Ms. Ruchira Gupta’s debut novel, I Kick, and I Fly is not just a story—it is the journey of fourteen-year-old Heera from the de-notified nat community of Bihar, India, who is at risk of being sold by her father, a story that is the reality for many girls from marginalised communities not just in India but all over the world. Through the power of Kung Fu, Heera discovers the indomitable strength of her own spirit in the face of daunting adversity.

As the founder of the groundbreaking anti-trafficking NGO, ‘Apne Aap’, Ms. Ruchira Gupta has illuminated paths out of inter-generational prostitution for thousands of girls, offering them hope of rebuilding their lives with dignity. Her contributions have been recognized with numerous accolades, including the prestigious Clinton Global Citizen and the Abolitionist Award bestowed by the House of Lords. She won an Emmy award for her investigative documentary Selling Innocents

As the President of Girl UP TSRS and Editor with Girl Up Unity, I was privileged to speak to Emmy Award-winning documentarian, author, educator, and activist: Ruchira Gupta on the problem of child trafficking, globally and how small changes at a systemic level and empowerment and education campaigns can break the cycle. Click on the link below to hear the complete interview.

Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty

One boiling September afternoon Zoya asked her mother why she must wear a hijab to school. It is just a few minutes’ walk. Most students would have left by now. Just a handful of teachers left to accept the final assignments. No one, known or unknown, would see her. Father was at work. He needn’t know. The black cloak was a heat magnet. It soaked in the sun and baked her inside. She reasoned with mother. Why must she?

Mother sighed. It was their daily tiff. A ritual repeated, repeatedly. Zoya would give in, ultimately. But mother felt guilty and drained. The veins at her temple throbbed even before they would begin to argue. In anticipation of defeating reason with unreasonableness.

Zoya knew she would lose. But winning didn’t matter. She had to say what she felt, at least to her mother. And see her writhe in discomfort. It was her punishment for knowing that she was wrong in forcing her right.

Father was another matter. His eyes were always grave. If he ever smiled, it was behind his long bushy beard. Unseen. His brow was always creased, wrinkling the dark mark of piety in the middle of his forehead, where his head touched the floor in prayer, five times a day. In the world outside, father often lost. But he wouldn’t even think of losing to his daughter.

But, as they say, father wasn’t there that day. And Zoya was adamant. I will not wear the hijab today, mother. There was steel in her voice. Mother looked at her alarmed and excited. What had happened to this sixteen-year-old? Could Zoya really have the courage to do what she herself couldn’t dare to even think of? Go out in the street, with her face shamelessly open to the gaze of the world? What if there were men on the road?

Your father will kill you, Zoya. Someone will see. Urfi Bibi goes to the doctor on that very path, every afternoon. She will know. And she never lets anyone take a peek at her face. Not even her doctor. The shopkeepers will see you, Zoya. Have you no shame? Don’t leave the room when I am talking to you.

Zoya was at the mirror in her room. Inside that, her mother’s reflection followed: Her anxious voice droned on, talking of morality and modesty. But Zoya, deftly applying kohl around her deep dark eyes, thought of something else. Of young Mahsa Amini in Tehran, pulled out of her car by the moral police, euphemistically called the ‘guidance’ patrol. She had committed the unspeakable crime of a loose headscarf. They told her brother, cowering at the wheel, she would be returned in an hour, the time it takes to guide girls back onto the path of morality and goodness. Away from the wanton wickedness of showing their hair, and maybe a part of one ear.

But some young women in Iran are stubborn. The right path needs to be drummed into their heads, quite literally. Mahsa didn’t survive this guidance. The beating she took sent her into a coma. She died on her hospital bed, blood oozing from her ears, dark pool-like bruises spreading under her eyes. But she lived in the shunned hijabs and cast-off headscarves of thousands and thousands of grieving women. They came out singly, and in droves, out on the streets, snarling their angry despair into the faces of gun-wielding policemen, scared for they had never ever seen so many women, young and old, brave death, with such reckless willingness.

Zoya thought of the schoolgirls, across Iran, detained for taking off their hijabs. Her mind went to Asra Panahi, no older than Zoya, whose sweet face she had seen on the internet, beaten to death for refusing to join a rally that would sing praises of the Islamic rulers. Asra died chanting “women, life, freedom.” She was one among many teens, who had chosen death over the hijab.

That was in autocratic Iran. She was here, in India, where no law could force her to cloak herself. No, she won’t listen to mother today. Won’t even look at her. Zoya’s resolute hand ran the fine comb through her long hair. Her kohl-blackened eyes blazed. No, mother. No longer. Not today.

Then, the mirror caught her mother’s stricken face. A sense of guilt washed over Zoya; from the top of her head, weighing down on her shoulders, dripping down her spine. With that came resigned anger. Why are you so weak, mother? Why must you make me accept what you have done? Is it right that we women must accept 1500-year old rules of modesty? Why do you not stand up for me? They wept. Hot guilty, angry, desperate tears.

Mother held her beloved Zoya to her bosom. My child, the world is too cruel, to be alone. And that is what you will be, if you challenge it. We only have our people today. If we leave them, there will be no one to give us shelter. To protect us, when they come for us one day. It is a terrible compromise, my child. I know. But there is nothing that we can do.

