 It's a privilege to be asked to introduce today's session with our distinguished panel members. We are delighted to have here with us Lady Kishwa Desai. Lady Desai is a best-selling author and highly respected columnist for The Guardian, The Indian Express, and other broadsheets. She's done much work on gender relations in India. Previously worked in television for over 20 years as producer and head of television channels. And it was a particular news piece, some time ago on female infanticide, which led Lady Desai to write her first novel in 2010, channeling her outrage on violence into a series of critically acclaimed novels. Her latest novel, you've seen the displays outside, The Sea of Innocence, is the third in a series of books concerning critical women issues in India. Her first novel, Witness the Night, dealt with female infanticide in India and won the Costa Book Award in 2010 for the best first novel and has since been translated in over 25 languages. It was also shortlisted for the Authors Club first novel award and longlisted for the Man nation literary prize. Her critically acclaimed novel, Origins of Love was published in 2012 and is about surrogacy and IVF, a topical issue in both India and other parts of the world. This new book, The Sea of Innocence, it deals with the emotive issue of women's security in an atmosphere of heightened sexual violence and has a very strong resonance with the recent incidents of rape and gang rape in India about which I'm sure you're all familiar and following the disturbing rape and murder of the recent 23 year old Delhi student in December 2012. There has been an unrelenting international focus in sexual violence in the world, not just democracy. During tonight's event, Lady Desai will provide a contemporary commentary on the attitudes of men and women towards victims of sexual violence, looking at issues of gender bias in the police, in the caste system, very entrenched and the impact of skewed demographics caused by sex selection. I'll just take a quote from Lady Desai, the characters in her novels are the antithesis of the popular notion of Indian women in cinema, literature, art and in real life. And as an Asian woman myself, born and brought up in India, I'm very much looking forward with intense interest, I must say, to this evening's discussion. So on the stage with Lady Desai today, I'm pleased to introduce you to our very own Professor Steven Chan, who our director has already introduced. I just wanna say a few words about Steven. Steven's professor of international relations and one of UK's most respected academics on international politics and relations. He's made a significant impact on political developments in Asia and Africa, particularly through his involvement in high-level diplomacy, serving as a member of the Africa-China-U.S. Trilateral Dialogue, which is an effort to establish a common set of principles to help govern the emerging trade wars involving the three regions. Steven was awarded the OBE in 2010 for services to Africa and higher education. In that same year, the International Studies Association awarded him the title of eminent scholar in global development. He's published about 28 books. Steven will correct me if I'm wrong, and I think I've countered them very carefully on international relations. More than 300 articles, features and reviews, plus novels, poetry and short stories, among very many other activities he's involved. In his most recent book, The End of Certainty, Steven takes a fresh and provocative look on world politics today, arguing that international politics has failed because the certainties' traditional philosophy failed to help us understand power shifts and struggles in an endlessly diverse world. I think I'll stop there, but I do hope you'll enjoy tonight's event, and you are as excited as we all are here at the school. We are, you know, goes without saying, we're very excited about the future for Suas, and I, on that note, will conclude and pass over to Lady Desai and Steven to start our discussion. Thank you very much. Well, ladies and gentlemen, my very great pleasure to be with you tonight and to host Lady Desai, who as I'm sure all of you know is rapidly becoming one of these significant authors of modern India, not only for her ability to treat serious themes of the gravity that they deserve, but to write about them in an accessible manner. And I think that is a very rare combination that she manages to achieve with considerable elan and which she's managed to sustain through four works and these works have become celebrated. They do not shirk from some of the more difficult undercurrents that are now making themselves felt closer and closer to the surface of contemporary Indian life. I wanted to begin by talking to her about her latest novel, The Sea of Innocence, which features a mystery surrounding the disappearance and the rape of a certain young woman. And as Nirmala said, this rape bears the echoes, it bears as it were the resonance of what actually happened in Delhi towards the end of last year. When there was a gang rape of a young student on a bus that was horrific in its execution, certainly absolutely horrific in its consequences, but which seemed at the same time to be the tip of an iceberg that no one in India was prepared to acknowledge or discuss with the gravity and the seriousness that such things deserve. So books of this sort, I think, hope to continue to raise the profile of how to deal with gender issues, particularly those touched with violence in an emerging superpower that India is now becoming. But, ladies and gentlemen, I was actually in Delhi the week before this rape occurred. And it was a momentous time for all kinds of reasons in India. It was the time of the death of Balathakare, for instance, depending on your point of view, either eminent or notorious nationalist figure in Calcutta. It was a time of great debate about whether or not a nationalist in Dukal way forward was the way forward for India or the maintenance of a secular way. There was no debate at all in that week preceding the rape about the role of gender and then suddenly a very, very gender-specific, gender-centered crime of horrific dimensions hit the headlines. And I'm just wondering how you've tried to reflect that in your latest novel, which is set on the beautiful beaches of Goa. You might think that you're in some kind of tourist paradise. It concerns the disappearance and the rape of a tourist. And it reminds me very, very much of Delhi. Of course, the drivers in Delhi almost go out of their way. You almost have to bribe them to take you out of the cultivated cosmopolitan modern center of the new city of Delhi where all things work. And you almost have to bludgeon them, as I said, to take you to the poorer parts of town. As if somehow you could disguise or keep people away from an underlying reality. And I think your book goes straight to the heart of this underlying reality. But I would like to know, and I'm sure the audience would like to know how you came to write this book and how you decided to concentrate on this theme of gender violence. Thank you. Before I start, I just want to thank everybody for being here today. It's a very special day for me to be here at SOAS and I'm absolutely honored. So thank you very much. And to be interviewed by somebody like you. See, when I was listening to the list of things you've done, I almost felt like I should have been actually interviewing you. Now, the other way that, you know, what you spoke about, the fact that there was no discussion on gender