India (66 page)

The editor of a rival magazine, one of those damaged by
Woman’s Era
, said, ‘
Woman’s Era
is naive right through. It is the first magazine of its kind in India to cater for this new group.’

How did she define this new group?

‘It has now acquired a bit of affluence, embraced consumerism. It has a bit of education. But this education has been circumscribed by their traditional thinking and by their family’s old beliefs – it’s a kind of non-education, a kind of parrot education.’

The bookshop in the Bombay hotel didn’t stock
Woman’s Era
. The woman assistant made it clear that she didn’t like even being asked for it. I bought a copy from a pavement magazine-seller. My first impression was that the magazine was dull. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I might have missed it in the pavement seller’s display. It was well produced but undistinctive, with an unprovocative young woman’s face on the glazed-newsprint cover: carefully made up but unprovocative, a woman’s view of a woman. And if, without knowing the magazine’s reputation, I had looked through its pages, almost nothing would have stayed with me.

The main article, six pages long, with posed colour photographs, was about ‘bride-seeing’. This is the custom whereby, before a marriage is finally arranged, a party from the boy’s family visits the girl’s family house, and the girl is shown to the visitors and put through her paces. Ashok, the business executive I had got to know in Calcutta, had felt so humiliated by his own experience of bride-seeing that he had decided not to do it again. He had done his own courting and made his own proposal, and kept his family out of it. Ashok could do that; he could look after himself. Not many readers of
Woman’s Era
were in that position, and the attitude of
Woman’s Era
to bride-seeing was quite different. Most marriages were arranged, the writer of the article said. As long as this was so, bride-seeing was the best way of introducing the girl to the boy; and it was not as demeaning as some people said.

The article was, in fact, an article of advice to girls and their families about the best way of dealing with the occasion. In the first place, a girl shouldn’t feel rejected, the writer says, if after a bride-seeing a boy says no. It may be only that the ‘demand’ – the financial demand – of the boy’s family is too much for the girl’s family. To prevent that kind of misunderstanding, it is important for the girl’s parents to check out the boy and his family thoroughly, before the invitation to view. The girl’s parents should visit the boy several times. One tip the article-writer gives to the girl’s parents is to see, when they are in the boy’s house, whether servants, children, and pets like the boy.

For the bride-seeing occasion itself, the girl shouldn’t wear too much make-up or jewelry. She shouldn’t boast, and she shouldn’t say she can do things which she can’t do. Nor should the parents try to appear better-off than they are; some families, the writer says, even borrow furniture to make a show. Then there is the question of dignity. The girl and her family are the suitors on such occasions; the boy and his family have to be won over. But: The girl’s parents should not behave in an ingratiatingly humble and servile manner.’ Easy enough to say; but how, in the circumstances of a bride-seeing, can the girl’s family keep their dignity? The writer makes one suggestion. ‘Some families insist that the girl touch the feet of every boy and his parents who come to see her. This practice is deplorable, goes against the basic human dignity, and is best avoided.’

Still, the unfairness of the procedure remains. “Why can’t the boy sit in
his
drawing-room, nicely groomed and smelling of aftershave, with his head bent and his academic qualifications, job certificates, etc., in his hands?” ’ To that complaint of a girl, which the writer of the article quotes, there is no reply. Except this: if a girl doesn’t want to go out husband-hunting on her own – ‘and believe me, in our society it is an extremely difficult game’ – then the girl has to put up with the bride-seeing visits. ‘If the boy’s people put on airs and act uppity, they can be forgiven, for tradition and thousands of years of social behaviour have gone into it.’

Later, after I had met Vishwa Nath in Delhi, I could see a little of his passion and iconoclasm in that last sentence. But without that knowledge, the sentiment appeared simply archaic, an acceptance of old ways because they were the old ways and the best ways. And, with that acceptance stated or implied (sometimes with a take-it-or-leave-it tone), the article got on with its business, which was to give the kind of instruction that might come from some worldly-wise person within the family. Dress modestly for the bride-seeing; mind what you say; watch out for trap questions from the boy’s family; be respectful towards older members of the boy’s family, and affectionate with the children.

