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

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

‘I am certainly the first person in my family to date, like the Americans say,’ Gold told me. ‘It’s the same for most girls who work with me. It is because of changing times but also because there are actual places to go on dates to. Earlier, Delhi had a few cafés, and everyone went there. And you had to be very rich to go to five-star hotels. But that’s changed now. There are so many more places for young people to meet. And if you go far away from where you live, no one will even see you with a boy.’

The casual sexism of the office environment—its bro-codes, power cliques and alpha males—gnaws away at our professional enthusiasm. The fact that men at our workplaces are paid much more than us for doing the same jobs, while treating us as somehow less serious, less willing to work hard, only serves to make it easier for us to quit.

know you won’t understand, but it’s very different from the way our grandparents were married. In those times, the amount of land you held back in your village made all the difference in who had the best husband. But when our families had to sell all their land and move to Ahmedabad for good, that changed. Nowadays, it all depends on who has the best job and pukka house. But I really wish you could tell who drinks and who doesn’t.’

A good husband was divine intervention and sheer luck. Even the best man’s character would eventually curdle and rot. Life was tough on men and they took it out on the women and children, losing interest in being devout, kind and courteous. Women were protected from the harshness of the world outside, so they remained hopeful and God-fearing.

Mapuben even suggested that encouraging a violent husband to drink a lot was a good idea, that she gave her own husband enough money out of her wages so he would pass out as soon as he got home.

‘Her husband was not a bad person. They were happy in the early years when he had a job. But when money became tough, all homes in the colony faced trouble. My cousin would talk about these problems with her sisters and neighbours. But her husband didn’t talk, he just took out his frustration on his wife. I wish men and women could just talk to each other. But men here never like discussing money with their wives. I think it makes them feel like they are not providing for us or doing what a man is supposed to do. So, instead, men drink and hit their wives and children.’

She sounded deflated, as if marriage had pulled the plug on all possibilities. She

eloping had made a woman’s ‘fallback’ position in marriage weak, as economists might put it, relative to men. The police were scary, friends were far away and had their own problems. Living alone presented risks to their safety in both small towns and large cities. Regardless of their economic circumstances, moving away from husbands and in-laws created shame, turned women into pariahs. Beyond the economics of elopement, there are emotions. Parting from parents in an acrimonious fashion was considered too painful.

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. Many women’s groups and unions seek support

Women often only work after their husbands permit it, even if this need to take permission is a constant source of angst and marital friction.

They simply yearn for marital bliss and fantasize about a more meaningful relationship with the men in their lives.

am not alone, though I get bored. I had thought I would help the church’s social work here. But there is less money and a lot of difficulties these days for church and NGO work, so I am not as busy as I thought I would be. Most girls and aunties who have come back from Delhi remain unmarried because they have enough money saved up and can afford to wait to find a good match, which doesn’t happen often. Many people in the village think that women who have returned from Delhi are not good wife material. We are older also.

It’s impossible to grow up as a woman in India without knowing what it is like to have to always seek permission to be yourself. Each of us, in our own way, often magnified by caste and class, encounters resistance in finding self-acceptance, achievement and affection. If your experience as a straight woman in this country has been one of bliss, without heartache and self-loathing, I reckon you’ve inherited an Ambani-esque fortune. Or that you’ve lived a very protected life. Setting snark aside, let me acknowledge that the fortunate few who’ve found love and self-contentment without much friction may find limited connection to the stories I’ve tried to tell. Let me also acknowledge that my stories do not capture the struggles and fandom of women who are not straight, or those who reject gender binaries. The fans I encountered remain trapped by heterosexuality. For now, I hope that you’ll digest these everyday stories of women struggling to become themselves. That you’ll try to understand why so many women find emotional comfort in an actor as they seek to realize their ambitions for a life of love and dignity.

The Indian state, our markets and families have waged a sustained campaign of scrutiny and surveillance over the bodies and spirits of women. Even our money and modernity have failed to win us sometimes the most basic human dignities. And through years of experience and cultural reinforcement, what economists would call a series of repeated games, we have learned to expect very little from any of our institutions, of the great edifices of our society. To borrow language from a 1987 Amartya Sen article on gender relations within the household, women have become ‘habituated to inequality’. Consequently, we have failed ourselves, teaching ourselves to accept being treated as inferior in public and private life.

But I’m too angry and heartbroken to offer any moral ambiguity and equivocation. I find myself in no mood for subtlety or nuance when it comes to describing the women in India. And the data supports my strident lack of balance or sophistication. Let me be clear—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.

In other words, Indian institutions conspire to silence women, prohibiting us from raising our voices or our expectations. Each aspect of Indian life has become colonized by an old boys’ club. Forty-seven years have passed since this seminal report. Where are we now? 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.

Despite how modern the fashion and language of young urban Indians might seem, despite the number of luxury brands present in Indian shopping malls, and activism on social media, women’s employment rates have steadily retreated to the same levels as in the 1970s. Nearly all women in India still depend on men or family money for their living.

Why is it so hard for many of us to publicly accept that the market for personal rewards and professional recognition is disproportionately skewed against women who desire success and independence?

Worse, women’s interest in pursuing a sense of self outside the home is heavily taxed. Sixty per cent of Indian women are not allowed to travel alone outside their villages or neighborhoods, even to the market or a health clinic. Nearly each one of us has experienced some form of sexual violence. Fifty-three per cent of us are anaemic. Despite increasing educational attainment, women have far less access to jobs, technology, property or communication devices—the oil of twenty-first-century independence.