before this rape actually took place is absolutely correct. Because I think gender was very much at the bottom of the heap. Whatever discussion you wanted to have in India about women and about women's rights were almost always likely to be scuttled. And the really sad part about this whole issue is that even in parliament where women have been struggling to get a 30% reservation in parliament has been delayed year on year by parliamentarians who get up and, mostly male, all the men, will get up and give you absolutely absurd arguments about it and stroll it and scuttle it. Indeed, the last time, there was a physical fight which took place on the floor of parliament, which actually delayed the bill. So there is a certain kind of patriarchy that exists in India. I grew up in India as a working woman there. I was fortunate that I didn't personally have to face it. But there's a lot of discrimination. There's a lot of prejudice. There's a lot of sexual harassment that I could see in front of me. Because as Nirmala mentioned, I used to run a television channel. I also worked as a journalist and as a television producer for over 20 years. So I knew there was a gender bias. And I knew that all these things existed. And it used to enrage me. It was to really make me angry that we are discussing all these other issues about growth rate and this and that and the other, which is all very important. But the main issue, if there is more violence taking place within homes, which is how I saw it, which is where young girls first get indoctrinated into this whole issue that violence against you is going to happen. It is going to be something that you take for granted. And it starts at home. It starts with the baby girl that people don't want. And it just carries on. And then it carries on to when she's going to get married. It could be a dowry debt. Then it could be on a killing if she decides to step out of the home. So all those issues. So I already was, as all Indian women are, was aware of the fact that there was a huge gender problem. So when I was asked to write these series of books, I had already thought that I would write a book on rape and sexual violence as long back as about four years ago when I first started thinking about the series. Because it was obvious to me that the newspapers were reporting these cases. And they were reporting them in very lurid terms, catching front pages and things like that. But within a day or so, the papers and the media attention move on to something else. And usually, the victim would become the criminal. In very many of the cases, uncomfortable questions would be asked of her. She would be treated as though she should not have been at a particular place. Indeed, even for this particular girl who was gangraped, I am still asked when I talk about these issues in India, but what was she doing there at 10 o'clock at night? Why was she out there with her boyfriend? Why was she dressed the way she was dressed? So these are things which is to upset me. So I decided that I needed to write this book. And I started researching it four years ago. And it was a horrible coincidence, because I was actually doing my final edit in December. And the eerie thing is, I still get goosebumps when I say this, the eerie thing is that my book timeline is December. It's set in Goa, so it is December. So I actually was able to incorporate, because I write contemporary novels. I write about India as India is happening, what is going on about current issues. They're all integrated into my novels. So I was able to mention the fact that there is this girl who's been raped while my heroine is going out there and looking for the, I mean, the central protagonist is looking for a girl who's gone missing on the beaches of Goa, who's presumed to be raped. She's thinking about this girl who's gone through this horrible incident at home. And indeed her mother and her adopted daughter go enjoying the protests at India Gate. So I tried to sort of bring the real issues into the novels, because as you mentioned, I don't want people to think, this is some fantasy land I'm talking about. And I don't want to set my novels 300 years earlier or 300 years hence, it's here and now. And we need to talk about these issues. But you want very much not to celebrate a fantasy land, but a very, very real land. One of the questions that kept striking me on that visit was to what extent it was a schizophrenic land. And I'm mindful, for instance, particularly of India Gate, which is a huge arch which celebrates by having inscribed on it the names of every single Indian soldier who fell in World War I, for instance, is a huge and in its own way a very, very magnificent monument. But I was in India as a speaker at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, which is this huge extravaganza. And two things struck me about this particular extravaganza and that was there were no women speakers. Everything was a male dominated celebration of power and influence. But they did have a grand party and all of the Bollywood stars and starlets turned up to this party. And people like Shah Rukh Khan came to this party. He's sort of like the Brad Pitt of Indian cinema. But what really struck me as the guests came in was that you had all of these absolutely beautiful starlets. And without exception, every single one of them was hanging on the arm of a much older, extraordinarily ugly, but obviously extraordinarily rich man. And it seemed that the fantasy that you see on the screen is actually answered by this reality of a certain kind of huge disparity in terms of what the genders are expected to achieve, even in the most glittering and the most glamorous part of Indian life. I think you might, yes, you do have a point there that even cinema is not a land which is egalitarian in any way. I do want to say one thing about cinema, though, that it has allowed some of these starlets to play fairly bold roles, especially in recent times. So I would not say that cinema is completely sort of alien to the issues or does not deal with the issues which are happening in India today. Of course, they deal with them in their own way. And so you do have a lot of naked bodies and there is a huge debate which is going on in cinema in India today, which is that whether they should be doing the kind of item, I think you're all familiar with item numbers, whether they should be doing these, what they call them, duck, duck, item numbers, which get the audience all worked up because what it is doing is that it is also titillating the audience in a very obvious and blatant fashion. So some of these images, unfortunately, are also images that a lot of people seem to carry as being the reality of the Indian woman, whereas it is not. What you attended, Stephen, was like a 0.5, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 5% of what India is all about. I mean, the Hindustan Times summit, sorry, it's the largest scale selling daily in India, but that summit and the people there do not represent Indian reality. But those women who were there definitely represent the kind of aspirations, the kind of woman that a man would like to have in his life and they represent that and because it is a highly, it is still not a literate society by and large, these visual images, there is a big question mark right now, are these images kind of feeding into a fantasy that real life cannot sustain? And one more thing I just want to add to this is that the lyrics which are now going along with some of these songs, I don't know if you've listened to that, about I'm a tandoori