Zoya looked at herself in the mirror. The kohl had flown down her cheeks. She laughed and mother joined in. Wash your face, and redo your eyes, she said. Zoya shook her head. No kohl today, mother. Let me go plain and covered. What good is darkening my eyes when most of my face will not be seen? For whom? Why? Mother understood her child. Let this be her silent protest.

Zoya had half a mind not to go to school anymore. But it was assignment deadline day. There was no option. Zoya pulled the black cloak over her long hand-embroidered shirt, and tied the black scarf around her head, pulling the half-veil over her mouth and nose. She had forgiven mother, but was not in a mood to let her know. As mother stood, breathing heavily and slowly, Zoya turned her back and walked out of the door.

Outside the sun was beating down, without mercy. The heat licked at her eyes, already burning with the salt from the tears that she had cried. Zoya walked on, like an indistinguishable blob in black, ignored by everyone who walked past her. I am a living, breathing, unique being, hidden inside this cloak. Am I nothing to any of you? An intense pounding rage filled her head. She walked on.

There was something happening at the school gate. Several young men with saffron scarves around their necks were shouting slogans at the two old guards, who nervously ignored them. These were men from the local Hindu Sena. The men would often waylay Muslim men and chase after them. Sometimes they would catch one, throw off their skull-cap, pull them by their beards and force them to repeat Hindu religious chants. Once in a while, one who resisted too much, would find himself bruised and unconscious on a hospital bed.

Zoya waited a little distance away. Hoping that the men would tire of their hatred-games and leave in a while. Ten minutes went by. Then another fifteen. The slogans were dying out. Some of the less committed in the mob had sat down on the pavement next to the gate. Perhaps, it was time to make her dash into the safety of the school.

Zoya moved swiftly, with her head bowed, her body bent inward like an armour, her assignment file held close to her beating chest. The men looked at her approach. Those lolling about stood up. One man came straight at Zoya, brought his contorted face near her and shouted a slogan right into her face. Take off your hijab, if you want to live in our nation. Take it off! Take it off! The crescendos filled the air as the men danced around her.

The deep rage burning inside Zoya’s heart flamed out in a blazing fire. I will never take off my hijab, she screamed. Allah hu Akbar, she shouted. God is great! Allah hu Akbar! I am Muslim and I will never take off my hijab! Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar!

An Interview by Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty

Jayati Ghosh is one of India’s leading development economists. She is also a strong advocate for feminist economics. Prof Ghosh has been recently awarded the prestigious John Kenneth Galbraith Award for 2023 – previous awardees include Nobel Prize winners Kenneth Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz and Angus Deaton. Prof Ghosh’s numerous books include, Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, Making of a Catastrophe: The Disastrous Economic Fallout of the COVID-19 Pandemic in India, and Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s work in globalising India. She is currently Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was earlier Professor at Centre for Economics Studies and Planning at JNU. 

NMC:  The textbook economics that we are learning in school appears to treat the household only as a consumer, and does not enter it to look into the gender-based division of labour inside it. Why is mainstream economics, as taught in high-schools, so blind to the economic role of women’s work within the home?

Jayati Ghosh: It’s not just the economics that is taught in high schools and colleges—it’s the economics discipline in general that has been quite blind to the very existence of unpaid labour, its causes and implications. Take the standard microeconomics of utility maximisation that is taken as the basis of individual economic behaviour. It is assumed that the essential trade-off for a person is between work that provides income and leisure. This effectively assumes that there can be no such thing as unpaid work—and that is the philosophical basis on which the entire edifice of neoclassical microeconomics rests! It’s no surprise, therefore, that is described as being about “Rational Economic Man”, because most unpaid work is actually performed by women. Similarly in macroeconomics, the only variables taken into account are those that are effectively monetised or exchanged, leaving out the entire substratum of the care economy on which the recognised or market economy rests.

It’s only relatively recently that feminist economists have managed to bring this out into the open, but it still does not really inform the basic economic principles that have been taught to and internalised by most economists.

NMC: Economics does not treat work as valuable unless it is paid for in the market. We know that in every country women are less likely to work outside the home than men. In fact, the latest CMIE data says only about 8 percent of working-age women in India are employed. This means that the backbreaking housework that women do is not even visible to the discipline of economics. How can economists then claim to speak for the entire economic reality of a nation without even accounting for women’s work?

Jayati Ghosh: The definition of work has been problematic for a long time. Fortunately, in 2013, after much active lobbying, the International Conference of Labour Statisticians agreed to an expanded (and more correct) definition of work, which was subsequently also adopted by the ILO in 2014 and should now become something incorporated into national statistical systems. Work is now defined as producing goods and services, for exchange or for own consumption, including within households. This last addition is crucial. Work for payment, or employment, is therefore a subset of work.

In India (even though India was the Chair of the 2013 Conference that agreed on this) we still use work participation in the more limited sense of employment, that is work for some kind of remuneration. But even that is a bit blurred, because our data includes a category of “unpaid helpers in family enterprises” (again, mostly women). But our survey data also has categories like “engaged in household duties” (mostly care work) and “engaged in household and related duties like fetching water and fuelwood, kitchen gardening, etc. If we add all those who are engaged in such activities, we get much higher work participation rates for women in India, near 90%, and it turns out that more women work than men!

I used to argue that this reflected a system that is “gender blind”, but now I think it is rather “gender exploitative” because the economy, private employers, the government and public policies all rely on this.

