An open letter from students at National Law University
Abish Mathew, comedian of the AIB Roast fame, performed at NLU Delhi on the 22nd of March for our annual fest, Kairos. Early in the show, Matthew cracked a joke on domestic violence, at which point, two women students who found the jokes to be extremely misogynistic, walked out, showing him the middle finger. The audience reacted with some tittering, and Abish Mathew fumbled momentarily, before resuming. The audience asked him to carry on and to ignore the protesters. In the mean time, a group of female students marched into the auditorium holding placards reading “Get Out, Sexist Pig”, and also used expletives such as ‘fuck off’.
The auditorium erupted in shouts of “fuck you guys” and the protesters were booed and heckled by the audience members who demanded that the protestors either leave or move to the side. They eventually did move to the side of the auditorium, where they continued to hold their placards up and attempted to interrupt him. Abish was greeted by a standing ovation when he stated that he was an artist and recognized the right of the protesters, and subsequently when he ended his show by stating he had overstayed his welcome.
After repeated efforts to meet with Abish Mathew, one of the protesters was allowed to speak with him. During the conversation, he said that he had no idea that jokes about these issues would warrant such a strong response. He revealed that he does not crack jokes about female foeticide, for instance, as he recognized the issue to be a grave one, but clearly did not draw a similar link to domestic violence.
As the protesters exited the auditorium, they were met with a hostile crowd that was yelling at them. Their clothes were commented upon, and jokes were made about prior incidents of sexual harassment on campus and one of the protesters was pushed. The protest and the subsequent incidents sparked off a debate over email and social media with people agreeing and disagreeing in various degrees with the form and substance of the protest.
We believe that sexism is all pervasive and even if propagated in the garb of humor causes greater social harm than mere insult or offence. Sexist jokes serve not only to trivialize grave issues such as domestic violence, but also render these issues invisible within larger institutional structures of oppression, thereby reifying these structures.
The jokes cracked pertained to domestic violence, women’s physical appearance and sexual (un)attractiveness, and reiterated traits that are traditionally ascribed to women. Domestic violence is an institutionalized, systematic form of abuse. As an issue that is seen as being situated within the realm of the “private”, victims and survivors often find it difficult to seek redress because of its normalization. Joking about domestic violence perpetuates a culture where violence against women is the norm. Further, such jokes may act as a trigger for members of the audience who may be victims or survivors of such violence.
Mathew also commented on the physical appearance and sexual “unattractiveness” of the ex Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh – Mayawati, who is one of the most powerful leaders of the country and is a Dalit woman. He chose to critique her appearance, completely glossing over her achievements and how she overcame several structural hurdles to occupy such a powerful position. In the world we inhabit, women are pressurized to conform to patriarchal standards of beauty. There are entire industries based on fragmenting women’s bodies and selling beauty as her most pivotal aspect. Women all over the world develop eating disorders, suffer from low self esteem, and undergo emotional trauma because of their inability to conform to what is regarded as the ideal body type. In such a situation, to joke about ‘pretty Punjabi women’ ballooning from Maruti Swift to Maruti Swift Dzire after their marriage was deeply problematic.
Mathew painted a troublesome picture of women, drawing upon traditional roles assigned to them in a patriarchal society – of being predominantly someone meant to serve the men in her life. He joked how a woman, while having sex with her husband, noticed how dirty the house was, and called her domestic help as soon as her ‘sahib’ was done, so the house could be cleaned. This may also be a reflection of how women are expected to be inanimate blow-up dolls during sex, where it is solely the male partner who experiences pleasure.
Some of his other jokes included women being bad drivers, as while driving, they simultaneously perform other tasks such as putting on make-up and feeding their babies. Even if one is to accept the unproved claim that women are bad drivers, there are various sociological reasons for why women may be bad drivers, such as their being caged into homes and lack of opportunities for them to navigate public spaces without fear.
The protesters believe that abstaining from commenting adversely on marginalized communities should not be confined to only academic spaces, but also should be accommodated into our lives because political correctness must not be treated as an instrument of appeasement. We believe that our advocacy for substantive equality must be internalized and not just serve as a charade. The burden of political correctness transcends the boundary between the public and the private and travels with a person regardless of the nature of activity being carried out. Further, the conscious enjoyment of sexist jokes is antithetical to the very tenets of feminism.
However, given the current political climate in the country, where various forms of speech have been censored, our form of protest was perhaps disempowering to minority groups like ours. After all, the marginalized and oppressed are the easiest to put down, and our form of protest may, in that sense, may contribute to our own disempowerment. In retrospect, we do believe that there might have been a better but equally legitimate a form as we adopted. We must also realize that consequences of an alternative form of protest are up to conjecture, and there is no guarantee that they would have lead to an unprecedented engagement on the issue.
