New Delhi: Some women at Delhi’s student protests have been criticised less for demanding accountability over examination failures than for the language in which that anger was expressed. Viral clips of young women peppering their speeches with expletives have prompted an entirely predictable response from India’s moral custodians.
A woman who swears, they insist, diminishes herself because the vocabulary of abuse in Indian languages is itself misogynistic. If every expletive ultimately circles back to a mother, a sister, a wife or a sex worker, then surely women should know better than to reproduce it.
It is an argument that appears sophisticated until one asks a simple question: Why does the burden of purifying public language always make a stop at women’s doorstep? Indian society did not become profane because young women at Jantar Mantar discovered gaalis. The lexicon of abuse was authored, normalised and handed down almost exclusively through masculine speech. Even when Indian men abuse one another, they almost invariably do so through the bodies of women. Our profanity has long outsourced male humiliation to female sexuality. The same men who have spent generations weaponising women’s bodies in everyday speech now appear scandalised that women have begun speaking in the same language.
Strip away the concern over language and what remains is an old obsession with female propriety.
Social media was quickly awash with familiar admonitions: Look at the language. What kind of girls speak like this? They’re only insulting themselves because these gaalis target women. If women use such words, aren’t they degrading their own gender?
Beneath every one of these objections lies the same expectation that has shadowed women for generations. No matter how legitimate the grievance or how righteous the anger, a woman’s first obligation is to remain respectable. She may occupy the street, but not too loudly. She may dissent, but never at the cost of her femininity.
There is nothing novel about this anxiety. Every expansion of women’s freedom has been greeted with a fresh moral panic. When women entered factories in large numbers during the Second World War to fill the shoes of men fighting the war, governments and advertisers alike celebrated them as patriotic workers. Cigarette companies quickly repackaged smoking as the iconography of emancipation, encouraging women to step into public spaces historically occupied by men. A handbag on one shoulder, a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in the other hand became shorthand for economic independence, mobility and modernity. Liberation, it turned out, was eminently marketable when economies needed women’s labour.
Once the war ended, the old fears about feminine decorum returned with lightning speed. Every generation found a new frontier on which to police women. The length of a skirt, smoking, drinking, being single, living alone, returning home after dark, choosing work over marriage, seeking divorce, choosing not to have children.
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Language isn’t politically innocent
Every major gain of the feminist movement has first been denounced as civilisational decline before entering the realm of the ordinary. The history of women’s emancipation is, in many ways, the history of society repeatedly mistaking equality for excess.
The outrage over women using gaalis belongs to that same lineage. What many Indian uncles are really defending is an older moral imagination in which women remain the repositories of civility while men enjoy a far wider emotional franchise. Male anger is interpreted as authenticity, even virility. Female anger must first pass an etiquette test.
The claim that women are merely “abusing themselves” because Indian gaalis are misogynistic also misunderstands how language evolves. Words acquire meaning through power, and they lose that power through contestation. Language is never politically innocent; it is always a record of who had the authority to name, shame and define. Feminist movements across the world have long wrestled with whether slurs can be repossessed by the communities they were designed to humiliate.
Consider the word r**di. Patriarchy transformed what is, in the most literal sense, an occupational descriptor into one of the most potent instruments of female humiliation. It is hurled at women not because of what they do but because of what the word has been made to signify: shame, impurity and sexual transgression. Feminist attempts to reclaim it were never about celebrating the slur. They were simply refusing to let patriarchy monopolise its meaning. Women calling themselves “proud r**dis” in a recent social media movement were asserting that a word derives its violence from the social order that weaponises it, not from the syllables themselves. Reclamation has never required universal agreement. Its purpose has always been to deny patriarchy perpetual ownership over language.
None of this transforms abuse into an ideal political vocabulary. Public discourse is rarely elevated by profanity. But there is a peculiar asymmetry in demanding linguistic refinement only from women while excusing generations of men who built that vocabulary in the first place. Civility cannot become a moral obligation for one gender and an optional virtue for the other.
What unsettles many viewers is the collapse of an older archetype — the patient, restrained, morally superior woman whose legitimacy derives as much from her manners as from her politics. The young women at Delhi’s protests refused that bargain. They were not asking permission to be respectable before they could be angry.
Indian women are increasingly unwilling to remain custodians of a virtue men have rarely been asked to perform. The profanity will fade with the news cycle. The refusal to perform respectability almost certainly will not and should not.