chicken, just swallow me whole and or stick my lips with yours as fabric, all is done with all the requisite movements and hip shaking and all that. And the fact is we all have to reconsider whether these images in a country like this, where there's been huge genocide, which means that some of you are aware of the statistics, 37 million more men in India today because of the systematic killing and sex election which has happened in India has led to a situation where there is also huge levels of frustration because those images do not match reality and some of these rapes which are taking place, this is what my younger colleagues who are now working in India tell me is a kind of a push back. Men are getting angry seeing these young women out there unattainable, the only way they can attain them is if they move in as a gang and rape her in a physical gang rape. And there are people who have written about this as well that the item number that you see on screen is nothing more than an actual rape taking place, albeit they do not take her clothes off, they have very few clothes to take off anyway. But she is like in the middle usually of a huge bunch of men who are dancing around her and sort of almost lusting after her. So what you see then replicated in real life is the physical disrobing of a real girl who in recent times could be as young as five or six and it makes no difference to them. Absolutely take your point. I mean, off and on I've been watching Indian cinema since the 1980s and it certainly has become much more blatant at the same time as the pageantry has become much more complex as if the aspirational side of it has to be choreographed into something which has this dichotomous series of meanings. But insofar as of this aspirational and insofar as you've written a number of novels which have become extraordinarily popular and if they were to make a movie of the latest novel with all of its very serious themes how would you wish to cast the lead figure, Simran Singh who is a very complex Indian woman? Yes, well you know that's going to be a real problem for Indian filmmakers because you know my Simran Singh is the kind of woman you do not see in Indian cinema at all because she's middle-aged, you know. That's why actually I wrote her because I found that you know middle-aged women do not appear as heroines in Indian cinema. They do not appear as heroines in Indian literature per se. Mostly most of the literature would have very beautiful and very urbane, very sophisticated or very rural but you know somewhere the prettiness, the docility if you like, you know the kind of... So Simran Singh, my heroine is neither docile nor is she willing to listen to anyone. She considers herself voluptuous because you know she's overweight I guess and she is very much in your face woman. She does not listen to anyone including her mother who wants her to get desperately get married, get married, she doesn't want to do. She adopts a child who's 14 years old. I mean who does that? I mean she's completely bonkers, you know. So I think that is what I think people have liked about Simran Singh is that people all over the world can relate to her because she's the kind of woman they want to be or they can identify with, she's real. So the short answer is, I don't think any Indian producer in his right mind, if he's applied with alcohol and given something, go and make this film. You know you'll get Ashwarya Rai in your next film when some deal is done with him, I do it. But I do have a very sane British producer who is willing and has taken the chance and is making a film with the first novel, Witness the Night, which is also a very dark look at gender side and where Simran appears for the first time, so. I mean to what extent is she very much an Indian creation, a figure for the difficult times in India and to what extent does she mirror an international trend, female detectives for instance. Even though she herself is a social worker who takes on certain qualities of a campaigning detective but you have Scandinavian figures, you have African figures and then of course Smith novels, is it the moment of the great African female detective who does things that men can't do? Yeah, I just wish all of this were true, you know that I had actually sat down and said, oh my God, I'm gonna invent this wonderful female detective and she's gonna go out. But actually that's not the way I think most novels get written. Most novels, or at least my novel definitely, the first one, it was my first novel, Witness the Night. It got written, as I said, out of sheer rage. I got tired of living in a country where murder could be atoned. I mean, you could kill your baby girl and nobody's gonna put you behind bars. What kind of a country is this? And it was not something, as I said, which was happening 200 years ago. It was something which I was seeing as a journalist, as a working woman, happening every day. Every day there would be a small item somewhere about some baby girl into whose throat had been stuffed. Either opium or raw husks of wheat who had been strangled, who had been thrown out of a window in a hospital. I read about hospitals where no baby girl had ever been born. Oh, you know, isn't that amazing? No baby girl ever born. And there were villages in India which were treated as amazing but true stories. No baby girl ever born in this village. It is not real. So it was something which is to make me extremely, extremely angry. So that book was written out of sheer rage. I had also met a woman. It was written because I had met a woman who actually came to me for one of my talk shows and she started telling me the story of her life. And she said, she wasn't meant to be around because when she was just born, her relatives told her this later on as a teenager, she was told the story, is that she had been given an overdose of opium. And this is very, very plausible because in Punjab, that's how you used to get rid of your unwanted baby girls because they would just go to sleep. They'd just never wake up. So she had been given an overdose of opium. Then when I started researching, I found that there were also other means of killing baby girls which are much more inventive. They would put them into pots and drown them in milk and then bury the pots and stuff like that. And sing songs saying, go away now. Next time there was a song about it, which they sang, go away now. Next time come back, bring a brother. So it was perfectly acceptable. So when I wrote this, all I wanted to do was get that anger out. I did not know that anybody would even read this book. Forget about inventing a character. But I did want for it to be a book of hope. So it is a very dark story, but I wanted to put in the heart of it a woman with a sense of humor who could deal with these issues, who could deal with these tough issues. So I invented Simran Singh, who's a detective, she's not a detective, she's a social worker. She's a very rich woman. I wanted her to make her completely independent from any patriarchal influence, benevolent or malevolent, whatever. Just know what, she was her own person, so she had to be very independent, very rich. She could have done nothing with her life, but she decides to do it. She decides to go out and do social work, but very tough social work. The kind that takes her into jails, the kind that takes her into, so she was sort of unusual. So when I thought of her, I really didn't think, A, that the book would ever get published. I thought nobody is ever going to want to read about a middle-aged woman who drinks and smokes and has