On White Women and Privacy

Bhaichand Patel has a fine column in Outlook on the attitude towards White women in India,

Sudhir Kakar, who lives in Goa, says that a white woman walking alone there is likely to be stopped by someone on a motorcycle and asked point-blank, “Do you want to be f*****d?” Or words to that effect. Kakar is an authority on human behaviour and I asked him why this should be so. “The Indian woman is a maa, a beti or a bahu for these men. The white woman, on the other hand, is fair game. She is a whore.”

Sexual harassment of women is a worldwide problem. They get their bottoms pinched in Rome. In New York, men on construction sites will make lewd remarks to pretty women passing by. The behaviour of Indian men is less innocuous; there is nothing playful about it. He wants to bed that woman, nothing less. And he is prepared to use force if necessary. He has the impression that westerners treat sex as casually as shaking hands.

This is racism, but there is more to it. Indian men prefer fair women to dusky ones. And there is nothing fairer than white. If you need convincing on that point, I suggest you turn to the matrimonial pages of our Sunday newspapers. All the potential brides have fair complexions. The dozens of creams in the market that claim to whiten the skin all do brisk business.

An Indian man may not be willing to marry a white woman but, if he had a choice, he would prefer to have sex with a white woman rather than an Indian one. There are other factors involved in the harassment of white women—lack of sexual outlet, men still being virgins well past puberty, sometimes frigid wives—but the colour of the victim’s skin plays an important part. You will not find African women being harassed in this country.[link]

That’s an attitude one will find even in Indian students in America.

On a different note, Javed Naqvi discusses why the Indian media is so obsessed with the French President’s girlfriend especially when it refuses to discuss the private life of India’s politicians,

The obsession with the Sarkozy-Bruni story and complete aloofness from the Vajpayee saga reflects a dilemma over public morality that the Indian media as also the country’s burgeoning middle classes face. At one level there is a great liberal attitude of progress but the very next step is stalked by a barbaric mindset. Kissing in English movies is good and the censors have no problem with all the wet scenes that Hollywood and cheap Italian flicks churn out regularly. In 1933, Devika Rani, grand niece of nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, kissed her husband Himanshu Rai in the movie Karma. But since then no Indian heroine is ever shown kissing a man and while rape scenes are a staple diet they are carried out with all the clothes intact. The temples of ancient Khajuraho and Konark have the world’s most erotic scenes on display so much so that parents don’t want to send their adult children by themselves there, but try and depict those figurines on the canvass and all hell would break loose. The conclusion is inevitable. India was a far more liberal civilisation than the way it has evolved. To begin with there were no vigilante groups of the Hindu and Muslim varieties that roam the streets today, ready and armed to bludgeon a Valentines Day event here or a fashion show there.[link]

Though Naqvi is quite wrong when he claims that ‘’since then no Indian heroine is ever shown kissing a man.” What would happen to this dude then?