Understanding the male perspective

Reicha Tanwar

Gender studies in India has become synonymous with women’s studies and feminist theory and has largely overlooked the concepts of masculinity and gender-relations framework. There is a definite need for the development of critical thinking on gender (both masculine and feminine) and how it is constructed. Masculinity studies is an interdisciplinary field of cultural, social, historical, political, psychological and economic analysis that interrogates the constitution of masculinities across cultures at various times in history. The present volume is important that it fills the gap created by mainstream women’s studies scholarship in India. Masculinity studies is not a rejoinder or repudiation of feminism. In fact, it would not have existed without feminism and its courage to question patriarchal power and privilege. It analyses how society shapes as well as views gender roles and expectations from individuals based on their sex. 

This volume attempts to understand the attributes of maleness (mardangi) in the context of caste and class relations, patriarchy and cultural domination. The area of this study is North India with special reference to rural Haryana. It also seeks to find answers for what we are witnessing today that is worsening gender equations and an increase in gender-based violence in society. 

Its author, Prem Chowdhry is an acclaimed historian who has done extensive field work in North India, specially Haryana, to understand rural Haryanvi society and the intersection of caste and class and its influence on gender relations. In fact, as a historian, as a sociologist and as an economist, all rolled into one, the author has tried to locate the study of masculinity (ies) in the major shifts that marked three phases in the political economy of Haryana : the Colonial period, the period of the Green Revolution and new economic policies and globalisation.

The volume offers to the reader a gendered perspective to the British domination in India through the British Indian Army. The book explains it well. “It was a constellation of martial caste status, land ownership, dominant caste syndrome and good bodily physique which came to ideologically connect and configure the dominant masculinity in colonial Punjab.” Relying heavily on oral sources and traditional folk songs and proverbs, the book seeks to determine how masculinity has been viewed, lived and experienced in the past. It explains that through some extremely revealing and popular proverbs, still in usage. 

“Aurat ka khasam mard, 
mard ka khasam rozgar”

(The lord of a woman is a man; the man’s lord in his livelihood) The saying underlines the importance given to bread earning as the primary role in an adult man’s life.

“Mariyo naar kullachhani,
Marriyo marad nikhathu”

 (A characterless woman and an idle/unemployed man are better dead).

Apart from gainful employment/work, marriage and procreation are considered the hallmark of mardangi, therefore the recent phenomenon of the vast numbers of unmarried and unemployed men who are experiencing unimaginable levels of tension in Haryana’s society.

An interesting observation that has been recorded during fieldwork by the author is the space that women sportsperson in Haryana have carved for themselves by excelling in wresting, boxing and athletics. Hitherto considered to be ‘masculine sports’ the observations are that women are ‘building their muscles by lifting weights, wearing kachhas (men’s underclothes), exposing their bodies to the public . . .” And summed up by the emphatic assertion, ‘who will marry these girls’?

In the display of masculinity, Dalits emerge as major victims of oppression whether by sexual assault or other forms of violence or coercion. This view is based on numerous cases which have been widely reported. The analysis of the work is based on a complete understanding that masculine identities in present Haryana are, in certain respects, empowered by modernity. And women in comparison are perceived to have become a central problematic to be more constrained. The increasing visibility of women on the streets has, in many respects, led to an increase in crimes against them, as in many ways it is a reaction to the perceived loss of masculine control over this space.

Prem Chowdhry has given us another well researched and an easy to read volume. The narrative holds attention interspersed as it is with anecdotal references and typical Haryanvi idiom that makes grasping the basic thesis easy.