Abstract
For a long time within the social sciences, and more so in the context of kinship and family studies, the domestic space was arguably absent. Essentially characterised as a space for women's reproduction and often their unacknowledged labour, the domestic was bracketed off from social analysis. Domestic spaces were assumed to be natural and hence invariable. Social scientists, mostly men, then proceeded to study men's lives within the rubric of kinship studies to understand the variations in kinship arrangements, particularly those of kinship-based societies. This focus changed with feminist re-evaluations of such studies, like Jane Fishburne Collier and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako's co-edited text Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis, which contended that studying kinship must entail studying gender and paying adequate attention to women's lifeworlds (Stanford University Press, 1987). Reflections within social science disciplines concerning their embeddedness in colonial histories and their influence on what one studied and how also invigorated analysis of the hitherto ignored domestic space. These interventions have produced a nuanced picture of gender politics in domestic spaces in postcolonial nations since the last quarter of the twentieth century. I begin with this rather well-known trajectory, since Gyanendra Pandey's book Men at Home, while certainly a product of these interventions, also marks a baffling erasure of it.
In the opening chapter, “Preludes,” Pandey provides a rationale for his project – to situate men in the domestic space. In doing so, he aims to draw attention to “the physical, psychological, and emotional costs incurred by men and women” at home (3). Pandey avers that there has been considerable scholarship on domestic hierarchies in South Asia. His project is impelled by the “doggedly persistent and deeply damaging” character of these hierarches and discriminations which are compounded by “every man-made and natural disasters” (3). Pandey suggests that there has been little investigation of “the real-life, flesh-and-blood meaning of being embedded in structures of discrimination and denial in privatized, domestic spaces” (3). Later in the book, he will refer to it as the “visceral register.” Pandey chooses to illuminate this “real” and “visceral” existence at home by conducting a close reading of select autobiographies. As rich, layered, and intriguing as these autobiographies are, the author does not explicate how autobiographies are amenable resources for documentation in the “visceral” register. I am not attempting to evoke an archaic binary between real life and the written text or between the ethnographic and the archival. Yet, just as ethnographers no longer take for granted the “reality” or easy translatability of experience to analysis, leave alone their truth claims, a book premised entirely on autobiographies must first make a case for how and what in them permits access to the visceral registers of being. Pandey does not do so, at least not convincingly.
In Part 1, “Legacies,” and within a chapter titled “The Indian Modern,” Pandey argues that autobiographies are performative acts involving the presentation of desired and anticipated selves. He intends to read them for what they “aver, admit, evade and obscure about life experiences” (26). Methodologically, Pandey only fleetingly explores the relationship between lived experience, history, memory, and the performativity entailed in writing an autobiography. Pandey's claim that “women's writings reflect a different training, another sensibility and sensitivity at work than the men's—less mansplaining, more womansfeeling” needed more theoretical elaboration to actively resist the crude essentialism that may be attributed to it (26). Feminist writings have thoroughly nuanced the understanding of the gendered nature of experience and of forms of writing, and a more deliberate engagement with these ideas was perhaps, necessary.
There is also a problem of temporality. If Pandey is interested in persistence in the face of changes, as he mentions, changes as recent as COVID-19, how does he intend to map this persistence of hierarchies in the context of change by the limits set by the timeline of the autobiographies he employs for analysis? Pandey does offer us a painstaking scrutiny of male entitlement and female suffering from these autobiographies. Is this then, a historical project to underscore the persistence of male hegemony in the domestic, and if so how does it speak to the contemporary – which the author alludes to through a notion of persistence of hierarchy despite change. In simpler terms, the timeline and the intention are not very clear.