NMC:  I was reading about the debate on whether women’s domestic work should be treated as ‘unpaid’ labour that helps keep wages down. But aren’t capitalist wages, by their very nature, ‘family’ wages? So, isn’t the women’s domestic work not indirectly paid for via the man’s wages?

Jayati Ghosh: Wage determination is a very complex issue, and it is simplistic to describe wages as family wages or individual wages. They reflect many different economic and social processes, not just the state of the labour market but social norms of subsistence, which also keep changing. Also, the male breadwinner model of the household is less and less relevant, not only in the West but even in countries like India. So unpaid work is precisely that—it is unpaid, NOT paid through the male wage. It’s a unique and cross-cutting system of labour exploitation that does not fit into those market-driven categories, although markets rely on it.

NMC: I watched your lectures on Feminist Economics, and I was struck by how market-forces make it difficult for companies to implement non-discriminatory hiring policies, because companies that hire women (potential mothers) end up with higher wage costs to account for maternity and child-care leave. How can market-capitalism solve this problem?

Jayati Ghosh: Markets cannot and do not solve this problem on their own, just as they do not solve so many other inefficiencies and types of injustice. This can only be dealt with through appropriate regulation that is also enforced properly.  

NMC:  A slightly different question – extreme nationalist and conservative ideologies idealise women who are ready to sacrifice their individual aspirations for their husband and family. What impact does this kind of an ideology have on the recognition of women as economic actors?

Jayati Ghosh: The whole idea of this patriarchal representation of women is to ensure that they continue to perform unpaid labour. This is also inevitably associated with lower status, often less voice and agency even within the household, in return for social approval and some hypocritical forms of veneration.

NMC:   Finally, could you recommend 2-3 books that every economics student must read to understand the issues surrounding gender and economics?

Jayati Ghosh: Two books that you might find interesting are Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch” (https://www.amazon.in/Caliban-Witch-Primitive-Accumulation-Classics/dp/0241532531/ref=sr_1_1?crid=23BQHMSSXKG32&keywords=caliban+and+the+witch&qid=1691375143&sprefix=caliban+and+the+witc%2Caps%2C197&sr=8-1) and Nancy Folbre’s “The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems”.  (https://www.amazon.in/Rise-Decline-Patriarchal-Systems/dp/1786632950/ref=sr_1_1?crid=T3GVQFY86O8U&keywords=the+rise+and+decline+of+patriarchal+systems&qid=1691375193&sprefix=the+rise+and+decline+of+patriarchal+system%2Caps%2C193&sr=8-1)

Interviewed by Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty

No part of this interview can be reproduced in any manner without a citation. The citation below can be used.

Maitra Chakravarty , Nayantara. “‘ECONOMISTS DON’T TELL YOU THAT MORE WOMEN WORK THAN MEN’: PROF. JAYATI GHOSH.” De Omnibus Dubitandum , 8 Aug. 2023, artful-writer.com/2023/08/08/economists-dont-tell-you-that-more-women-work-than-men-prof-jayati-ghosh.

Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty

The Madras High Court’s recent judgement foregrounding the economic value of domestic work could well become the precedent for future judgements on the property rights of homemakers. This is an issue which I have given thought to since childhood. In fact my TED Talk at the age of 10 dealt with precisely this issue. ( See link below my article)

On 26^th of June 2023, the Madras High Court pronounced a landmark judgment, which is bound to be cited as a legal precedent, in matters related to the economic value of the work done by homemakers in India. The High Court was adjudicating a property dispute between a husband and a wife, where the husband had claimed full right over properties and jewellery bought by the wife, on the basis that he had financed the purchases. The High Court ruled that just because a husband went out of the house to earn money does not mean that he alone has rights over its proceeds.  

“When the husband and wife are treated as two wheels of a family cart, then the contribution made either by the husband by earning or the wife by serving and looking after the family and children, would be for the welfare of the family and both are entitled equally to whatever they earned by their joint effort. The proper presumption is that the beneficial interest belongs to them jointly. The property may be purchased either in the name of husband or wife alone, but nevertheless, it is purchased with the monies saved by their joint efforts.” ¹

This is a radical judicial intervention into a vexed space, which is highly debated, not just in India, but across the world. The High Court recognises that there is no explicit law available “to recognise the contribution by the wife either directly or indirectly.” However, 

“No law prevents the Judges from recognizing the contributions made by a wife facilitating her husband to purchase the property. In my view, if the acquisition of assets is made by joint contribution (directly or indirectly) of both spouses for the welfare of the family, certainly, both are entitled to equal share.” ²

The issue of domestic work and its economic value is a fundamental question in feminist theory. It is at the centre of the family as a juridical and ideological institution and it is also at the core of the economic category of household, which informs all economic policy-making. Even in countries where same-sex marriage is legally recognised, the predominant family unit consists of a husband, wife, and children. Although there is no legal obligation on the wife to look after the home, they are expected to assume the primary responsibility for undertaking domestic work within the household. On the other side, the husband is socially expected to be the primary breadwinner. 

