No three-tiered wedding cake, no mangalsutra: Single women a growing tribe in India

Single women are asserting their right to be taken seriously, creating their own sub-culture with books, movies and even organisations dedicated to them.

A still from Lipstick Under My Burkha

I want someone to tell me what to wear. What to eat. What to like, what to hate. What to rage about, what to listen to, what to joke about, I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love and how to tell them.”

In British comedy-drama Fleabag, the breakout two-season anthem for the imperfect woman, the eponymous heroine is talking about the plotline of most popular culture products revolving around single women – that they have been put on this earth to fulfill their dharma, which is to follow the path of every Jane Austen novel ever written. Which is, of course, a truth universally acknowledged: That a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Increasingly though, the West and now India are slowly realising that life is not a Hollywood romantic comedy and happily ever after doesn’t always come with a three-tiered wedding cake, or a candy-flavoured heart wrapped in a gigantic bow. From Kangana Ranaut’s Queen (2014) on the big screen to the Rangita Pritish Nandy’s Amazon Prime show, Four More Shots Please!, women can lead solitary lives and be perfectly at ease with themselves.

In Shoojit Sircar’s Piku (2015), the father believes that “marriage without purpose is low IQ” and actively discourages his accomplished daughter from throwing her life away on someone less worthy – and not only because he wants her to attend to his bowel movements. He tells a prospective suitor, “She is moody, just like me. And she is also not a virgin. She has her own business, is financially independent, sexually independent. She is just looking for emotional partnership.”

And even that, without any strings attached.

Rising tribe of single women

We’ve come a long away from the time audiences cringed as Gul Panag’s Naina tried to come to terms with being “jobless and manless” at 30 in Turning 30. Alankrita Shrivastava who directed the movie in 2011 even before she turned 30 says society has travelled some distance from the assumption that being wife to a Mr Right is the goal of every woman.

“Even if you’re working, the patronising question is when will you settle down? No one believes that you can be complete in yourself, at peace with who you are. They forget that being single is an active choice, not an accident of fate,” she says. That’s why when she directed her next film, Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), it was so important for her to give sexual agency to the 50-something widowed Buaji played by Ratna Pathak Shah.

By all accounts, India currently has the largest number of single women in its history. According to Census data, there was a 39 per cent increase in the number of single women – widows, never-married, divorced, abandoned – from 51.2 million in 2001 to 71.4 million in 2011. The ‘never-married’ category in the Census takes into account all women aged 18 and above who are not married, so more realistic estimates put the number of single women in India at over 50 million.

It is a demographic that is quietly asserting its right to be taken seriously, creating its own sub-culture, with books, movies, web series, even organisations dedicated to it. The National Forum for Single Women’s Rights is a national platform for single women leaders, while the Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, formed in 2000, is an alternative family for single women.

Some of this is happening because women are gaining the confidence to tell their own stories. When it came to Four More Shots Please!, says Rangita Pritish Nandy, “Amazon was on the same page in recognising that single people and single women in particular, for whom it was a conscious decision to stay single, were a reality in Mumbai and India. It helped that Aparna (Purohit), who was part of the green lighting team (at Amazon) was single as were Ishita (Pritish Nandy), my sister, and I. Three women in a room of five people. That decision was made two slides into our pitch deck,” she says.

Angry women stay single?

Rangita Pritish Nandy calls herself possibly the happiest single girl you’ll meet, so all her memories are of the happy girls from popular culture: Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride, Sarah Jessica Parker and her tribe in Sex And The City, Rani from Queen, Thelma and Louise, Erin Brockovich and, for that matter, Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones.

A new book Single By Choice: Happily Unmarried Women!, edited by Kalpana Sharma, has a series of such single women chronicling their experiences. My former India Today colleague and iconic sports journalist Sharda Ugra writes beautifully about she managed to “stomp on the cookie-cutter, walk out of the bakery itself and pitch my tent elsewhere”.

