bhaar mein jaye aisi azaadi

The image of Cynthia D. Ritchie went viral on Twitter once as Pakistani men oohed and aahed at the white ma’am saahb “promoting a positive culture of Pakistan”.

https://twitter.com/MOOSA_PATRIOT/status/1061965395459014658?s=20

 My blood boiled. Let me explain why.

https://twitter.com/girlsatdhabas/status/1062739478652088321?s=20

You see?

It brings us back to the discussion in class – colonization being explained as “white men saving the brown women from brown men”. I relate this to our argument because of the subtle hint towards the dichotomy of good women (goris that will portray how safe they feel in Pakistan, nevermind the fact that it’s their white privilege allowing it in the first place) vs bad women (desi women always whining about how insufferable their lives are in their country because they don’t understand that we want to protect them! From who? Ourselves, ofcourse.)

Women don’t need to “be saved”, only they will save themselves. 

The Pakistani woman experiences a patron-like freedom not only from the western in the form of the imperialistic and neo-colonial methods of control that stems from their saviour's complex but also from multiple sources in their own society, at various levels where patriarchy attempts and mostly succeeds at controlling their life. Mohanty's argument is also enlightening in the sense that it reiterates the point that the discourse on culture has been politicised and its representation in the Western scholarship, that misrepresents or under-represents the “Third World Woman” as they call it. This, she stresses leads to graver situations such as imperialistic trends to arise in their contemporary form that can do more than just explicit control but prescribing control through psychological means even, as evident in the expectation of Western feminism becoming a marker of high standard of the treatment of women, regardless of the varying socio-cultural dynamics. The use of propaganda that shouts that Western feminism is trying to save the poor Thirld World Woman like a damsel in distress.

Saving becomes an act of controlling. It reminds me of the things being said when a woman clad in a hijab was pushed onto an oncoming train in London by a man. “Beta, jaisi azaadi apne mulk mein haina mazhab ki, waisi azaadi baahir nahi.”

Konsi azaadi? Nahi chahiye azaadi.

Controlling the movement, the identity and the expression of women under the name of religion is just as heinous as controlling women in the name of liberating them – stripping them of any freedom of choice. Freedom being tailored and handed down like lunday walay hand me downs, to push us further, because poor us, need to be guided along the path to attain the standards of emancipation set by our colonial masters.

Mohanty’s argument is that what makes the otherization of the women worse is not only that this otherization comes at the expense of being considered inferior and “late to the party” but also that it generalizes all the women of different identities categorized into one “third world woman” identity – flattening all intersectional and otherwise diversities among these women, reducing them to just a “third world woman”.  This weakens the women as it ignores the differences in the women and agglomerates into one single group and leads towards what can be called discursive colonialism and stomping out any possibility of pluralism, reducing all differences and uniquities of the women to one broad identity that is a disgrace.