By Deepika Sarma
Two days ago, investment banker-turned-author Lavanya Sankaran wrote an opinion piece for the Sunday Review in the New York Times, trying to tell the world that not all Indian men are rapists. (Good for you. I think so too.)
Then she decided to go a few steps further: invent two brand new classifications of Indian men, muddle everyday oppression with rape, wax eloquent and fuel everybody’s weekend social media rage.
Meet Sankaran’s Common Indian Male.
He’s a man who is
[C]ommitted, concerned, cautious; intellectually curious, linguistically witty; socially gregarious, endearingly awkward; quick to laugh, slow to anger. Frequently spotted in domestic circles, traveling in a family herd. He has been sighted in sari shops and handbag stores, engaged in debating his spouse’s selection with the sons and daughters who trail behind. There is, apparently, no domestic decision that is not worthy of his involvement.
Now, ain’t that cute? Sometimes you meet a guy and you think, where have you met him before? Then it struck me. Sankaran’s man is a lot like Hrundi V. Bakshi.
Could be his brother. His unfunny brother.
Now, meet Sankaran’s other variety of Indian male. This dude Sankaran doesn’t baptize. He is the kind Hrundi wouldn’t deign to say ‘Howdy Patiner’ to:
[F]eral men, untethered from their distant villages, divorced from family and social structure, fighting poverty, exhausted, denied access to regular female companionship, adrift on powerful tides of alcohol and violent pornography, newly exposed to the smart young women of the cities, with their glistening jobs and clothes and casual independence — and not able to respond to any of it in a safe, civilized manner.
Faced with her twin desires to say that not all Indian men rape and to account for the number of rapes, Sankaran decided to explain away rape as a viral flu that takes over the minds of working class male immigrants. Rape is what happens when you leave home. Like plaque is what happens when you don’t floss. It’s hard to say which is more harmful: the class prejudice behind her characterization of the animalistic migrant villain, or her portrayal of the innocuous, well-meaning Common Indian Male, the supportive man on which “female success” relies.
Sankaran’s writing is easy to dismiss, because I finished doing that in 2005 when I bought a copy of The Red Carpet and Other Stories, her first book which hit headlines for the six-figure dollar deal it attracted.
When I read that the Common Indian Male has to be “among the kindest in the world” while his working class migrant brother belongs to “the medieval world of the walking undead, the rise of the zombies”, the literary experience that was The Red Carpet came back to me in an unfortunate flash. Sankaran is a writer who delights in wonderful contrasts (Bangalore, for instance is “a potpourri of beggars and billionaires”, India is “terribly modern, terribly ancient”).
The Red Carpet wasn’t the worst thing I read in 2005, but Sankaran sounds most tinny and flat when she attempts to channel people from other classes. Mary, the domestic help in ‘Two Four Six Eight’, is seen by the story’s female narrator as thieving, lying, manipulative and vengeful. Tharikere Ranganatha Gavirangappa, the driver from ‘The Red Carpet’, a conservative family man, loves his kind employer Mrs Choudhary, his “May-dum”. This, even though he cannot approve of her clothes or visits to nightclubs, she will only call him Raju (because that is the name of all drivers), and the gap between their social strata is insurmountable.
In The Red Carpet, I also see the origins of the Common Indian Male. His name is Ramu. In ‘Bombay This’, he’s a typical Bangalorean (i.e. cool, yo. He doesn’t need to try): “Different, one-tharah types. Not so hard-and-fast. A chill crowd, like. Doing ultra-cool things chumma, simply, for no reason other than to do it.” And now, at thirty, he’s looking for love; he feels the urge to settle down, “the true Call of the Patriarchy began to make itself felt: the urge to father, to provide, to pay bills for More Than One.” Peekaboo, I see you, baby. Shaking your nurturing behind.
As much as Sankaran has betrayed the tenets of Class Consciousness 101 she has also betrayed her own literary ambitions. How do I know this? I am that person who read her interviews and (I’m going to deny this shortly) watched her interviews on YouTube.
In an interview with Tehelka, Sankaran said she tries to move away from the “Indian trope of sentimentality” in her writing, but in her ode to the Common Indian Male, it’s evident that she made no effort to do so at all:
There is a telling phrase that best captures the Indian man in a relationship — whether as lover, parent or friend: not ‘I love you’ but ‘Main hoon na.’ It translates to ‘I’m here for you’ but is better explained as a hug of commitment — ‘Never fear, I’m here.’ These are men for whom commitment is a joy, a duty and a deep moral anchor. At its excessive worst, this sensibility can produce annoyances: a sentimentalized addiction to Mummy; concern that becomes judgmental and stifling; and a proud or oversensitive emotional landscape.
At its excessive worst, this sensibility can produce more than just annoyances. It produces patriarchy.
And since I watched it so you didn’t have to, I need to add this. Sankaran’s compassionate view of oppressive structures also extends to the caste system, a subject she has written on – again – for the New York Times. In an interview, she once described India’s excellence in the IT industry as the result of a cultural affinity for mathematics and science.
“India’s the only place where you had the Brahmins on top – who were the academics and the priests. So you had the students on top, then you had the kings[…]India’s the only place in the world where knowledge is ranked higher than the military.”
After all those years of study, she said, India had its “moment of destiny” with the IT boom, a “validation” of all the years of “worship” of maths and science. There are two more videos in the same vein, with the author holding forth on the challenges facing modern Indian society.
Sankaran’s Common Indian Male is about as innocuous as Peter Sellers in blackface. But – to misquote Mr. Bakshi himself – ‘that is not what his name is called‘. His name is patriarchy and he doesn’t need to rape anyone to make his life peachy.