Where is freedom?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

How is freedom defined? When it comes to women, it is always presented as a favour, a conditional bonus that can be withdrawn at any time. Women should not "misuse their freedom" they are told over and over again. Twenty years ago, while shooting my film Unlimited Girls, I encountered some women at a college in Haryana who talked about how the men in the college molested them routinely, more so if they had performed in a dance or felt free to go drink water. Yet no one in the administration did anything and nor did the women complain because they said they would be told "you're the one who wanted to go to a co-ed college and now see what's happened? Stay home and do a correspondence course." The violation of women is seen as the consequence of their freedom - in this case simply the freedom to go to college. And if women cannot somehow perform the fear of being free without encountering any gender-based violence, then they have proven that they are not deserving of freedom.

Freedom was not made for them and now, they should accept this and retreat from its open spaces.

Women are also frequently told not to "misuse" their freedom - that is to say, imagine that mobility, in terms of getting an education or working, should be accompanied by fun. They must remain sober and held back in gratitude.

Yet, women's freedom is misused most by men, who believe that women's freedom, like many other things about women, exists only in order to serve the purpose of men. The incident at Delhi's Indraprastha College, where some men broke into the college during its annual festival and began to molest students reveals this mindset, and is part of a series of such incidents which have earlier taken place in other women's colleges like Miranda House and Gargi College.

Sadly, the response of the administration - locking some students in the hostel and asking others to leave because "once the women have gone, the men will automatically leave" reveals a mindset wherein it is expected that the presence of women enjoying themselves will invite the aggression of men and so, that freedom is in some way uneasy and problematic; not a natural right for women, but rather, a conditional and fearful one. It also reveals that what is called a "safe space" often provides safety only in the absence of pleasure. It is a retreat, a defeat, not a commitment that society makes to women.

I went to a women's college in the 1980s.It was considered to be less cool than going to a co-ed college - but I wonder why? Did men in co-ed colleges take women seriously? What going to a women's college afforded was a space to take other women seriously and to glow when taken seriously by women. It placed women's opinions, feelings, friendship, anger, intelligence and vulnerability at the centre of our everyday world and so, changed our expectations of who we could be and moreover, how we wanted the world to be.

When students protest to express their anger and anguish, authorities need to respond empathetically, not with embarrassed repression and panic. In a society increasingly resentful of freedom, these spaces of vital liberation need to be tended with mutual care and commitment to a hopeful future.

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