Kamla Bhasin on humour in women’s movement
REGARDLESS OF whether you are in the women’s movement or not, laughter is such an important aspect of life. This is why religions like Buddhism have incorporated within itself icons like the ‘Laughing Buddha’, and many of our popular folk songs and stories draw heavily on humour.
I discovered the social cohesion that laughter brings early in life. There is a tradition of pulling another person’s leg when Holi comes around each year. So during my student days, every Holi I would come up with funny couplets on my classmates, and put them up for the students to read. It was a lot of fun and created such a convivial buzz – with everybody wanting to know whether her name figured in my couplets.
That was an early lesson in using familiar traditions in interesting ways. When I came into the women’s movement in the 1970s, it struck me that it would be useful to employ the various notions and stereotypes of patriarchy to undermine patriarchal attitudes, through songs, sayings and symbols. For instance, there is the general belief that women are weak. Yet if women were so weak, how is it that they were expected to bear the entire burden of running the house single-handedly? I wrote about why it is women, not men, who are the foundations of society, and how the very foundations would shake once they mobilised.
It was not just patriarchy that was critiqued in this way. Some of my most powerful songs were directed at taking the mickey out of us feminists. Before the Indian Association of Women’s Studies conference was held at Chandigarh in 1986, I came up with a song that lampooned the doctorate holders amongst us. I wrote about how ordinary folk, when hearing about these venerable “doctor walis” coming their way, lined up their sick relatives in the hope of getting treatment for them, only to be told that these were not “dawaiwali doctors” (doctors who dispense medicines) but doctors who write voluminous books that nobody reads.
That song, which I consider among my best, ends with the ordinary folk telling the “doctorwalis” that “we will provide the data, while you make your theories”. I remember how a feminist academic like Dr Vina Majumdar would laugh uproariously at this caricature of people like her and would urge me to sing it every time we met at a public meeting. She had such a marvellous capacity to laugh at herself. Another time when we were protesting the government’s family planning programme, I came up with the slogan, ‘We don’t want Copper-T, we want property!”
Humour, to me, is in fact a very serious matter. Remember women – as indeed many religious, caste and ethnic communities – have been put down over the years in various ways, including through jokes, parodies and stereotyping. I would like to see the people who have been oppressed all these years to now do the exact opposite. When this is done, millennia-old institutions and norms are undermined. Laughter actually robs them of their power. That is why we came up with a feminist joke book in 2004 called ‘Laughing Matters’, a small volume of laughs and sketches, which I put together with Bindia Thapar. A lot of it was borrowed material, but there was also much that was our own. The publication proved to be so popular that its third reprint has just been released. In an introduction to that volume, I noted what Emma Goldman; Lithuanian-born US Anarchist had said about the Russian revolution, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Many of us in the women’s movement have been saying, “If there is no laughter in the women’s movement let us create it.”
The jokes we put into the volume were funny, but also deeply political. For instance, we have a section in it call ‘Patriarchal (Il) Logic’ that deconstructed the unequal way society regarded men and women: “When a man uses his brain, he is clever… when a woman does the same, she is calculating.” But it expressed a critique of ourselves, as well: “Question: How many feminists do you need to change a light bulb? Answer: FIVE. (One to change the bulb, two to write about the PROCESS and another two to make a video).” It also celebrated the way we were: “Scientists have just discovered something that can do the work of five men… a woman.”
There is another extremely serious reason why I think we should learn to laugh. Social transformation does not happen overnight, social movements can stretch over entire lifetimes. The hatred and oppression that one is struggling against could leave one angry and bitter. Laughter and humour is a wonderful antidote to that bitterness. You cannot, should not, allow anger to destroy the person you are, and a good laugh is the best way to shake away such negative feelings. Today, medical science advocates a life of laughter for physical well-being, echoing what people used to intuitively observe about laughter being the best medicine.
My first exposure to feminist humour was when I visited Scandinavia in the mid-Eighties. It seemed to liberally lace all the public activities that Scandinavian women activists organised at that time. I remember poring over a volume of humour put out by the Union of Scandinavian countries and finding so much to learn in this approach. It struck me then that it was only when movements mature that they develops a capacity to laugh.
I have not seen too much humour in the women’s movement here, whether in regional languages or in English. Some of us had the tendency to believe that we knew best. We also tended to be a bit holier than thou and very dismissive of other people’s opinions. It is, therefore, important to puncture our egos once in a way and remember our own vulnerabilities. There is a funny but very apt statement that I often use, which can, alas, apply to many of us: “Some people bring happiness wherever they go. Others bring happiness whenever they go!” (WFS)