In 1939, almost 85 years ago, Rabindranath Tagore wrote the poem Narir Kartavya (Women’s Duties). It is a rather long poem where Tagore describes minutely the culinary skills and ceaseless kitchen work of women, comprising shredding, slicing, chopping to boiling, kneading and frying along with micro-management of the home.

However, Tagore’s comments in the concluding part of the poem Narir Kartavya, may seem transgressive even in our contemporary times. The poet who was 78 years old in 1939, wrote,

Advertisement

“If at all women do ever read books.

Their hearts and minds should remain unmoved

Why new books. Buy the new panjika

And let the book touch the head in reverence

On every auspicious day.

Then there are those rhymes in the Panchali

The intellect will be blanketed

With scripts of national culture

But now perversity has stepped in;

The Bengali woman wears the chemise

By passing BA, MA exams

They are spreading the seeds of

Rational thinking; what utter westernization

Religion and religious practices lie devastated.

Neglecting Mother Sitala they vaccinate themselves

“during the eclipse bathing in the Ganga waters cleanses all sins”

Hearing this they laugh like fools!

‘Narir Kartabya’ Rabindranath Tagore 1939

 Let us turn to the immediate present. Recently the United Nations declared,

“2025 is the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide. On 8 March 2025, join us to celebrate International Women’s Day under the theme, “For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”

This year’s theme calls for accelerating action that can unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all and a feminist future where no one is left behind. Central to this vision is empowering the next generation—youth, particularly young women and adolescent girls—as catalysts for lasting change”

In 2019 in my write-up published in The Statesman, on the IWD,  I had observed, “The International Women’s Day observed on March 8th each year is a shake-up call, it is a gender sensitization day, it is a day not about women’s exclusivity or exceptionalism, IWD is about gender inclusiveness and gender equality, it is not about stimulating the negative vibes of misandry and misogyny.

But then this is the era of cultural and economic globalization. Women who are even moderately affluent, educated, employed or are homemakers, who have some dispensable monetary resources will dress up with greater care on this special day for women, globally and locally. So, on 8th March women worldwide will be persuaded to pamper themselves by visiting beauty parlours, spas, shopping malls, elite restaurants and resorts. Needless to add, generous discount packages will be offered.  In India, the attractive advertisements will mostly be worded in English, with sizzling fair-skinned women beaming from hoardings and television ad breaks”.

So, in 2025, it is time to ponder whether women themselves are interested in securing their independence from patriarchal control and their dependency on institutions such as marriage, family and organized religion that glorify women’s self-effacement rather than self-empowerment? Has the education system in both the Global North and Global South been able to erase systemic patriarchal conditioning?

We are witness to huge advertisements hoardings where smiling women from rural India are made to pose with cooking gas cylinders and women in urban and suburban India are seen to beam merrily, clad in fancy western or ethnic clothes streaming chains of gold, diamonds and precious stones. There is a remarkable resemblance in the body weight, the rural often veiled women are as thin as the women on jewellery hoardings. The first presumably remarkably thin due to dietary imbalance and malnutrition and the latter due to rigorous gym stints and dieting, apart from smearing the body with every possible fruit and flower juice.

Let us move from the empirical to the epistemic violence consolidated by patriarchy. In the world of academia, the unquestioned acceptance of patriarchal texts that poison young minds is common. So, Shakespeare’s Othello murdering Desdemona in full view of the audience is regarded as a moment of tragic thrill and chill. Generations of students of the English departments of Indian universities have answered examination questions about the play Othello as a domestic tragedy, but very rarely if at all, have questions been framed about the gruesome demonstration of domestic violence and murder on stage. Othello’s suicide was inevitable of course.

A few more evidence of texts innocuously representing domestic violence in the English literature undergraduate and postgraduate syllabi, may not be out of place. Take for instance Robert Browning’s poem Porphyria’s Lover. The affluent, love-besotted girl, takes unimaginable risks to meet her manic-depressive lover. Her lover believes she ‘worships’ him. To permanently secure this adulatory love of complete surrender and abjection Porphyria is strangled to death with her own long luxurious hair, by her lover. He smugly declares in the stunning concluding line of the poem, “all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound

Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her” … and yet God has not said a word”.

Instead of titling the poem “Porphyria’s Murder” or “How to Murder your Beloved Easily” Browning in his phallogocentric wisdom preferred to title the poem “Porphyria’s Lover”. Maybe as a case study for Sigmund Freud.  In fact, Robert Browning seemed quite fascinated by female homicide. In a dramatic monologue, also included in the English syllabi, titled, “My Last Duchess” the jealous duke, the same Othello syndrome, declares unabashedly, “I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together”.

However, one of the most classic pieces of evidence of misogynistic poetry is the 18th century poet Alexander Pope’s long poem The Rape of the Lock. It is embarrassing even to ponder on the undisputed fact that for decades in English departments of Indian universities both male and female professors, ace intellectuals, have taught and explicated the poem line by line, as a classic mock-heroic burlesque poem. Train the trainer gender sensitization courses are obviously necessary. This is the stark fact even after the awareness created by the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s that led to the establishment of Women’s Studies Research Centres at many universities. The fact that the inclusion of such sexist, patronising, patriarchal texts in the syllabi have hardly raised resistance from even female faculty members, till date, as far as I know, is truly disturbing.

Let us now turn from cultural representations of women to the recent findings of the United Nations that had announced that the 5th sustainable development goal for the period 2015-2030 would be gender equality. How we have fared in this respect, from the study of available data till 2024 presents a very bleak future in terms of women’s roles and identities. The UN report states, ““Even as globalization has brought millions of women into paid labour, the number of women in the workforce is far behind that of men. Gender inequalities have also concentrated women at the bottom of the global value chain — in the lowest paid jobs, in piece-rate, subcontracted work, and insecure forms of self-employment, with little or no access to decent work and social protection. Women are half the world’s potential and unleashing it requires access to decent, good-quality paid work as well as gender-sensitive policies and regulations, such as adequate parental leave and flexible hours. The economics make sense, too: If women played an identical role in labour markets to that of men, as much as US$28 trillion, or 26 per cent, could be added to the global annual Gross Domestic Product by 2025.”

In India, women’s participation in the work force clearly illustrates that though the ratio of women working is the organized sectors is dismal, while the ratio of women working in the unorganized sectors is higher than that of men. This obviously includes the unpaid domestic labour of both urban and rural women, slyly romanticised as labour of love. Here are a few findings from recent studies that state,

“As per the official information, the percentage of women employed in key sectors such as Army, Navy and Air Force is about 3.97 per cent, 6 per cent and 13.69 per cent, respectively, as of 2022. Further, the share of women scientists in total scientists in India is only 16.6 per cent, as of 2018, though it has marginally increased from 12 per cent in the year 2000. Furthermore, as per the 07 December 2023 reply given in Rajya Sabha, the total number of women judges in the Supreme Court and High Courts is 3 and 111, respectively. This is about 10 per cent and 14 per cent of the total number of judges appointed in both the judicial bodies, respectively. Similarly, the percentage of women in the police force as of 2020 is about 10.3 per cent.”

Women have proved themselves as superb multi-taskers and have excelled in work-home balance unlike their male compatriots. Yet, the obsessive pressure of marriage and children, compulsory cooking and care giving to senior members of the family and children along with the husband who becomes completely infantile post marriage.   It seems women will have to wait for another 1000 years to gain possession of a room of their own that they can lock or open at will, unless as urged by the United Nations on 8 March, 2025, women take the pledge to Accelerate Action – the time starts NOW.