lots of lovers. I give her lots of lovers, they say, great, go out there and do what you like. So I did all those things, but amazingly, it worked. It got the costar award and just kind of... No, the book's been very successful, but at the same time, I mean, you mentioned now two of your books. We began with Sea of Innocence. We've had a brief talk now with Mr. Knight, but an origins of lovers. Well, you've actually maintained this big theme, this theme of great despair, particularly on gender issues. And I dare say on class issues also, for three very immaculate novels. Well, origins of love was again, something which is a big issue in India today, which is renting out of wombs. It's actually a slightly medical novel in the terms that it is set within a hospital space. But what is happening, I don't know if you're aware of this, but there is a drop in fertility all over the world. So you do have extremely poor women in India being asked to sort of give, rent out their wombs for a period of about a year so that some rich couple somewhere or somebody who can afford it can go and have a baby. Nothing wrong with that. We've all heard of lovely, joyful stories about couples getting children, but it is happening in the absence of a law. And that was really bothering me. You know, there is a law that was formulated about four or five years ago, maybe even more than that, which has never been presented in parliament. So you have loads of, just in my colony itself, in Delhi, in the area I live in, I have seen at least 10 fertility centers come up just in the last one year, which offer you children and offer you this, that and the other. But they use the bodies of these very poor women who are usually illiterate, who do not, who can't even read the contract. They can't even read what has been written there. Of course they're looked after and they've paid some amount of money. Usually a couple of thousand pounds would be paid to them for that whole year, but they're normally then separated from their families. They are also, because they're kept literally like hens in a coop in houses which are then rented by those hospitals so that they can be monitored because the main thing is not the woman, the main thing is the baby. The baby has to be looked after and it must be born safe and sound. So it's very good if you know that this is happening. So I thought I would want to write a book because it's suddenly become a very popular, I believe Shah Rukh Khan is having his next child through surrogacy. Amir Khan has already had a child through surrogacy. So you have a lot of people going in for surrogacy, but do they know that what is happening and is it a commodification? I mean, it's an open, none of my books, I mean, I don't want them to be judgmental. I don't want them, I don't want the issue to be put out there and for you to decide whether this is. But are they judgmental or not? I mean, in origins of love, which is about this issue of surrogacy, there's an indictment of the West as well on Western couples. No, Indian couples, I said Shah Rukh Khan. This is happening with anyone who can afford it. I mean, there are people who are literally going down the ladder, normal working class people who can't have a child any other way are going in for surrogacy. But they do not know that they're doing this without an actual law in existence. So there are loads of legal battles. Let me tell you who's getting rich. The doctors are getting rich. The lawyers are getting even richer because everybody who goes there and has a child will find that there's some legal entanglement. A lot of gay couples have suddenly walked into a minefield, which in fact I had flagged up in my book that it is a minefield because India suddenly at the beginning of the year changed the law and said no more gay couples can come in and have a child by surrogacy. But hello, there were already so many babies which were being born to gay couples. And so what happens to them? So more legal battles. So the whole story is about the commodification of women's bodies. Should we reduce her to, sorry to use the word, but you're all grown up here. Should we reduce her to a vagina? Or should we reduce her, which is in the case of prostitution? Or should we reduce her to just a womb, which is what she begins to be because even her family will support her. Go, go, go, have this baby because they end up with two or three lakhs of rupees, which is a lot of money, more money than they'll ever see. The one woman I met, for example, her husband is a rag picker. So she's never going to see that kind of money in her life. So she went in for it and she had only one child and she told me I'm doing this for this kid because then I can educate her properly. And after this, I will have two more through surrogacy then we will build a house. And then I will have, you know. But that raises precisely, I think a very, very important question. If there's no choice, and when you go to India, not just in Delhi, but particularly in places like Mumbai, and you see the huge disparities of wealth, the extremely rich have got grander establishments than you'll find around Hyde Park and Knightsbridge and Hampstead. Absolutely. Whereas the poor live in an extremely powerless condition. If there's no choice and women do this, they commodify themselves because there's no other way to commodify any other aspect of their existence. Is there, as it were, something missing in the critique which concentrates only on the violence being done to them, when in fact the critique should be because they have no hope whatsoever in any case? I agree. I mean, we should have a better social service system. We should have better maternal care because that's what one of the women told me who'd gone for surrogacy, she said this is the first time I'm being looked after in a hospital because when she had her own babies, nobody gave a damn. I mean, it didn't matter. She could just have them on the road as far as the family was concerned. They were not looking after her. So there are huge issues there of ethics, of what is right, what is not right. And as you said, of choices, why do women make these choices? Is it because they want to do it or is there a kind of a social pressure on them? So I just want to add to this, what does social pressure do to you? In a lot of cases when these little babies are killed, baby girls are killed, they're killed by the mother. I mean, that is one of the most shocking facts which come up. So how does a woman do it? And I did talk to a psychiatrist and I said, how'd you explain this? It's baffling, I'm a mother myself of a beautiful girl. I would never ever even dream of doing this. So he said, it might be that at that time, it's the one time that she feels accepted by society. She becomes as patriarchal as a society around her. It's the one time she's doing what everybody around her would like her to do and she gets social acceptance at that point. So do women really have choices if they are so economically and socially deprived? If the woman in the household is the last one to eat, the last one to get healthcare, the last one to get any love or affection, isn't that the message that she's passing on to her children? That women in essence are a marginal section of society and are quite dispensable. So if you kill a baby girl, it's all right. If you rent out your womb and you're saving the family, it's all right. As I said, it sustained this theme which I find an extraordinarily bleak and depressing theme to do with gender violence and denigration through three novels and yet you