The chapter “The Indian Modern” juxtaposes literary classics like Tagore's Ghaire Baire (1915) and Attiya Hussain's Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) with autobiographies to underscore the point that the experience of home is contingent on hierarchies of caste, class, religion, and gender. Why this juxtaposition of literary classics with autobiographies? No answer. Contesting the scholarly conceptualizations that neatly demarcate the domains of home/world, inside/outside, and public/private, Pandey is invested in understanding “the world in the home” (ghar-sansar’) in the context of colonial and anti-colonial Indian modernity, from the vantage point of men. It is true that women have often been the subjects of such investigations, and to shift the lens to masculinity at home is a significant and novel intervention. For this, Pandey curates autobiographies of three internally differentiated groups – elite, respectable Hindus and often their second wives, two elite Muslim couples both of whom moved to Pakistan, and Dalits who are educated and middle class.
Many of these individuals are well known public figures such as Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Premchand, Rajendra Prasad, B.R. Ambedkar, and Baby Kamble among others. What is confounding is an attempt to use their narratives to write as Pandey claims a “history of ordinary life and ordinary people (with both phrases appearing under the sign of a question mark” (7). Who do these respectable ‘big’ people represent? To what extent can one generalize from the particular subject position of these auto-biographers to their community, or even to the nation of India? How do the particularities of these lives lend themselves to the generalities of masculine existence in colonial and postcolonial India? The subtitle of the book is “Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India.” What kind of imagination do these people represent? Whose liberation and from whom? The book does not offer clear answers. The text takes for granted and obvious what it should have taken some trouble to explicate.
In the second chapter “Homes our Fathers Built,” Pandey begins with the assertion that men built houses, while women made homes. Houses are physical structures and homes are emotional spaces. In an ambitious chapter, Pandey sets up a comparison between elite households, middle class dwellings, and the makeshift homes of the impoverished majority. For the elite inhabitants, male and female spaces at home are distinct albeit connected. Structurally, the former circumscribes the latter. There is also the elite preoccupation with invisibility and segregation from the masses. The Indian working class, on the other hand, lives in squalor with little privacy, men often sleeping outside. The chapter explores the relationship between domestic arrangement, class, and gender segregation but doesn’t really probe the masculine and feminine subjectivities entailed in house building or home making. The descriptions are interesting but the insights are predictable. The provocative title of the chapter sets a different expectation – an insight on masculinity, home-building, and men's roles as father figures is missing.
In the section titled “Practices,” the first two chapters, “Duty” and “Discipline,” would have been perfect fodder for Jessie Bernard's 1972 classic The Future of Marriage (Yale University Press). Jessie Bernard had argued how any marriage had two marriages within it, “his” marriage and “hers” and that his is always better than hers. Pandey narrates the marital lives of mostly twice (sometimes thrice) married Hindu men and their much younger brides. The gendered division of labor within homes across the caste spectrum is uniform – women support husbands, bear and take care of their children, nurse elderly family members including the rather elderly husbands, while their husbands concentrate on their careers and passions outside of the home. Some of them care about their wife's education and ambitions too, but never in a way that may jeopardize their roles as self-sacrificing mothers. To make matters worse, the public figures that Pandey selects are spectacularly self-serving men, at least in their personal lives. They withhold information about their previous marriages and affairs from their second wives until much later into their marriages, they are rarely at home, and neglectful of their household affairs. These are mostly absent husbands with a prolific public life, some of whom even philosophize about their wanderlust and freedom. This despondent patriarchal parade of occasionally benevolent men is tiresome and their lives belie the possibility of any progressive change in gender politics.
In the chapter titled “Dignity,” Pandey shifts his focus to the lower caste majority in colonial India and their experiences of the home. He declares that for the lower castes, the neighbourhood/slum was the home. Poverty, overcrowding, and a lack of privacy characterised their existence. Anti-caste assertions have always been about restoring dignity through self-respect and self-improvement. It was B.R. Ambedkar who presented the template for this process. A pioneering figure of caste reform and the Dalit movements in India, he was also the chairperson of the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution. “Educate, Agitate and Organize,” in his words, was a way out of the historical humiliation suffered by Dalit communities. Education was not simply about a degree and a respectable job, but a cultivation of self which required careful manners, articulate speech, and decent clothes. Access to education was not an easy struggle and was contingent on the sacrifice of family members. Fathers played an important role in ensuring a son got education to rise above his family station, so did mothers, sisters, wives, and in-laws. This template was gendered. It was meant for men and had women in supportive roles.
