All 365 days in the year ought to be International Women’s Days.
“My Fair Lady” was a film that continues to pique viewer interest through the decades, not least because of the excellence of the script and the quality of acting of each of the principal stars. Even those with lesser parts than the lead actors, Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn, were spectacular. A drunk aptly named Doolittle, who is the father of Eliza, the heroine of the movie, bemoans the fact that his longtime live-in partner is pushing him into marriage (as money had made him “respectable”) the very next day. The money came because a quirky millionaire had been told by Professor Higgins that Eliza’s father was, despite his lack of any formal education, a philosopher beyond compare. The millionaire passed on, and left Doolittle a fortune in his will. The evening and night before the wedding, the newly wealthy Alfred Doolittle and his buddies went on a binge, with him singing that “With a little bit of luck, a man can duck” marriage. Of course, he himself, inebriated though he was, took his vows in the church with his newly wed partner come morning. Sidney Holloway (who plays Doolittle) is not the only apparent misogynist in the film. So is the hero, Henry Higgins, who makes no bones about airing his view that men are far better than women in one’s life. What rescues “My Fair Lady” from the charge of being misogynistic is the fact that Higgins in actuality deeply cares for Eliza, and in the movie at least, settles down with her. As for Eliza, while along the path of “speaking like an English lady” through the Professor’s coaching, she begins to love him as well. Of course, Higgins constantly demonstrating the opposite of good manners (to everybody, let it be added) offends her self-respect, and for a while, the audience fears that he has lost her to Freddy Eynsford-Hill, an impecunious young gentleman who had fallen at first glance for Eliza. In George Bernard Shaw’s book “Pygmalion”, Higgins loses his lady love, but not in the movie. Among the most amusing parts of “My Fair Lady” is the rant of Higgins against women, “let a woman in your life, and your serenity is through”, to his friend Colonel Pickering.
Professor Higgins may have been a master of his subject, linguistics, but he was wrong about women. Far from losing out on serenity, it is for most of us the fair sex who provides that, and who by their presence create a cushion of emotional comfort that enables us to battle against the storms that so often frequent everyday life. If a digression into autobiography is permitted to this columnist, when he was born, he had a clubfoot, in the way the poet Byron had. Unlike Byron, he had a maternal grandmother, Balamani Amma, who refused to accept that a clubfoot had to be accepted. Every day, for months, she would gently massage her eldest grandchild’s foot, until finally the clubfoot disappeared.
A few years later, when polio struck, it was his mother Kamala Das who devoted months to ensuring that her crippled eldest son could walk again, first on his tummy in the way a baby did, then crawling, and after that stumbling and falling (and always being immediately held by his mother to prevent him from hitting the ground). Finally, your columnist learnt to walk again, and to roll back the effects of a disease that at the time was rampaging across the world. Much later, in June 2023, there was a cardiac incident. For months after that, this columnist’s wife Lakshmi watched over him like a hawk, never allowing him to travel without her by his side, until finally she became convinced that the danger of a repeat was low, a change of view in which two excellent doctors, Dr Sashikiran Umakant at TMA Pai hospital, Udupi and Dr Hemant Madan at Narayana Hospital, Gurgaon, played a key role. Even looking at the publication in which this column appears, The Sunday Guardian, but for two extraordinary women, Aishwarya Sharma and Joyeeta Basu, it would not have attracted readers across as many time zones as it does. Sorry, Henry, but serenity comes not with the absence but the presence of women, at least where this columnist is concerned. He has been lucky enough to have several times “let a woman in” his life, almost all of whom were what oases are in an arid desert. Or in other words, a world without women.
March 8 is International Women’s Day, but the truth is that all 365 days in the year ought to be International Women’s Days. From ancient times in India, Shakti, strength, has been associated with women. India is the mother of much of human civilisation, as became clear once we stripped away since 2014 the cloak of “myth” that was used by colonial masters to delegitimise knowledge of much of the past of the only remaining civilisational nation in the world, the Republic of Bharat, i.e. India. From this land, the centrality of Woman spread to other civilisations, including those of the Romans and the Greeks, where female goddesses were prominent in the pantheon of the divine, as they always have been in our country. Where there is gender equality, there is progress. It is no accident that Japan is once again, after a lapse of three decades, showing signs of its old dynamism. For it is only now that Japanese women have fought off patriarchy and come into their own, including in the management of companies. It is welcome that in “traditional” business families have placed daughters as their successors and not just sons or sons-in-law. Gender Equality is the true tradition of Bharat, i.e., India. As for Gender Justice, this is the foundation of a healthy nation.