said you would like at some stage in your work to hold out a beacon of hope for women. What is the beacon of hope? Well, I think largely it is Simran Singh, because she is a woman and she goes out there and gets stuck into these difficult issues but she also finds people around which I think we all do if you were to only look around. You do find pillars of support. If you go out there and you want to make a change and you want to talk about this and you, you know, for example, me, I mean, you know, four or five years ago, I would never ever have imagined that having written a book which deals with gender, I would be called to so as. No way. If I'd written on as I was talking to somebody and in the history of the Mongols or something, maybe you might have called me in. But gender to write about something which, you know, most people, of course they are gender studies, I do understand that. But to do a fictional work which is again a non-serious way maybe of treating a serious subject, this is how it was regarded when my first book did come out, people ask questions in India. Firstly, they would question me. Firstly, they would say, when I talked about gender side, they said, it is not happening. Why are you even talking about it? The only way I got some, you know, sort of, what should I say, they began to believe in what I was saying and what other people were saying is when the census came out. And that is when people realized that there were just 914 girls for every 1,000 boys. So many people like me in India who are trying to raise this red flag were not talking rubbish. So firstly, there is denial. And I think that is the most important thing which Les and I learned is that most people don't want to listen. So you have to persuade them. But that's precisely an interesting question in terms of how the public debate is conducted. I mean, maybe because I've not seen all of your interviews. Obviously, I have not. But those I've seen were almost exclusively conducted by female interviewers. Is there a vast discrepancy in the way that a male interviewer would try to question you about the work that you're trying to do? Stephen, am I supposed to do a critique of your questioning? Well, would you be the first man to interview me? That's a good question, actually. I haven't thought about it. Oh, really? That is interesting. It might quite be true. It might quite be true. One of the reasons it could be true also is that India is largely... You know, there are a lot of women journalists. And so it could be entirely possible that I just went that way. But he's quite right. I mean, women's issues are becoming relevant to everybody. But what was very heartening, though it took a horrible incident like the December 16 raid to take place, was the number of young men we saw on the streets of Delhi who were holding up placards and saying, we are not like this. You know, we support the women on the street. And I think that was a change. And yes, perhaps I had to come all the way so as to get interviewed by a male, you know. But the point is that this is a change that will take time. People, as I said, even women don't want to talk about gender. The women in my audience initially were the first ones to deny that gender side was taking place. They're the first ones to say, what was she doing there at 10 o'clock at night? There are comfort zones that we want to hide behind, especially the middle class. The middle class is very good at that because we want to maintain the status quo, you know. And the poor are actually not able to talk about these issues at all. So you're right. Perhaps the women will lead the change. It doesn't matter where it comes from. I think Indian women need to get more angry. And I'm very happy that a lot of the young journalists who came to talk to me are enraged by this and they are angry and they want to keep this conversation going. So, and they need to be angry because that's the only way you bring about any change. Otherwise everybody will say, it's all right. You know, and you won't have anything being any different. Thank you for that. Ladies and gentlemen, I think that I have done what I need to do by way of introducing, I think, some very, very profound themes that are absolutely the stuff of negative-sized work. Please short, please. And what we have always wanted to do was to use this as an openness so that you as members of the audience could also have a chance to ask her questions to make comments of your own. So I think we should enter about 30 minutes now of doing exactly that. If you wish to make a question, could you please stand up and identify yourself first, please? Gentlemen, it will be read first. The microphone. It's not possible to bring about societal change where the members of parliament or members of the Legislative Assembly or some of them are convicts. They have committed a crime of rape and other things with corruption and all. It's well documented. Yet nothing happens in a society where the legislators themselves are guilty of the crimes. That's very true. I mean, I could agree with you more and this point has been raised over and over again, especially when the anti-rape bill was being passed in parliament and the question that half the rape is a state in parliament. So what kind of bill are they going to pass? And there was, in fact, an attempt also to water down some of the parts of the bill because the men were finding extremely uncomfortable, especially the part of the bill that deals with stalking or voyeurism because they just felt that, oh my God, if you look at a beautiful woman next to you, you guys knew all you women would want just behind bars, they were really worried about what it would do to their security and the ease with which they go out and do these things rather than worrying about what was going to happen to the women. So I couldn't agree with you more. The leave teasing, which is so, yeah, I say, rampant in India is perhaps a contributory factor to what we're seeing at the moment because I know on my visits, even on the underground, this sort of thing seemed to be almost endemic. It wasn't just that one or two people were involved. It seemed to be that everyone was at it and, yeah, as a westerner, of course I was so shocked, I tried not to take a note of it, but it was so much in your face, you couldn't ignore it. Yeah, you're quite right, because, of course, the term leave teasing is a bit odd and the way between we see that teasing or rather teasing or something, but it's true, all of us have grown up with that. I mean, when I would travel in buses, when I was in college or school or whatever, you just did your best to protect yourself. You got into a huddle and got into one side of the bus because you knew exactly what was going to happen and if you were, God forbid, stranded on a lonely road, I mean, you could have the worst kind of you. So that is a pretty common experience and now, again, as I said, some of the younger, my younger colleagues tell me that after the rape case, there is a new game which has come into the minds of these slightly depraved young men, I think, on stations, as you said, mentioned the metro station and places like that, where they start, if they see a girl alone and they're in a group, then they start almost insinuating that they're going to rape her. So they will start saying, shall we? Kind of insinuating that they're going to do and watch her getting more and more terrified and enjoying it. So there is a... I just want to also just take a minute to talk about gang rape, you know, because I think there is this