A Brown Girl’s Guide to... Interview with Aranya Johar (I)

Read Traditional-Chinese edition here.

A month ago, a youtube video titled “A Brown Girl’s Guide to Gender” was widely spread and shared on social media, causing an internet sensation within days. In the video, Aranya Johar is shown rapping poetries about the sexist phenomena and problematic stereotypes in modern India, attracting worldwide attention to the issue. A few weeks ago, TEDxTaoyuan got to sit down with Aranya for an interview: following is our conversation.

1.What issues enlighten you on gender equality and women’s right in India?

Starting with the first question, about the issue that has influenced my piece. I will begin with the Nirbhaya rape case that happened in 2012. I think you must have heard about it, by any chance? Nirbhaya was a girl in Delhi. She was out not too early, I think 10 pm, with a male friend of hers. She was picked up by an empty bus, with about 5-6 men on it, including a minor. She was raped numerous times by different men, a rod was inserted inside her and she was deserted on the road afterwards. She survived the night but passed away a week later because of her injuries.

That incident started a spark in India because it was the first time such a violent rape case was picked up by media, and it was spoken about in a very constructive manner. There were debates happening on TV and people were talking about it. Everyone knew rapes were happening, that things like these happens often; but no one really talked about it up until the Nirbhaya case.

Apart from that, there was another incident that had an effect on me. There was a girl named Lakshmi and when she was 15 years old, a 32-year-old man called Guddu liked her and tried to court her. Of course, she was focusing on her studies and did not reciprocate his affection. Guddu then became very offended by the fact that a female did not reciprocate his feelings, and responded by spilling acid onto her face. This result immediately caused a ripple effect: Lakshmi’s life was basically ruined because she had to pay a lot of money for her surgeries. And since Lakshmi belonged to a middle economic background, she couldn’t afford such expensive surgeries.

This incident really affected me because the whole idea of marriage and the social norm of how getting married give prestige to Indian women; it affects how people interact with a woman, and also her career opportunities. Lakshmi later started an NGO called Stop Acid Attacks (Chhanv Foundation) and steamed up a makeup company, she then happened to fall in love and started dating the journalist that was covering her story. The way I told them, all the stories started with negative connotation but then were picked up and pushed into a positive connotation. But the fact that a man feels that he has the right to throw acid on your face just because you can’t reciprocate the feeling is a very harsh reality to live with. So these two cases definitely pushed me to confront this reality.

In India, woman are very prone to experience sexual assault and harassment. I remember being 12 and talking to a girl from my class about how it feels when we get stared at and how we don't feel comfortable about it. The girl was telling me that when she was 9 and on her way back to home from school, someone masturbated to her on a public bus while she was in her school uniform. When she brought this up to the bus conductor, he taunts her to leave the bus instead of telling the man to stop.

All these different issues should be enough for us to push for related discussion and action. Yet they are usually dealt with a negative manner. I think it’s really unfortunate that, at the age of 12, girls are taught to think and worry about things like sexual harassment and sexual violence. This is why I try to advocate for these issues.

2.It seems like misery has successfully effaced in metropolis like New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, etc. However, the darkness still covers vast expanse of country. In international news issues about group sexual assault, child marriage, conservation to free marriage against women often take up headlines or specials. What’s real situation in India? Expired by government since 1947, does Caste system still play vital role in gender development, marriage and matrimony?

It’s definitely picking up. Gender issues are being spoken about a little bit more, but it’s not the right people that are talking about it. You don’t have the government doing much in this regard. Child marriage is technically illegal in India, but people in villages still set their children up and once they reach the legal age, they immediately get them married. So even if they weren’t married officially, there was commitment and responsibility that both children have for each others from a very young age.

If I was from a rural background, I would have already been married by now. So that’s very unfortunate. In fact, one of the reason that this is an practiced custom is because when the farmers in the rural India cannot pay their debt, the landowner would “buy” their daughter as bride as a compromise. Traditionally, dowry is the gift you prepare for the groom that are cars, scooters or a large amount of money. This is known as the bride trade. Hence when people are financially stable, they get their daughters matched with someone as soon as possible, so they do not have not keep raising a female child that will eventually leave them for another family through marriage.