These gender roles within the marital relationship are perpetually reproduced in public culture through the idea of the ‘good wife,’ one who is dutiful, loving, caring, and willing to sacrifice their own interests for the betterment of the family. Indeed, women become ‘wives’ as soon as they are born, from naming conventions that allude to domesticity, to being given ‘kitchenware’ and ‘child-care’ toys, and then later as they enter girlhood, being taught to cook, and clean and tend to the males of the house. I would argue that the wife-role is prior to the mother-role, not only chronologically (one must be a wife first before one ought to be a mother), but also in the power hierarchy within the family. The mother remains the dominant woman in the family, as long as her husband is alive, and she is the senior-most ‘wife’ in the family; after that the daughter-in-law takes over the reins. 

We can see this older Bollywood cinema, where the hero is asked by his mother to get ‘her’ a bahu (daughter-in-law), who will help her look after the home, now that she is getting old. This is followed by the demand for a grandchild. This stereotype might have disappeared from contemporary cinema, but it continues in modified forms in television serials. The echo of this basic ideology of domesticity can be found in even more liberal households, where the son is often asked to get married so that someone can take care of them, especially if they have long hours at work, and eat out too often. Doctors tending to male patients will often turn to their wives to give instructions as to their diet, as if automatically assuming that it is the wife who runs the kitchen. Similarly, women are expected to be responsible for their child’s homework and class performance, again based on the assumption that child-care is the wife’s job. 

These are constant affirmations of the wife role, which take place every day, everywhere. Even the state reproduces them despite there being no legal sanction for such roles. Most standard government forms ask for the husband’s or father’s name to establish a woman’s identity, often privileging the husband over the father. There are innumerable instances of judicial officers resorting to stereotypes when speaking of marital relationships. Thus, the wife role acquires the stamp of a quasi-legal status, even though it has no juridical locus. 

This weight of social, cultural, statutory, and quasi-legal construction of the wife-role, makes it inevitable that most domestic tasks are undertaken by women. The National Statistics Office Survey 2019 revealed that 92% of women in India participate in unpaid domestic work in the home, while only 27% of men did the same.³ The opposite is true when it comes to paid work outside the household. CMIE’s employment data for June 2023 shows that only 9.14% of Indian women in the working-age (15+ years) population participated in the labour force; in urban India it was even lower, at just 7.92%. ⁴ The data is clear – in an overwhelming majority of families in India, women do not go out of the home to earn a living. Instead, they look after the home and spend their day in domestic work and child care. 

In fact, without a wife taking care of the home, a husband simply cannot go out to work. In the absence of a wife, the husband would have to either do the domestic work themselves or pay for the services that a wife provides within the homestead. The High Court outlines this clearly in its judgment:

“In generality of marriages, the wife bears and rears children and minds the home. She thereby frees her husband for his economic activities. Since it is her performance of her function which enables the husband to perform his, she is in justice, entitled to share in its fruits. 

A wife, being a homemaker performs multi tasks, viz., as a Manager with managerial skills – planning, organising, budgeting, running, errands, etc.; as a Chef with culinary skills – preparing food items, designing menus and managing kitchen inventory; as a Home Doctor with health care skills – taking precautions and giving homemade medicines to the members of the family; as a Home Economist with financial skills – planning home budget, spending and saving, etc. Therefore, by performing these skills, a wife, makes the home as a comfortable environment and her contribution towards the family, and certainly it is not a valueless job, but it is a job doing for 24 hours without holidays, which cannot be less equated with that of the job an earning husband who works only for 8 hours.” ⁵

This is what makes the High Court’s judgment so important. From the point of view of the market, a worker gets market-determined remuneration for their labour. This wage, by its very nature, must be enough for the worker to return to work the next day. In other words, it must be enough to reproduce their labour power or ability to do labour. In all capitalist societies, wages are equal to the cost of all the goods (wage-goods) that are required by a worker to survive and return to the labour market.

In the Indian case, if a male worker had no family to look after their needs, they would need to buy the services from the market, either in the form of domestic help or directly as products (such as cooked food from restaurants). On the other hand, if he does have a family, then the wages must take into account the family’s cost of living. In the first case, the worker would have to spend a significant part of his wages on buying goods and services to sustain themselves. In the second case, a part of their wages would go to maintaining their wife and children, who will undertake unpaid domestic labour. From the point of view of the employer, the net effect is the same. 

However, when we look at it from within the institution of the family, the husband spends less on the living costs of the family, when the wife undertakes domestic labour, than he would if he had to buy the corresponding services from the market. Because the wife’s labour does not enter the sphere of exchange, it does not acquire a homogenous market value. It is entirely unpaid – not by the capitalist who employs the husband, but by the husband who gets the benefits of this labour. The absence of valuation ensures that the wife’s living costs are never the same as buying similar services in the market, since such services have acquired a value through the process of exchange. This allows the husband to save more from his wages, than he would, if he were unmarried. 

Household savings, therefore, are inflated by the difference between the cost of ‘maintaining’ a wife and the market-value of services which a wife provides. It is evident, therefore, that any assets that are bought with the help of such savings, must automatically belong as much to the wife as they do to the husband, who directly earned the money to buy those assets. Indeed, the court points out that a wife loses out monetarily by not only providing all domestic services (for 24 hours) free of cost but also because they sacrifice their own potential career. 

“If, on marriage, she (the wife) gives up her paid work in order to devote herself to caring for her husband and children, it is an unwarrantable hardship when in consequence she finds herself in the end with nothing she can call her own.” ⁶

The High Court’s judgment gives homemakers equal rights in the family’s property, even if they have not made any direct financial contribution to their purchase. The judgment recognises that all wages are ‘family wages,’ and therefore cannot legally belong to the wage-earner alone if they live within a family where their needs are taken care of for free. This seminal judgment is of immense consequence in defining the economic role of homemakers, and it is especially significant in societies like ours, where money equals power. 