new kind of... It's almost a new word for me. It's a new lexicon of rape, as it were, because when we talked about in the past, gang rape, if you look at it, what happens in the UK, gangs are these street gangs, a bunch of kids getting together, and of course, they do rape. They do get together and they do rape people. In India, it has now become, sometimes if it's urban India, it could be just a random set of people who are just getting together for a evening's entertainment. So they're not even in the old sense a gang. They've had gang rape in villages, in rural areas, where the caste system is pretty well entrenched. So the upper caste were always, in a sense, allowed access, and to gang rape women from the lower caste. That was part of their... And they would get away. It's not permitted, but they would think it was permitted because they were of a higher caste. And those of you who remember the famous story of Bandit Queen and Pudan Devi, and things like that, that is how it all began, because she was gang raped. And then she went on to take her revenge because she was of a lower caste. So there are issues about where this... Because thanks to genocide, there's also a real problem that men do not have access to women physically, practically, because there are not enough women. They've killed them all. You know, so what do you do? So, like Draupati, you know, in the past, where you share five husbands. So you have Draupati-like syndromes happening in states like Guyana, where one family will buy a girl, import a girl, or one of them will marry, one brother will marry, then the rest of the brothers will share. The father-in-law will also share. Everybody else will get a piece of her. And now they're telling me that their exchange may last, I don't know if this is true or not, but somebody just told me there are these exchange festivals where if you're bored with them, you go and exchange it with somebody else. So I think there is a certain mentality, also having grown through years of gender side, years of marginalizing women and making them physically irrelevant. So when you see a woman, you don't see a woman. You see a piece of flesh. You see me. You see somebody like on screen, you know, and that's the woman you want, but you can't have her. So you just take whatever's available. The day my book was launched in Delhi, and we had the law minister launching it, and we thought everything is going to be fine. And you know, the next day there was a horrible rape of the five-year-old who had candles and all kinds of things stuffed into her vagina by two men. And the police actually tried to bribe the parents to shut up about it and not go to the media. So we are still living in our stage where incidents like this, where men feel they can get away with it, and they do, you know. I was checking on the next thing that's right. Having established that there is a shortage of females, why do you think males are successful in getting so much in their dowry demands? Well, because it is a patriarchal society. At the end of the day, the people still feel that their men are special, and that, you know, I mean, their boys are something special. They have invested. The whole idea of why don't, let's just examine the issue, why don't they want baby girls in the house? Why don't they want, because it's a useless investment. You're never going to get any returns. All you're doing is investing and bringing her out, but she's going to go off and live in somebody else's home anyway. So she's going to be useful for them. So if you have a boy, you have access to money. Dowry, incidentally, is illegal. But people still ask for it in all kinds and shapes and form. But to just give you a sense that maybe things are changing, maybe somewhere women are realizing that they might be worth something if they are in short supply. Two or three cases which I read about recently, one was that one girl in Bihar refused to get married. The bridegroom had come, and the party had come to the house. She refused to go with him because she said, write your address and show me. He couldn't write, he was illiterate. And she was 10th class boss, as they said. And she made him go away, that. Then another one where she, while talking to him, said, oh, he's too stupid, I don't think I want this guy. And the third one refused because she said, you don't have toilet in your house, I'm not going to go with you. So these are instances where some families as opposed, see the whole thing is a family unit. How are you bringing up your girls? How are you bringing up your boys? If the family supports the girl who refused to go with the guy who didn't have a toilet in his house, he bloody will have to build that toilet. And he did. So there are issues like this which make us more aware that if women got the support of their families, if their families did not turn into mobs against them, but into loving, parental, supportive structures, we could have a very good blue system. Is there a woman here just by the collab yet? Since the delirium in December, India's past new and great laws, which are very good on paper, but do you think they're ever going to be enforced completely, especially because there are 30 million cases pending? No, it's very tough. I mean, we were in despair because one of the things is that you have a six or some random number like that fast track course operating in Delhi. And what about the rest of the country? Where is the focus? So they did all this because basically they wanted to shut all the women out who were out there protesting. So there are things which are ongoing within colleges, within universities, within schools, girls are being taught to look after themselves better. So, you know, on an individual basis, on a private basis, things are happening, but if you were to just take the account of the fact that the so-called fast track court has been looking at the Nair Bhair case, the gang rape case for the last six months, and they haven't been able to come to any judgment as yet. We don't even know what is happening to the case because most of us are forbidden from reporting it. So we are just still wearing... As far as I'm concerned, it just... Actually, there were a lot of people who said the existing laws were good enough if only they were implemented properly. So the fault does not lie in the law. The fault lies in the police officer who refuses to acknowledge that there is a complaint. The fault lies in the medical doctor who just turns a blind eye. In the families who tell the girls, keep quiet, forget about it. And you know, the whole sense of shame, you will bring shame to the family if you go out there and say you've been raped. So I think those are the issues which we will have to deal with because unless we get somebody who's really interested in gender, you know, this government, I don't think is interested in gender. They're not enough parliamentarians sitting out there who women A, I don't know whether that will really make a difference, but that is one of the things. I see somebody who's a feminist, you know, someone who feels strongly about this, but there isn't. A little here. I'll put it further down. Kishore, thank you very much. I was wondering how, whether class and caste are important issues to you because I heard it mentioned only once, once by Stephen and a couple of questions for you, about caste. Because instead of, the recurring terms have been, ahead of time has been the Indian woman. Now do you think the Indian woman that explains all sorts of experiences that women have or are there other kind