The Sidelining

Illustration/Uday Mohite

My lady friends are in a pretty bad mood. A significant number are Malayali. No prizes for guessing it’s because KK Shailaja, popularly known as Shailaja Teacher, after a stunning performance as Kerala’s Health Minister through the Nipah and COVID-19 crises, after winning Assembly elections with a historic majority, was not included in the Cabinet while Pinarayi Vijayan began his second term as Chief Minister.

My friend N said to her mother, “so?” Her mother giving the side eye said, “you mean the sidelining?” D informed that his girlfriend’s mother “is refusing to watch TV in disgust at The Sidelining”. The Sidelining, said N, is a generational memory. Our other friend, J, has a good-and-mad grandmom who remembers The Sidelining of KR Gowri in 1987. After a stellar record and an election campaign promising to make her Kerala CM, she was sidelined for the post, in favour of an upper caste man. J’s mom remembers the sidelining of Susheela Gopalan in 1997, who lost the party vote for CM by one vote.

Which woman does not know about being sidelined? Domestic labour? It’s your duty na. Promotions at work? But you want maternity leave and all na. Oh was that idea yours? I didn’t (can’t) hear you. Sexual harassment? The man is fighting the good fight, don’t pull him down. Artist? But only about women’s issues no. To this they are supposed to respond by emotionally sidelining themselves, or, to use a wonderful Malayalam English word my writer friend Nisha Susan taught me, with ‘dignikutty’. To ask for your due, to point out inequality, to assert your desires, is undignified in a woman and adored in a man.

Women who complained about The Sidelining, had to bear the onslaught #BoreMatKarYaar lectures. It is the tradition of the LDF to foreground the party, not the person, they said. Three women in cabinet of 21, what more do you want? It’s the first time a woman is Party Whip (what about first time woman is CM, boss?), sirs must be having some plan for her. Progressive gents like Jacinda Ardern, but ghar ki baat is different. Tradition comes up a lot doesn’t it, when people ask for equality, which requires change, which requires not the same treatment of all in an unequal world, but affirmative action which will right the balance. Women must always defer their rights and due to serve families, communities, nations and parties, while men keep making the future in their own image, saving the world—for themselves. Where’s the surprise when women are angry?

People don’t like angry women. Me, I love them. I love the clarity of their sarcasm, their adamantine ultimatums in rage, the chaanta laga precision when they cut through patriarchal bullshit. Like Mamata Banerjee who emerged highly irritated from a CM’s meeting where the PM had held forth singly (why not? He has the beard for it). “This was not a one-way communication, it was one-way humiliation,” she declared. Slicing the air with one-liners, the way men slice notes in dance bars, she continued, “One nation, all’s humiliation”, and finally, “Eto insecure keno (why so insecure) if others speak?” Like with a thunderclap in a soap opera, thousands of women turned their heads from the sidelines as the words reverberated in the sky, speaking for so many, “Eto insecure keno, keno, keno?” indeed.

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

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