In the metropolitan cities, child marriage is not very common. I do hear about friends who get married when they are barely 18 or 19, but it’s very rare. Also in the metropolitan cities, these issues are spoken about more and given more weight. Rape victims feel empowered enough to bring up the issue to the media, which is not the case in the rural area. In fact, a lot of female victims of rural background feel that they owe the male partner a certain amount of sexual dependency. So it’s really the stigma and mindset that we need to change, and of both men and women. We need to work on people of both genders, we have to break the whole mind set that has been built on for generations and generations.

Aside from the actual issue, it is always more practical to encourage public discussion by the crowd. In my opinion, we have to pay more effort and talk about these issues with the government, and aim to set up policies that can make a difference or touch on more lives. I grew up in the urban area, and we are quite sensitive with these kind of issues since we have more access to objective and correct information. However, in the rural area, people in general still hold on to more traditional beliefs, which is what I think should be changed. But of course, it is already better now than ever.

3.What are major sexual discriminations in India? Would you like to share any incident happened in your life or friends’ one (based on the poem in UnErase Poetry or not is fine).

One of the examples that I mentioned happened on the busride really affected me because she was only 9 years old! I come from a very liberal and open minded family, so I can afford going out late at night as long as I have a safe way to come back home, which could be by cab, for a friend to drop me off, or to have my brother pick me up. But I have lot of friends who aren’t allowed to leave home after 8 pm, unlike their brothers. Even children like us that belong to middle class families in a metropolitan still face these issues.

You probably know that Bombay gets really hot during the summer, and I loved wearing shorts when I was younger. But after I reached puberty, I stopped wearing shorts because I felt very uncomfortable going out in them. When I spoke about it to my brother about this, he never realized that we think about these things, that we think twice before wearing something short out. There definitely has been a few conventions like these that mounted up in my mind and made me write “The Brown Girl's Guide To Gender”.

I think my parents are a lot more open and liberal compared to others. There is a certain amount of trust they have in me, and they give me much more freedom and independence than most girls are allowed to have. I am thankful for that, but I am just the fortunate exception. My girl friends more commonly cannot leave their home after a certain hour or cannot wear certain things. It’s really sad for me to think about it.

I have one older brother who is six years older than me, but we are very close. Our parents haven’t done much to differentiate between us, which is very a rare thing in India. In most Indian households, boys get certain privilege because they are boys, and girls get certain privilege because they are girls. But in my family, my parents raised me and my brother the same way. There’s never been an idea that my brother can go out at a certain time and I can’t. We are treated equally, which is a very uncommon thing, and I feel that’s one of the reason I did my piece. I realize that I have been allowed certain things that other people aren’t. And that’s not ok. If I get a chance of going out and not limiting myself, why are other women forced into something else?

A lot of people think rape is justified on the basis of things such as she was alone late at night, she was wearing a dress, she was wearing a skirt, she was wearing something provocative, or her clothes were tight fitting. I feel that people always certify ways to justify rape in India. Once you explain how that is not right, that how one dresses does not equalize consent but a matter of individual freedom and privacy, people get defensive. They would say “oh! You should not have worn skinny jeans or she should not have worn her jeans up to her knees.”

There’s a certain amount of sexual discrimination and hypocrisy that comes to it, and people try to persuade themselves that you can rape proof a girl. They claim that after a certain age, girls should not be allowed to wear shorts or skirts or even school uniform, even if they had already modified the school uniform to make it “safer” for girls to wear. That’s a very sad mentality because by limiting a young child, by telling her that if you wear this, dress like this or act like this you are prone to be raped, you are twisting and torturing them mentally.

It all happens so naturally, no one sits down and tells you how this works. You are always taught in different ways, like when you wear shorts out and someone will say “oh! Aren’t you worried about getting raped?” It’s always that one line. No one actively reinforces it, but it keeps coming up among conversations and dialogues, always slipping in between words. It’s never actively done, but it is always there.

Continue to read here.