Our protest has often been equated with a ‘heckler’s veto’, however this is a mischaracterization as the protest did not command the power to use institutionalized machinery in order to stifle speech. The protesters represented a minority both numerically and ideologically, and were protesting against a dominant and pervasive narrative. We cannot, therefore, be likened to a majoritarian group restricting the speech of minorities. Further, our speech did not even constitute ‘heckling’. The right to free speech does not subsume the right to consequence free speech. Just as clapping, cheering and hooting in appreciation are legitimate reactions to a speech, a critical reaction, which may not be courteous or polite, is also as legitimate. Moreover, denying us our right to protest would have impinged on our right to free speech. If we deem only speech recognized as deserving of legitimate state restrictions as expression which can be legitimately protested against by non-state actors, that would spell death for free speech of dissent.
We believe that protests are often disruptive, even when non-violent, and legitimately so. Some of the world’s most successful non-violent protests have been extremely disruptive. During the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, while women protested outside the White House fighting for their right to vote, the State decided to crack down on them using the charge of obstruction of traffic against the non-violent protesters. In order to achieve one’s political goals under certain circumstances, disruption becomes essential.
Many have raised the concern that if we did have a problem with the sort of jokes Abish Mathew cracked, we should have protested with the organisers long before the show given that it is public knowledge that he is known to crack jokes that are derogatory to oppressed groups. If the organisers were aware that Abish Mathew would be cracking sexist jokes, should not the burden be on them to ensure that he didn’t do so on our campus? Within the free speech paradigm, a protest following problematic speech enjoys more legitimacy than stifling speech before it has been uttered. Pre-censorship of speech requires a far greater burden to be discharged. Further, while Abish Mathew may have the right to free speech, to our mind, he does not have the right to the platform of our University auditorium because we are trying to create a space where people belonging to all genders feel safe, and our protest was against the use of University space to perpetuate sexism through humour.
We must recognize that speech can effectively counter other speech if the marketplace of speech is actually free. However, in the real world different power differentials and structures do exist, and for that reason, one speaker has a position of power over the other. In this case, Abish Mathew had the mic and stage, while the protesters, carrying their posters, were asked to move aside, and to let the show continue. If we were to truly give counter speech a chance, should we not have created space for that speech? Is it enough to say that they could have countered Abish’s speech later, for instance through a blog post? Or should the organisers have given the protesters the stage for a few minutes after Abish’s speech?
The reactions directed towards the protesters, both at the time of the protest and after were quite hostile, and point towards the need to introspect about the need to nurture space for dissent and protest. Some protesters personally felt unsafe after this incident. Feeling unsafe is a very personal experience, shaped by the lived experience of women in our society, and is not something that calls for an explanation.
Despite past events, it is heartening to see that the protest has generated dialogue, debate and introspection both within our University, and outside. A healthy and fruitful debate attended by large numbers took place within our campus three days after the protest. This is a small victory in pursuance of achieving our larger aim as a University, towards building a more inclusive campus where persons of all genders feel space.
Protesters and Supporters:
Aarushi Mahajan,
C.V. Aradhana
Gale Andrew
Jagata Krishna Swaminathan
Mahima Jain,
Malavika Parthasarthy
Nishtha Sinha,
Pawani Mathur
Pearlita
Rishika Sahgal
Shweta Kabra
Sonal Sarda
Chinmay Kanojia
Lakshya Gupta
Vaibhav Dutt
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Reblogged this on Doubting Derek and commented:
A narration of the events at the comedy event at NLU, Delhi.
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QUOTES:
1. “We believe that different forms of protests are ‘suitable’ for different situations and it should be up to the protestors to choose their form keeping in mind the circumstances.”
2. “It is our view that not all speech warrants the same level of protection.”
3. “In order to achieve one’s political goals under certain circumstances, disruption becomes essential.”
I think it is hypocritical on part of these ladies to cleverly draft special parameters of legitimacy for themselves in this manner. By the bizarre logic herein, even demolition of Babri structure becomes a legitimate form of protest.
Hope I did not commit a blasphemy by using those words!!
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Calm your t*ts you guys! As someone from a backward community, I do enjoy the occasional casteist joke. Is that a crime? I don’t think so. As a woman, while I find many of the jokes that aim to belittle women quite crass, I recognise that people have a right to laugh at them. Hell, even I join in and laugh at some of them. Why must we all take ourselves so seriously?
Your right ends when you encroach upon another’s. In this case, by not permitting Abish to complete his jokes, you unfortunately encroached upon his rights. He hurt your ‘sentiments’- a vague concept which can’t really be quantified. NOT a big deal. You on the other hand, hindered free speech. I believe your crime is much greater than his. As for inculcating ‘political correctness’, that’s a shallow and superficial concept which acts as an obstacle to dealing with issues seriously. You guys are REALLY no different from the people who forced M.F. Hussein out of this country, or those who found offence at a cartoonist’s work depicting the Parliament as toilet, or those filed criminal cases against Karan Johar and gang for being crude and insulting ‘women’. It’s high time people stopped dictating the terms under which a joke is funny or not. A joke is a joke. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. Please do something more worthwhile with your time, like ACTUALLY helping the victims of domestic violence ( say through spreading awareness in rural areas and urban slums where such instances are highly prevalent) instead of this high-handed behaviour. Also, you shouldn’t get special rights that impinge upon another’s by the virtue of being a minority. Peace out.