of, you know, other differences within the Indian woman? Yeah, absolutely. I think the caste system has done a great disservice to Indian women within each caste. I think they still are the lowest of the low. You know, even if the government gives reservations, it's usually the male members of the family who get that support, you know, sort of when they have these positive kind of discriminatory efforts which are going on. So the Indian woman does tend to lose out there and as I mentioned, in terms of caste system, of course, because it is taken for granted that the upper caste do have, you know, can manhandle or molest the lower caste women. There have been some cases which have been reported in the newspapers also where men have barged into the homes of lower caste women while her children are watching and have written. So, you know, they just think they have complete impunity because some of those attitudes have now been transferred, I think, into urban areas where the caste system has been transferred into the class system. Whereas if you have power, then you can do what you like. And which is why a lot of the really horrific recent cases which came to light had politicians of powerful figures in the middle of them, but most of the time they came to nothing. You know, even one of the cases which I have written about in this book, which I refer to in passing, is the Scarlet Keeling case, which was a case of a British, you know, a teenager who went to Boa and was raped and murdered. But the first thing the police did when they found her naked body on the beach was firstly they said they didn't know who she was even though she had been on that beach living there practically for the last three or four months. Then they said, oh, she had gone for a swim, you know, and she took off all her clothes and she went for a swim in the middle of the night. That's what happened to her. So there were various, finally when there was a lot of pressure and they tried to get the case investigated it was like months after the incident had taken place. So, you know, a lot of the heart where she went to, that chat was destroyed. So at every level, there is an attempt to stop people. So, caste and class, it depends who you are, if you're powerful enough which is why these guys, as we mentioned earlier, are sitting in parliament, they have rape cases against them, they take full advantage of it. So, gentlemen of the Green show. Thank you. Thanks for a very interesting talk. My name is John Paul, I'm from the Harmer Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence in St Andrews. Kind of building on what you've just said. I think the film Who Killed Jessica is a great example of the politics kind of covering up for the for the elites. But my question ties into that and it relates to, I guess, the clear example is the Gujarat riots of 2002 where particular violence was focused on women in particularly brutal ways. And I wondered if you had any insights into you know, in the West, we have a seven code of chivalry, which I think to a certain extent still stands. And in India there seems to be a code of the reverse chivalry, that women seem to take particularly focus of violence when the norms of society broke down and how that plays out if you have any thoughts. You know, I just want to say that there is, the Gujarat riots were horrible, but they were not the first riots in India. I think we sometimes forget that there are many more victims of riots that would exist in India and I almost became a victim myself because my previous name was Anuvalia and I had just put up a nameplate outside my house just the day before the Sikh riots broke out in the Kundalini and so they came to burn my house down, they came with the jerry cans. I remember their faces very clearly. It's just that my neighbours came and said, no, she's not an actual Sikh, you know. I had to bring my children to the door and say, you know, they've got short hair and you know, trying to convince this it was just a mob that comes and does whatever it has to do. I was lucky I escaped but many people did not escape in those Sikh riots and those riots were also equally brutal. When you look at rape that happens during riots it's, I think they also try and get rid of not just the woman brutalise her but they also do not want especially in communal riots. They do not want that her ability, her reproductive organs are left intact because the idea is that you must kill the other race, you know. You must not allow the other to survive. So the woman becomes like a vessel for that, you know, and I think some of the brutality you saw in the gang rape is also kind of linked to that but let's go a little further back during the partition of India there was a lot that happened which is still buried in popular memory. You know, I mean women also had to leave Lahore and come to India. They left everything behind. So if you look at what is done to women then and what has happened to women now it is just a continuous story of aggression of violation sometimes, you know, done by others, sometimes done by your own family members because they're trying to save you from rape. So all kinds of things. Sorry. I can just come back just to say, but it's interesting how for example you mentioned partition where one of the major crimes was the abduction of women from the other religion and then their incorporation is property and family whereas you transition to Gujarat and it's the murder of the most brutal and horrible waves of the other woman rather than the abduction. I know part of that is partition involves moving and migrating but it seems that a level what existed previously. Oh no. I would not agree with that at all. I would say that everything, Gujarat was not a high point of violation of women. As I said if you just go through the riots which have happened previously unfortunately what has happened is Gujarat was at the age of television and in India and it was a highly reported riot because it also happened in a middle class families were involved in things like that. But what was done, I mean I have read stories of partition so I know the brutality which took place then so I think a woman's body is a woman's body. You can violate her in any number of ways and these ways are not new these ways are known and these ways especially exist in popular memory when you're trying to annihilate the other. So it's not rocket science. It wasn't invented in Gujarat I don't believe that. Hi I was just wondering if you care to comment on the difference between gender roles in India with gender roles in her neighboring countries Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh Sri Lanka. Is there any significant differences or is that going on? No I think there is a lot of commonality. Yeah absolutely I mean I was in Pakistan recently and I do think that you know women there and women from India maybe have shared history so as Bangladesh it used to be one of the same country so I think we do have a lot of commonalities there and their issues are very much our issues the kind of patriarchy they face, the kind of rage that they encounter. I mean if you look at what the Taliban for example is doing in the border areas it's horrible. They're actually picking out girls who go to school and killing them and you know and things like that. So I think there is a careful targeting and a sense that we have to keep women within a circumscribed space and as I was saying to the gentleman earlier you know these are maybe historical or unknown methodologies which these people have now perfected or kind of ingrained the world has been there but ingrained into their daily existence so we have a lot of commonalities yes. I'm going to take one last question at this stage and I think that you will have a good second. Thanks it does follow on actually from the last question of it which was about the if you see any differences between the different states in India because just picking up the point on gender side. Actually I was at a Martha Sanne lecture on Wednesday and he was talking about the data and he was saying actually it's not seen across all the states that really it's seen yet north and west and states like Bengal and Kanataka and Tamil Nadu and Kerala you don't really get it so yeah I guess not just on that issue but more broadly whether you could discuss some of the issues between different states yeah. No he is absolutely correct because this was used to be actually very much a North Indian problem but then I think in the last couple of decades you saw it also occurring in Tamil Nadu because that's when Jaya Lalitha started putting out those little cradles and saying don't kill your baby because drop them in a cradle outside we'll look after them. So they have been sort of coming in the certain states as well. Shockingly I mean I think the statistics also showed that the matriarchal states on east there was an element coming in there as well you know the reason being that science has made it very easy for us to tell the sex of the child. You can do the sex selective portion before. I mean like you can do the portion and not wait for the child to be born and then physically kill her. So a lot of families who are say lower middle class middle class farming communities whatever who do not want to reach people who don't want to divide society. It's for example in places in South Delhi where I live which is you know some of the more wealthier parts of Delhi you find the sex ratio there is appalling because people just go to clinics and they sex select the child. So I think it is beginning to impact probably until we sort of you know reasonably begin to think of women as good enough to invest in. So yes Amartya is right it is not you know all India problem but it is beginning to impact all India because migration is taking place people carry those images those you know kind of attitudes with them. So it's not something you can anymore you know restrict and that's the worry that's what we all that's the mindset all of us have to change. Can I just comment on the reason of this kind the question I had in mind to actually I grew up in South India and I studied a little more and I could see the distinct differences in the way women were treated. Even now I feel a lot more safer in the south than in the north and even on public transport you were mentioning about your experiences in the south you still have segregation in buses you have women some being men of me. But is that a good thing? But this is the point I want to raise with you I mean is assimilation better or is segregation in these sort of circumstances what factors would you attribute to the fact that south has consistently seen fewer cases of rape and sexual violence either due to underreporting or it could be the that's not true actually there's there's a lot of underreporting you think they're not underreporting they're not coming out of that also so you know in terms of just attitudes why is there a difference in attitudes that's what the question is in the north and the south but I thought we just established that probably north has always been it's been quite an endemic problem in the north that's the best that says so in the south it has been more so in the north definitely but as I said the the idea always was there are historical reasons as well which deal with the fact that if you look at Punjab they needed meant to fight and you know there has always been a less especially after even things like the partition took place where women were given lesser value you did not want your woman to be abducted or raped so a lot of adult women were killed by their own family they were meant to kneel on the ground and then kill attitudes yes do differ and they differ because of you know farming practices and you know dowry and you know all those kind of endemic kind of practices which people have in the north but I do think that living in the south possibly I would also give some credit to education you know there has always been a higher emphasis on education and I do think that states like Kerala and other which have a high literacy rate do rather less badly on these parameters also in 2001 there was a national policy for the encounter of women which was adopted and it started giving micro-credits yes there could be a bit of endemic reasons and there was much more success for the south than you know particularly Kerala where it's a combination of both a metro and a city plus yes so there are these issues education is primary I mean you have to educate your girl child I mean that is so essential and you have to educate the mother you know that those issues go without saying probably then they can be changed and I think the south has done much better but I think perhaps I should have I wanted to add an explanation about the question I think the principle difference between south and north is that the caste system is much weaker in the south because there has been an anti-brival movement for about a hundred years and also christian influence was much bigger through schools in the south than it was in the north so now it still continues to be much more traditional Hindu caste system oriented south has a caste system but it is much weaker with a hierarchical relationship that is also and what was the derivative movement justice party and DMK and so on actually gave high status to the lower caste and the anti-brival and that may have made a lot of difference to the difference in the attitude I mean we are very complex multivariate problems it is not going to be easy I wonder ladies and gentlemen if I might start to bring the evening to a close I think we have had a very good discussion about the central themes of three great novels we haven't even discussed the fourth book Darling Jean I can't I think in any case a cinematic family but it raises the question what is the next big project are you going to maintain this very important theme very very difficult theme for yet a novel or are you going to try something different for the next book I am at that very difficult stage where I have three wonderful books to write and I am really not being able to write which one to do I wish I had a three face coin or something like that toss and then make up my mind but I think the final call will probably be taken by my agent Alas she would probably tell me this is the book you have to write next make my life easier but there are three really really nice books one of them has to do with the continuation of the series which I don't want to give up on the gender we need to keep revisiting it and looking at whether we have really made a difference Well whichever book and for all the books in the future I think you take our best wishes and fondest hopes for their great success great hopes also for the film that the British producer is going to try to make at the sea in a sense Ladies and gentlemen I think we will be very privileged tonight to be here for a very frank and extremely interesting discussion which hasn't shown the importance of the dynamic issues of today's India and I think that we should show our gratitude to Kishmar at the side in the traditional manner