer episodes of depression than men. Many of us are increasingly unable to cope with the patriarchal structures we have inherited and preserved, whether in the waning forests of Jharkhand or the gated complexes of Gurgaon.

For the brave, change requires bearing the isolation and costs of resistance. Sometimes, change requires us to be silent, to let someone else have their say. Change will need good faith and generosity.

My own bias, after reading, research and a couple of decades of regular adult life, is to believe that women’s access to an independent income is one of the most powerful tools of resistance against patriarchy.

Research shows that employed women produce more progressive and less narcissistic male children; boys grow up adjusting to the idea that men must help at home, that a loved one may have passions beyond her immediate family, that his female family members do not breathe merely to serve his needs.

For his fans, Shah Rukh’s films and interviews mean whatever they want them to mean: he becomes an archive of all that remains unattainable in banal personal lives; or a call to freedom for working-class fangirls; or a self-help guru for self-helping-women; a soppy balm to soothe the rough-and-tumble of an ordinary female life full of struggle, surveillance and tactical bargaining; an urge to explore bodies and their sexual appetites; or he can serve as the symbol of a metaphysical absence.

Shah Rukh remains a spiritual timeout from the alienation, rational trade-offs and determinism of modern life. He continues to provide respite when the world doesn’t feel human, when these women feel disposable. When families and workplaces don’t treat women as people with desires and rights. When love becomes a chore. A break when practising accountability in intimate interactions feels lonesome. When the moral burden of propelling social change within their immediate relationships becomes too taxing or lonely-making.

Be it Marx or a movie star, or whoever you admire, our shared future will need icons who unite us in conversation and connection, not those who divide us into spiritual silos.