From India, with Love: contemplations on love (an anarchist’s view)
It is not a debatable topic at all when we say that love does not exist in India. It does not exist in the slums of Mumbai, it does not exist in the rural areas of Bihar, the jungles of Chattisgarh, the posh neighbourhoods of New Delhi, and so on and so forth. Love is absolutely absent from India.
You quite rightly might think that you do know certain examples of couples in love but left to those very couples, is it likely that their younger relatives will also have support from them in their love lives? In many cases, there is dowry in love marriages, if at all there isn’t honour killing. Marriages in India are a testament to the fact that even though most indian youngsters do have their moments of exchanging smiles and glances and possible risqué dates very much in the fashion of Romeo and Juliet, the very youngsters never marry outside their caste. 96% marriages are intra caste, which either means that a) there is something fundamentally wrong with the youngsters themselves or b) love does not exist in India. It is all a mere show, a hypocritical display. I will give a very personal account of my evolving views since childhood that lead me to the conclusion that Indian society is fundamentally unfree and therefore love, like language, when controlled becomes a tool of mass oppression. I can post studies and numbers, but that do not do service to understanding what actually goes on.
What does (b) even mean? Well it means very simply that the society is very anti love. In India you can very easily take a leak in public, but you cannot hold hands. I remember when I was growing up, as boys we had no sort of training or exposure on how to view women. Till the age of 20 I had not made a single conversation with a real girl my age. They were mythical creatures to me. I barely only saw a few girls, as would my classmates when we passed by a girls’ school nearby and during that time there would be utter and complete silence in the van that carried us home.
It was not very unusual to exchange pen drives full of pornography amongst teenagers, who often described ghastly acts they would do to other girls and possibly their girlfriends during my school time. Soon enough porn took over all of their sexuality. From age 13 onwards all women were basically either a subject of our harrowing myth or related to us. There was no in between.
I remember being utterly taken aback on watching porn for the first time, I frankly was so surprised at the visual that I almost went into shock. I was 12 then. I remember an elder walked into the room and I came out of my delirium then. Yea I almost got caught. I was so stressed, the women seemed to be in mental and physical anguish. I had no idea, neither did any of my friends. However, my classmates enjoyed it. They enjoyed reading about rape in the newspaper, not because the condoned it but because they found immense pleasure in realising that sex after all is as terrible an impulse as they saw in the videos, and nobody knew anything about consent. I confided in my mother, she counselled me well. She did not tell me about consent still, but she told me that I will have to stay away from such profanity and channel my energy into something useful, although she did mention that sexuality in itself is not wrong. I did not know better, I took it very academically. Sex was a sacred chord that was tied to procreation.
“Women do not like it”, I thought, and “men are beastly creatures who survive to dominate women into performing the act. Women accept the least worst subjugation in the worst case to merely procreate”.
I feel from 12 onwards, I wanted to read about feminism, philosophy. I was utterly repulsed by the thought of intimacy and relationships. They were a chain of domination to me.
The Nirbhaya case had shaken me, the blaming of the victim by men around me, and so did the attitudes of my classmates and relatives towards women. However there were no grades for being sensitive towards it, all I got were scoldings and disgust for even inquiring what the words meant. The topics of sexual organs were to be neatly crossed out with a pencil. God forbid a woman was our Biology teacher. Boys and men around me spared no one from their rapist myth they called “sexuality”.
As I grew up, I had the chance to attend extra classes to prepare for JEE. The girls always sat segregated, they murmured and I faintly remember hearing them speak. I never dared to talk to one. Neither did any of my classmates. Two years passed in those classes.
I grew depressed and sad due to this lack of freedom and any real friendship. The absence of 50% of humanity from one’s life does affect it’s quality which is not completely due to sexual frustration. I had no male or female friends. I saw the world as this great royal rumble where men fought each other to brainwash women into consenting. I did come to know that women do consent voluntarily, but I could not believe it. Frankly, because I still saw sex equivalent to pain and suffering for women, and also because I knew no one who would ever say otherwise to me. I was an ugly, under confident child, and frankly familial patriarchy and sheer disgust towards any expression that was remotely mine made me completely confident of my beliefs. I wanted to fight the suffering of women. I wanted to eradicate porn and cyberbullying.
Two girls did approach me in my childhood to be friends, but conscious of the fact that I was a man, I relieved them of my friendship. I did not and could not face it that I too wanted to be friends, because I hated what it meant to me personally.
Unconsciously, I still did not see women as equals, I pedestalised them into a part of humanity that is always the victim. I became a part of the problem. You know the torture of the evil is more digestible than the torture of the righteous, for the simple reason that the torture of the righteous is two fold.
I began engineering. Segregated classrooms. Refusal to talk to women. I soon enough enrolled for military, I wanted to join the NSG. I wanted to rescue women and children. In the solitude of the selection process and the long runs I realised that perhaps I could do activism. I realised I should work on a cultural revolution. I opted out of the highly competitive NDA exam right before they would announce the results in the interview round. The scores came in, had I said yes, I would have been in the military. I could not turn away from my goals now.
I started going to slums, distributing sanitary pads. In doing so I made friends with girls. It felt different. I had no romantic interest, but in hanging out with them I realised something at the level of Mary’s apple. That women were human beings.
They liked to smoke, they wanted to date, they liked the same things I liked, they had goals and dreams. They were restricted, although arguably my upbringing was way more restrictive but they were not very different.
I did a lot. I am proud of my actions, it lead to lasting friendships. I would ironically also say I made my first lasting friendship with a girl. I eased a bit, I got into a relationship and did all I can for the girl. However, my putting women on a pedestal had not gone.
