Haryana’s paradox of success

Shiv Visvanathan

Sometimes stories like biopics capture a fragment of society which becomes a sociology of a fragment. Read alone, it becomes a partial truth, a caricature, a one-sided view of reality that can create misleading expectations. The fragment has to be located in a context. An individual has to be read within the locus of family, caste and state to get a picture balancing constraints and realities, showing how freedom can be turned into innovation.

To understand this, one has to realise that one is confronting a mix of three sociologies. The first is Bollywood, which produces its own mass sociology, a mix of history and legend which is powerful globally. Aamir Khan’s Dangal was a superhit in China, literally creating a market for Indian films. Now it is not the old Raj Kapoor songs in Awara that appeal but the narrative itself. Second, there is folklore which provides the commonsensical codes of society providing everyday theories of norm and behaviour. Third, there is academic social science, which also attempts to understand the policy. Each is a form of narrative, each is a kind of analysis and a picture of Haryana appears refracted through all these three lenses.

Dangal is neither feminist nor patriarchal. It is about a wrestler who wanted sons but was dealt with daughters by fate. But fate can take a strange turn, as he discovers, almost in an act of serendipity that his daughters have wrestling skills. The story becomes double-edged here, a battle between the father’s “right” to summon their bodies to fulfil his dreams and their right to dream their own world.

Akhada for breakthrough

Initially, the women resist and the resistance takes an everyday form as the women object to dirty hair. In a burst of domination, Mahavir chops their hair despite objections. Yet, that act of cutting hair opens a new world of freedom. It is as if even authoritarianism can be tapped for other purposes. Yet there are different styles of dominance. There is dominance of orthodoxy where Mahavir wants to train as per old world methods. It is as if the women have to decode the world of akhada to break through, the women then realise that they have a new world of choices which their peers condemned to domesticity and labour may not. One has to become liminal to have the potency to break through, yet mere liminality can make you the object of fun and contempt. One has to leap into a future defined by men to redefine it for women. It is difficult disentangling patriarchy, women’s rights, the folklore of a society that stereotypes women yet celebrates their moment of victory. Haryana responded with accolades to Geeta Phogat’s victory at the Commonwealth Games. Yet victory becomes a tribute literally to the guru-shishya relationship. 

What is interesting is that despite Mahavir’s patriarchal stubbornness, he does not stereotype his daughters. He sees their individuality and knows that victory in sport will give them opportunities that other women will not have. Women wrestlers almost become a separate category with rules and a world of their own. The film creates a mixed sociology and yet becomes more real for it. It speaks of achievements, freedom even in the world of patriarchy. It is almost as if when women cross a threshold of achievement, society becomes proud of their difference and integrates them back at a different level. It is the mixed up sociology of Dangal that gives you a sense of home, freedom is possible but to a few who can face the risk of difference and harness old codes for new purposes. It also shows you that the family is the source of change and when the family decides it wants change and visibly, society adapts, even if reluctantly. Yet society ensures that the freedom does not extend to everyone but to an encapsulated few. 

Dangal celebrated the women wrestlers of Haryana. But the very power of Dangal shows the public ambivalences to change, to the contradictions it emphasises. Haryana, like Kerala, produces a competent genre of sportswomen lauded over the country and yet Haryana is the embodiment of violence to women and the legitimisation of violence through words like patriarchy and honour. Honour seems to be a word for the family’s chastity rather than the woman’s. The reverse side of the story emerges when you look at violence towards women who threaten what society dubs a code. There are some taboos that are impossible to break. 

Honour killings

Recently, an 18-year-old Jat girl eloped with a Dalit. The parents immediately filed a case of abduction. When the couple got married under the protective eye of the court, the girl was found to be a minor. During the court proceedings, the girl was shot dead, along with the sub-inspector accompanying her, by two youths. The police recovered seven cartridges from the scene. The scene is dubbed as honour killing. The word itself seems to explain away the violence a society condones. It is almost as if love and care have no place in an honour-loving society looking for a public image of purity. The everydayness of honour killing shows that women’s bodies are read through different filters. Sport is seen as a cordoned off area, an area which can be seen as a spectacle where those who can watch can retain their old world values with equanimity. The naturalised violence of wrestling becomes acceptable, as tolerated as the naturalised violence of honour killing. In both, the parents turn out to be heroes, one for finding an innovative way around patriarchy, the other for upholding patriarchal views. Two grammars interact to create change in special domains and make sure that change does not become the general phenomenon. Haryana is full of contradictions but it is a society that knows how to separate them.

The world of Geeta Phogat runs parallel to the world of a Jat girl. They are both swamped by tradition and controlled about how to access modernity. When one reads sociology or listens to folklore, one realises that it is not schizophrenia but a strange dualism where the two worlds coexist. The grammars are almost similar. Haryana consumes the victory at the Asian Games with the same contentment as it reacts to the honour killing. Both add to the legend of the state, but society makes sure that some forms of change are unequal to others. It will be decades before we see any photograph honouring the courage of the Jat girl along with the achievements of this extraordinary family of wrestling sisters.

— The writer is an academic with the Compost Heap, a group in pursuit of alternative ideas and imagination