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

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

She has just had an important week at work—a project she had helmed was released successfully into the world. We might expect her to be thrilled by this triumph. Instead, as we rummage about in her thoughts, we find that she is queasy, berating herself for her inadequacy. She is preoccupied with the sudden and surprising death of a long-distance romance.

She knows his kind. He is a prototype of the Western cognitive universe, where calibrated composure is strictly preferred to any display of vulnerability. A man of tremendous promise and perfection, collapsing under the weight of his own potential. A simple and decent man, his love life is steeped in the robotic rituals of serial monogamy. A man who has forged and forsaken intimacy so many times that he is inured to romantic aches and niggles. A man stuffed full of accolades, yet starving for meaning. A strategic man, his cold calculus of self-actualization has classified her as inconvenient and incompatible.

She doesn’t harbour hardened, cynical views on many things other than the chronic lovelessness that is the fate of successful women in her city.

mess? All my relationships seem to follow a pattern—I choose to exclusively care for a man while he chooses to exclusively care for himself.

He can casually let go of any romantic connection because the probability of finding a substitute is not scarce for him. She too, can play the field. Sadly, her field is not as open and unconstrained. Patriarchy, geography and her preference for handsome men who take an interest in their partner’s career ensure that she will occupy the romantic doldrums of Delhi, where sex is plentiful, but chances of an authentic connection are rare and depleting.

No man in Delhi with the same attributes as her will face the same shallow pool of romantic options, and the resulting fears and predicaments. If I were a man with the same job and degree, I would be swimming in a sea of dates and attention. But I am not a man.

He makes you feel that you’re the most important person in the room and is so sharp and present that you never have to repeat a question or a word, he gets it all the first time. He has the ability to see something in you in that first moment and he tailors himself to your personality, without changing what is expected of him. He’s truly special.’

his character played rugby with the boys and raced aeroplanes but also helped an aunt select which saree to buy. He fasted on Karva Chauth with Simran, so that it wasn’t the usual one-sided ritual, and served guests like women are expected to do. We’d never seen a combination like that before. He redefined masculinity on screen.

Limited access to media devices or lack of independent incomes, no free time for fun, unfriendly public spaces and rising ticket prices conspire to restrict the number of women who can enjoy a film. Men have more money to pay for the content they want to see.

These niche films, which are targeted to more educated audiences, existed in the past. It’s just that the audience for these films has expanded as the audience is more educated now.’

He said, ‘I think there was a time when the audience was eighty per cent male. It’s improved in some pockets. But I think it is still largely male, say sixty to seventy per cent depending on where you are.’ We talked about how difficult it was for women to watch films at the cinema and whether this inequality surprised him. ‘Honestly,’ Roy Kapur admitted, ‘it doesn’t surprise me. It saddens me. But we all know the kind of country we live in. How can we expect the way we watch cinema to be an exception?’

But look around us in Delhi—the ugliest men are with the loveliest women, and the women are insecure. The men think they’ve done these women a huge favour by being with them.

If New York is the city for epic encounters with strangers, New Delhi is the city where one avoids them in drawing rooms. Life in Delhi can feel like living in a Victorian novel, hoping to be announced and introduced to another.

She was a product of three prestigious institutions—an Indian Institute of Technology, an Indian Institute of Management and a partial scholarship to study at an Ivy League policy school. After ‘enduring the corporate boys’ club for five years’ at a multinational firm, she took a pay cut to branch into sustainable energy at a well-regarded private foundation. Her new employers respected weekends.

He seems considerate and thoughtful when he talks about women. It’s rare to see that in our country where every man can come to seem like an asshole or a predator or someone fundamentally unable to talk to women.’

Vidya’s long-term boyfriend of nine years had broken up with her on the phone after he cheated on her. ‘My first year back in Delhi from the US in 2013, we fought a lot and he called me arrogant because of my credentials. He himself had not been accepted when he applied to study abroad. My mother said it was clear that he was uncomfortable with my success. I did not believe her then. But looking back, it’s obvious that he was punishing me. I don’t think he did it on purpose, he was very nice and progressive, but it just happened.’

‘The guy who ghosts after three months of wonderful dates; the guy who starts chasing after another girl at a party you take him to; the guy who says he needs to be with a north Indian girl only after we’ve had sex; the guy who ignores all women he doesn’t find attractive and can’t talk to your female friends with respect; the guy who tells me that I should stop working if things have to become serious … there are all kinds of morons out there. My experience of trying to find a partner tells me that most men in Delhi can’t date or marry women who are more successful than them. They need a girl who depends on them completely, who will look at them the way I look at Shah Rukh. Some guys do this without realizing it. And others will pretend to be liberal initially, but it won’t last.’

that the world of Indian intellect and academia was only available to children of intellect and academia.