Notes

1. Kannaian Naidu & Ors v Kamsala Amman @ Bhanumati & Ors, S.A. No.59 of 2016 and Cross Objection No.26 of 2017 (High Court of Madras, 21.06.2023), pp.39. https://www.livelaw.in/pdf_upload/kannaian-naidu-v-kamsala-ammal-478279.pdf
2. Ibid, pp.41.
3. Radhakrishan, V, and N Singaravelu, ‘Data | 92% of Indian women take part in unpaid domestic work; only 27% men do.’ The Hindu, September 30, 2020. https://www.thehindu.com/data/92pc-indian-women-take-part-in-unpaid-domestic-work-only-27pc-men-do-so/article32729100.ece (accessed on July 2, 2023)
4. CMIE, ‘Labour Participation Rate: By Region and Gender’ Economic Outlook, Updated on 01 Jul 2023.
5. Op.Cit., pp. 37-8.
6. Ibid, pp. 39.

Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty

Robert Frost had claimed that he wrote Birches with “one stroke of a pen,” however, evidence suggests that he made several attempts to write the poem, and refined it over the years, even after it was first published in 1915. It was only in 1949 that it appeared in its final preferred form. Frost painstakingly polished each phoneme, paying attention to what it would sound like when being read out. The poem first appeared in print in The Atlantic Monthly, in July 1915. It was reprinted in the book Mountain Interval in 1916. Even after that Frost made some important changes when Birches was reprinted in later collections of his poems.

Although Frost wrote the poem when he was in England, the idea of swinging birches came from his own experience as a child in New England, USA, where boys would commonly swing birches. As he wrote in 1951,

“The first birches were trees I swung near the district school I went to in Salem, New Hampshire.”

A friend taught him how to “climb birches and ride them down.” This is described both in great detail and through similes (” With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up to the brim, and even above the brim”) in Birches. Frost wrote a parallel poem for girls, Wild Grapes, at the request of Susan Ward Hayes, who was the literary editor of The Independent, “the first editor ever to publish me.” Hayes was too light to be able to bring the birch tree “to earth.” But she still

“clenched her hands in memory of the pain of having had to hang on in the tree too long.”

In both poems, the bent tree is seen as an intermediary between heaven and earth, between the material and the spiritual. Frost was a critic of the scientistic belief that cold, hard, logic could explain everything. He believed that science needed to acknowledge the value of imagination and the ability of metaphors to capture human experience. One can see this clearly in Birches, where Frost gives us a very ‘material’ description of the process by which birch trees get bent because of snow-storms, only to be told that the poet, himself, would have preferred if this was not just a material phenomenon, but the result of a boy’s play.

The words are used carefully to recreate sights and sounds for the reader (or listener) – it is almost as if a camera had captured it on film. The birch trees are “loaded with ice”, and since it is a sunny morning, when the “breeze rises” and makes the branches sway and “click” against each other, the sunlight gets refracted through the “crystal shells” that cover the birch branches, and “turn many-colored.” This material process poses dangers as well, because the ice crystals are shed “shattering and avalanching” like “broken glass.” In a sense, Frost is saying that this very ‘scientific’ and ‘true’ description, poses a danger to human imagination, destroying the spiritual – “You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.”

We are now brought back to the world of metaphor, away from pure matter. We have already been told about the “dome of heaven” falling, and we are soon introduced to the metaphoric use of the female-form as a simile for the birches. Indeed, while Frost makes the activity of swinging the trees a masculine pastime, done by a boy, but the bent over birches are themselves likened to “girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/ Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.” Frost would continue to see birches as feminine, referring to birches on his farm in South Shaftsbury as his “lady trees.”

Frost immediately reinstates metaphor and imagination as the right way to experience the birches, almost as an assertion against the ‘truth’ of science. It is as if he is apologising for letting ‘science’ intrude for so long into the poem. Thus he writes,

“But I was going to say when Truth broke in / With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm/ I should prefer to have some boy bend them/ As he went out and in to fetch the cows—”

This is consistent with Frost’s constant endeavour to make scientists see the metaphorical quality of their scientific statement. Thus he wrote,

“Materialism is not the attempt to say all in terms of matter. The only materialist—be he poet, teacher, scientist, politician, or statesman—is the man who gets lost in his material without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost soul”

Someone who only deals with matter is a “lost soul”, but in Birches, the boy who “summer or winter” has to “play alone,” — because he is “too far from town to learn baseball” — is not lost, because he has an idealised relationship with nature by swinging birches. Once again, there is a near cinematic description of how boys “conquered” birches by swinging them:

“He learned all there was/ To learn about not launching out too soon/And so not carrying the tree away/ Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise/ To the top branches, climbing carefully/ With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up to the brim, and even above the brim./ Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,/ Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.”

The boy is happy to play on his own, “summer or winter” as he “subdued his father’s trees.” This is a nostalgic imagination because the poet tells us “So was I once myself a swinger of birches/ And so I dream of going back to be.” One would think that Frost is talking about his own rural upbringing, of tending cows, and being in a state of play with nature. However, this is purely an imagined past, a metaphor for the loss of innocence of adult-life, because Frost himself grew up in Lawrence, a city in Massachusetts. His own memories of swinging branches were from an urban setting.

