“I want you to always know and remember two things: Don’t let any man make you feel less of a woman for not having a child. Having children is drudgery. It’s hard work, and you’ve other things to do in life. Two, I don’t think you’re the marrying kind. You may have as many lovers as you want. But don’t ever be compelled to get married.” -Photographer Dayanita Singh’s mother’s advice to her when she was an 18-year-old girl.
How many mothers can, even in the 21st century, advise their daughters the way Dayanita’s mother made it clear to her daughter long ago in a much more conservative India? Very few, I believe. Why is there such a stigma attached to being single, especially if the person happens to be a woman? And why is there an unnecessary emphasis on producing children to prove her womanhood as well as motherhood? Why are children de rigueur in our asinine social set-up? We’re all brainwashed with the ‘perfect partner syndrome.’ It’s terrifying to break that convention. But it’s an illusion: We’re born alone, we die alone. We’re equipped to be alone and it’s healthy and perfectly fine to be alone.
Our society always has a problem with those who choose to be single. There’s a certain stigma about being single. Why do we find it so hard to accept that being single could be someone’s conscious choice and not a situation by default or something unfortunate to have befallen them. To me, the most important decision a person takes in their life is whether to remain ‘happily unmarried’ or have a spouse, children and all that jazz. We always erroneously think that single women are pining for their own family, a husband and children, especially once they have ‘passed’ the age of marriage.
Of my 10-15 female friends, all in their late 50s and 60s, I’ve never found anyone ruing their mistake in deciding to live without a partner hanging around their necks like the dead albatross in S T Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was a thoughtful choice for them. They could have opted for a conventional marriage but instead, they chose to remain single. Yes, they have had multiple relationships but without any strings attached. I’ve always admired this free spirit of a woman. Because down the ages, men have been given or accorded to themselves the liberty to do as they please. If they can defy rules and conventions, why can’t women? Self-styled guardians of society and pseudo-moralists will cast aspersions on such women for this ‘libertine’ behaviour. It’s the courage of conviction on a woman’s part that mustn’t go unnoticed.
We are constantly placing restrictions on women. There are numerous cases of male teachers marrying their female students but apparently, the sky will fall in a vice versa situation. Why should there be such a hue and cry if a female teacher does the same? Society always looks askance at women not conforming to its conventional ways. And why should women conform? Why can’t we have more women like Neena Gupta and Simone de Beauvoir, the muse of French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre?
It’s time women emancipated themselves from their traditional roles of being wives, child-producing machines and ‘legal prostitution’. Readers will be amused to know that in Sanskrit, the word ‘ankshayani’ (who sleeps in your arms) is used for a concubine as well as for a wife. Even in Acharya P K Atre’s Marathi Shabdkosh, the word ‘angvastram’ (originally a Kannada word) is used for a wife and a ‘lesser wife’ (‘up-patni’). Shouldn’t women be free of all these derogatory roles and hail their singlehood as a triumph of their unrestricted spirit? The Arabic word ‘khasam’ for husband also means ‘enemy’ in the same language. Isn’t the husband the biggest enemy of a woman? So why should she deliberately fall into the trap of a relationship, in which her ‘soulmate’ could turn out to be her sworn enemy?
(The writer is a regular contributor to the world’s premier publications and portals in several languages)
