An individual can’t exist alone as he/she has to have a visible and invisible complex network of social relations which is partly given and partly self-created. Such a network on the one hand mediates a modicum of existential success and on the other ensures the continuity of individual’s relevance in social life. But individual is not something that necessarily implies one and the same thing as class and gender generally define what an individual actually is in concrete terms.

Class and gender are most important markers of an individual. Gender is usually a crucial factor that can override class. A poor man has greater agency than a rich woman in terms of an array of choices, social mobility, freedom of action and personal liberties. All this because of gender. Structure influences and restrains the both but the woman more as is evident in our cultural practices and social history. Perception and subsequent behaviour born of gender distinctions are so deep-rooted that the phenomenon has etched its subliminally illusive presence in the innards of language which apparently appears to be neutral human tool evolved to understand ourselves and the world we live surrounded by.

Language, in fact, is the most stubborn carrier of hard to notice prejudices and biases of our long past arising out of racial, ethnic, gender, class and religious differences. As the underlying phenomenon is universal, all languages suffer from this cultural malaise. The Punjabi language is no exception. To illustrate the point we will take just two words namely ‘Randi’ and ‘Gashti’ which show how these words have come to denote the opposite of what they originally connoted. ‘Randi’ has indigenous roots as it’s found in both Punjabi and Hindi. ‘Randi’ or ‘Rand’ originally meant a woman, a widow. But later it also assumed the following meanings: a dishonourable woman, a whore, a slut, a harlot etc. It seems worth probing why and how the word “Randi/widow” took on such meanings through a process of pejoration.

How the phenomenon of a helpless woman who needed compassion and care after having lost her husband turned into its opposite? How a widow was perceived and taken as a cunning whore is painful story of outlandish dictates of patriarchy and male chauvinism.

In the subcontinent women have not been and still are not to a large extent independent economic beings which has created a culture of dependence as a safety net for them. An unmarried woman had to rely on her father or other male members of the family for her material needs as well as social protection. After marriage, mostly arranged, it was husband who took care of her needs, material and immaterial. Once her husband died she lost her economic cover and social safety net. Husbandless she became highly vulnerable. Her economic insecurity further weakened her social safeguards seemingly rendering her a quarry that could be hunted without fear of incurring punitive action.

The maxim that portrays the hunting of widows as an irresistible game goes thus: “Randi wassay jay lok wassan deway [widow can lead her life honourably if people/town allow her to do so]”.

In other words, a woman can’t live a life of dignity if she is not overshadowed by a man, be he her father, brother, husband or son. So a woman without her so-called traditional protector, husband in this case, becomes a female who can be taken liberty with and consequently be demonised as a whore. It’s not the widow who willingly turns into a whore but rather a situation in a patriarchy-ridden society involving economic and cultural factors that forces a vulnerable woman to be perceived as whore or be taken as one.

Linguistic construction makes no such a fine distinction as it makes the very word “Randi [widow]” a term of abuse that disparagingly describes a woman who is otherwise a respectable being. The language thus causes a hurt to women who lose their husband for no fault of theirs and do not necessarily do what is imputed to them as a result of predatory and lustful perception of lascivious males.

Another word that’s used to describe woman is “Gashti”, a word borrowed from Persian, which originally meant patrol, watch, sentinel etc. But now the word is frequently used for a call girl, loose woman, hussy, a whore etc. A person or a group that goes out to do some assigned duty, or is mobile, or is on the move or simply loafs around connotes freedom of movement and a measure of independence. But it’s revealing that if a woman goes out unaccompanied or independently in a public space she is dubbed “Gashti”, literally meaning woman on the move but in the derived meaning a call girl or hussy or whore. It implies in no uncertain terms that a woman who dares to defy the tradition of being tied down to hearth and home and asserts her right to be free in her movements risks being dubbed “Gashti” by males who believe it’s their birthright to control her in her movements.

In other words, it’s not a woman’s whorish action that creates a whore but rather her urge to be independent and desire to gain agency earns her this execrable epithet of “Gashti”. Social mobility in case of women is equated with negation of self and thus a dishonourable act. In an obnoxiously odious male-dominated society a woman’s struggle to be a free autonomous individual ends up with the opposite of intended meanings; instead of being accepted as a person fighting for freedom, she is slapped unjustifiably with the harshest punishment of being out of the moral fold of society. There is hardly any distinction made between being her indoor and outdoor in the instances referred to above. In both the cases a woman is perceived the same, a dishonourable person.

So the fight for gender dignity has to be waged at two levels, social and linguistic. What happens in the social realm shapes the linguistic constructions. Linguistic constructions in turn tend to re-enforce the acceptance of social practices by apparently making them logical. Social transformation is no doubt hard to come by but transforming linguistic habits is even harder.

Language is sluggish as it takes long to form a construction and even longer to shed it. We need to expand the limits of our world by transforming the limits of our understanding of social actions of male and female through forging linguistic expressions free of judgment and biases of a particular gender.

The prescription for the restoration of female dignity may have unsettling side effects, for all the male chauvinists at least, but no placebo will do. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2019