Gender on the Street

Here in India, we can't help notice gender patterns and differences--some familiar from the U.S., and some a variation or different.  You see this when out on the street, in traffic, or walking around our current campus (Christ University in Bangalore, or Bangaleru).

What do we see in the photo above?  Lots of traffic, for one thing--though this is a rather less crowded scene than one usually sees on most streets, into the late evening (!).  Among other things, you might be able to see that nearly all motorbike drivers are men, often young men (perhaps because weaving in and out of traffic is a younger man's sport?).  Though one occasionally sees a young woman driving a bike, they are almost always the passenger (and if married, sometimes with a small child in between the couple).  As you can see with the woman in the blue sari, they usually don't hang on to the male driver, but rather balance as best they can, perhaps holding on with one hand.  She's also sitting modestly, side-saddle, with no bike between her legs (having to negotiate her sari might also be a factor), though I think that must also render her perch more precarious; the girl in red on the right is riding more firmly, wearing loose pants.  

The photo also suggests that women, in addition to dressing differently than men, also are more likely to dress in traditional Indian wear, either a sari (especially for married ladies), or at least a kurta (a long shirt, almost a dress, that comes down to the knee, with loose pants underneath, matching the top if one is being stylish).  The men, on the other hand, would likely be wearing dark pants with a western style sport or polo shirt; businessmen or other more elite men would likely be wearing a dark suit, often with a tie.  We see this in the photo of students on campus below.

While some of these young women are wearing jeans, most are wearing more traditional pants (the more daring are wearing tights, but note that no actual legs are to be seen; neither men nor women wear shorts).  Some arms are bare, but I've only seen bare shoulders a few times.  Overall, modesty is the expectation for both men and women, but for women a more traditional version than for men.  (I should add that I love the styles and colors the women wear.)  Another important thing to note in the photo above: there are lots of women students in this photo, taken during the change between classes one day; while female illiteracy is still common among poor women, expectations of not only literacy but also college are common among the growing middle class (at InfoSys, a major Indian high tech corporation we visited the other day--more on that in a later post--about a third of the employees are women).  

Gender also seems to be a largely homosocial world here.  On campus one does see mixed groups, talking and joking, but on the larger street, apart from couples married or who are doing the Indian version of dating, women are often walking around with other women, and men with men.  Men sometimes hold hands with each other (no gay identity implied here by that), and less often one sees women linking arms (but not holding hands).  Cross-sex touching in public seems rare; I've only seen one male-female couple holding hands, and no hint of public kissing or hugging (kissing is almost non-existent even in Bollywood films that feature a certain amount of female skin in the dance scenes).  

Pedestrian traffic continues well into the evening, but my impression is that women "drop out" of street life earlier than men; women alone would be more conspicuous than men alone, and presumably less safe, subject to harassment, or perhaps worse (given some well-publicized recent events of rape).  So who can be out on the street, and when, is also gendered.  Our faculty hosts have told us it's good for women to be settled in by around 9:30.

Much of what I've said applies "more so" for observant Muslims (India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia, even though our program engages primarily with Hindu and Christian India).  Muslim women often cover their hair, and sometimes their face, when out in public, and wear a robe that is even less revealing than kurtis and saris for Hindu women.  Muslim women seem much more likely to wear traditional Muslim clothing, though of course those who are not may not be "seen" by me as Muslim as easily.  (There are some neighborhoods where I feel like I'm back in Cairo, and one does see modest-sized mosques and hear the call to prayer if one is familiar enough with it to hear it amidst the din of constant traffic noise.)

I've been writing here in terms of our conventional gender binary, women and men.  But the other day when we were on a commuter train, a quite tall woman got on the train, and clapped her hands loudly, then began asking passengers for some money.  She looked different in some ways from the usual woman, and acted differently--usually women beggars are very quiet, if sometimes insistent.  We realized she was a hijra, or a "third sex" person, someone born a male who's living as a female.  It's a bit different than what we usually mean by a transgender person, though in fact when we were applying for our visas for India we were asked to check one of three boxes: male, female, and transgender.  Being an hijra goes way back in Indian culture, and involves some ritual and wedding roles, among other things.

Possibly related to this is my experience one day trying to find a kurta for Barbara.  She's not here, of course, to try one on, and Indian sizes are different than in the U.S., so since we are roughly the same size (if not necessarily the same shape), I took the kurtis to the women's dressing room, seeing no men's, to try on.  The ladies who help were gracious, and when I came out a young salesgirl asked me "Would sir be needing some cosmetics to go with his kurtis?"  I felt like I had fallen into some ambiguous gender category.  (I didn't get the cosmetics.)

And one more "gender on the street" observation for the moment: whitenings.  Our students have noticed that beauty or cosmetic shops often advertise skin lightening treatments, often specifically called "whitening."  A "fairer" woman is considered more desirable; one local woman showed me a photo of her brother's fiancee, and commented that she's not as fair as the photo shows, as photographers can lighten the soon-to-be bride's skin to make her "more attractive."  My own personal reaction is unbelief: most of the local southern Indian women I've seen (faculty, local students, on the street) are often darker than many African Americans back home, and they are also lovely in the deep golds, oranges, reds, yellows and other colors, perhaps with a dark green or turquoise scarf.  But I also know this is not necessarily a helpful reaction, any more than if I tell a woman student back home who's worried about her looks that she looks just fine.  

A more sociological response is to think about why lighter skin might seem preferable.  I'm not sure, but there may be several factors at work: class and caste might be one, if darker skin connotes someone who works in the fields, and so is a lower-class farm worker or laborer.  Another might be the increasingly persistent presence of media images of white/European women as the standard of beauty for women everywhere; we often see advertisements that feature white women many shaders lighter than those women towards whom the ads are aimed.  And third, colonialism might be at work: British colonialism, ending only in 1947, justified itself with assumptions about race and racial inferiority, with the darker the people the less civilized they might be.  But there's also an earlier wave of "colonialism," when the Muslims from the areas northwest of Indian established the Mughal caliphates, ruling for centuries (remember that the iconic image of India, the Taj Mahal, was built by the Mughals, and is closed on Fridays, the primary Muslim holy day of prayer); the incoming people were from areas of Persia and Afghanistan and farther west, much lighter in color than the more indigenous Dravidian people of the South.  The Southern peoples with whom we've so far spent most of our time speak different languages than northern ones, are more conservative Hindus, and share various cultural differences with those in the north.  But, bottom line, color makes a difference, and evidently much more so for women than men, for whom beauty is more an issue.

I'll be posting later on some differences in family and marriage patterns, another key aspect of gender here.