Three years ago, Deepika Padukone’s My Choice video produced for Vogue opened up the Pandora’s box of ‘choice’. Cut to the present, where her character as Rani Padmavati in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s infamous movie Padmaavat has reopened the debate again. Co-writers of the film Siddharth-Garima have penned a blog piece in response to actor Swara Bhasker’s scathing, well-worded open letter titled, ‘At the end of your magnum opus…I felt reduced to a vagina — only’. A line from the duo’s response, ‘That my dear is feminism. The power to be able to choose,’ has been echoed by hundreds of people to defend the act of jauhar committed by women at the end of the film.
I have not watched the film yet, maybe I never will. The must have conversation about mise en scene or the elements that make a scene, and how altering them could categorise a movie on either side of the representation-glorification line falls beyond the framework of the column. So I will talk neither of Padmaavat, nor whether it has glorified or plainly represented Jauhar but will stick to this very vague notion of choice as the start all and end all in a debate on women.
It is non-contestable that at the very root of feminism lay the core ideas of women’s’ agency and the power to choose. The definition of ‘choice’ as ‘an act of choosing between two or more possibilities’ remains incomplete without adding to its end, one, ‘That have no or same consequences’, and two, ‘With absolute freedom’. It is so very important to remember here that ‘making a choice’ is not automatically feminist, as choices are made within socio-cultural-political contexts and with or without as many privileges there are.
An easy example to start with would be the one of body hair removal. One many very choose to remove all facial and body hair because they wish to and because they can afford to.
But wanting hair removed is placed in a social context where beauty is associated with a hairless body in a world made for the male gaze and so many of us women are deeply conditioned to believe otherwise. Given this, removing body hair is only swimming with the tide instead of against it, and not a choice, because currently, the consequences of keeping the hair and removing it are not the same.
The same applies to why some feminists choose to be married. ‘Choosing’ to be married does not make it a ‘feminist choice’ — it is a feminist wanting to be married in a world that does not see a non-married way of life with a partner or partners in the same way it sees marriage. In several cases, even those who don’t want the socio-legal recognition that comes from marriage go ahead and get married to save themselves from being singled out in a society that is still far from embracing diverse partnerships. This then classifies as taking the easiest option to ensure the smooth running of other aspects of life — by no means again a choice — because the consequences of the two choices are not the same.
The homemaker, the care-giver, the school dropout, the one who lost all the weight, the one who did not be with the man she secretly loved — the same lens can be applied to every other instance of a woman who we believe and assert is making a choice. But until her socio-cultural environment is altered, where there is no tide to swim against, where one possibility does not outweigh the other, where the consequences of one is not drearier that the other, lets not call in choice. Because a choice has to come with absolute freedom to walk on any of the paths that lay ahead, with no shame.
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton