Agar saaz chheda, tarane banenge, yaniki, if there is an interview, there will be memes. Queer memes, Zoom class memes, but most of all, South Asian sasural memes.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Let us cut right to the chase, or, as my friend Swati texted me early one morning last week, “Interview dekha?” Soon after, my friend Aneela from across the border, sent me a photo from Karachi’s Women’s Day Aurat March, saying “from the aurat march straight to Harry and Meghan”. The poster said “Izzat ke maare kitna chup chaap rahein” (Until when must we be silent for honour?). To which truth of family life we can only say, “were you silent? Or were you silenced?”
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Agar saaz chheda, tarane banenge, yaniki, if there is an interview, there will be memes. Queer memes, Zoom class memes, but most of all, South Asian sasural memes. The dubbed Punjabi videos: “Main maasi Oprah, ki dasaan, pehle te sab vadde change, bade lush-push te vyah kitta, agle din sareyan di akhaan badal gayeen” (‘a posh wedding, Aunty Oprah, but next day it all changed.’) I will be saying lush-push forever now, be ready. The Balaji saas-bahu edit, featuring thunderbolt-and-lightning repeat cuts. The filmi memes: “The queen told Meghan pankha band kar, yeh tere baap ka ghar nahin hai”, the K3G poster featuring the Royal Family and the sasural genda phool meme, with Oprah going “oye hoye oye, oye hoye oye”.
Some lush-push people back home were bristling with righteousness. Many of them said things like Biji is so changi, yaniki, “the Queen is a very nice lady”, as though the Queen had knitted sweaters for them in childhood. Simi Garewal tweeted that Meghan was evil, then retracted evil and replaced it with “calculating”. Ok then.
Like with most things, I was reminded of an old Hindi film, Do Raaste. In it, Bindu is the vamp daughter-in-law who wears shimmery black sarees and wants modern sofa sets—yanki Netflix deals—while Mumtaz is the sweet girl in light sarees, devoted to the joint family.
Posh folks dismissing “saas-bahu” melodramas, is a clever way to pretend these things don’t happen in their homes, equating elite with evolved. As if they are oblivious and excused from that great South Asian fear—“sasural waale kya kahenge”, as if their sasural wale don’t say plenty. Who in our fair and lovely land could be surprised about obsession with skin colour, and its innate racism/casteism or mean in-laws yaar? Or, the idea that a woman is always less valuable—a mixed race woman more so—and so she should be grateful for what she gets, yaniki, you married a prince, now you want more? Samajhti kya ho apne aap ko?
Ms Garewal was only one among others who also said how they did not respect a woman who breaks a home. But, no problem respecting a home that breaks a woman, it seems. Ghar ki baat ghar mein rehni chahiye —yaniki, how you are mean to the bahu and unjust to the domestic staff—in order to maintain the honour, cache and bank balance of the ghar/community/country. So, they praise the woman who bears it all and sacrifices herself at the altar of these worlds, say snide things about the woman who openly works the system to wrest some power, and denigrate women who decide to shrug off its suffocations.
But, life is for living, or as the meme I’ve not yet seen might have maasi Oprah say, “Ja Meghan, jee le apni zindagi”.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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