New Delhi/Nidani (Jind, Haryana): Huddled together at 3.45pm, minutes before their training matches in Haryana’s Chaudhary Bharat Singh Memorial (CBSM) sports school, Nidani, young boys and girls, mostly teenagers, are warming up to “fight like a man”. Away from the mundane, dusty, routinized, gender-divided world outside, on this yellow and blue wrestling mat, everyone looks the same. With the same tightly cropped hair, it is difficult to differentiate between a girl and a boy. But girls who want to be wrestlers need to be trained before they morph into women.
“We have to train them before their hormones start to play...before they hit puberty. Being a man, it’s much easier to participate in a sport which is predominantly mardaana (masculine). With women, it is different,” says Narendra Kumar, a wrestling coach in Nidani village. Eventually, when women become wrestlers, they are often told they have become too “masculine” to be called women.
Manhood, manliness, masculinity are terms which mean different things to different people in different societies—with the definitions mostly swinging between being a construct of the society to being a biological constitution. Feminist anthropologists argue that most of the sex selective qualities are just values society attributes to the sexes.
In her book, Seeing Like a Feminist, feminist author and political scientist Nivedita Menon writes: “If the body we inhabit is marked male, it has one kind of effect; if female, another kind of effect; if black, or Dalit or disabled, yet other effects. Body by itself does not produce effects—these are produced by its location in a world structured around certain qualities, assumed to be universal.”
Renuka Singh, sociologist at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), describes the concept of manhood or masculinity as an interplay of both culture and biology.
“Biology interacts with culture differently at different developmental stages (of life) of different sexes. So, the idea of manhood is contextual and is defined by both the interaction of nature and nurture,” said Singh.
With the discourse on the third gender and women’s rights, India has started to move from anatomy-based definitions of men and women, and is taking steps towards becoming a gender-neutral society, if only at a slow pace.
All this flux, however, is happening with conventions still defining the roles of men and women, and expectations from each of them still based on the preset rules for the sex ticked on a birth certificate. Masculinity, for some, is not just about brawn anymore, it is about brain as well.
A real man is not just someone who “protects” his women, but one who looks at women as fellow human beings. On International Women’s Day this year, Mint asks men about what it is like to be a man in India today.
