(En)gendering Discussion: In Conversation with Manjari Sahay

Devashree Somani and Neha Mehrotra, Class of 2018

Manjari Sahay, a student in the Ashoka Scholar Program, sent out a simple one-question survey to the student body on 30th October. With the promise of anonymity, she implored women on campus to reply to the following question: “Are you afraid to mention/speak up about gender-related concerns on the Ashoka Undergraduates Facebook group or on campus at large?”. Within a week, she released the results of the survey, which showed that 36.8% of the respondents did feel afraid to speak up about gender-related concerns. Third-year undergraduate Neha Mehrotra sat down with her to ask her about the survey, and about her opinions of gender politics at Ashoka University at large.

Find the full interview here.

Please find below the transcript of the entire interview. Any edits made were only for clarity’s sake.

Neha: What motivated you to send out the survey that you did?

Manjari: Well, I guess one answer to this question would be that it was my experience of gender at Ashoka and in the world. But I suppose people like finding a more immediate point [because of] which I decided to do this. I guess the push for me was the post that Arush [Pande, Class of 2019] put on the Facebook group, about the whole egg-throwing incident and how his claim was that it was an act that reeks of male-entitlement and typically something that men do.

But, anyway, I don’t want to get into the post as much as what concerned me were the responses to that post. And I think what I found really disturbing was that firstly, most of the people commenting on that post were men. Secondly, they seemed to have no problem with claiming what are gendered and non-gendered acts for women. Thirdly, they thought it was okay to claim what the larger issues of gender are for women. And, honestly, I am not somebody who has any problem with boys kind of giving their two cents, but what disturbed me was the skewed ratio of the men and women commenting or voicing their opinion on the subject. I just couldn’t understand why no women would want to say anything. Or why they wouldn’t want to kind of “own their own experiences” — for the lack of a better phrase.

But on some level, I mean, I had an inkling which was confirmed when I had conversations with girls the next day, and a lot of them would kind of come up to me and just be like, “You know, we completely agreed with what you were saying or what Arush was saying. But we’re sorry, we couldn’t voice our support vocally.” Or they would send him private messages being like, “We’re in complete agreement, but we’re sorry [we can’t say anything publicly].” So I wondered how many women felt like they needed to keep checking themselves and what they say, and how many of them experience this inability to voice their views publicly. Especially on a platform like Facebook but also, more generally, on campus on issues of gender, given the kind of an environment that exists or is known to exist when somebody does bring this issue up. So, I think that was what motivated me to send out the survey. I really just wanted to get a sense of how big of a problem this may or may not be, or if it’s a problem at all.

Neha: When you got the results back, where you surprised [by] what you saw? What did you expect?

Manjari: Yes and no. I was not surprised that these had been the experiences of women because, of course, I’ve had some of those experiences myself, and I have had in-person conversations with girls. But what did surprise me was the anger in those comments and just how much they had, kind of, kept to themselves so much so that it had come to the surface in this particular way. So, I was surprised at not the fact that they had had the experiences that they had stated but the fact that a) they had felt that the only way that [this was the only way] they could voice it, and [b)] that when they did chose to voice it in this anonymous way, there [would be] so much anger in their voices.

Neha: The response rate — how many responses did you get?

Manjari: I think there were 133 responses, which is alarming given that, I think, if we have about nine hundred to a thousand students of both undergraduate students and [Ashoka Scholar Program] students, then at least five hundred of them should be women, if we assume half-and-half, even though there are more women [in these programs] than there are men. But the response rate was only about, say, 133, and in that way it’s not necessarily a representative survey. But, I think, the reason for that could’ve very easily just been the fact that, you know, whether or not women have this anonymous platform, often there are so many forces acting on them that stop them even before they get to responding to the survey. For example, if I’m a girl and I’m just sitting at a dining table, and I hear one of my male friends being like, “Oh, have you heard of the survey sent out by this feminazi?” Then, of course, I’m instantly going to be like, “Okay, maybe if I try to respond to that survey, maybe my friends won’t think I’m so cool.”

Neha: It’s just like a slow conditioning.

Manjari: Yeah. I mean, obviously, there’s a kind of want for social-sexual acceptance, but also a sense of apathy that I think really does exist at Ashoka, which is that, “the survey doesn’t matter; my response doesn’t matter. The problem is so great that nothing I do matters.” I feel like that’s a problem I’ve noticed, especially amongst senior girls, this total feeling of apathy, where they’re just like, “We don’t know what can be done anymore”. And, among junior girls it’s a lot of fear, that will eventually turn into apathy. And I think that has something to do with the response rate.

Neha: So, did you go through the responses alone, or did you do it with someone? Because [they] must’ve been really draining to go through.

Manjari: Yeah… I felt like it was something that I had to do alone, mostly to preserve the anonymity of the respondents. I didn’t want anybody who was reading it with me to know who had given what response. I feel like if they have chosen to respond, they’re placing their trust in me, and not me and my closest friends. So I did feel that sense of responsibility where I was like, “Okay, I need to do this by myself.” But, of course, it was a deeply emotional experience for me because there’s a way in which you know these things exist, but when you read them you realise how palatable they are and how real these experiences are. Of course, I did have to seek out my friends after doing the reading, and be like “I can’t believe the world is this way,” even though, of course, the world is this way. And I needed that emotional support afterwards. But during the process, I just thought that it was a better idea to do it by myself.

Neha: So, since the four years that you’ve been at Ashoka, have you noticed a sort of change in the gender politics that you’ve seen on campus?

Manjari: I think it’s playing out on a much larger scale now, given that there are more students. And even though there are more girls on campus, I think a cultural problem — which has always existed; I’m not going to say it’s the new batches that brought it with them. It’s, say, girls being talked over in classes or the general disregard for their occupation of public space versus your own. These problems, I think, have always kind of been there but they’ve obviously grown as the size of this place has grown.

Then what becomes shocking, given that all this time has passed and there are so many more students now, is that there is still a total lack of a student-led response to things like this. It’s the fact that we need faculty members to tell us that we need to have a town hall on something in order for us to discuss it. That nobody feels like this is a problem, or that the only time they talk about it is to say that, “Bro, stop making a big issue out of this.” So I think that the problem has become more glaring, for me personally, and it has become more disappointing, but I don’t think the problem itself has changed fundamentally.

Neha: What do you think qualify as gendered acts versus non-gendered acts?

Manjari: [laughs] Wow, I’m going to get so much shit for this, but — so I guess I just come from the school of thought, and my education leads me to believe, that we exist in a political world, which is to say that we exist in a world that is not devoid of power dynamics. Power plays out in a lot of different ways, often mediated by social structures of gender, caste, class, and so on and so forth. And so I think when two people of different or same genders are together, there exists a power dynamic between them which can be gendered. So I feel like there is a potential for almost all acts, given that we all have genders, unless we choose to identify otherwise — although that is also a political move — that all of these have the potential to be gendered. So I will not concede that such a thing as a non-gendered act exists, because we don’t exist in a vacuum. To say that there is such a thing as a non-gendered act, I think, is an extremely privileged claim to make because then you haven’t really had to feel the weight of your gender or the weight of another person’s gender; it’s just been a bit of a non-consideration for you, and the fact that you haven’t had to consider of it says something.

Neha: What are some of the ways in which you think women’s voices are being policed on campus, and, to some extent, are the women doing it to themselves? What is it primarily that seems to be policing women’s voices on campus?

Manjari: I mean, as step one, I don’t think campus is devoid of the the world that it exists in. And I know we like to assert that Ashoka is a bubble, but this is one of the ways in which it is not a bubble — which is to say that the gender dynamics that you see outside, you’ll find here as well. The problem is not outside Ashoka, the problem is not in Assawarpur, the problem is here, too. There is a way in which we exist in a larger ecosystem. And so problems of gender, which pertain to, say, women not feeling like they can speak publicly as much, or low women representation, etc. you find the world over and of course you find here as well.

But I feel like there haven’t been enough remedial measures to help women overcome things like that, because there is a way in which we have been conditioned our whole lives to stay silent, to listen, to obey. And, while there is a way in which our classroom education pushes us against that, there is only so far it can take us if there isn’t something outside the classroom that is helping us as well. And the problem then exists at the larger level of student discourse; so whether it’s in smaller actions like how we treat our women friends, how we talk about girls, locker room talk — whatever that is supposed to be — or the kind of space we let them occupy, how dismissive we are of their concerns we they do voice them without realizing that, you know what, that’s their lived experience. These are all ways in which they are policed, and of course we come to internalize those ways, because how could we not? You don’t even want to let yourself get that far where someone else has to police you. You say, “Okay, so, in order to make myself more palatable for everybody involved, let me just police myself.” And that’s the easiest way to exist way in the world. But that’s it then, you’re just existing.

Neha: So, is there something about the structures at Ashoka, take the political parties for example — very scant female representation. Why is that? Because these are… I mean, is there something about the structures of these bodies that limits their participation? Or is it just a general thing?

Manjari: I think political parties, some of them at least, I don’t know if I can speak for all. You know what, I’m not going to speak for all. Some of them have been proactive in recruiting women and giving them an equal platform. I know that the political party that I am a part of has really given me space where I can voice my opinion.

But there exists a problem, obviously, at the level of these women being taken seriously by the people who are voting for them. I’ve heard of instances where when a girl is standing for elections, for example, her sex life becomes the point at which you’re like, “Okay, you know, this doesn’t make her a great candidate. How good a political representative could she possibly be, given the how much sex she’s having?” That’s never a question that arises with a boy. I mean, I really hope that the male candidates from these parties are also having a lot of sex, but it’s not something that anybody considers, right?

And so, I think, the problem lies at the level of perception. I think political parties have tried, historically speaking. But these women are just not getting voted in. Even if most of our lists are women, people will systematically overlook the women on the lists and will vote for the men. Because men are seen as the thinkers, the occupiers of public space. And it’s their opinions that are valued in a certain way. When women representatives do actually come into the house, there are like four, every year. They’re either, you know, fetishized — which is to say that this one really enigmatic female leader — and sexualized in this very odd way. Or they’re seen as these kind of stuck-up prudes that not nobody really wants to listen to. They invite an eyeroll, like, every single time. So, at every step of political representation women are fighting some battle or the other, in order to be taken seriously, and that’s pretty unfair.

Interviewer: Okay. Thank you so much for your time.

Manjari: Great. Thank you!