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

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

Despite rapidly increasing educational attainment for girls and declining fertility, a 2020 World Economic Forum report on gender gaps in economic participation and opportunity placed India in the bottom five countries of the world, with Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

As per data from CMIE for 2019, only ten per cent of mothers from the wealthiest segment of urban India, those between the ages of twenty and fifty-five, held a paid job. Even with expanded maternity leave following an important legislation in 2017, employers offer little flexibility to handle

India ranks in the bottom five countries of the world when it comes to the share of men helping in housework, alongside Pakistan, Mali, Cambodia and South Korea.

‘People think life is so much easier if you have staff. But it really depends on the kind of help you get. I have a maid who comes for shifts, she doesn’t live with us. It takes effort to coordinate all the lists of things to do, to buy groceries, to help the children with homework. I like to run a good home and want my family to eat well and live well. That makes me happy. It requires energy. My husband doesn’t care as much about these things. Getting him to care or do his share would make me a nag and need even more effort, so I silently do it all.’

teachers (thirteen per cent), corporate managers (eight per cent) and nurses (2.5 per cent). Then there are domestic helpers and personal care workers (eleven per cent), housekeeping and restaurant service staff (five per cent) and salespersons at shops (five per cent).

You are taxed by tradition, bound by maryada. Families reluctantly allow women greater exposure to the world beyond what is socially palatable but wax eloquent about custom and tradition as a means to try to reassert control.

These contractors relied on an army of subcontractors who would pay women to stitch, dye, embroider and tailor individual pieces of textiles at home.

Contractors could coordinate cost-effectively with workers through phones. The opening of India’s economy offered many such unstable jobs to women. However, these workers were barely visible in discussions on the economy itself.

Our research team was small—just me and a young woman from Lucknow, affiliated to a partner NGO.

By realizing that girls could not go to school if the separate toilet was not functional, by being unable to keep up with their lessons because of housework that was expected of them but not of boys, by being so proximate to the freedom boys enjoyed in public that was denied to girls, Manju and her friends had acquired a restlessness that was distinct from the equanimity displayed by their mothers and older sisters.

They might not have watched her videos or films but her pictures in the local papers, buses and on every advertisement made her ubiquitous. In 2007, most tribal families in Kirkitona relied on agricultural work in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal to survive.

Anna told me that I was not alone in conducting research; I too was the subject of a study being conducted by the locals. People would grin and ask Anna as many questions about me as I did about them. How could I be from Bengal? Why was my face such a strange shape? Why wasn’t I married?

‘In our village, the men are gone for work. In cities, they are all outside the security guard’s quarters. The drivers and peons, they keep looking at us all the time. They are not okay. I don’t like the way they look at us. Some men in the market say lewd things as well.’ In the early days of 2002, Lily had no

‘If I don’t make enough time to scold and check my son, he’ll become too much of a hero. There are many boys here who are like that,’ Sandhya said in her interview. More than half the families surveyed removed their oldest girls from school so they could care for their younger siblings.

Let me be clear—there is no meaningful dimension of well-being on which men and women are equal in India. None.

Women’s literacy levels have increased, but more men are literate and men study many more years than women. The consistent wage gap between men and women, and declining women’s employment, show that men are able to earn far more financial independence from their education.

The data on Indian women’s well-being, employment rates and freedom of movement suggests that they live on a different planet, not just country, from their male compatriots.

Our political and business leadership remains predominantly male—busy ravaging land, air and water, the very resources that determine how much women toil to care and cook for their homes. The state and the family—the two critical institutions of Indian life—have delegated all the unacknowledged and laborious burden of care to women. Yet, women’s work, paid or unpaid, within homes, is barely supported or acknowledged by labour laws or infrastructure programmes.

The share of women ‘workers’ shrunk from thirty-three per cent in 1911 to a meagre twelve per cent in 1971. Several reasons triggered this post-Independence drop in women’s paid work: difficulties in capturing and understanding women’s labours, population growth, the increased mechanization of the economy, a shift from traditional hand-weaving towards modern mills and factories in which employment was largely offered to men.

The results highlighted the duplicity and self-deception inherent in all our perceptions of the role of women in the world.

In the dominant language of economics, the women I met mean very little. They are nothing more than faceless members of a tiny numerator which helps calculate India’s female employment rate. The tickets they bought to watch Shah Rukh movies are cast as just another financial transaction, helpful for calculating box-office sales. The media they worked so hard to purchase represents another commonplace sales figure for a technology giant or a media empire. Their struggles and labours, embedded in these transactions, are obfuscated and deemed irrelevant. They become simple data points in a graph, valuable