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Jaspal Singh Sidhu,
I support fully the protest against sexist jokes cracked and relished from the angle of socially dominating patriarchy and gender discrimination that, too, at a public place . As a person hailing from the Sikh minority and sporting Sikh cultural and religious symbols like beard and turban I had faced and have still been facing ( now,low invective) community-targeted jokes reflecting stereotype perceptions of the literate people against the Sikhs who are being presented as ‘boorish, uncultured, mentally dwarf and of low thinking people’.
I suffered feelings of oppression even when my friends cracked ‘Santa-Banta’ jokes (using Sikh characters) popularized by Sikh writer-Khuswant Singh- to secure, to my mind, a ready acceptance among English knowing literate Indian class. And, I too suffered some sort of bullying from my classmates and even from non-Sikh friends through such jokes–‘Sikhon ke baran baj gaye’.
Similarly,in Punjab villages we Sikhs bully Dalits through degrading jokes calling them ‘dhed’,unthinkable and duds.
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I am moved by the sincerity and self reflectivity shown by the protestors, who are trying, like many of us are, to deal with the conundrum posed by the apparent contradiction between our commitment to freedom of expression and our distaste for speech that is humiliating and draws upon dominant power structures, thus normalizing them.
I think it perfectly consistent with our commitment to democracy and freedom of expression to hold protests like standing silently with placards during a performance of this sort, attempting prior and later dialogue with the performer, writing extensively about it. Spontaneously, some counter speech may also erupt (the fuck you’s by the protestors that have been acknowledged, for example), but rather than actual disruption, the continued silent presence of people standing in protest could act like a voice of conscience.
An equally powerful response could be to hold counter performances later, with equally stark jokes about powerful groups – Let the freedom of expression extend to us also. Jokes about men – a) How many men does it take to tile a bathroom? Two – if you slice them very thin.
b) Never let your man’s mind wander – it’s too little to be out on its own. Ha ha? Or “Is that what your feminism is about, anti-men?” Or – “Ah, a feminazi!”
And more jokes about Brahmins, about the Hindu right, about homophobes.
Of course, you can hold these AFTER you get permissions, permissions to get permissions, deal with hurt sentiments, with physical violence to disrupt the programme, denial of permission after getting it because authorities apprehend physical violence, and so on. But still that is the way to go.
It is equally striking, the difference between the introspective, self critical tone and ethical responsibility shown by the Open Letter, and the response by “Natasha” who claims to be both female and “from a backward community” who displays “her” borrowed balls, lent to her by the patriarchy whose willing agent she is, (if “she” is who she says she is at all) by using the misogynist, female-shaming term “calm your tits”. Although this term is used for men too, it is precisely shaming because you’re being told you’re acting like you have tits. This charming phrase is used, says Urban Dictionary, when someone is being “overdramatic, when an individual reacts in an inappropriately excited manner, or is stressed, anxious, freaking out, pissed off, raging, etc.” All states of mind and emotions related to tits and female hormones, of course. Bravo “Natasha”, you have certainly earned that dick! Especially with that brilliant analysis of domestic violence – “Please do something more worthwhile with your time, like ACTUALLY helping the victims of domestic violence ( say through spreading awareness in rural areas and urban slums where such instances are highly prevalent).” That statement alone is worth the highest honour reserved for the most anti-poor patriarchal statement – the Golden Dick Rampant. Congratulations.
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Back to the great conundrum – how do we decide what is or isn’t offensive, what parameters do we use? Should we mention Modi’s rise from a humble background before lampooning him, or should we do a show of hands to make sure none have objections to jokes about cow slaughter?
From the account given above, it does seem like what has been said by the performer was in poor taste. Yet, humor by itself doesn’t denigrate an issue, I’ve seen performances by stand-up artists who went on to joke about the death of a parent, their struggle with substance abuse and depression. Should we put a stop to those as well just to ensure no one with a similar experience gets ‘triggered’?
Freedom of speech and expression is only tested when it is pushed to the boundaries, the protesting girls have a right to feel offended, but that doesn’t obligate the rest in any way to acknowledge it.
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Let me try to put my point of view in a few simple sentences.
1. Yes, the jokes made by Abish Mathew were sexist and offensive.
2. Yes, the world would be a better place if people stopped making sexist jokes.
3. No, it is not ok to disrupt a stand up performance just because you find it offensive. If some Hindutva types had disrupted the staging of a play because they find it offensive, you would have (rightly) decried it as an attack against freedom of expression. You would not even attempt to make such nuanced arguments in their defense. This is plain and simple double standard.
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Crack a joke without invoking a stereotype and I’ll agree with the protesters.
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