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.’

If any progress has been made at all, it’s been because women have fought for it, they’ve snatched it and then they’ve guarded it.’

all enterprises with more than fifty employees were mandated to provide crèche facilities.

There are also growing concerns that the 2017 amendment will lead to the private sector hiring even fewer women.

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’.

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.

Through our journey, Vibha talked non-stop. She told me how she was top of her statistics class, how she had many followers on social media, how she had organized for girls from her college to be present at the protest. She struck me as a person composed of appetites and ambitions—desperate to taste the world. Eventually, she made a familiar request, one I had grown accustomed to hearing from north Indian women returning from public spaces—‘Please don’t tell our family that you met us at the protest. We had said we were going to the mall.’ ‘Papa did not give me permission to attend the protest,’ Vibha said. ‘But it was important for me to be there. All my friends from college were going, I had urged them to come. As women, we needed to walk together. My mother agreed to join. It’s sad we had to lie, but what else could we do?’

Vibha’s father simply released his instructions into the drawing room air without directing his words to any specific person, knowing his demands would be met.

There are also instances of girls being resold to other persons after living a married life for a few years.’

‘I am sure you have many boyfriends,’ Varun interrupted, snapping me out of my sociological reverie. As if everyone hadn’t already heard his ‘banter’, he repeated his remark for his sister’s benefit. ‘I am sure your friend has had many boyfriends,’ he said to her, a grin spreading across his handsome face. Vibha started to say something, but Varun suddenly raised his voice: ‘Keep quiet! The grown-ups are talking.’ She was stunned into muteness, scared of her younger brother. Varun had shouted at his sister louder than any man I’d heard before. Vibha’s father was nowhere to be seen, her mother was a grim-faced spectator. Both women were trembling. Varun’s gaze returned to me. ‘You know,’ he said, his face twisted with contempt, ‘here in Haryana, we have a saying about men and women. And about their boyfriends and girlfriends. A key which can open many locks is a great key. But a lock which has been opened by many keys is a bad lock.’ The sexual metaphor was sharp and clear.

You’ll also be told how everyone should treat women fairly within their own homes, in a country where marital rape is not yet a crime.

These ordinary women practising ordinary change are everywhere around us. Encouraged by education and access to information, a new generation of women, with a stronger sense of ‘I’, hopes for more. They watch films and lust after an actor. They have friends and casual sex. They dare to imagine a self which deviates from their prescribed function as dutiful caregiver. Their professional or personal success has little to do with an online or offline following. With acclaim or public attention. Their hope is not to be noticed at all, or to be noticed in their immediate world on their own terms. Primarily, they just want to be loved, paid well and left alone to do as they please. They seek affordable accommodation and friendly policing systems, not a benevolent patriarch’s protection. They seek men and families that can support their desires and ambitions, not treat them solely as providers of family honour, sex, children and care.

As long as our institutions socialize us to be homemakers and follow caste puritanism, as long as our loved ones tax us for seeking a sense of self beyond beauty and duty, as long as state and society don’t show solidarity with the unpaid labours women perform, even the most careerist woman will wish to escape her job, given the opportunity.

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.

Perhaps it is a sign of how unequal a society we have become that the feminism of my class of Indian elites who live in Twitter Pradesh does not resonate with those who do the hard work of engaging in quiet renegotiations within homes, marriages and friendships.

These people are legends in their own lifetime, there is no doubt, and there will be no change in that fact. He can do good movies or bad movies, and it won’t make a difference. He has reached that pinnacle of stardom. He is like the Beatles—some songs were brilliant, some songs were awful. But the Beatles are the Beatles. And Shah Rukh will always be Shah Rukh.’

She started talking about Deepika Padukone’s public break-up and battles with clinical depression, about how Priyanka Chopra married in her late thirties after finding mega global success, how all these actresses had faced unhappiness because of men and yet continued to focus on what was important and thrived in their jobs. ‘Boys these days don’t care about girls. They are looking for fun everywhere. It happens to actresses also, then I know it’s okay for it to happen to me. I look at them and know that I am not alone, that it happens to such beautiful and high-profile women also. I don’t know why but it makes us feel better.’

Everywhere, girls see that female film stars speak openly about having boyfriends and break-ups. A few continue to work after marriage and motherhood. This is very different from when we were younger in the 1990s, when actresses would hide their romances and stop working after marriage. I think this makes it more normal for girls to want and have a boyfriend and good career in real life.’

That moving away from old ways of living and loving creates paradoxical spaces for joy and bone-crushing loneliness.

Unlike their mothers, none of the female fans I followed through the book looked to the gods for comfort or enchantment. They watched TV or looked up YouTube videos instead. None imposed traditional Hindu or Muslim notions of sexual purity on themselves or the women in their lives. Shah Rukh had triumphed over Jesus.

I’ve read enough to know that my pains and desires are not personal faults. Hurt and yearning in our times are artefacts of larger structural forces, and generations of women have faced frustrations and hurdles like mine. Women like me have a diverse pool of cultural resources and friendly solidarities to draw upon. But

If wealth accords love, a man’s income buys him far more love than a woman earning exactly the same paycheck. The per-rupee supply of love varies by gender. Women feel more loved when they toe the patriarchal line, when they prop up powerful men.

fangirling. Many faced violent hostility for merely watching a film without seeking permission from their parents, husbands or in-laws.

However, the best economists know that the economy is nothing but our moods and relationships, which define who produces and transacts what.