Auto Ethnography

It is often said that “Home is the first school”, ascribing the role it plays on molding a
person’s ideology and their perspective of the world and its inhabitants. However, to my
and ideally everyone’s astonishment, it is and has always been a factory to reproduce and
affirm gender injustice and patriarchy. Right from the childhood, be it a girl or boy, they are
sowed with its seeds and are watered until they accept it as a norm or they themselves
become the perpetrator.
These things have been normalized to such an extent that people have stopped giving a
second thought about it or even explore the possibility of its ejection. There have been
numerous instances in my household that reinstate the age old gender based practices.
However, my first encounter, which is common to most of us, is when I was a kid. We used
to live in a joint family and one fine day I casually asked my mother to prepare lunch for me,
which instigated a couple of reactions from my grandmother and my aunt. My mother
refused blatantly and my aunt was kind enough to feed me. I was furious with my mother to
which she said “Main abhi kitchen mei nahi ja sakti 3 din tak” giving no further explanation.
Only later did I realise about the age old stereotypes affixed to women for having a perfectly
normal menstrual cycle. The stigma of impurity is allocated to her and is looked down upon,
and the irony is that this is the time when she should be consoled and treated with utmost
respect and sincerity. When a person is in pain, you do not abandon them as some
contaminated object, but rather support and care for them, but in India since the sufferer is
a woman, the treatment is literally opposite.
My second experience involves my elder sister and is related to the field of sports. My sister
always champed the marathon races and other sports activities. In one of the sports day,
when my sister came home wrapped with medals around her, my uncle being all joyous
said” Tu mera beta hai”. This ironic compliment was very easily overlooked by all of us
which by all its means hold patriarchy as the norm. As if all the strides and efforts of a
woman would only be appreciated if they match the benchmark of being equivalent to
male. In our society, there exists only one and the only desirous identity which is of a male
and the characteristic of being robust and good in sports can only be achieved by them. And
in such a system if a female dares to match upto that possibility, she is stamped to being
male and hence, desirous. A female can only be called so if she is timid and homely in
nature, which though being the fuel to run any household all over the world, is not seen as
desirous or appreciated on any platform. A woman is very easily called a tomboy if she
speaks with her heads up, and knows to put across her point in a loud voice than a male,
where she could be called an ideal woman or not ideal but a woman. It is a shame that our
society can be such a hypocrite, where a quality can only be exhibited a particular being and
deviation from this norm is not an exception but an equation to that being itself, which is so
unfair and unjust on the face of it.
My third experience is related to a common want/worship of most of the parents and quite
visibly my uncle and aunt too is having a male child. My aunt already had a daughter and
when the second daughter was born, she brought with her loads of disappointment and
irritation. She was not seen as a baby or god’s gift, but as her biological self as if by choosing
XX chromosome, she has committed the biggest sin, and has to live with that guilt
throughout her life and at the same time absconding her parents right to ever continue
their so called lineage and property “waaris”. However, after a long time, my aunt begat a
son, to which a party was thrown, which was a symbol to announce the world that the pride
of the family has been born. In India, we worship female goddesses from times immemorial
and there are actually more female goddesses than male, but we fail to practice such thing
in our daily lives. The daughter is still seen as liability and the son is seen as pride and
honour to be showcased. My grandmother who is herself a woman was in complete dismay
when she heard the news of the daughter, to which I do not blame her completely as she
had also been fed with the same false idea of requirement of men in the family and society
at large. This shows that patriarchy is imbibed to such an extent that females look upon
males to complete them and establish their existence. One great example of this is that now
I live in a nuclear family where my father is willing to let go of the stereotypes attached to
menstruation, but my mother is not letting it go and still continues to practice it. This is
because according to her it is perfectly normal thing and she has somewhere accepted the
baseless idea of the impurity which if looked upon seriously poses a bigger problem for the
society. Now the females themselves have become even bigger committer of patriarchy. A
system which was discovered and propagated by males at large has not only made women
its victim but has reversed its role to that extent.
In multiple instances, we look past certain behaviour patterns as being too trivial. We see it
as normal and ideal without going into its roots, and hence they give way to a cancerous
ideology which is eating the society from inside. Nationalism and India which everyone is so
proud of has given shelter to such ideologies from such a long time that it has shackled the
entire gender into it, making it utmost difficult/ impossible for them to get rid of.
In order to tackle such systematic gender inequality, we must delve deeper and recognize
the fact that seemingly innocuous incidents in our everyday lives feed into the imbalanced
power structures.
This is not to say that no progress at all has been made. For my parents celebrated both me
and my sister’s birth equally and in fact my sister has always been kept at a higher pedestal
when it comes to her demands and choices in life. She is encouraged to take part in all the
sports and academics and is treated like a queen.