Jaipur, Jan 26: Renowned literary critic and this year's Padman Bhusan awardee Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak today said sexism was deeply entrenched in the society where the practice of blaming the victim of sexual harassment still gained prominence.
Reflecting on the protests across India after the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi, the renowned educator said that she believed the basic question about the issue has still not been understood.
“Two of my students are travelling through India and since they were in south at the time (when the incident took place), I asked them about the reaction to the gang-rape there. To my surprise, the focus was on asking these youngsters to be careful and not go out after certain hours,” she said.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival today, Spivak recollected, while she was interested in talking about the outrage over the incident, her students explained that instead of that there was a sense of panic rather than anger where they were.
Spivak narrated the experience of two of her students to explain how the culture of blaming the victim still gained prominence over anything else.
She went on to add how a part of India is still mistaken to be the whole.
“Who are the young? It is not just the urban radicals who constitute the young. In fact, when we look at the Delhi gang-rape, it is not simply a gender question,” said Spivak, author of the much-acclaimed essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?'.
Talking about the gender issue, she said that “sexism was still deeply embedded in the society”, and it was one of the causes for her “intellectual insecurity.”
“I had just won an academic award in Japan and was addressing a press conference. The first question I was asked by the biggest newspaper was how difficult it would have been for me in India because I looked beautiful,” she said.
In addition, Spivak - who is the University Professor at Columbia University, the highest honour of the institution - narrated her experience at Presidency College in Kolkata where it was suggested during her student days that she was doing well because of her good looks.
“Even today, my name is not mentioned there without details of how I looked rather than how I felt. Such sexism does make one insecure,” Spivak explained.
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