How to Be a Modern Man

IN A YEAR when corporate CEOs have started taking mental wellness seriously and are using Zoom calls to urge men working from home to share the load of housework with their wives and partners, traditional masculinity has certainly come under the scanner. Gender roles may not be equal but a conversation has started in society on what being a man means in contemporary India. The cultural cues are confusing. Should they emulate Kabir Singh from the eponymous movie and love their partners to death (or at least abandonment) or should they be like the father of this year’s Gunjan Saxena, progressive, patient and silently persuasive? Should they celebrate that men in Central Government jobs—and some enlightened private sector companies—can now take 15 days of paternity leave or should they mourn that Rajeev Satav’s Paternity Benefit Bill, introduced in 2017, is still pending? Should they infantilise their wives and call them gudiya (doll) like Ranveer Singh or should they treat them like the independent-minded individuals they are as Virat Kohli does?

Praseeda Gopinath has written at length on the many masculinities offered by Mumbai cinema in particular. The whimsical, decent picaresque hero embodied by Raj Kapoor, the suave sophistication of Dev Anand, Guru Dutt’s idealistic tragic hero, and Dilip Kumar’s understated, emotional everyman in the 1950s—the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema—to Shammi Kapoor’s boisterous masculinity, Kishore Kumar’s goofy non-normative men, and Shashi Kapoor’s beautiful, youthful urbaneness that defined Hindi cinema and urban India’s translation of the swinging 1960s. The arrival of Rajesh Khanna’s romantic hero, writes Gopinath, although short-lived, ushered in the beginning of a new age of the all-powerful charisma of the Hindi hero and the male star, reaching its apogee in the restrained yet uninhibited lanky vigilante machismo of Amitabh Bachchan, who spoke to the increasing national anger at corruption and income inequality in the 1970s. In the 1990s, post-liberalisation, Shah Rukh Khan shifted the paradigms of hero masculinity to the softer, sweeter, vulnerable yet ambitious, urbane, middle-class man. The new millennium brought in the man child of Dil Chahta Hai, best embodied by Ranbir Kapoor in a series of films from Wake Up Sid to Sanju.

In cricket, another marker of social behaviour in India, the masculinities have altered as well, from the regal Anglicised gentleman Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi in the still-sold-on-England 1960s, to the aggressive little guy punching above his weight and stature in Sunil Gavaskar during the angry 1970s. Cut to the 1990s where the good son, Sachin Tendulkar, grew up into the new king of a new India-dominated game—Rahul Dravid, always in his shadow, was equally dependable, reliable, trustworthy in a world where values were changing as fast as market dynamics were altering. Then to MS Dhoni, cool, confident, carefully constructed small-town boy with fire in his belly, father to baby Ziva with a sharp Instagram profile. In Kohli, the millennials found their icon swaggering on the field and a softie at home, creating a new physicality, a new diction, and certainly a new set of emotions more empathetic to women, offering a new way to be for the middle-class man.

Film scholar Pramod K Nayar says: “As role models, the sports stars are seen as aspirational. The new-age stars combine an aggressive on-field persona with a sensitive father-companion role. But both are roles for public consumption: presenting particular images of themselves. Since we no longer debate, or can debate, whether they are truly aggressive/ sensitive, all we have before us is this role-play.”

In the midst of this role-playing, the middle-class man wonders which way to go. Does he go the way of Maryada Purushottam, the ideal man, or pursue greatness to the exclusion of all else, even being good, like the accomplished but flawed Ravana? Is he to revere the celibate Hanuman of the Indian Ramayana or the warrior in love with the mermaid princess Sovanna Machcha of Southeast Asian Ramayanas? Does he focus on being a good husband or a good father? If he does the latter, what do our ancient stories tell him? Popular writer Anand Neelakantan decries the idea of the ideal man. “It is a very north Indian concept,” he laughs. “In the south, we are all Mahabali’s people. We believe in the equality of all. We believe in the ideal human, it could be a man, a woman or even a transgender.”