Chapter II: the Heartbreak
My ex girlfriend was how she was but for what it’s worth I am not here to whine about her. She ghosted me, and it was because of her new found freedom in a city far away from her house.
I realised something profound from this experience. Women have to sacrifice a lot of autonomy by merely existing. They are expected to suddenly be extremely free and corporate style confident, which is a huge jump. She went to that city and her peers expected her to be a certain way. Now she could either have me, or her freedom, as she thought. I represented to her the captivity of her past. I was to be abandoned. She did so, it caused me pain admittedly. She came to apologise two years later, her guilty conscious was not allowing her to live a fulfilling life.
However, I will say I allowed my own abandonment, in fact, I facilitated it. No I am not over philosophising. I wanted her to be free, without ever wanting freedom myself. I wished for a ritual, I became the sacrifice. I do not think that could qualify as love, because if love is a union my pain should matter too. Meaning thereby I should not have tolerated the sheer disrespect and voluntarily exited the relationship when she was becoming toxic to me. However my own inability to know that I am the union and not merely its support meant a relationship of only giving, and never receiving. I accepted that perhaps in reality, I was paying the debt on behalf of all the men. I was so drained, it still felt that I am in her way. I did not see my pain as an equal pain, and putting oneself below someone else is another kind of control.
Men see themselves as providers to women, without women ever desiring it. This takes the form of either extreme relinquish of control or extreme seizure of control. Love should not be in terms of a provision and reception. Love should be uniform. To accept any other form of a union is not love. Love should change how one feels about themselves, it should be like a prism that splits light. Love should be equal and unequal. To define its equality is a way to contain it, hence control it. A man must think “I try to do equally as much but what she gives me is far more than what I give her”. Love therefore is a game of hide and seek. Both people in love try to catch up to the other and this becomes the best way for them to self actualise. Love is the most liberating of all feelings thus.
In India, workers have no certainty. Jobs often coincide with break ups, and divorces these days as offices form little “families”, all filled with men, who grew up with masculinity equalling domination in their minds and women, who have no idea what freedom means. These men expect women to be a certain way and this creates rifts massive enough to rip ties apart.
Wild lions and caged lionesses are left together to work in this sanctuary where they must survive. The lionesses begin following the lions. They become institutionalised. The very peer group that meant freedom now puts them in captivity. The corporate structure in fact is the jungle, uncertainty all over. (I am sort of proud I came up with that comparison)
My cousin sister loves a guy that organises metal concerts. He is sort of the perfect guy for my sister. I love him, he is very caring and sensitive. However her parents won’t agree. Caste, family, net worth et cetera et cetera.
In India, when I say there is no love, it does not mean people cannot love. It means a sinister society, that does not want love. They grow so institutionalised and repulsed by love, it is no longer a question of feelings for them. It is a matter of honour. Indian parents do not want the best for their child. They envy their child. The child represents to them freedom and sensitivity, they put it in captivity and throw it as cannon fodder to ideology. God forbid my sister decides to spend her own money. In no time will it become about honour. A fully functioning adult has to keep up with this code of respect.
Parents terrorise boys and girls to break up, then proceed to slut shame them. Parents never really grant their children freedom, so to speak. You constantly have to strive to “restore their honour” by everything you do. They do not leave your soul until they die. You have to kill your curiosity, your visions, your originality, your love life, everything, for the sake of their honour. An increasing number of families do not observe the hindu mourning period of 1 year now.
And so we see a nation where 67% respondents want to get rid of their parents, where streets of Mathura are filled with old widows awaiting death, where old age homes are filled up to the brim. Tired of honour, children routinely try to fight for freedom, and this becomes the struggle of Macbeth and his wife against the prophecies of the three witches. They come to haunt, and then the deed is done. The arranged couple avenges the death of their possibilities.
I had to speak up in my household. Males in my family can no longer bash women. I fought and fought. I won. But that too is because I am a grown man now. I will fight for my sister too.
Chapter IV: Mirror of reality
In India, live in, inter caste, inter religion and homosexual relationships, and most freedoms won for the cause of love are again under threat. The youth lie displaced and do not vote. The old people vote for the least useful and the most casteist parties possible. Democracy in India, especially since the hindutva BJP is in power has become a clown show. The institutions are rigged to the core. I do not think I need to expand this any further. I will conclude now. The reader now understands why I say there is no love, it is because our culture is insanely divided and subjugating. Where there is no freedom, there cannot be love. Love in essence is expression in freedom. Like language, the containment of love is a way to sieze power. The ruling elite have done all they can so that the corrupt system of marriages, dowry, caste division and honour killings do not stop. They are now coming up with elaborate laws that are supposed to “guard” their culture. What culture? The sub continent of India has a thousand different peoples and cultures, again what culture? They have made it easy for billionaires and the young people have no job security any longer.
What is to be done? Anarchism is the politics of direct action. Here is what you can do.
Talk about love marriages with your friends and younger people. Educate young boys about love and sex.
Open up dialogue with your parents and younger siblings about love and sexuality.
Open dialogue again if they recoil. And again. And again. Keep resisting. Get all the young people in your family under your banner. Then again.
If you are a professional, form co-ops and share your knowledge. Develop scalable co-ops, redistribute the surplus and secure an emergency fund for the families of your fellow workers. Stand for them. Fight capitalist oppression. Boycott companies, engage in mutual aid.
The praxis of anarchism is the praxis of love. And to be able to love means to be able to be free.
Until we do not resist this bs actively, expect no love to exist.