Gudiya: Just a doll on our shelf?

I am Gudiya. The doll. Not quite the Barbie girl, but still there’s a common theme there—you can make me walk, make me talk, do whatever you please. But believe me, life in plastic, it’s not that fantastic. I come in various pardahs, chaddars, or even burqahs. But all versions have my head bowed. You would think that sells like hot cakes in the rural markets—cute an’ covered up, but you’d be surprised, with a slight change of clothing, the same expression works countrywide.
The toy company was delighted—one version suits all. A market survey polled submissiveness as the key quality cross country. Now, families of production lines are at work creating the various versions that sell my various roles—mother, wife, daughter, second wife, village pawn, television celebrity, poll manager, martyr. This is backed by a large media campaign—television shows, women’s magazines, multi-crore advertising and beauty pageants all work in close connect to build me up to what I am. I come with two Kens—Arif and Taufeeq, and a baby boy–Manin–too. Depending on which version you buy, or which role of mine you have polled for, you receive the complements that match. You see, I aim to please, and to fit into my buyer’s concept of morality. Each customer is valuable, and customisation of merchandise is the key to the business. Some buyers/viewers/readers have complained that my eyes appear too vacuous, too vacant. I know what they mean. I have seen deer in the forest near my village look like that in the beam of a car headlight—glazed over and paralysed by the moment. To counter that, one version has downcast eyes, so the expression stays hidden. But let that not fool you, for within that I live, I breathe, I feel, I think.
For some days the toy company debated giving me a voice. Imagine—a doll that could say all it could think! It was the design of a whimsical, some even called him, a mad, creator. It looked good, it was innovative, it would pique interest, but what then? No, the toy company decided. People would watch for a while and go away. The survey was right. It was a matter of profits. Giving me a voice would just be too big a risk. What if I said something people didn’t like? What if, just for once, I chose not to play along? What if I’d dropped Arif, dropped Taufeeq, told the elders what I thought of them, told the activists they knew nothing of my reality, told the journalists where they could shove their cameras, and walked off into the sunset with Manin? It would involve creating a whole new life for me—where would I stay, work, earn? Who would feed me, clothe me, protect me? What if, horrors, even if there was a chance I summoned the courage to stand up to the world beaming into my face, I didn’t need protection? If I survived and proved myself right, and all that they lived by and stood for wrong and worse, dispensable? What if society as we know it crumbled and women had no more excuses for continuing to live their sordid, dishpan lives? What if men could no longer look their wives in the eye, secure in the knowledge that that was not what was happening in their homes—daughters with no options, wives with no lives? The voice was way too risky.
In the end, the poll results were voluminous enough for my range to fit into its results. You may not know it now, but I am an iconic doll. Others are westernised and imported. I am made of the clay of this earth, and am shaped in the tradition of the all male creator of my image. I am symbolic of every woman in every home in every town and village, who watched me or didn’t, who polled in or didn’t. Or worse, who watched silently, as her husband did, and said nothing. I suggest that every mother who dresses up her doll child, and grows her up to be a doll woman, picks me up, and plays with me once—dresses me up, marries me off, tells me what to name my child, where to live, whom to love, then cracks me into the clay of the earth on which they themselves stand. And then, for all the thousands of questions you asked me through your reporters and channels, answer me this one—did you really want me to speak at all?




Or perhaps you thought, thousands of Indian women live like this everyday. They said I died of ?itis. Call it what you will, you polled me my life options and switched off your TV, and tuned me out. You left me in the idiot box with options A, B or C. Except, that given the statistics I had, was there really a choice? You’ve seen what happens to participants when the audience polls the correct answer on KBC. Public opinion counts. It can change lives.
You were doing one of two things to me—offering me submission, which meant first husband, no child and social approval; or a fight for my family unit against not just the village in which I lived the only life I ever knew, and the only means of our livelihood, its elders the only family we had known, but now the world beyond, calling, writing, texting their opinion. You gave me a pause in which to make my life decision. My whole being lay suspended in horror and disbelief at that moment. Tell me, what did you expect me to say? What in my past made you think I could summon the courage to stand against the whole media savvy world.

I was a child when I married Arif. I was 17. I know now there are laws that prevent child marriage in India. But nobody implements them until the marriages are sensational enough. Mine wasn’t. I was marrying a simple soldier and I was proud to. More importantly, I was told to. I did not know law. I did not know I had a choice. You, the media who screamed and beamed my faces to the cities when I was hunted and then too trapped to think, did not tell me I had a choice when I might have exercised it. Because rural stories don’t sell newsprint I suppose. A month later he went away and didn’t return for four years. Progress in the villages today, thanks to activism, means I do not have to commit sati. I just have to marry the next guy they ask me to. I was thankful for that. Or else, I might have been sent to Vrindavan as a widow and my fate would have been worse. But then, the censor board would never let you accept that, so you don’t know. So I married Taufeeq, just a month wed and many years unwed.

For the first time, I was a woman. I fell in love. Taufeeq was my, and every Indian girl’s, dream come true. He provided for me, he looked after me, didn’t hit me, and didn’t drink like some of the other men in the village. He would buy me flowers and take me to the nearest town to watch a film whenever he could spare the time and the money. We were poor, but happy. I was the envy of all—first an honourable war widow and now this happy marriage. Better still, I was pregnant, and the village midwife said that by my cravings and the excessive heartburn, it would surely be a son. I made peace with my mother-in-law by and by.

When your cameras beamed me into your channel surfing lives, you didn’t hear me speak. You didn’t hear me think. You didn’t hear me feel. When you polled my life you didn’t hear me relive our whispered dreams, our newly wed cuddles, our plans for our unborn child. You

For all the noise, the sound, the elders, the activists, the TV cameras and journalists, readers, audiences and observers in my face, in my house, in my life, none of you truly spoke to me. Or asked. Or listened, for that matter.