A 22-year-old teacher and aspiring comedian named Sakshi Jha declared herself a “man-hater” on the competitive standup show India’s Got Latent last week. Her brief set and subsequent banter with the judges included a fantasy about beating up a future husband, whom she would regard as a slave, and her penchant for destroying male egos. Jha was the only female contestant on this episode. She received a unanimous score of 0 from the judges, as well as the audience, and now faces a public backlash and a reported job suspension.
Jha is a young woman from Bihar, a state that even within elsewhere in India seems especially entrenched in a patriarchal worldview. Even if what she says about her grandfather telling women to stay in the kitchen is not autobiographical, neither is it fiction. The culture out of which her stance arises, however sloppily-conveyed it may be, is recognisable to us all.
Early in her set, she uses a phrase, “generational trauma”, that speaks volumes. A sharper, savvier, more articulate comedian would have deployed all the elements in Jha’s set in a satirical set that more would have enjoyed. Jha is nervous and oblivious during the show, and her comic material and delivery are not strong. The only laugh-out-loud moment in her segment comes after she says “mens”, when host Samay Raina takes the opportunity to encourage supporting the education of the girl child through the Teach For India organisation. This defuses the visible discomfort of the five-member “manel”, none of whom take things to a sexist level. Jha does, however, get castigated during the show for allegedly doing a disservice to feminism — a contention that is quite a stretch.
“Feminism isn’t man-hating” is a tired trope. It is so incomplete and defensive. What is entirely feminist is interrogating what some call hatred. Some also call it exhaustion, heartbreak, rage — even hope. The data is all there to validate the sentiment, as well as to dismantle it. Jha said something unvarnished, and at worst vaguely problematic in its hyperbole, but not untrue for its artlessness.
The other half of the coin is that any ingénue like Jha would be eaten alive by the gatekeepers of liberal discourse, simply for lacking polish and performativity and for not being proficient in English. But those who actively engage in and embody feminist practices are more likely to have compassion for her. A rising tide lifts all boats, and the feminist movement has space for those who are figuring things out, and those who don’t think politics matters to their lives, and those who do but lack the vocabulary or exposure to deepen or apply what they empirically believe, and those who make harmless mistakes and learn.
Jha doesn’t need to be a perfect representative of the cause, and certainly not at a nascent stage in life, public-facing or otherwise. As long as she keeps misandrist humour out of her classroom, where it is not age-appropriate, and rethinks the colourism she displayed cheekily at one point during her India’s Got Latent appearance, she’ll be fine. She’s hardly the greatest threat to feminism out there, let alone to the patriarchy.