‘Why does he mean so much to you?’ I asked. ‘He is self-made,’ she replied without a moment’s pause. ‘The films may not be the best. But he was a boy from Rajinder Nagar who rose to the top, he was an outsider who made it on his own, without any family connections in an insider-club industry where he knew no one. He came from nowhere. I admire that more than anything else.’

She would present his success as a purely ahistorical phenomenon of sheer hard work and individual genius. I believed, much like all the authors I had read, that achievement was socially manufactured. This was particularly true in countries as unequal as India, where caste determined your starting place in the world.

world. Your life path and career are often entirely dependent on what your parents do, who they know and how much capital you inherit.

that ‘interesting careers in arts and letters or policy’ in India were only available to people with enough family money to take risks and serve long and underpaid apprenticeships.

Intriguing that no media outlet at the time bothered to report on the reigning actresses of Bollywood the same way—after all, like Shah Rukh, Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit, Juhi Chawla and Urmila Matondkar had never inherited acting as a career through family. We never heard journalists or audiences in rapture of women who made it on their own. Most reportage on these women was restricted to their beauty and love affairs.

People like me and him, without anyone to rely on, need to work to make a good living. We have limits. For people like us to pursue an artistic path is tough, we do not have the profile for

Vidya was the first ‘full Delhiite’ in her family. She was born in Salem and moved to India’s capital city at the age of five. Her parents had gone to school in small, sleepy towns, ensconced in a tight network of cousins and family friends, surrounded by people just like them. The Student’s parents went to Delhi University and met at Oxford, mingling in a far more diverse and cosmopolitan crowd. While the diversity of Vidya’s peer group, compared to that of her parents, created spaces for new friendships, they also offered spaces for new rivalries. ‘How can she be the same middle class as me?’ Vidya wondered about her frenemy.

Feminists have long argued that women’s unpaid, unappreciated role as caregivers is a form of ‘domestic slavery’ which we are socialized into accepting. At the same time, they recognize that women undertake care for family members and loved ones for all kinds of reasons, including to consolidate their position within relationships, to express love and to feel loved in return. But men are rarely expected to perform the effort-intensive parts of caring and loving. As the scholar and writer bell hooks has pointed out, ‘Sexism decrees emotional care and love is the task of women and men come home too tired to deliver emotional goods.’

Economists write about location premiums—where you are often predicts who you become.

Did I smile too much? The honour of the family revolves around the virtuous woman. When a woman becomes a wife, there are new dynamics around jealousy and men’s ownership of their wives’ bodies. The moment a woman steps out, you are signalling something to the world, that you have broken with tradition. And in such highly sexually segregated societies, I find this preoccupation with women’s bodies just astounding and unchanging. In a way, there is no similar obsession with men’s bodies. Men’s bodies are supposed to be healthy and productive, but no one polices them the same way.’ Privileged women are often those who exercise complete control over their bodies and how they spend their time.

‘pure relationship … where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only insofar as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it’.

Up until encountering The One, my love life was dull. Much like Vidya, I had failed to find the right man but had miraculously found the right work. Suddenly, I’d become a sum of my professional competencies. And just as suddenly, my competencies seemed like disabilities in the dating pool. Men explained my job to me, finding my obsession with it an ungainly, unattractive attribute for a woman. My passion for what I did and my ferocious attachment to it became a deficiency that no cosmetic product could hide. In my early thirties, I finally understood that many of the straight men my age, those who operated outside the arranged-marriage market, had been socialized into desiring women who were cheerleaders or status symbols. I stopped blaming these men for their romantic choices, realizing that we were all victims of our unequal society and circumstances.

And soon I learned that for The One, men carried Ivy League degrees, factoids on finance and plush jobs with more dignity than women. Womankind was best suited to careers as supplicants—earning ad-hoc incomes in fashion blogging and social-media influencing.

And while this brief interlude was wildly fun, no finishing school, academic degree or waistline measurement would ever make this man treat me the way he treated his family or his friends: as a fellow human being. Watching The One and his surrounding cast of friends and admirers, I realized that I no longer yearned for romance or sexual validation from these men—I desired only an honourable fellowship.

Women have to fight with tradition and have to accept losing the fight. I had to accept being at home because my husband would never be able to take care of the house and children the way I can. My daughter is five now, and my in-laws are keen that we try for a son. I have refused, but my husband doesn’t draw the line with his parents. Each time I say I want to go back to work and that we could manage with a nanny and our in-laws being home, my husband says my work would be pointless as he earns so much more than I could. He feels I should stay at home and enjoy it as other women do. But I can’t, I miss my job and office life. Somehow, in India, women are automatically expected to give up work. It’s considered natural, and I don’t think it is. I won’t teach my daughter that.’

‘I tell her that there are no men like that in real life, no man will fight for you. You’ll have to fight for yourself. She laughs at me and can’t believe that I like such soppy films. She is far more sensible than I was at her age.’

‘Unattached or divorced men, who may not even be as successful as me, find far more acceptance and dating success here,’ one said. For most of these single women, marriage

Amidst these suffocations, I still encountered women who felt entitled to have fun, who aspired to greater control over their bodies and hearts. They believed in a woman’s unequivocal right to choose her own life. Some simply opted out of the lives their country and culture had set out for them and forged new paths. They used the money they earned to rent accommodation and VCD players. Their hard-won independence allowed them to possess their own mobile phones, bank accounts and email addresses.

They dared to gamble away the safety of family and arranged marriage in favour of sexual adventure and professional ambition. I decided, for reasons of interest and logistical convenience, to call on these rogue women, these cultural outlaws, first.

Her refusal found voice in her school report card. If she could not be the sweetest or funniest, she would be the most studious. Exam-based excellence was her retaliation for the male worship she perceived in her world.

We’d never seen a man talk to women with such respect and love (izzat aur pyaar se), never seen a man pay this kind of attention (dhyaan) to a woman. He was in the kitchen talking to the ladies. The way he talked to the heroine’s sister and mother!

‘When my mother slapped me that time for going to a movie,’ she added, ‘even though she liked Shah Rukh as much as me, that’s when I knew what I wanted in life. I wanted to be like the men around us. I wanted to watch films without having to take permission or feel guilt. Learning to speak English and becoming an accountant were the only way to get a job and be free.’

An endless loop of tears and tests constituted a significant part of her late twenties. ‘Even after I got such a good job, people never allowed me to fully enjoy it. Everyone was only interested in when I was marrying.’

She loves her children, but she says she would leave him if she had a place to go, and if she could support her kids.’

In 2015, as the Accountant inched past the age of thirty-four, she told me that her mother and father had given up looking for a match. ‘They’ve grown tired and realize that no one is looking for someone as old as me who wants to continue to work. They once thought that a government job would improve my marital prospects. But the opposite happened.’

‘One day,’ she said, ‘a family had come to see me and made some nasty comment about my complexion. They said that all that hard work and travel to office was making me look dark and tired. They left, and I felt horrible. Usually, I would cry alone in my room. This day, control nahi ho paya and I started to cry on my mother’s shoulder. I think that was the day they decided to stop looking for a groom. They saw how these matches were always insulting my hard work and everything I had done in life. My parents loved me too much to watch me suffer. Something changed that day. Things became better with my father and mother. We decided that akele rehna theek hai.’

As per the India Human Development Survey in 2012, eighty per cent of Indian women need approval from a family member to go outside the home to visit a health centre. Three out of five women need permission to visit the local grocery store. In 2015, only forty-seven per cent of urban women could go unchaperoned to a public space.

‘The working world is unfair to many women, yet even when they succeed, they must confront another series of challenges. Their hard-won successes are taxed in ways that men’s are not. The taxes I’m talking about aren’t paid in dollars and cents or imposed by the government. They take the form of annoyance and misery and are levied by individuals, very often by loved ones. I call these impositions taxes because they take away some of what an individual earns, diminishing the joys of success.’

Years later, in 2016, when I asked Gold to reflect on those days, she said she felt she had been censured and punished not for being out with a white man but for being unashamed of being out with a white man. ‘I looked too comfortable,’ she told me. ‘Girls being comfortable in cinema halls, girls being comfortable in the company of men was crossing some line. If I had looked meek, if I had covered my face, or had been looking down at the ground, they would have felt bad for me and been kinder. I am sure of it.’

But he won’t allow that because he fears losing how much I worship him. He knows that if he tells all the girls he’s seeing about each other, many of us might leave him and he doesn’t want to risk that sort of blow to his ego.’

‘At least your fellow doesn’t lie to you. He is being honest and straight. Now you decide what you want. If the sex is good, it’s tough to walk away. Because sex is so important, yaar. It’s the only good kind of attention men can give women. But most boys in India don’t know what to do, and most girls I know don’t know how to enjoy it. No one tells us about it, we can only learn from porn, and that doesn’t show what we women like. It’s made for boys mostly, and I think it’s just teaching them to keep attacking our bodies in bed! I wish they would take some lessons from Shah Rukh—have you seen how he kisses women on the neck so often in his films? No other actor does that. Shah Rukh could teach these men. Instead they learn from God knows where.’

‘Us girls in India have this problem. You sleep once with someone and, suddenly, you fall in love with him. I know better, I’ve read books and articles which taught me that this is all about hormones, not feelings. I can control it.’