In popular ancient texts though, author Anuja Chandramouli points out, most fathers in particular veered from being stern and expecting their sons to be dutiful to being murderous. Dasharatha was a doting father and husband. He pampered Kausalya, Kaikeyi and Sumitra, and the ‘putrasneha’ (love for son) he demonstrated for Rama defies belief. He loved his son too much and when forced to send Rama into exile he pined away and died shortly after. Shiva was less indulgent. He decapitated Ganesha when Parvati’s son denied him entry to his mother’s chambers without her permission. What made it worse was that Shiva asked Vishnu mounted on Garuda to engage Ganesha from the front while he attacked from behind. But once he resurrected Ganesha, all was forgiven.

Siruthondar, one of the 63 Nayanmars, was so poor he could not buy meat for a passing Brahmin who insisted he ate only mamsam (non-vegetarian) food. So he carved up, cooked and served his only son. The son was later restored to life. Arjuna was a good father to Abhimanyu but he didn’t bat an eyelid when it was decided to sacrifice Iravan, his son by Ulupi. Yayati demanded his sons by Sharmistha and Devayani give up their youth so that he may indulge his desires for a thousand years and punished the ones who did not oblige. Dushyanta abandoned Shakuntala and Bharata. Even Rama, blissfully unaware of his sons being raised in the forest by Sita, thought nothing of taking them away from her while she went back into the earth.

he modern Indian man is caught between his many roles in the private domain—father, son, husband—as well as his public role. These may not have been mutually conflicting but with the rise of women empowerment, a more dynamic family unit, and increasingly enlightened laws, led by the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act 2013, and moments such as the #MeToo movement, men are finding it difficult to balance their roles. They’ve been taught from an early age that they can have it all without doing it all, but perhaps it is not so true now.

Divya Prakash Dubey, storyteller of middle India and its aspirations, says: “The people I write about, you could say, their role model is Rahul Dravid. He’s the man you can trust, the father who will stand in his child’s school line. His father did not even pick up his own shoes. Yet he is ready to help his wife, he sits in on online classes, he knows that the daughter of the house wore jeans and the daughter-in-law of the house should by rights do the same,” says Dubey. “He sees everything from the same lens as that of his father. He may not have become the son his father wanted, but in the eyes of his son or daughter, he wants to be a father of whom maybe after a few years his children will say: ‘I want to be like dad.’ This father is a superman wearing a T-shirt and shorts. No one has married outside their caste or religion in his family, and yet he will tell his children, if you have a choice of your own, tell me, don’t run away.”

For Dubey, masculinity is a simple choice: “We all want to be like our father. Most of us imitate our fathers. We want to grow old speaking like that, to love in the same way, to do everything just the way our fathers did. That is what makes us unique. People who do not want to be like their father or hate them, they too are measuring themselves against their father at a deeper level. Their hatred is also a copy of their father.” He references Ajay Devgn in Drishyam (2015). “If there is a tragedy in the family, the man stands like a wall.”

Often this is a trap too. In this year’s finest thriller Raat Akeli Hai, Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Jatil Yadav, a small-town police officer, who has several complexes—being dark-skinned, being 40 and still a bachelor, even his odd name. He has an expectation of a devoted and dutiful wife which is smashed to smithereens when he meets the character played by Radhika Apte, who is also the chief suspect in the murder of her much older husband.

Siddiqui says as a man he himself internalised many insecurities and ways of being, inherited from his father and grandfather. “Culturally, patriarchy gives us so many complexes that it takes us a long time to realise how wrong some of these notions are. I have seen this in myself, in my own journey, internally and externally from Budhana to Mumbai. And in my own relationships with women. For instance, often with our mothers when we have fights, their last retort is usually that ‘your father was exactly like this’,” says Siddiqui. And yet, they can’t be like their fathers, because the women have moved on, acquiring their own identities and winning their own independence.

Much of middle-class life in India is a performance, notes Dutch scholar Michiel Baas, who has just written on the topic (Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility & the New Middle Class). For men, it’s a journey towards and away from one’s own father. “I always joke that it is very expensive to be middle class in India because there are all these expectations of the kind of lifestyle you need to lead. But it is equally true of the masculinity that is adopted. It may be respectful of the patriarchy but in practice it can follow quite different trajectories.”

Indeed, even in a country as deeply patriarchal as India, not all men are powerful. Masculinities, like patriarchies, operate in the cruel plural rather than the comfortable singular. Men, as Siddiqui says, can also be victims of patriarchy. In that, at least, they finally have something in common with women.

cinemaheroesIndian societymasculinityModern manrole modelsvulnerability