But by the time Frost wrote the first version of Birches, he was already devoting himself to write about the country. In a letter to his friend John Bartlett, probably written in August 1913, Frost wrote,

“One of the curious fatalities in our lives is that without collusion we have simultaneously turned our minds to run on rusticity.”

The idyllic picture he paints of the boy and the birches is one of isolation, and creative play. It is a space to which one can escape, when one is “weary of considerations” of one’s present conditions, where life has become unfamiliar and difficult to navigate, such that it is like “a pathless wood/ Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twig’s having lashed across it open.”

Let us recall how Frost had set up the woods in the very first three lines of the poem:

“When I see birches bend to left and right/ Across the lines of straighter darker trees,/ I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.”

The birches are bent, as if under the weight of age, in contradistinction to the straighter darker trees, which are probably younger and haven’t greyed. This is the poet’s present reality, but he wishes he could imagine it differently, as caused by a boy at play. We have already been given the structure of what the poem sets out to do – talk about life’s drudgeries and how good it would be to escape it.

The metaphoric use of birches keeps changing as we move through the poem. When we are first introduced to the image of the bent birches, they represent a human being, so bent over by the cares of the world, that they can never return to their ‘free’ state, even when these cares fall away. Later, the birches represent life itself, which can be “conquered”, the “stiffness” taken out of it, and rendered “limp” by a (rustic) boy at play. Finally, the poem takes a turn to the first person of an ageing man recalling a carefree boyhood (“I was myself once a swinger of birches”), which he wishes to return to (“And so I dream of going back to be.”) At this point, the metaphoric role of the birches change again,

“I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.”

At this stage the birch has become a metaphoric ladder that can take the poet toward heaven. Frost italicises the word ‘toward’ deliberately to remind us of Jacob’s Ladder, the stairway to heaven from the Old Testament. Yet, this move away from earth is only a momentary withdrawal, because the birches rise up, but bend down to the earth again. Indeed, Frost makes it clear that he does not want this escape to be mistaken for death. He writes,

“May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return.”

Because this life might be full of cares and problems, it is still the best place to be ( “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”) Frost affirms life and living, even if he seeks alleviation, because without life there can be no human connection, no love (“Earth’s the right place for love.”)

One could argue that Birches is internally inconsistent. It seems to suggest the weight of the world bends people forever, and freedom lies in escaping it. At the same time, it seems to reaffirm life, and holds the promise of a renewed future, where one can “come back to it and begin over.” Frost himself seemed to allude to this inherent contradiction in an essay written 35 years after Birches was first published.

“‘Birches’ is two fragments soldered together so long ago I have forgotten where the joint is”

However, Frost would not have considered this to be a problem at all. He did not believe that poetry should have the certitude of science, nor that metaphors need to be explained. Poetry according to him was about ‘belief’, not analysis. In a lecture he gave at Amherst College in 1931, Frost elaborated on this idea of literary belief –

“Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but by belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing to be, is more felt than known.”

It is important, therefore, for us as critical readers to approach Birches in the same manner, by feeling and believing it, even as we seek to break it down for analysis.

References:

1. Schichler, Robert L. ‘Several Strokes to Perfection: Deliberate Artistry in Robert Frost’s “Birches”’ The Robert Frost Review, No. 25, Fall 2015, pp. 39-69.
2. Gades, Naomi, C. ‘Cracked Knowledge: The Epistemology of Robert Frost’s ‘Birches’’ The Robert Frost Review, No.2, Fall 2017, pp 14-26
3. Ellis, James, ‘Robert Frost’s Four Types of Belief in ‘Birches.’’ The Robert Frost Review, No.3 Fall 1993, pp. 70-74.
4. Frost, Robert, ‘Education by Poetry’ Amherst Graduates Quarterly, February 1931

Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty. (Previously published in Outlook Magazine.)

In every country, everywhere, math is held in awe. If you are good at it, then people think you are smart. Physics comes in as a close second. And the two together congeal in that pinnacle of all disciplines, Astrophysics. Anything else is not that hard – it is simply not rocket-science.

Then there is tech and coding. Those who can do it are seen as a superior race, if a somewhat geeky populace, with weird-shaped heads. You must have seen them in Hollywood movies and Netflix crime shows. They avoid eye-contact, drink lots of soda, are partial to comic con, and type random words into screens at superfast speeds. They are bad at following puns, do not understand jokes, but are fantastic at locating super-villains by inputting their tailor’s name into a self-developed, yet-to-be-released AI software.

These three streams occupy the top of the global caste-system of sciences. Below them come the less glamourous disciplines of Chemistry and Biology. They are the also-rans, looked down upon by the high-thinking mathematicians, physicists, and techies. It is cool to wear Schrödinger’s Cat on a T-shirt. Not so cool to talk about dissecting rats.

But all of these stand above the outcastes of the academic system – Humanities. If you choose to read sociology, history, politics, philosophy, or God forbid, literature, in college, then the world treats you as a wastrel. Especially if your family is paying for your studies. Even more so, if you have actually done well in high-school. What will you do with it, the Elders of your clan ask? How will you earn a living?

