The many faces of empowerment
Listening to Suhag Shukla and Vipasha Surange speak at the Hindu Women’s Festival* this week brought to mind a personal experience around empowerment, or rather the perception of empowerment.
In their conversation, Suhag and Vipasha discuss the issue of a single view on what empowerment means and looks like. Vipasha quotes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on the danger of a single story, and how that applies to us as Indian women too, while Suhag tells of a particular moment where she herself was guilty of applying a stereotype. Do watch if you missed it (and also Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk here).
A few years ago, I did a job that involved travelling to India several times a year, as I led my organisation’s establishment of operations there. As the second generation of my family born outside India, with all of us now scattered around the globe, I loved the opportunity to spend time in my matrabhoomi (motherland); visiting a variety of places helped me gain a much broader sense of the country and its diversity, hearing languages and eating food that even my Indian-born ancestors wouldn’t have experienced in their more locally-lived lifetimes.
On a much less profound level, however, there was another enjoyment: the chance to use more of my Indian wardrobe! Usually these clothes would be confined to the cupboard until there was a festival, wedding, family occasion or other cultural event, mainly because the British weather is usually not best suited to clothes designed for a tropical climate. So, into my suitcase went kurti tops, salwar kameez, sometimes even a sari, and I looked forward to the opportunity to wear them in a place where they would (I assumed) be commonplace clothing.
I won’t say that my expectations came crashing down, but there were a few interesting experiences that made me stop and think about my clothing choices, or rather what those choices meant in terms of other people’s assumptions. Without going into the minutiae, what I found was that many of the women in I encountered in senior/authority positions dressed pretty much in Western clothing, and that I was taken more seriously by people if I did the same, rather than wearing my Indian clothes. There was always a slight look of surprise when colleagues would defer to me in meetings with external people, as if this young-ish woman in her brightly coloured traditional outfit couldn’t possibly be the senior manager with budget responsibility.
Suhag and Vipasha talk in their conversation about this issue: that an ‘empowered woman’ must look and behave in a particular way, or she is simply downtrodden and needs lifting up. They discuss alternative paradigms for seeing the world, giving us all an opportunity to re-examine worldviews we take for granted.
From my personal experience there can also be a subconscious ‘white saviour’ aspect that is so embedded in people’s psyche, even when they consciously don’t bear prejudice. My clothing aside, if I was with a group of colleagues, it was always assumed that the white man in the group was in charge. No? The white woman then. No? Okay, the Indian man. Sorry? The Indian woman is the one calling the shots? Really?!
And if this perception has been embedded within Indian society, then for those looking in from the West the perception is even more stereotypical and needs to be challenged. I will say that this wasn’t everyone, it wasn’t all the time, and I’m certainly not saying that all white/Western people I know hold incorrect stereotypical views on Indian women. But there is clearly still a long way to go before we truly see the incredible spectrum of what female empowerment looks like.
There is also no denying that there are many women across all cultures for whom empowerment and independence remain out of reach. Those of us lucky enough to hold control over our lives do have a responsibility to shine a light for those who don’t, and we must champion change. Yet as this event shows**, making sweeping decisions on female empowerment based on someone’s outward appearance or their relationship to cultural practices hides a richer, much more complex story.
*Disclaimer: the project I co-edit, Beyond the Bindi, is a publishing partner of the Hindu Women’s Festival
**See also the unfolding controversy of France’s newly imposed hijab ban, and the recent Sabarimala situation in Kerala.
