Through the Past, Darkly

Through the Past, Darkly
By Paromita Vohra

Last week Sunny Leone was interviewed by Bhupendra Chaubey and Mr Chaubey came out looking embarrassingly bad. Or as one feminist e-zine put it, behaved liked a total Uncle while Ms. Leone looked on with an amused smile at him uncling all over himself.

In a landmark of gormless interviewing, where he brought on an impressive repertoire of leers and jeers, Mr. Chaubey also kept using a terrifically retro term, as he kept asking Ms. Leone about “your past”, darkly.

The insinuatingly muttered, ‘woman with a past’ was once the euphemism and allegation of choice for women who had had sex without marriage.

This past could be acquired through being sold into or choosing prostitution, being raped, being divorced or deserted by a husband, being carried away by passion and trusting the lover enough to believe that sex would lead to marriage and then being jilted or, gasp, having a child out of wedlock. It didn’t matter how it happened. Sex had been done to the female body, for, apparently, the female body was a passive land waiting to be conquered, plundered, discarded and then rehabilitated by those with a passion for proving themselves reform-minded.

Somehow only women had 'a past'. Men in this narrative, only seemed to have a present, perhaps the reason why some misinterpreted this to mean they were God’s gift to women. Indeed some of them did gift themselves to women with 'a past' and countless Indian films depicted them as noble – take Pakeezah, Sadhana, Tawaif, Kya Kehna or Baaghi, which began with the preface "In this year of the girl child, we dedicate our film to those women, who have been victimised by lust and greed and are subjected to social rejection and also laud those who strived to uplift them."

In such stories the woman would always weep on being thus chosen, unable to believe that "aapki nazron ne samjha, pyar ke kaabil mujhe" and would strongly try to dissuade the man from this act of selfdestructive nobility. The man was no ordinary man, but ‘devta.’ “Main aap ke kaabil nahin” she would utter – I am not worthy of you, because, yes ‘a past.’

That’s the past of the term “the past.”

It’s true that these stories did in a sense present love as something that can challenge and change social norms through its ability to propel acts of transgression. But in this definition of love the woman was passive, waiting to be chosen by the man who was noble and heroic in wanting to uplift her. They did not present love as mutually transformative.

We’ve traveled some distance from this thinking today as single women and men become not only lovers but also friends, learning to understand and see each other as people, with desires and histories, not ‘pasts’; as they engage with each other as multidimensional people, who also happen to be sexual, not just flattened representatives of gender ideas and ideals. More and more, we shake off that gaze of morality.

On the other hand the idea of ‘he for she’ — he who will protect women, always from sexual violence, not so much say, domestic violence — runs strong around us, telling us a parallel truth about gender, sex and love. Mr. Chaubey represented the most base element of this thinking when he kept harping on Ms. Leone’s work in porn films as her ‘past’, but the MARD style campaigns featuring our groovy lover boy heroes are really sophisticated extensions of that same thinking. It’s time to turn a Sunny smile on those too, in the name of love.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own. The opinions and facts expressed here do not reflect the views of Mirror and Mirror does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.