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One wet and windy evening, as the lights turned red at the traffic signal of Bangalore’s Brigade Road, a line of men and women silently appeared across the zebra crossing. Each person wore an alphabet that glowed.
Together they formed the sentence: ‘Why are you looking at me?’ When the lights turned green, the line silently moved away, just as it had come. But in those seconds, every pair of eyes from every impatient, fume breathing vehicle was focused on those letters.
These people were part of the Blank Noise Project – an initiative against street sexual harassment started by art student Jasmeen Patheja. In India, when a woman is harassed on the street, she’s often made to feel like she asked for it, like it was her fault. “Were you wearing a sleeveless shirt?” a disapproving aunt will ask. “Were you out late?” a concerned father will query. But so what if you were? Did you really every ask for it? India’s law sees as a crime the act of “outraging the modesty of a woman”. The use of the rather quaint word ‘modesty’ makes us ask, does the law act any differently if I were groped and leered at while wearing, say, a navel-exposing leather two piece suit than it would if I was demurely draped in a sari? Does it discriminate?
Blank Noise asks these questions. Targeted in the metropolises of Bangalore, Delhi and Bombay, we want to get people out of the complacency they have adopted when they think about street harassment. If it happens everyday, all the time, does that make it alright? People will reassure you after a bad experience, “But you’re alright, aren’t you? He didn’t… do… anything, did he?” If it’s not rape, and you survived, all’s well that’s ends well?
At Blank Noise we’re saying NO it’s NOT. It’s NOT OK to be groped, leered at, pushed, pinched, rubbed, cat-called. The project is out on the streets. Groups of volunteers ask people to define “eve teasing” (that ridiculously underplayed term we’re always using in India when what we actually mean is harassment). There are opinion poll boards they carry around at different city locales, bus stands, for instance, asking people what they would consider harassment; is it looking, staring, ogling, stalking, groping, touching….
This is often accompanied by interviews on what punishment it should merit and whether they would intervene if they saw harassment take place. These interviews give us some priceless insights into how people view harassment of women on the streets.
“Girls ask for it when they dress provocatively,” both women and men have said.
“We cannot control ourselves when we see someone dressed like that.”
Apart from asking people’s opinions to gauge what public perceptions of harassment are, we also have demonstrations and public performances like the one at the street light. On most streets where women look down at the ground, avoiding eye contact, swerving to avoid people reaching out to grope them, it is a strangely empowering feeling to be at a streetlight staring down a man with your breasts forming part of the sentence why are you looking at me?”
It’s an unusual experience for many men to be stared at by a woman. In Bangalore when we were at the street light, men would finally turn away from our stare. It flipped the traditional power structures where women shy away from mens’ gaze. Here we were in control, we were staring them down. When they asked us what we were doing, we handed out pamphlets outlining Article Section 354 IPC about eve teasing being a criminal offence. Once you get people’s attention it’s easier to draw them into a dialogue.
Jasmeen has been taking photographs of her eve teasers over the last two years and putting them on the Blank Noise blog along with section 354 of the Indian constitution. Photographing the eve teasers has reversed the power of the ‘perpetrator’, thus making him vulnerable to being exposed. Each photograph speaks of a unique encounter with the eve teaser; there was one where a young man insisted he only had a ‘crush on her’, that he did not mean to sexually harass her, that he was a ‘decent man’. The fact is that eve teasing is not always street sexual bullying for the eve teaser; he is not always a perpetrator in his own eyes, its true that in some stratas of Indian society it is seen as a form of wooing. This has been further propagated by Indian mainstream cinema. The guy gets the girl by chasing her, teasing her, wooing her. In another instance the eve teaser pleaded and begged Jasmeen to not publish his photograph. This was after molesting her in a crowded bus. He got off the bus saying, “ please don’t do this to me, I am a father of two children.”
At Blank Noise we are also working on another project “Did You Ask For It”. We’re asking for clothes that people were wearing when they were harassed. Most people remember them to the last detail – underwear and socks. So we’re collecting all the clothes people send us and all the little scrawled notes that accompany them, personal traumas and buried memories tumbling out in courier packages that come from far away. All the clothes will be built into an enormous 1000-piece installation that we hope to construct at very public intersections in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi.
This is to defy the assumption that you “asked for it” by what you were wearing. Because, honestly, whether you were wearing a shalwar kameez which covered your wrists and your ankles or a tank top which didn’t… your chances of being harassed and made to feel unsafe on the street are just as high. When people question your clothes or your “attitude” after you have had a bad experience they’re suggesting that it was your fault, that you were provocative. This is rubbish!
On International Women’s Day, Blank Noise had a blog-a-thon: bloggers from across the world posting about harassment experiences on their blogs. The response was overwhelming which just goes to show that most women in India, despite what they say and how they might be in denial, have been harassed. It has disturbed them. They’ve dealt with it, invariably, alone. But Blank Noise is a collective effort. It’s very public; as public as harassment itself. It encourages people to come out and talk about it. To recognize that it’s not your fault if someone encroached upon you, it is a crime; and the perpetrator must be punished.
We had overwhelming responses from men and women from all over the world: Italy, China, UK, US, and all over India Lucknow, Mumbai. Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkta to name a few. The responses came in the form of testimonials, opinions, and experiences. We can safely call the Blank Noise blog-a-thon an online mass catharsis.
While the term eve teasing is specifically Indian, the issue of street sexual harassment is universal. We are open to ideas on how you would like to participate on both an online and offline basis.
We are currently focused on a building installation of clothes as testimonials, for the DID YOU ASK FOR IT, project. We are hoping to receive clothes from people all over the world. Mid year we hope to have that 1000-piece installation up in the center of India’s largest cities, hitting people with the reality that street sexual harassment exists, there is no such thing as asking for it! |  |  | FLAG THIS STORY FOR REVIEW | |
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