Thinker, writer, achiever, go-getter– nouns that enfold a quantum of action evoking the imagination as soon as the epithet ‘woman’ is added to these words; and the doing woman emerges. The doing woman enwraps history in her folds –a history of doing that the world has been obliged to notice and allow, but, may be, not normalize with. Woman’s doing has to be something remarkable in order to qualify as ‘doing’ so that such doing women may be adorned with a crown (of thorns?) – the extraordinary woman. This idea seems like a liberal set-up of the patriarchal world by means of which it not only coerces the ‘ordinary’ to remain invisible and serve patriarchy’s needs, but it also controls the norm and dares women, over and over history, to challenge it, and to continuously prove herself. Else why would every fight that women have had to put up against patriarchy seem so personal, even when one is sitting in the comfort of one’s home and watching a mere movie on a Sunday afternoon? I could sense this unease in me while watching the movie, Gunjan Saxena, which narrates the ordeals and eventually the recognition of the extraordinary, breaking-the-cage phenomenon by Gunjan Saxena who has actually delivered her services for the nation at the crucial time of the Kargil War. She not only battled enemies across the border but also enemies within the patriarchal society she dared to challenge. It was impossible for the patriarchal world to accept Gunjan as an ordinary person who was working hard towards her dreams, eventually joining the Indian Air Force, because this world gets nervous about the woman it cannot recognize on its own terms, a woman who claims. However, when she proved her grit, winning all the challenges thrown at her, the scions of the patriarchal world were forced to accept her and immediately marked her as extraordinary. Although the film ended there, a thought lingered- was she able to deliver the extraordinary all the time, run that extra mile, in order to remain acknowledged by patriarchy? Could she falter like an ordinary human without the world bringing out its measuring rod and stating- you have fallen shorter by one centimeter, the reason for which she was initially rejected entry into the forces? Did she allow herself to retire tired of being extraordinary?
The doing of the extraordinary woman, before receiving sanction, must create ripples of shock in the stagnant pool of patriarchal narrow-mindedness. Recuperating from the shock, when patriarchy realizes that it cannot control the extraordinary doing of a woman, it strategizes the narrative to mark the doer and the deed as something beyond the boundaries of allowed normalcy, a meaning ‘extraordinary’ carries etymologically. This narrative allows patriarchy to be dismissive of, say, women doing the household chores which is ordinary, a role women are born to fit in. ‘House-wife’ reflects a derogatory identity which invisibilizes the work woman must do at home.While ‘home-maker’ for ‘house-wife’ is an interesting strategy of patriarchy to embalm the dismissiveness associated with the latter, does it in any way affect the notion? When we pull up our sleeves to bestow the tag ‘important’ to home-making, so that it receives the required sanction (mostly inside cold-room conferences!), or keep ourselves completely away from it declaring our feminist intent (I can’t cook!), or insert moments of housekeeping within the ‘important task’ we do, so that the struggle of doing the important task can receive adequate accolades- are we taking anything away from the patriarchal frame of the ordinary within which housework is enclosed? It remains where it has always been, a domain of women where men come and go, talking of being liberal and more. We barely feel how any of these arrangements to reach to the extraordinary constantly relegates the ordinary to the junkyard, almost in a Darwinian sense- survival of the extraordinary, where the ordinary must perish.
Patriarchy also renders this fantasy of the extraordinary vibrant by endowing values to the category. ‘Extraordinary’ can be benevolent like in ‘remarkable’, or a warning like in ‘deviant’, a ‘transgression’ even. Interestingly, both sides of the scale serve the purpose of patriarchy in fine balance. The ‘remarkable’ has the sanction, and must never falter expectation; the ‘deviant’ is derided, although extremely attractive to patriarchy because the challenge it throws at patriarchy can be enjoyed and snubbed simultaneously. However, patriarchy uses its own strategies to create, legitimize and maintain the distance between ‘remarkable’ and ‘deviant’ women. The 19th century rise of the bhadramohila, the educated, sober, remarkable woman of the bhadra samaj, was dependent on the creation of her other, the abhadramohila, boisterous, loud and hence, deviant women of lower sections of society. The distance maneuvered between the categories eventually breached the feminine circles of adda in the andarmahals and made the space more cloistered. Different genres of literature of the period, like detective fictions, often tried to live up to the expectations of the bhadro readership by portraying women as victims or vamps, as in the works of Panchkari De, in order to warn the rising consciousness of the new woman- nabya nari– of the era, who were avid consumers of this genre. Patriarchy’s sanction of a certain kind of extraordinary often renders the deviant isolated, although both types must keep fighting endless battles against new versions of patriarchy that emerge with time.
Thus patriarchy celebrates the extraordinary by generating a sense of lack for the ordinary, thus making it harder and harder for most women to break through these notions and just be. It becomes more impossible when actual vulnerability goes unnoticed because the privileged feel the necessity to capitalize on pseudo-vulnerabilities in order to prove the extraordinariness of their struggles and achievements. While struggles and achievements must be celebrated, this tilt towards derecognizing one’s privileges while putting oneself up on the pedestal of celebration is abominable; it hurts the sense of honesty and respect. As a result, patriarchy strategizes itself as an option which one might not choose in order to become extraordinary. Consequently, the invisibility and oppression of the ordinary tends to be the price a woman must pay if she chooses to remain ordinary. It becomes impossible for the ordinary to thrive when privileges are easily forgotten in these narratives of the extraordinary, mostly by women themselves. If our privileges do not allow us to become self-reflective, recognize pain and hurt outside ourselves, how are we to build empathetic bridges that could help us go across? Patriarchy devices strategies that seem to make the ordinary non-celebratory and the extraordinary, non-patriarchal, while laughing heartily in the sidelines. In all of this, the feminist ideology of equality remains a transcendental truth that defers realization.
Acceptance of the ordinary is to allow life to flow, to bind oneself to the other, not in hierarchies, but through interdependence. Once, man’s conviction of his extraordinariness severed his ties with nature. Now man’s fear of his own destruction makes him turn the logic upside down rendering nature as extraordinary. The resultant effect is the impossibility to understand the need to break hierarchies and join hands for co-habitation in order to be- nature and man together, none more important than the other. The extraordinary is not to be discarded, but let it not push us into believing that it alone makes life worthwhile. Let it not take away from the ordinariness of everyday, living by realizing that every form of doing, everyone and everything is interwoven to create the vibrant pattern of life. Let us look for the ordinary in the extraordinary, so that this patriarchal fantasy can be deflated and life can be attentive to its dripping moments.
Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash
