Varsha Tiwary 
A young Iranian student from the Islamic Azad University, Tehran, incensed over harassment by morality police over ‘improper hijab’ turned her body into protest by stripping down to underwear and marching – arms crossed, hair flowing down her back – in defiance of the Iranian regime that constantly polices women’s bodies.
Why is a lock of a woman’s hair so threatening to those already moral, as per their strict religious code?
How could wise old tapasvis or hermits, who sat unmoving for decades in meditation, be so easily distracted by an apsara (heavenly dancer), that rage ‘made them’ rain curses and banishments?
What’s behind patriarchy’s mortal terror of the female body?
Why is it that those who use religion to perpetuate political power – on whichever side of the religious divide they may be – Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus; are all on the same page as far as policing women’s bodies is concerned? Maybe because all patriarchies are a protection racket.
They want to claim it is they who protect women, but not by doing any real work to make things safe – only by increasing the fear perception. So that women get caged behind ever tighter lakshman rekhas (boundaries). The more the imprisonment, the greater the perception of fear. A jackpot for any raving, frothing religious maniac. By garnishing their hate filled rants with a fistful of cultural-religious adjuncts that justify greater control women, they get instant traction and support. It’s the easiest bully thing to do: at a time when women are doing everything men can do, only better, construct a strutting masculinity, indignantly and piously buffed up on the need to ‘righten’ the immoral, corrupting, corruptible womenfolk; who if left to themselves, would bring society, culture and religion to knees.
All this to tamp down a powerful paradox. If women were to be totally safe and equal and free – to love, marry, dress, reproduce as they wished – would anything be left for the patriarch to construct his manliness with?
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
I remember the dress code imposed on campus women in the year 1989-90 when I was a student in Panjab University Chandigarh. Five years after the ‘flushing out’ of militants from Harmandar Sahib, our once vibrant campus was flush with them. Hard-eyed, blue-turbaned men with flowy chest-long beards cruised on Bullet motorcycle convoys, terrorising women with dress codes. Directives in Punjabi were pasted on walls and over hostel gates:
No sitting alone or pillion riding with a boy.
No skirts.
No lipsticks and open hair.
Covered heads and chests.
Most girls already wore dupattas, now they took to draping long, heavy cotton ones over the head and face. The day scholars, subject to family policing could laugh it off – they were dropped off and picked up by family members. The real targets of this policing were us hostellers, who could be easily accosted while they walked to the departments.
Also read: The ‘Girls of Revolution Street’ Protest Against Iran’s Compulsory Hijab Laws
Many reports of girls getting stopped, slapped, abused and humiliated by foot soldiers of the militancy poured in. Leave condemnation, the authorities meant to protect us, smirked and gloated. “Now these heroine-type girls will be brought to heel.”
News quoted wardens: “This is at least one good thing militants are doing.”
The campus SHO agreed. “The girls on campus often get out of hand.”
Newspapers published the ‘appeal for compliance’ of the militant leaders: “Our purpose is only to make an example of these ‘fast’ girls bringing disrepute to Punjab’s culture.”
This gushing support demonstrated that everyone – the wardens, professors and police – felt unequal to the task of making the campus safe for women and now that our skirts, sleeveless dresses and gauzy dupattas were not just frownable, but punishable, saw the militants’ diktat as a welcome reduction in their headache. The individual family and social burdens of ensuring the rule of law, quickly got inverted into policing of the women themselves, even in the confines of this progressive campus in posh Chandigarh. So eagerly was the unofficial diktat embraced, that militants began claiming it was a social duty gesture on their part, and showed their moral fineness.
Fundamentalists the world over share this common terror of the female body existing in its own right. Dressing, marrying, not marrying, reproducing or refusing to reproduce as per her own choice. By dressing up, marrying by choice, by using birth control or having access to abortion, the female body poses the biggest threat and hurdle to all rigid identitarian controls that translate into lasting political power for fundamentalists.
So all religious bullies seek to resuscitate some particular strain of fear prevalent in the patriarchal society by demanding that this is to protect the women. These bullies want their fears, their prurient gazes, their anxieties about their waning social or marital privileges to determine what all women can do or not do. They do this not just though law but by dispensing certificates for good character, morality or if that fails, by proclaiming they are caging women only to ‘protect’ them. That all this is for the sake of religion, culture, society.
The more the control, the deeper the hold of the regressive social order that ushered them in and that will ensure their perpetuation.
Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi based writer and translator.