You may not know me, but I know you. So many of us in the country know you. And now, even more people will know you. Congratulations on being selected as India’s official submission to the Oscars.
I got to know of your stories a few months ago, when I watched your movie, Laapataa Ladies. When I first read your movie’s title, I translated the title as ‘Missing Women’. I was immediately transported to the concept of ‘Missing Women’ expounded by economist Professor Amartya Sen in an essay over 30 years ago: “A great many more than a hundred million women are simply not there because women are neglected compared with men”.
The concept of ‘Missing Women’ is roughly as old as I am and I wonder how it still is not an individual’s but a gendered individual’s world. Gender always marks its presence by commission, hardly by omission. Then, I realised that the movie was about ‘Lost Women’ and not ‘Missing Women’. But it really is about ‘Missing Women’.
Phool, you were a young bride who considered it a sin to utter your husband’s name and then you found yourself lost on a railway platform. You slowly struck up a friendship with Manju Mai, who ran a tea stall there. Despite her taunts, you dreamt of going back to your husband. Even when she made a powerful statement by asserting that women don’t really need men, you were unable to cross the threshold of the social construct you grew up in. As far as you were concerned, your capabilities existed to aid your husband.
My dear Phool, when Manju Mai asked you, “you know how to run a home, but do you know how to reach your home?”, your silence spoke louder than your words. Her statement hits harder when statistics reveal that, of the women who migrate in India, nearly 81% migrate due to marriage — just like you did, Phool.
Jaya, you narrowly escaped being a ‘Missing Woman’ by being a ‘Lost Woman’. You, like so many women of ‘marriageable age’, sought some more time to join the mind-numbing race between the biological clock and the career clock. Wanting to pursue further studies, you escaped your groom. Because of the ‘veil’, you ended up accompanying Phool’s husband, who realised his error only after the veil was lifted.
You were a ‘Missing Woman’ who would have been anonymised in society, save for your insistence on asserting who you were. Throats turned dry when Phool’s mother-in-law told you that in the process of adapting to the marital family’s likes and dislikes, women forget their own likes. Is this steady erosion of individuality not making more ‘Missing Women’? It was heartening to see you finally no longer missing or lost. And we saw Phool realise that you introduced her to herself.
While your heartwarming stories left me smiling, a thought lingered: can we define Phool as a ‘Missing Woman’ or Jaya, had she kept quiet? Can we define as ‘Missing Women’ all those women or girls who take on the identity of a woman or girl acceptable to society and forget who they were before they got married? Can we say that every woman who misses out on an opportunity because of the glass ceiling is indeed a ‘Missing Woman’?
By this account, the number of missing women may far outnumber any estimate till date, for every time a woman fits herself into the mould of an acceptable woman, her authentic self becomes a ‘Missing Woman’. We are missing when we are invisible, we are missing when we are anonymised, we are missing when our identity is lost. I learnt we do not need to identify as a ‘woman’ to be missing; if we are invisible in the social matrix, we are the ‘missing individuals’, irrespective of our gender identity. The missing women of the 1990s were statistically absent, but today’s missing women are counted. We are missing women, if we are not who we want to be.
Now that a greater part of the world will see you, may I request you, Phool and Jaya, to help bring other stories to heartwarming conclusions too? Can you please speak for all the missing women who are not just lost but, as Manju Mai said, who do not know where they are headed and hence, remain missing? I will be cheering for you, and I know, you will be cheering for us all too.
The author is an IRS officer. Views expressed are personal.
National Editor Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column
