Mumbai: Middle-class families like to talk about themselves as “ordinary families” or say, “We are ordinary people.” But are families simple?
Earlier this month, software engineer Atul Subhash, 34, took his own life in the midst of a messy divorce after he left a video testimony detailing how he was dealing with an adversarial and corrupt Indian legal system as well as that of his estranged wife. Feeling tortured by hostility. Nikita Singhania’s family.
Their video testimony presents an emotional portrait of contemporary social life, of how the idea of ’simple families’ becomes a denial of human complexities. This denial underlines how parents expect children to fulfill social roles and destinies. Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in the anxiety and frustration associated with marriage.
Although the contours of marriage are changing, it is still not considered negotiable and according to a Lok Foundation-Oxford University survey 93% of marriages in India are arranged.
Like many Indians, Atul Subhash and Nikita Singhania met on a matrimonial portal and got married soon after. However, during their honeymoon in Mauritius, Singhania told Subhash that she never wanted to get married. The family had put pressure on her to marry due to her father’s ill health and their desire to see him ‘settled down’ before he died.
One can imagine what a terrifying moment this would be for a newly married couple. This is not an expectation of honeymoon intimacy, but the honeymoon, now a standard part of the marriage ritual, is often the first time a couple actually encounters each other in person. And when the choice is made on the basis of affiliation, not affinity, things can get complicated.
Conversations about what it means to be with another person are absent or suppressed, because anything that might create space for the individual is seen as a threat to this world of the ‘ordinary family’. Personal desires, friendships, interests, ‘pass time’, career preferences, romantic desires – all that makes one an autonomous adult – are viewed as betrayals, met with tears, threats and drama.
One can exist only by dividing oneself – playing a role, hiding one’s individual self. When this self emerges in love, sex or intimacy the guilt or shame can lead to attacking those who ‘pressured’ those glimmers of freedom. When a partner reveals their true self that is beyond expected norms, social, sexual or physical, it creates an identity crisis – and sometimes this can be expressed as disgust rather than curiosity or engagement. Is.
Atul Subhash and Nikita Singhania had met very little before marriage. He told that she spoke very little during their conversations. They considered this a sign of ‘being wise’, a type of move in which feminine wisdom is seen as calming masculine unrest and bringing stability to life. In fact, Singhania later told him that his mother and aunts had told him to speak less because speaking too much, revealing one’s true self, could break engagements and marriages. The details of this marriage, even if only heard from one party, are one of deep incompatibility and alienation. In many cases when such rifts are encountered, there is pressure to adjust or have children to save the marriage. Neither party has the emotional or social resources to even consider ending it with some reciprocity, imagining individual happiness rather than social conformity.
But there is a gradual change. At one time the term ‘innocent divorcee’ was commonly seen in matrimonial columns to refer to someone seeking to remarry after divorce. This indicates that they were victims of someone’s wrongdoing. If left to their own devices, they would never actually want something like divorce. The divorce rate in India, although still low, has doubled in the last two decades. This has been driven in part by changes in women’s lives and roles. Women are more expressive, they aspire for material and personal pleasures.
trap set for men
Romance is often talked about as an exclusively feminine fantasy – and feminine folly. The truth is that for many women the idea of romance places the idea of liberation and individuality at its center. Bringing up romance to always be judged based on their suitability, it symbolizes being loved just as you are and an escape from social realities. However, for men, romance becomes another iteration of the masculine role, associated with discovery and conquest, which symbolizes their success.
We make fun of women’s romantic fantasies. But men have also been raised on a fantasy that we don’t accept: the fantasy of masculinity. It is the cunning trickery of patriarchy that men confuse supremacy with freedom.
Families raise men to imagine that they will always be the central, decision-maker. They are also constantly reminded of how much their success is being affected, how all the family’s resources—emotional and material—are being thrown at them. It is a debt he must repay by becoming a real man. And to be human means to be successful in every way, to be invincible and above reproach. The worries and loneliness of such a life remain unseen.
This often leads to hostile and secretive relationships with families. Hiding their insecurities, suffering alone, feeling anger for the burden being placed on them and also a feeling of helpless compassion about betraying their family if they choose something that makes them happy.
In this context, there comes immense pressure on intimate relationships to become the automatic solution to separation. Intimacy, by nature complex, uncertain and full of vicissitudes, becomes an abyss, far from that simplicity. Facing insecurity and lack of control becomes unbearable. This is why romantic failure leads to so much violence in men – either toward themselves, or toward others. There is a reason why the character of Devdas seems symbolic to generations of Indians. In the old days, when marriages did not work out, people were told that it takes time to adjust. What remained unsaid was that the adjustment was primarily women’s. The idea today that relationships take time requires a change in the masculine mindset – a commitment to an uncertain process for which they cannot be prepared.
For decades, struggling with these restrictions, we turned to popular culture to experience our personal emotional complexities. Love stories, family dramas, questions of choice between honor and happiness reflect emotional experiences and provide them with gendered psychological validation and catharsis. While older films are often criticized for their conservatism, these narratives made some space for both unusual men and the diverse nature of emotional life.
The pain of love, the density of companionship and shelter, the acceptance of loss, and the re-emergence of hope, the deep interiority of personal life that were once expressed in song, are completely absent from a culture where visibility and immediate meaning are our primary means. Control life. Social realism is the only arbiter of truth, whether public, private or personal.
The emotional isolation of our society is reflected in the gender isolation of our films. Women-centric films mostly present the reality of women in the context of violence and sociology, for example ‘Thappad’. Male-centric films focus on the masculine wound, which ends either in death, as in the old Bachchan films, or in men being unable to break out of the loop of violence, as in ‘Animal’. Perhaps something very gentle is needed to break and heal this sexual impasse. Something like love, whose vitality lies in that it offers new meanings every day, how to make space for the other without submerging oneself.
Unfortunately, the prevailing discourse on masculinity has failed to address these internal crises. Flat descriptions of toxic masculinity often stigmatize marginalized men. The victim narratives promoted by men’s rights activists only push men deeper into these gendered fates. New age discussions on masculinity ask men to embrace their emotional and vulnerable selves, cook a meal or two, but never question the imperatives of social and economic success on which masculinity is based. They leave a group of men struggling in an economy that can’t afford them jobs that don’t conform to societal imaginings of what men should be.
The death of Atul Subhash undoubtedly highlights the terrible flaws in the legal system and the misuse of laws. But these shortcomings and abuses are not limited to gender issues. Many people are disenfranchised by the nature of our legal system. Therefore the argument for its reform is broad. Touting a law designed to protect women from dowry violence may not actually help men, no matter what the claims.
In fact, the most compassionate response to the tragedy of a death is to recognize the deeper tragedies in which it is embedded. As families become nuclear and as people migrate in the capitalist world, we need to learn to relate as individuals, beyond identity. There is a need for a humanitarian cultural revolution that recognizes this emotional juncture at which we find ourselves. But for this we need both emotional politics and emotional education.
(Paromita Vohra is a city-based writer and filmmaker.)