Instruction, instruction of the simplest sort – that appeared to dictate the tone of the magazine. That appeared to be the need the magazine was meeting. The customs, like bride-seeing, might be old; but the world in which they were being practised was new;
and in this world the readers of the magazine appeared to be starting almost from scratch.

‘Personal Hygiene’ was a long article in the same issue of the magazine. It was illustrated with a photograph of a girl bending over a sink and throwing water at her face, and the advice it offered was of the most elementary kind. There was a little flick of irreligion at the very beginning of the text, but to spot it you had to be in the know. ‘Today, of course, whether one believes in godliness or not is not a matter of such grave concern, as is the fact that many of us fail to adopt cleanliness and personal hygiene as our chosen religion.’ Cumbersome, even imprecise; but the point of the article was the clear and simple hygiene lesson.

There is no harm in getting dirty, but the problem arises only when we like to stay dirty … The importance of keeping our body and our surroundings clean and orderly cannot be stressed over much. Their direct result is good health, peace of mind and happiness.’ To be clean, to be ‘tidy’, was to avoid infections, and that meant spending less on doctors and medicines: it was, therefore, to avoid a certain amount of financial worry.

Stage by stage, then, taking nothing for granted, the writer took the reader through the problems, in India, of personal hygiene. ‘An orderliness of the surroundings is the first and essential step.’ ‘Orderliness’ – a euphemism. ‘Surroundings’ – a strange word, but clearly ‘house’ or ‘apartment’ wouldn’t have suited everyone’s living space. So we begin to understand that the living conditions of the people for whom this article is meant are not always good. Some of the readers of this article would be at the very margin, would just be making do.

Water is important, the article says; enough of it should be available. India is a warm country, and a bath once or twice a day is necessary, ‘accompanied by a thorough and strong but gentle scrubbing, using soap and lukewarm water’. After the washing of the body, the washing of clothes. ‘Clothes which have once become wet with perspiration should be washed well before they are worn again … Cleanliness of the undergarments is extremely important as these are worn next to the skin. If they are used continuously without changing, they are likely to cause irritation of the skin, or more serious conditions.’ A full-page advertisement opposite the last page of text is for an anti-lice treatment. Daughter embraces mother; they both smile at the camera. ‘She trusts me with all her
problems … and I trust only Mediker with her lice problem.’ (Lice! No wonder the young woman in the hotel bookstore made a face when I asked for
Woman’s Era.
)

Simple instruction – it made for dullness, if you were on the outside. And the stories – there were five in the issue – were like fables. A fat woman goes with her husband on a posting to Korea. She is nervous of the hotel food. She fancies that the mutton is really dog-meat and the noodles are worms. She eats salad and yoghurt and a little rice for two months; she loses weight and becomes another, better person. The rich young Indian businessman, back in India to look for a wife, is frightened away by the flashy girl he had been expected to marry; instead, he chooses the humble, orphaned cousin who has been living with the girl’s family as a kind of servant. In another story the rich husband is completely won over by the simple goodness of the poor-relation aunt whom his wife is trying to hide. Simple goodness – it is the quality most people in these
Woman’s Era
stories turn out to have. There are references in the magazine to women reading romances, especially the English romances published by Mills and Boon. But the love that matters in these stories is family love rather than romantic love.

Family love, articles of simple instruction on unglamorous subjects, advertisements for a Procter and Gamble lice-treatment, advertisements for antiseptic creams, water-heaters: there was nothing here to exercise the fantasy, to encourage longing. Who would ever have thought that this was the formula for a best-selling women’s magazine?

Gulshan Ewing was one of the most famous women’s magazine editors in India. She became the editor of
Eve’s Weekly
in 1966, and took it to its great success in the late 1970s.

