Does Women’s Day matter?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

As International Women's Day came through last week, you could feel the gusty winds of ennui in the corridors of social media. Four main responses reigned.

First: The dread of the corporate twaddle that would surround us: spa discounts and the bland slogans of change no one can disagree with. Floating everywhere like errant pieces of cotton candy was the ally of corporate twaddle. Influencers and wannabe influencers force-fitting shakti or sisterhood into that morning's post. Then, there was the slightly supercilious "I don't think I need Women's Day/It's no longer meaningful" response. Lastly, the sincere response, from the earnest to the erudite: histories of women's struggles, acknowledgement of feminist legacies, the wish for solidarities.

The first three responses are perhaps more about the marketplace than Women's Day - and reveal a greater relationship with that market than feminism. Social media has the great ability to make us confuse individualism for individuality and outrage for righteous anger. Righteous anger identifies sustained, subversive patterns of injustice and wishes to change them. Outrage responds to whatever just happened and because it a "simple", clear message, easy to replicate, it is rewarded with "reach" and scale which are considered signs of success, and can confuse you into thinking (only) you are right about everything and everyone who isn't like you is wrong (yaniki fascism). The need to stand out here can propel many statements.

International Women's Day has its roots in socialist and labour movements looking for foundational social transformations and for a long time, was observed mostly by women's organisations engaged in multiple struggles and protests. In post liberalization India, March 8 has acquired a wider appeal, because the market recognized and catered to women's desires for liberation from oppressive structures. But it does so in a conditions-apply manner. You can have a couple of freedoms in the new system, but the overall structures - patriarchal, caste and capitalist monopolies - and their interdependence, should not be questioned.

As ideas spread to larger numbers of people, they are often diluted. But they are also expanded and reinterpreted - today, many people think about our emotional and cultural worlds as spaces of struggle and protest too, and their insights expand our political understandings. In 2002, I interviewed the feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia for my film Unlimited Girls and bemoaned how people benefit from feminist struggles, then invalidate feminism. She responded with a question: what would we rather have? That people had the possibility of freedom because of feminism, even if they don't admit that. Or that they do not have those freedoms at all? Politics is not an exam where people only pass or fail, after all. It's a developing situation, as they say in political thrillers.

I'm with the sincere and passionate folks, because at this moment in time, where we are pushed to flatten ourselves for easy uptake, they engage with the tremendously beautiful and difficult work of depth and making connections. If one thread joins the disparate renditions of Women's Day, it is the recognition that someone, somewhere always needs Women's Day to spotlight their issues, to ask for justice and fairness, equality and joy. It's a day we renew our commitment to the idea that we are interdependent, intertwined social beings, determined to change in relation to each other, not just by ourselves. This idea matters.

So, yeah, International Women's Day matters. Zindabad.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com