When a Hero Crumbles

An encounter with feminist writer Germaine Greer

I never had a hero growing up. The closest I ever came to hero worship was when I put my father on a pedestal and truly believed that he could do no wrong. It was the naïve conviction of a six-year-old and lasted almost a decade, until I replaced him with someone else.

In the summer of 2005, when I was 19 and going through a phase of re- invention that involved less thinking and more living in the moment, a professor handed me a copy of The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer. To a young mind that had grown up feeling fettered and claustrophobic in the closely-guarded environment of a Christian boarding school and a conservative family, this book came as a revelation.

Thirty-four years after it was first published, I devoured every chapter of the book, and that is when I began to believe that I could be whoever I wanted to, however I wanted, without my gender and sexuality getting in the way. It was a fight that had not always seemed worth the effort before I read these words: ‘I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.’

By this time, the rest of the Western world might have moved on and discovered the joys of other things in life besides feminism with all its baggage, but I was just getting started, thanks to the confidence that I found in the words of the Australian activist-feminist. Armed with that tattered copy, I awoke to a new me.

Six years after I had first read and idolised Greer, I found myself heading what used to be a feminist magazine for working girls. It was during my time there that I heard whispers about the impending arrival of the woman who was responsible for changing my life. I decided to walk up to my boss and beg her to make me a part of the programme. To my surprise, not only did she approve, but she put Greer in my hands. It was too good to be true.

One day before Greer was to arrive, I found myself unable to function normally. I couldn’t breathe because of the excitement, let alone sleep, and found myself pacing nervously up and down the visitor’s lounge of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport two hours before her arrival. I had no idea what I would say to her, but I did picture us becoming the best of friends thereafter.

Greer arrived wearing black and declared that she was mourning the war in Iraq and would only wear colour once it was over. She looked old, tired and, to my horror, a lot like my grandmother. We settled into the car and I launched into a monologue about her having changed my life.

Once I finished, she told me an anecdote about a former student who had locked them both up in her house and begged to be allowed to call her ‘mother’. This made me wonder if she thought I was psychotic, so I decided to shut up for the rest of the way while she politely talked about assorted plants growing along Delhi’s roads and their natural topographic history.

This was definitely not going as anticipated. I kept glancing at her, looking for a shade or hint of the woman whose passionate words had awakened an entire generation of women. To my dismay, all I could see was a calm old person unwilling to get into the slightest controversy.

It was surreal. The queen of bluntness, often represented in popular media as loud, obnoxious and tough, was sitting next to me and making conversation like she was at a garden party. I decided to push and provoke, unwilling to let go of her without a meaningful conversation.

Armed with four of her most acclaimed books, I made my way to her room and dumped them on her bed. She signed them diligently, all the while talking about the lovely hotels in India and her past experience in the country with ‘Pappu’ Patnayak, in whose house she was a house guest, and the temples of Orissa with their “demigod like priests”. Giggling, she told me about her love for Shah Rukh Khan.

You idolise someone because you see in them a reflection of what you would like to be; therefore heroes are nothing but aspirational. They bring out the best in you because of how you perceive them to be. For this reason alone, I wanted one redeeming, meaningful conversation with Greer that would go beyond the trees and mystique of India.

I also wanted to please her. So the next day, we arranged for a surprise—we asked Shah Rukh Khan if he would like to meet Greer. He obliged. Sometime in the afternoon, Greer was in a deep conversation with me about the crisis in Libya when there was a knock on the door and Shah Rukh Khan walked in to introduce himself. Greer turned a deep shade of pink and burst into peals of laughter, which lasted long after the star had left the room, and then the conversation veered towards the age-defying qualities of Mr Khan. I tried to tell her it was Botox, but she would not listen. Eventually, I gave up since I realised that Greer treated her visit to India as an expedition into the exotic. There was nothing more she wanted than to look and marvel at the contradictions of the country. A day before she left, she told me that she would like to go antique shopping, so we walked down the streets of Janpath while she haggled with vendors about the prices of this and that. All the while, I walked beside her calmly when all I wanted to do was scream out her name to anybody who would listen and announce who she was.

That evening, she surprised me by asking about my life and sharing bits and pieces of hers. The more I answered her questions, the more I realised that my stories were nothing more for her than research for an academic paper. She had no advice to dispense because she viewed me as ‘the other’. It was offensive because I had sincerely begun to feel that before belonging to any caste, country or religion, I was a woman first. And to be viewed by my feminist idol as a specimen in a science lab made me very angry—angry at the fact that she could not look beyond race and culture to identify the one link that I was trying to create, that of sisterhood.

She had clearly moved on from the person I idolised, someone with conviction in the cause of equality. My blinders were up and I saw for the first time that her cause had changed and so had she. She spoke of the environment with the same passion that she had reserved for feminism earlier. Disappointed, I dropped her off at the airport. Heroes, no matter how invincible, are also just ordinary human beings.

I still read The Female Eunuch sometimes, but not with the same passion as earlier because like everything in life, I eventually outgrew it. And as Emily Dickinson said:

‘Faith is a fine invention/ When gentlemen can see—/ But microscopes are prudent/ In an emergency.’

feministGermaine Greerwriter