By Sharanya Gopinathan
A ‘Basic Business Communication’ textbook recommended by Delhi University to students in the third year of their graduate courses in Commerce has joined the very long list of Indian textbooks that make ridiculous statements against women. While some of these textbooks make overtly horrifying statements, others pack in some casual, throwaway sexism with their strange analogies.
Professor CN Gupta, former head of SRCC’s commerce department, writes, “Email messages should be like skirts — short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover all the vital points. If the email message is long, it might not be read at all or read too casually.”
It’s been in the book since 2005, but only came to light now when a Kamala Nehru College student found the words insulting.
Funnier still, when contacted about the issue, Professor Gupta said he was “inspired” after reading an international publication using a similar analogy, except it was less inspiration and more a direct lift: this quote has been attributed to a pretty varied bunch of dudes, from Winston Churchill (whose gross brainchild it actually is) to priest and theologian Ronald Knox, to Richard Branson, and tweaked to refer to everything from emails to religious sermons to editorials to speeches. My colleague says that she remembers all her Economics textbooks from school making a similarly mystifying analogy: that statistics should be like bikinis.
Anyway, this isn’t the first textbook to plagiarise a quote, and it definitely isn’t the first to encode sexism into its message. Remember when a Chhattisgarh textbook said that one of the rising causes for unemployment in the country was “working women”, and that women were stealing jobs from men by being employed? Or when a CBSE textbook said that non-vegetarians “cheat, lie and commit sex crimes”, or more recently, when an Economics textbook said that maids were waiting around to be married to their employers and then do free work for them, or when a Physical Education textbook described the “perfect shape” of the female body to Class 12 students (it’s 36-28-36, in case you were wondering).