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu is not so sanguine. The author of Status Single: The Truth About Being a Single Woman in India, based on the experiences of 3,000 single women she interviewed over a period of time, says she still believes the single woman is largely invisible in Indian cinema or television. And if she does exist, “she’s either the promiscuous husband-snatcher who’s dressed provocatively and works late hours in media, which is portrayed as the stereotypical profession, or the woman drinking and smoking”. Or, it is the complete reverse end of the spectrum, she says, where she’s an asexual widow and either devoted to her son or busy poisoning the daughter-in-law’s food. Or, pressuring her for an heir apparent.

Single women are still quite the socio-cultural anomaly and there’s hardly ever been a realistic depiction of a strong independent single working Indian woman who lives life on her own terms. Kundu doesn’t spare even Queen, everyone’s favourite cinematic representation of singletons. In the film, she points out, the protagonist is shown slipping into singlehood thanks to unfortunate circumstances, and even when she discovers her strength by embarking on a solo honeymoon, she still has to come back and return the engagement ring to the man who broke up with her.

“That’s the dramatic climax of the film. The ‘paisa vasool’ moment for the audience. A woman’s independence is measured against male dependence. It’s either that trajectory or Pan Nalin’s Angry Indian Goddesses where women who are rebellious are single. Women with rage are single. Women who step outside social parameters are single,” she says.

Single women in mythology

The irony is that ancient India was quite comfortable with the idea of single childless women and single mothers. Gargi, scholar and daughter of sage Vachaknu, was a single woman who refused to be curtailed by marriage. Writer Kavita Kane describes her to ThePrint as possibly ancient India’s most famous rishika who composed several hymns that questioned the origin of all existence. At King Janak’s philosophic conference, thebrahmayagna, Gargi was one of the eloquent participants challenging sage Yajnavalkya with a strongly worded argument on atman or the soul that confounded the rishi whom no one dared to argue with.

Kane calls Shakuntala mythology’s first single mother. In the original texts, abandoned by her lover, she is scornful of the royal legacy of her lover-husband King Dushyant. She tells him that she has brought their son Bharat up as a prince in the forest, fit enough to be a king on his own merit. Sita, for Kane, is the best-known single mother whose twin sons are also brought up in the forest and who eventually challenge the father.

Then there is Hidimbi who brings up Ghatotkacha alone in the forest without the father, Bhima. Also, Jabaal, the mother of famous philosopher-rishi Satyakama Jaabaali, who lends her name to her son. When a young Jaabaali goes to rishi Gautam for education and is asked about his father, he gives the answer supplied to him by his mother: “I do not know who your father is. I gave birth to you, I am your mother. You are Jaabaali, the son of Jabaal.”  This response shows that it is not the silent power of suffering and sacrifice but strength and conviction that defines single women, says Kane.

Don’t need a mangalsutra

In 2016, the Ministry for Women and Child Development recognised single women as independent entities in its draft national policy for women, and talked about creating a “comprehensive social protection mechanism” for them, but the policy is yet to be cleared.

Ironically, India has had a considerable number of powerful single women politicians, from the late J. Jayalalithaa (‘Amma’), six-time chief minister of Tamil Nadu, to ‘Behen’ Mayawati, four-time chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, to ‘Didi’ Mamata Banerjee, serving as chief minister of West Bengal since 2011. All of them are or were single, yet society has always defined them as someone’s sister or mother, denying them an identity of their own and normalising their unmarried status.

In her seminal 2016 book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, Rebecca Traister says: “the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated, not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hustled nearly all (non-enslaved) women, regardless of their individual desires, ambitions, circumstances, or the quality of available matches, down a single highway towards early heterosexual marriage and motherhood.” She believes the more women delay marriage or remain single, the easier it becomes for men, like women, “to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes, iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases”.

In that case, we won’t have to listen to dialogues such as this one from Sonam Kapoor’s character in Veere Di Wedding: “Jitna bhi padh lo graduation, post-graduation…par jab tak bhen*hod mangalsutra gale mein nahi lagta na tab tak life complete nahi hoti (No matter how much you study, be a graduate or a post-graduate, but until you don’t have a wedding necklace your life isn’t complete).

The author is a senior journalist. Views are personal.