By Maya Palit
It’s time we agreed that women got a sliver of time off every week, says a new campaign titled #Sundayisherholiday. Launched by Colors TV, it is an emphatic plea to men to consider that women might be entitled to a break from household chores. The rhetoric around it is meant to be deeply inspiring: “So on weekends, while you are resting, binge watching TV, and catching up with friends, she is busy cooking everyone’s favourite dish, taking care of the kids, finishing pending household chores and more. All this without complaining, because she loves you. Unfair much?” The campaign has had 3.3 million views and counting on Facebook, and Colors TV has followed it up with regular posts trying to egg on men to go through with this because of all the brownie points they will get: “Be the showstopper to your wife this Sunday! Be the hero to your kids while she sleeps in peace” and “Flex those muscles by the sink and see her heart sink in your love”.
The video shows a woman waking up at the crack of dawn, then doing regular enough chores through the day like cooking and shopping and dropping the kids at school, with a few special ones thrown in like fixing a man’s tie and wiping a brat’s mouth with a napkin at the dinner table. At no point does it bother to suggest that help around the house more than once a week would be more than nice. Or that in fact, in countries like India we (particularly the demographic represented in the ad) do exploit domestic workers for these chores (so unlike some of these countries, we don’t struggle with monetising and outsourcing domestic labour for household chores).
It also slots women into the nauseatingly doting, long-suffering, tireless workers with no capacity to complain and “no concern for themselves”. The slow dirge played in the video tries to critique women for the skewed setup at home, first diagnosing the problem at the heart of all this, which is their compulsive need to work around the clock. It uses some rich personification, “Vakht bhi tumse kehta hai, kya tum khud par sakht nahi?” (“Even time is telling you that you’re too harsh on yourself”) and tops it all with a rallying cry for men to be the saviours for a day: “Voh toh apne liye fursat nikalegi nahi, toh kyoon na hum hi ye kaam kar de?” (“She will never make time for herself, so why don’t we do it for her?”)
Campaigns that end with an image of a man massaging a woman’s foot, wearing an expression that begins martyred and rapidly turns smug, are confusing. Maybe that’s because their creators are confused about their purpose too: the managing director of Publicis South Asia, the company that made the ad, assures us that despite the subtitle ‘For every woman out there’, the campaign is in no way exclusive to women: “This initiative is not just about women rather about enriching interpersonal relationships by finding time for each other”. So it’s as much as it is about promoting some notion of what would make a wholesome atmosphere at home, and this is going to be accompanied by a contest. The whole initiative feels far away from what it could aim to do: to get men to share equally in the household chores in concrete ways (as this challenge envisioned by Laura Bates suggests) rather than make them feel noble for helping on one day a week.
Skeptical responses to the campaign have brought this up, with journalists like Sowmya Rejendran pointing out that no one’s dying without the benevolence of campaigns which end up making “men and women feel happy about the highly skewed gendered division of labour”. Saumya Tewari compared the Colors ad with #NayiSoch, a recent Star Plus ad that had cricketers wear their mothers’ names on their jerseys to drive home the point that men are who they are because of their mothers and their fathers, and emphasized the irony of these ‘progressive campaigns’ being taken up by two notoriously conservative channels. One woman told Colors TV it was delusional, because if she didn’t work “the house will be dirty, no food, the children will start crying”, which made me think that one of the ways campaigns could actually help could be, as this piece suggests, to condemn the “cultural pressure of domestic perfection” by not expecting women to run spotless homes. The bottom line is that by asking men to be the heroes (or in Star Plus’s case, by using only men as the mouth-piece), #Sundayisherholiday ends up being more round-about than the more to-the-point messages like Ariel’s ad from last year, where a chat between a couple of grandmums about women’s wages going up is cut short by a guy demanding to know why his wife hasn’t washed his green shirt. (Or even, for that matter, the Lloyd washing machines ad, which needed to stage a nonsensical conversation about unisex machines to make the point that Sir should also be washing clothes.)
I remember talking to a woman once, who was a double Maths graduate and the principal of a school where she taught many classes a day, juggled piles of admin work, then drove home in a rickety van and cooked for the family, while doing tuitions, because her husband was tired after the office and her (adult) kids couldn’t be bothered. She also woke up at 5 am to cook lunch and put it in tiffin boxes for everyone in the house. She was one of the bossiest people I’d ever met and I’m trying, but failing, at imagining her being pleased about the song and dance behind campaigns like this. I reckon her reaction would be more along the lines of “You want to help at home after 19 years? Nice. Get on with it then.”