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

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

Because only the deepest dissatisfaction with reality drives us to dwell in fantasy.

A woman on celluloid is always the Beauty, the Bitch or the Bechari, never even our own muddled desi Bridget Jones.

And this act of male devotion, where a man will worship a woman before marriage or motherhood, is what makes each of his films unique. Salman protects women, Aamir teaches us, Shah Rukh sees us.

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.

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.

You’ll tell me how you usually demonize and deify the men in your life, they’ll never be real people to you. When the reality of their humanity strikes, it’ll leave you bitterly disappointed.

If your marriage doesn’t make you happy, at least your children do. You’re glad you have sons; they won’t be burdened by marriage like girls are. You promise to raise them to be progressive. ‘So they know that good men can cry, and they make their wives feel like Shah Rukh makes us feel, safe and loved,’ you tell me.

With all his romantic might, he gazes at the magnificence of his lover, his eyes tearful with joy and spiritual satisfaction. Shah Rukh’s gaze is soppy and ridiculous to the rational sensibility, but you don’t care. Because that look is not one of condescension, not where a woman is seen as a troublesome burden or a debt-recovery instrument or an object of lust, a silent, uncomplaining outlet for male carnality.

Our lives are spent offering accounts for everything—where we went, what we ate, what we can cook, who we met … everything must be counted and explained. Women make the best accountants—we have answers for everything, we expect to be probed, our lives are audited. Men have no such thinking; once they finish school, they are free to do as they please. Who asks them questions? Only their wives and mothers, who are usually ignored. —Accountant–Fanwoman, 2016

We women are the opposite—all our successes, however small, surprise us. I remember on my first day, I kept wondering if my work was okay. The men around me would make fun of how unsure I felt, joking that I was constantly seeking praise. It was my first time working in government as a full-time officer, so I needed to build my confidence. The men around me always looked confident. Give an Indian man a good exam score, a good degree and a good job and he thinks he is God (apne aap ko sakshat bhagwan samajhtein hain).’

‘Confusion is the route to all clarity in the world.’

‘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.’

In September 2003, though, the same court allowed the female retirement age at Air India to be reduced to fifty, while men could retire at fifty-eight. Bizarrely, the Air India Cabin Crew Association felt this was a positive judgment which accommodated the wish of women employees to lead a ‘tension-free life at home’.

It taught me that my father thought of my education as a hobby, and marriage was my main occupation.’

According to a large-scale survey by Save the Children in 2018, three in every five adolescent girls felt unsafe in crowded spaces. One in four feared being abducted, physically assaulted or even raped if she ventured outside her home. Two out of three adolescent girls were worried about being verbally abused, stalked or being inappropriately touched in public.

Across class and social location, working women traverse this tightrope between markets, modernity and maryada all alone.

Most of the women I interviewed, those with well-paid office-based jobs, expressed a deep-seated discomfort with the everyday demands of deadlines, dishes and dignity.

I worked up the courage to ask her, and she smiled. ‘All this empowerment (‘sashaktikaran’) is good in English-language reports. I have learned these words through our meetings at the office. But in life, things are more complicated. You need peace (shanti) in families.

Money and cash liquidity are cast as more valuable contributions than the daily labour of loving and caring for the home.

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.

the data showed that rural men, those between the ages of fifteen and fifty-nine years, worked ten-hour days. Rural women worked longer days, at thirteen hours—spending five and a half hours on employment-related tasks and nearly eight hours on unpaid housework.

‘You should never care so much about work outside the home; a man can take it all away from you anytime he pleases,’

she did not want to keep begging for small pleasures, Manju hatched a plan with her mother. The Darzi Chowk video store would charge `400 to bring a VCD player to their village.

While her mother had made peace with restrictions on where women could go and what they could do, Manju and her friends had not. They experienced inequality as boredom—

For Manju, the fact that Raj avoided the easy route (for a man) of running away and cared enough to stick around, compromise and fight for approval to ensure Simran wasn’t cut off from her kin was a measure of his strength and maturity.

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.

‘it cuts down on time, things get done so quickly. I remember thinking, if only we had electricity and a kettle like this back home.’

The Indian state, our markets and families have waged a sustained campaign of scrutiny and surveillance over the bodies and spirits of women.

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.

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.’

all the data on gender-based violence or economic discrimination will show that the home and intimate relationships are where female autonomy is quashed, where the Indian Constitution is crushed, where non-conforming women are taxed, where overt and covert abuse is rampant and self-denial supreme.

In conversations on discrimination in India, politicians and the thinkerati make social change sound like a marketing campaign. Equality becomes a dress that can be advertised, with the hopes that more people will buy it.

They’ve argued that male power is constructed by the love women give men as mothers and partners. That ‘love’ confers power, and that the powerful are often loved the most.