Dalit women were subject to a patriarchy different from upper caste women, and perhaps a more pernicious one. While they had to toil to make ends meet, the home was also their responsibility. Women were subject to violence by Dalit men at home and were vulnerable to assaults of an often sexual nature by upper caste men. Yet, they played an important role in anti-caste assertions. Kamble's story is particularly illuminating. Although she provided ample support to her husband's small business, she was at the receiving end of his wrath and hid her writing from him and then his son for decades, until an anthropologist later discovered it and urged her to publish. Even though Dalit men's dignity was in many ways indebted to the labour and sacrifice of countless Dalit women, that they were secondary to men was never in doubt. In Vasant Moon's life, his mother is the breadwinner who ensures that he achieves tremendous success, but his sister Malti, although married well, didn’t share her brother's glorious fate. Their mother ensured only that her son was properly educated, not her daughter. Pandey, with very few notable exceptions, chooses to introduce us to women who seem to fit patriarchal codes and rarely challenge them. Despite their many achievements, they rarely resist the weight of domestic ideologies that mar their lives.
In the final section, Pandey maps the “vestigial register” in terms of things men did or did not touch, language used, and moods unleashed on their wives. Pandey regards them as registers of male entitlement. He reminds us that men avoided “touching” routine housework even as they continued to enjoy being taken care of. Occasionally, some well-meaning upper caste men contributed meagrely to it, without upsetting women's universal burden of domestic labour. Pandey alludes to the reproductive labour that women performed in birthing multiple children, many of whom did not survive. Men had a limited role here and went about their public lives. Men, of course, managed the more important affairs of finance and procurement and provisioning for their households. Pandey points out that while this skewed division of domestic labour is mediated by class position, he acknowledges that the skewness persists and is maybe magnified among the lower castes. Pandey also mentions that men treat women as objects of sexual gratification and tries to link it with their endless pregnancies.
Pandey then focuses on “speech,” particularly the kin terms of address for spouses in Indian culture. The terms suggest a hierarchy, where the husband is an elder disciplinarian, offering patriarchally coded care and love. In spite of this, men betray a certain restlessness at home. Pandey here collapses a range of emotions from irritability, anger, frustration, rage, boredom, need to escape, even violence as symptomatic of restlessness. He sieves through interesting incidents in the lives of people he narrates which perhaps would require more nuance than reducing it to a manifestation of male ego or insecurity. Pandey is no psychologist, and his analysis here appears scant. He wraps up this section by arguing that ultimately men took for granted their place in the world and their autonomy and therefore women's place at home and their dependent role as suffering mothers. He employs Baby Kamble's concept of navrapana (husbandness) to underscore this taken for granted male entitlement.
It is the epilogue with the laterally inverted title “Ym Ylimaf” (translated as “Read my Family”) that ties the project to the personal register. Pandey's father left his first wife (like the many men we encounter throughout the book) and chose a second one. Pandey himself married twice. Against this epilogue, the preceding chapters are either illuminated as a somewhat nuanced yet perambulating self-exploration amidst similarly placed men, or a somewhat tiresome exercise in navel gazing. It is for the reader to choose. What is more interesting however, is that Jessie Bernard, in her 2002 chapter “The Husband's Marriage and the Wife's Marriage,” published in Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott's co-edited volume Gender: A Sociological Reader (Routledge) had noted, last century, that despite the hostilities that men betray against marriage, marriage is good for them. She also noted that men who married once, were also likely to marry twice. If Pandey's book is any indication, then he stylishly convinces us that not much has changed.