Emancipate brown girls
Jennifer Murugan believes there is oppression
of women in the Indian community. The intent of this article, she says, is to create empowerment and liberation from the decades old shackles on brown girls. Murugan, 19, is a student of Commerce, majoring in Business Management and Marketing at a Durban
college
“WHAT a lovely girl, she’s so nice and quiet”, are the exact words that will be used to describe you if you adhere to the requirements of female oppression, misogyny and patriarchy that has plagued our Indian community for decades.
From birth we raise our daughters under the command of their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and older brothers; we tell them where not to go, what not to wear, what words not to speak and what careers to pursue, all to make them eligible enough to marry, to continue under the patriarchy of yet another male figure, known as their husband.
If this notion is difficult to grasp, which it should be given the fact female oppression is so engrained into the Indian community it has become part of our culture, let me tell you a little story that you may be able to relate to.
When I was 5 years old, my mom put on some of her lipstick for me and had me waltz around the living room while everyone said how adorable I looked and took pictures of me for photo albums. When I was 9, my mom would force me to wear the earrings she had bought me because she said that I was “a girl, and girls wear pretty earrings”. At 11, she would insist that I stop wearing “those untidy jeans and put on one of those pretty summer dresses that I picked out for you”.
At 14, my mom grounded me for two weeks for trying on her lipstick in front of the mirror because it made me look older than I was. At 16, I couldn’t put on a pair of earrings and leave the house because, “Who’s attention are you trying to get by wearing those fancy earrings?” were the type of questions I would have to answer. At 18 my summer dresses were frowned upon by my relatives for showing too much of my legs, a body part that both men and women have, but only one of theirs is sexualised from very young ages.
Sad enough, the blatant presence of misogyny in all of this is not the worse part. The oppression of our girls runs much deeper than the clothes we are told not to wear – it is the constant fear instilled in us that what we wear gives precedence to the attention we attract and the harm we may “bring upon ourselves” by showing the same amount or even less skin than our brothers. The ideals of the Indian community with regards to the way we treat our girls is so archaic it may as well be confused with rape culture itself, which in a society whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalising or trivialising issues like sexual assault and abuse. We are so conditioned to think that when something on a scale of unfortunate to tragic happens to a female, that in one way or another she has brought it upon herself. This is when the notion of feminism is most needed, when it is safer for our brothers to walk to the shops alone at night, than it is for us because being female and walking alone at night is “asking for it”. When schools are teaching girls how to avoid and prevent rape and sexual assault and yet not explicitly telling boys not to rape.
Telling, and more importantly, making our young girls believe that things like being called pretty, “marriage material”, quiet and conservative, or anything else that undermines their ability to be intelligent, brave, resilient and extraordinary simply does not matter. It is time that oppression in all its forms of gender roles, clothing, the need for approval and sexual assault become disassociated with our culture.
If you think that this article undermines the way you choose to raise and cultivate the women that your daughters will grow up to be, then sadly you are the reason why our community needs feminism, which is the very advocacy of women’s rights based on the grounds of equality of the sexes.
The biggest mistake we can make in our communities is to continue telling and forcing our girls to be quiet and using their opinions against them as a sign of disrespect. We need to teach them how and not what to think, give them opportunities to disagree yet offer them guidance, make them feel comfortable with their bodies and not sexualise their innocence and nature, tell them marriage is their life’s choice and not their main purpose to aspire to, encourage them to be loud and bold and overflowing with conviction, teach them that not only is being a woman an essence of power, it is a liberation. If we can achieve this within the Indian community, we will become part of a movement of women that achieved emancipation, not just round roti, because that is what we will continue to be reduced to if we do not broaden our minds into liberal thinking.