Policing Pleasure

Bubbling with so much to talk about, my friend and I reached the community centre in our residential complex, counting down the seconds to an anticipated respite from the July heat once we entered the air-conditioning. Seeing all the chairs occupied, we moved into the “card room,” set our bags down, and began to softly speak about the previous few weeks, during which she and I hadn’t seen each other. Suddenly, in a cutting voice meant to be heard by us, an older woman (between sixty and seventy) remarked, “Vo in bachchon ko bol kyu nahi dete ki yahan baithna allowed nahi hai?” Roughly translated: “Why do they not tell these kids that they are not allowed to be here?” This woman looked us up and down in disgust, and prompted her friend sitting with her to express disgust toward us as well. They both seemed to exude immense pleasure in delivering us this scolding while indirectly asserting their ownership of the room. As two women in our thirties, this interruption transported me back to my adolescence—my cheeks burnt red and I felt deeply ashamed, humiliated, and angry. I looked to my friend, hoping to find grounding in our collective anger against this unwarranted and humiliating scolding, but found her looking down at her shoes, swallowed by embarrassment. After taking a few minutes to recover, we spoke about how powerfully this joint shame engulfed us, and how familiar and practiced our visceral reactions were, linking this relational dance to our mothers and mother-others (maasi, maami, daadi, naani, female-identifying teachers, etc.).

This article is a psychoanalytic examination of the sentence Vo in bachchon ko bol kyu nahi dete ki yaha baithna allowed nahi hain? with the aim of articulating the nuances of how and why the Indian woman is trained to be a (non)subject within the culture through the maternal field. 

The first idea of note in this transmission is that vo or they should assert that children should not be allowed in the card room. The older woman here does not directly claim that her enjoyment is disturbed by the presence of “children,” which would imply that the woman is an autonomous pleasure-seeking subject who is frustrated at the presence of children, as they interrupt her search for satisfaction and gratification through games and conversation. Rather, she denies her own personal desire, aligning herself with vo, thus identifying as a good obedient subject to the powerful Other who apparently sets the code of conduct required in the card room. 

This chosen alignment with vo also forecloses the possibility of relating with my friend and me in solidarity as members of an in-group who have, as residents of this complex, elected the governing body who authors the card room rules. Instead, she sets up vo as an unnamed, intangible, and removed authority figure in opposition to us, one that allows her to be here but prohibits us.

It is significant that vo in certain Indian regions is used by women to refer to their husband and in-laws indirectly, underlining a taboo against naming authority. Patriarchal authority is thus maintained by language, making vo an unnamed omnipresent entity, around whose diktat the family is built. Naming acts as a counterforce to idealising the authority by rendering them human, unconsciously challenging the fantasy of man as the omnipotent universe-creator by acknowledging him as a baby only experiencing omnipotence, mistaking his environment’s agentic subjects for objects he has created and thus controls.

The question arises: Why does the woman not claim her desire to play and be undisturbed directly, and why does she instead feel compelled to evoke patriarchal authority in order to have younger women removed from the metaphorical playground? 

Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar proposes that the Indian woman is denied recognition as a subject in her own right, acknowledged only in relation to a male other (as a partner, wife, daughter, sister, etc.), and is consequentially denied the desire to seek self-elaboration. Shifa Haq adds that the woman’s renunciation of desire is socially celebrated as “maturity,” replacing the usual process of developmental maturation that includes sublimating one’s instincts to achieve socially acceptable personal gratification. She links the pride associated with this renunciation to moral narcissism. Amrita Narayanan takes this further, elaborating on how women experience sexual pleasure indirectly by policing the sexuality of younger women. By demanding younger women to surrender their eros, older women enter a moment of union with patriarchal authority, here vo, by executing its aim to control the direct expression of female sexuality; in this case, my friend and me giggling excitedly about our week. The older woman did not ask us to be quiet by asserting her desire to play, since that request would offer us a chance to maintain a link with her and her friend and identify with their pleasure. This linking would rattle their identification as the desire-less extension of vo while strengthening our desire to seek personal pleasure, either by joining them or lowering our voices while sustaining our excitement. Our ownership of desire understandably colours the women green with envy, a colour they would prefer to associate with disgust, as the former threatens their identification with vo if they were to use us as models to own their pleasure. Instead, she acts on her envy by attacking our excitement through humiliating us and calling us children. 

This leads me to the second part of the sentence that positions us as children, bachchon, stripping us of our sexuality. Free young Indian women who are identified with their sexuality and ambition is a new psychological category in India. Even for young married women, like my friend, marriage could be imagined as mutually gratifying. However, older women have accumulated power through age, where post-menopause, they are recognised as a non-sexual executive of the unnamed vo, having passed the purity test of apparent maturation through renunciation of desire. She can now finally be the one who creates, modifies, and ensures the preservation of family values, where other family members with transformative potential, like the young daughter and daughter-in-law, are socially forbidden to question whether the older woman is catering to her need to feel powerful or in the “pure” interest of the family. 

Thus, if the older woman had accepted us as younger women, she would have been forced to face and mourn the loss of her years to the patriarchal order to feel like an agentic subject, where each personal desire had to be renounced or lived out in secret under the guise of family. When she renders us children, she can bypass this transformative but painful mourning process by choosing to not register us as women in her symbolic order. 

This brings me to my last point, that of our shame. Even though young women like us are aware of the historical wounds on the eros of women in the patriarchal order, the conscious disgust and unconscious envy exuded by older women still unleashes a primitive anxiety within us that we have experienced with our mothers. When we choose direct pleasure, we unconsciously assert our separation from our mothers, making them psychically attack us through shame rather than encouraging our individuation. This is because in addition to the envy of facing a life she could never have, we threaten her celebrated position within the patriarchal order, which is contingent on producing compliant daughters. The disgust thus communicates that we will be shunned from the mother’s love if we choose individuation, and will be at the mercy of her wrath as we harm her by destroying her identification, which causes daughters to feel annihilatory anxiety. If we surrender our subjectivity, however, we will be no more than our mothers, nor can we be more for our mothers. In both situations, the daughter loses a vital part of her life force, the mother’s love or elaboration of her own subjectivity. To me, the radical solution is linking the enactments of self-lessness of older women to their disguised desire for play, mastery, and self-indulgence. Making this link explicit destroys the unconscious assumption older women carry that they will be annihilated and cast out if they are recognised as desiring subjects; evidenced by the new symbolic order attributed to them by younger women who will see them as a cohesive self from whom they can learn self-elaboration and relating. 

Once the initial shame had passed, we walked up to these women and asked them for the story of how they learnt to play cards, because we wanted to learn their method of enjoyment from them—which led to an evening of sharing stories and playing cards. Linking a woman’s actions to her forbidden desire for pleasure thus dissolves the split of a sacrificial divine entity and a selfish outcast to make room for a subject who has historically been rendered a non-subject, leading to radical possibilities of symbolic reordering for women in patriarchal society.