Boys and Men: BOYISH and a dialogue on Indian masculinity
Art: Ajin Mohan
After the birth of his son, Rajat Mittal began the Boyish project, a series of essays to challenge traditional aspirations of Indian masculinity—financial success, physical strength, and a lack of empathy—that have been emotional hamstrings to men for generations.
Soon after my son’s birth, when the initial high of parenthood simmered down, I became eager to pen a series of letters to him, letters that he could read when he was all grown up. It was an idea that had always intrigued me. I was excited to finally get started, putting thought to paper after becoming a father myself.
However, as I sat down to write the first of these letters, I was stuck by the daunting task of composing something relevant. What could I possibly say to him that will still be valuable 20 years from now? I didn’t feel like waxing poetic about existentialism and the meaning of life. I wanted to write about something more tangible, a real element of our identities.
Toxic masculinity works by creating echo chambers and closely gate-keeping them, and I was admittedly part of this gatekeeping that boys often engage in by bullying others who display empathy, kindness or emotions. Admitting this in writing was harder than I anticipated.
The topic that drew to my mind was masculinity. Penning a note on what being a male means in our cultural context felt appropriate. To begin, I qualify as a male; and secondly, I felt convinced that this is a timeless topic, bound to remain relevant, no matter when he reads the note.
My son is born American, but I was born and raised in India. For better or worse, he is bound to learn about masculinity from me, someone who was raised in a middle-class Indian family from Uttar Pradesh in the North Indian belt. So, this note felt like a great opportunity for me to give him more context about my upbringing. I grew up in the 90s in two small towns in U.P.: Mankapur and Raebareli. Here, gender roles were strictly defined and rarely questioned. Being a man meant being physically big and strong, emotionally stoic, and most of all, being motivated by numbers, success and image.
This is what masculinity had meant to me. The media I consumed growing up reverberated this ideology. Hero-worship was huge, and the hero was always a strong man. Financial wealth, social class, a staunch, big physical persona, and lack of empathy, were markers of this notion of ‘manly strength’.
I now know that this is an incomplete frame: Being emotionally sterile and unempathetic is not a mark of masculinity; in fact, it’s a blot. A generation of men like me are becoming fathers to newborn sons now, but rarely questioning what they have learnt about this topic and what they would like to change and offer to their sons. The demands and duties of manhood can be so strictly defined in a patriarchal culture like India’s that a lot of men end up feeling emotionally hamstrung for all of their lives.
Not only has this led to a generational crisis situation around women’s safety and respect, I believe we are on the cusp of another silent epidemic, of mental health and identity issues for boys in India. Just as the feminist movement has long examined and established how a patriarchal culture undermines the female gender, I strongly believe that the men and boys are reeling under their own understanding of patriarchy, one that is debilitating and preventing them to live a more fulfilling life.
Art: Ajin Mohan
I had little idea that a note to my son on this topic would end up encouraging me to do more, and a year after that first note, I emerged with Boyish, an anthology series of 12 essays, through which I discuss gender stereotypes affecting boys in India. Along with my personal point-of-views, each essay also narrates a story of an Indian man who defied such stereotypes to build a fulfilling professional life.
Each essay of Boyish is written to have an open conversation about how Indian society often squeezes out all empathy, kindness from boys to make them men, how these boys are belittled when they perform acts of emotion. Young boys who know no better fall prey to such behavior in their pursuit of manhood, and before they realise it, they tend to grow up to be emotionally tuned out. Put together, the essays that comprise Boyish yearn to challenge the reader’s conditioned understanding of masculinity and help boys grow into empathic men.
Writing this project has been a strangely daunting task for me. First, it required a ton of personal introspection and a confrontation of my own conditioning. Toxic masculinity works by creating echo chambers and closely gate-keeping them, and I was admittedly part of this gatekeeping that boys often engage in by bullying others who display empathy, kindness or emotions. Admitting this in writing was harder than I anticipated. A few essays felt like I was calling out my close friends and family, people who I care about a lot. In the essays where I discuss stereotypes that I didn’t experience myself, I had to draw on experiences of close friends, on stories that I’ve been privy to—and I felt a sudden rush of responsibility burdening me.
Boyish is as much an art project as it is a writing project. I value images that can do the job which words can’t. That is why each essay is dressed up with the vivid, dreamy illustrative art-work of artist Ajin Mohan. By creating a fictional character, our intention is to suspend judgement and reality in the reader’s mind for a brief second, and give an alternate point-of-view a chance.
I truly believe that, for the past couple of generations, middle class India has pushed boys to have a higher IQ at the cost of a lower EQ. Our society has celebrated STEM degrees, and downgraded liberal arts as something ‘unmanly’. For boys to claim their manhood, it has been essential for them to display crass behavior.
It’s time for this ideology to change. It’s not just hurting the girls in our society, but hurting the boys themselves. As we empower our girls towards financial independence and running businesses, we also need to facilitate boys to live lives that are not weighed in only by money, status and fame. Gender should sit on the sidelines in terms of an individual’s pursuit of happiness. Boyish is nothing more but a nudge to its readers to let boys be boys.
Boyish is a 12-part essay series which discusses how gender stereotypes limit boys in India, and tells stories of Indian men who did fabulously well when they did not restrict themselves by these stereotypes. Many boys choose professions & lives based on how they perceive masculinity. They are bound to the demands and duties of manhood. With a poor understanding of what being masculine means, they often miss out on their true and happy self. Boyish is an attempt to change that.
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Rajat Mittal is an engineer turned creative maker. Previously, outside his work in the technology industry, he has co-authored 3 books for young girls, namely Menstrupedia: Friendly guide to healthy periods and two editions of She Can You Can: The A-Z Book of Iconic Indian Women in India and US. You can learn more about Rajat and his work at lifeinafolder.com. You can also find him on Twitter: @lifeinafolder and Instagram: @lifeinafolder.