At dinner in Bombay one evening, speaking informally of the
Woman’s Era
phenomenon, before she knew (or I knew) that I was going to take a greater interest in the subject of women’s magazines, Mrs Ewing described the kind of new reader women’s magazines in India had to reach out to. This reader did a job. She got up early, looked after her family, got them off to school and work, and then went out to work herself, in an office, perhaps. At half-past five she left her office. On the way to the bus stop or railway station she bought the vegetables for the evening meal, and cut them up on the way home.

I was attracted by that detail of the cutting up of the vegetables on the train home. But it took only one or two suburban train journeys for me to understand that in Bombay the detail was romantic, a vision of pastoral, that suburban trains were so crowded that, far from cutting vegetables on her train, the woman office worker would have had to fight – hard – to get on the train. Later I read a whole story in
Woman’s Era
about a girl becoming separated from her sister during a scrimmage to get on a suburban train.

Mrs Ewing admitted the fantasy when I went to see her some days later in her office. She had simply wanted, she said, to describe the position of the Indian working woman in the cities. I might have thought that she was being merely witty in her description; but the life of the working woman was not funny.

‘We’ve talked to these people, and friends of these people. We’ve had feedback. And what generally happens is that she – the working woman – she’s up at the crack of dawn, about five, to fill the water for the day. We don’t have 24-hours’ running water in most houses. Water comes on early in the morning, goes off all day, and returns in the late evening for an hour or under a couple of hours. That’s in the lower-middle-class areas. So when she gets up – tubs, barrels, whatever she can get hold of, she fills. Then she does the morning chores, filling the tiffin-carriers for husband and children, after giving them tea, breakfast, whatever. It’s mainly she who does it. Then she’s off to work herself. A very long train journey in a crowded train, usually. She hardly gets a seat.’

‘What kind of job would her husband have?’

‘A clerk, a bank employee. A middle-level job in a factory, earning about 1000 to 1500 rupees. Her job would be anything from 600 to 1000.’

‘That sounds hard.’

‘Very hard. It’s not funny at all. She’s away from the children the whole day. She gets off from her office at 5.30 or six. She might first take a bus to the station. Or – this is more harrowing – she might have to take a bus all the way home. There are mile-long queues for the bus sometimes. When I pass I often wonder when they are ever going to get a bus. Before getting to the bus or station she would buy her vegetables or whatever she needs. Her vegetables are there, in her little
thela
, a carrier bag.

‘And then she gets home. And before having her own cup of tea,
she has to give one to her own lord and master, who’s probably sitting with his feet up, already at the television. Ten to one, in spite of the low earning, they have a television. Then the dinner, then a bit of the children’s homework – if she’s capable of doing that. Her day would end late. She would have to do the washing up. Then she has to think of the water again.’

‘How do they keep going?’

This is their lot, their destiny. They believe this is how it has to be for them. I’m not necessarily describing the reader of
Eve’s Weekly
or
Woman’s Era
. I’m just making the point of how sad such women can be with so much drudgery in their lives.’

Women in such circumstances needed special magazines. Simple mimicry of European or American magazines wasn’t what was required. The idea of glamour might even be wrong.

Mrs Ewing said, The only difference between the middle readership of
Eve’s Weekly –
which might be secretaries – and the readership of
Woman’s Era
is language.
Woman’s Era
uses more simplistic language and talks down to the woman. A fascinating explanation of the success of
Woman’s Era
was given to me the other day. The women who read
Woman’s Era
are really intimidated by magazines. They’d rather pick up magazines like
Woman’s Era
that don’t make them feel uncomfortable. But I’m optimistic that that kind of reactionary woman’s journalism will be on the way out. When we’ – she meant
Eve’s Weekly
– ‘write about bride-inspecting, we get all het-up. And we tell the woman, the girl, that she doesn’t have to go through this. But she can only revolt if she is educated enough to be economically independent at some later stage.’

That was the point: that for a girl or woman from that background, with that education, living in those ‘surroundings’, the idea of revolt was fantasy.
Woman’s Era
was addressed to those women. And so the magazine which had at first appeared so characterless to me, so dull, began to say more, began to create a whole new world of India, a whole new section of urban Indian society which wouldn’t have been easy for me to get to know.