That is the crux of the problem. Science teaches us how to build and rebuild material things – including our physical bodies. Humanities teaches us how to build better, more fulfilling, happier societies. Violence, hate, isolation, depression, which have become endemic to contemporary society can only be addressed by understanding how human societies work, how human beings relate to each other. By devaluing Humanities, we have created pathologies in the social body, even in those nations which have mastered all material needs.

Material needs are produced using the technologies of STEM. They can be commoditized and bought and sold for a price. The disciplines that come under the umbrella of Humanities produce social welfare, which cannot be priced, nor bought and sold. There is only one exception – Economics, which comprehends and organises the very process of exchange. So, it is not surprising, that other than those who study Economics, students of Humanities find it difficult to get well-paying jobs. And in the consumerist societies that we live in, it is understandable that the best talents would be attracted towards the most lucrative disciplines.

If the Humanities are about welfare, then it is for the state to ensure that its practitioners get paid well. That is an essential condition for attracting the best minds to study these disciplines in high-school and university. But for that to happen, welfare itself has to be valued by those who decide government policies. Societies that are organised around free-markets tend to privilege consumerism and material-production, at the expense of happiness, social- connections, and human welfare. That is one key reason why such societies – which is most of the world today – find no real value in studying about what makes us human.

The market is quantitative – it exchanges specific quantities of commodities for specific amounts of money. The market’s ethos is to convert everything into quantities, to value everything as so many multiples of a unit of a good. This ethos lends itself easily to STEM disciplines, which work with quantities and statistical-probability. Even Humanities has been taken over by this quantitative spirit – you can see it in every discipline, from political science to psychology. Qualitative studies and theory have been replaced by surveys and empirical typologies.

This has shorn Humanities of its complexities and made it banal. High social theory is as, if not more, complex than the pure sciences. It requires an analytical mind, which can comprehend complex connections and understand counter-intuitive conceptual structures. Advanced social-theory – the backbone of the Humanities – requires one to abjure obviousness, and lay bare that which is not available to experience. The quantification of Humanities militates against the very core of the social sciences. No wonder then, the disciplines of Humanities are considered to be easy, pursuits that do not require deep thought, while STEM subjects are seen to need higher cognitive abilities.

This fetishization of STEM has even led to claims that women are incapable of doing it. Some biologists have argued that women have ‘empathetic’ brains, while men have ‘systematic’ brains. This, we are told, makes women less likely to do well in STEM subjects. One big study is often quoted to back this ‘scientific’ hypothesis. It shows that even in gender-equal Scandinavian countries, fewer women study STEM in college. Feminists see this as a major cause for concern, while male critics of feminism, point to it as an example of the fundamental differences between male and female brains.

What they leave out is that the same study also shows, that girls in Scandinavian countries do better than boys in STEM subjects in High School. They just happen to do even better in the social-sciences. It is understandable that they would choose to study what they are best at – in this case, Humanities. It is also possible that Scandinavian ‘socialism’ values the social sciences more than other ‘advanced capitalist’ countries do. So, studying non-STEM subjects does not mark you out as a loser.

Perhaps, the women of Scandinavia know something that the rest of the world does not. That when we say something is not rocket-science, we ought to mean that it is much more complex and difficult than rocket science can ever be.

Nayantara Maitra Chakravarty. (2023, June 17). Why Are Sciences At The Top And Humanities At The Bottom Of Academic Hierarchy? https://www.outlookindia.com/. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/why-are-sciences-at-the-top-and-humanities-at-the-bottom-of-academic-hierarchy-weekender_story-295505?fbclid=IwAR3V3NM0NSEvn_vt7iMNIrYhvIwOyJmFu4DcnC1yXKWoUSnMbCHHSyI1EFs

There is a joke doing the rounds on the internet about Laxman Narasimhan, the freshly-brewed CEO of the global coffee chain Starbucks. In the joke, Narasimhan prohibits anyone from using the name ‘Chai tea latte’ for one of Starbucks’ most popular beverages. As Indians, we know immediately why the name is absurdly funny. But for Americans the term ‘chai’ has to be added to their tea, to give it that fragrant whiff of India.

In fact, if there were a list of things that are quintessentially Indian, an indivisible part of our culture, then chai would be right at the top. And where there is chai, there is samosa. Not just any samosa, but samosa filled with aloo. The two are such an inseparable couple that the former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav once coined the slogan, “jab tak rahega samose mein aloo, tab tak rahega Bihar mein Lalu.”

Yet, these two Indian icons – not Bihar and Lalu Yadav, but chai and samosa – were not known to Indians just a few centuries ago. Tea was a colonial gift, brought by the British to balance their opium trade with China. While they got the Chinese addicted to opium (they even fought two wars over it), they got Indians addicted to tea. So much so, that an irate Rabindranath Tagore wrote an essay about it, at the dawn of the 20th century, complaining about how the British were distributing free ‘cha’ to Indians. Yes, the terms cha or chai are not ours; they come from the Chinese. But now, all the world thinks of chai as Indian.

What about the samosa? That too was brought from the Arab world, by the royal chefs in the kitchens of the Delhi sultans in the 13th century. But no chef would have ever imagined that the royal ‘sambusak’, which originated in the Persian word for ‘triangular pastry’, could be filled with potatoes. That is because our tryst with potatoes took place in the 17th century when the Portuguese brought it with them. They also introduced the other ‘Indian’ staple – chillies.

But what have chai and samosa got to do with Indian culture? They represent a fundamental truth about our culture, that we Indians have always let global winds carry various influences to our land, and we have moulded them into something that is uniquely our own. Take our classical music, for instance. Its origins can be traced back to the ritual incantations of the nomadic peoples who migrated to India several thousands of years ago. Over the next millennia, those musical traditions became cross-pollinated with the music of the indigenous peoples. Later, the Turks, Mongols, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Persians brought their own influences. What emerged was a composite tradition that the great Western classical musician Yehudi Menuhin called “the original source” of all music.

Our art and architecture are other great examples of this amalgamation of traditions from across the world. When the Mughals began to lay Persian-style gardens in the cities they founded, they started off as pure imitations. But over the years, their designs incorporated older Indian styles and motifs. The buildings around the gardens would be built in red sandstone and marble and often had ‘chhatris’ or dome-covered pavilions, which originated in India. Even the architecture of the colonial period is a perfect blend of European and Indian aesthetics. The buildings of Lutyens’ Delhi are the greatest examples of this amalgamation of Indo-British ideas.

That is why there can never be any ‘authentic’ or ‘pristine’ Indian culture. Everything that we call our own is a product of innumerable influences. They are ours because we shaped them to our needs, our beliefs, our aesthetics. Chai is as Indian as the Mahabharata. The Taj Mahal is as Indian as the Sanchi Stupa. Indo-Anglian novels, which have taken over the English-speaking world, are our authentic creations, as much as the plays written by Shudraka or Kalidasa. They have been created by people who considered the Indian subcontinent to be their home, and they are all things that the rest of the world identifies as Indian. Perhaps, this is what Mahatma Gandhi meant when he wrote,  “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any” 

In reality, all cultures are like that. Every national culture has traces of influences from other regions and other territories. Take the so-called ‘national’ dish of England, Chicken Tikka Masala. It is a dish made with shop-bought chicken tikka, canned tomato soup, and Madras Curry Powder. It cannot be found anywhere in India, and Indians wouldn’t recognise it, except for a vague familiarity with the flavour-profile. Chintz, the fabric that is identified as typically British, comes from Golconda. Today, we have brought these back to our homes as cultural ‘imports’ from England.

That is why the pursuit of cultural purity is a spurious mission; it can only lead to self-defeating narrow-mindedness. My idea of Indian culture is of a rich and intricate tapestry of myriad traditions. Because our nation is not an undifferentiated homogeneous mass; it is a layered union of different languages, cultures, food, clothes, beliefs and even histories. For India’s culture to flourish and for our traditions to be alive, we have to emulate the openness with which our ancestors accepted everyone who came to this land, whether in peace or in war. This is especially important today when the fabric of our nation is in danger of being torn asunder by communal conflict. We need to embrace whatever is worthy in other cultures, assimilate them and make them our own. To me, ‘Indian culture’ is like a garden, where myriad flowers blossom, and fill the world with their fragrance.

* (This essay got me into the finals of the Nanhi Chhaan essay competition in 2022. I was among 15 chosen from across the country)

In the past year or so, I have been asked by many well-wishers to identify my passion. This, I am told, is essential to get into a good college. I must have a story. I must be about something. My life, at 16 years and some months, must already mean something. I must not only be a fount of knowledge but also be a do-gooder with a body of contributions to society.

I delved deep into my soul, scoured my innards, and the only passion I could find was an intense love of cup noodles, preferably Korean and extra spicy. Another intense interest, bordering on being passionate, is devising ways to safely annoy my younger sister, provoke her into violence, such that she alone would be the object of any parental admonition, when our fracas spilled over, out of our room into the public sphere of civil society.

Clearly, I do not have a passion worthy of its name. But I do have interests; tons of them. It is also true that I often sup upon one and then flit to the next. It could be gender politics one day, and drop-D tuning the next. Yet, I am training myself to focus, to treat all my interests with rigour, to polish and hone them, and in the process separate the wheat from the chaff. How does one do that, you might ask. What scale of values can one use to distinguish between pursuits that are worthy and those that are not? I would say, there is only one parameter that I use here – the ‘why’ question: Does this particular interest of mine answer the everyday questions I ask of life? If drop-D tuning for guitars qualifies (I will one day write a blog on why it does) then so be it.

That brings me to the name of my blog. In a certain deep structural way, it unites everything I want to know, everything that interests me, makes me curious, and exhilarates me. It can be described through this motto – De Omnibus Dubitandum, a slightly modified version of Soren Kierkegaard’s book De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, that everything must be doubted. Doubt, questioning, and scepticism are the foundations of the modern, liberal, mind. It makes us question not just the received wisdom that is passed on to us, but also our own instinctive belief systems, all that we consider to be ‘natural’ and ‘true.’ It makes us realise that all that presents itself in its sheer obviousness, is a product of power and culture. It is the construction of signs, an artefact of discourse. It makes us realise the limits of our freedom, and thus frees us from the prejudice of ‘normality.’

This blog is a record of my doubts, of my skirmishes with all that I am taught, all that I read, and all that I imbibe. I will interrogate every bit of ‘knowledge’ that I come across, as an adversary, even when I instinctively accept them as the truth. I believe that only when I honestly pose the best possible questions about everything that I accept, that I will truly understand what to stand by, what to fight for. And, perhaps, through this rigorous process, I will discover my passion, my story.