Multitudes: A Story of Small October Revolutions

Not everyone knows my name at the protest site. But they do know that I know where Harsh is. Each time I’m at the site without Harsh, the women ask me one after another, “Where is Harsh?” I like that because it reminds me of school when teachers would ask me about a friend in the class, not just any friend but my absent best friend. Whenever I was with Harsh at the site, I held their hands, reminding them not to put weight on their right leg, holding an umbrella over their head as they held the camera in front of their eyes, pointing at the protesting women, a gentle weapon, as they might say, an unapologising companion. Harsh is a Trans non-binary person (they/them/he).

I misgender my friend and say Harsh is injured to the third woman who asks about them (she doesn’t know my name, I don’t know her name. She is protesting. I’m beside her in solidarity. That’s all that mattered, plus Harsh. She looks at me for a moment, nods, and lets me know I’m misgendering Harsh, ‘Not her, his.” I bite my tongue in embarrassment: “Of course, yes. His leg,” I say. What kind of a friend, best friend, am I, I tell myself, who keeps on misgendering her friend (Harsh prefers They/them, his/him pronouns). What a shame to be politically aware and fail spectacularly in political spaces, I think. If Harsh were there, he would tease me and tell me to give him 10 rupees to add to the misgendering jar. I owe him maybe 30 or 40 by then. And I’m frustrated with myself; I’m still acting like a child who keeps on stubbing her toe against the same chair (someone should move the chair! Should I be doing that myself? It seems like that, given I’m the one who walks without looking). I don’t think the woman  that corrected me had the opportunity to attend a university and study as I did.

Then I pause: Am I embarrassed because someone not as educated as I just corrected me? What kind of person does that make me? Someone so entitled that she is embarrassed to be corrected by someone less educated than her? Would I feel the same embarrassment if someone as educated as I am were to correct me? My mind splits itself into two people that continue to talk to each other: No, you are not that stupid: you are embarrassed because you did something you could have avoided and someone corrected you, I tell myself, whether the person was as educated as you or not, you would still be embarrassed, right? I ask myself, yes, something gentler in me reminds me that you are ashamed because you made a mistake. Shame is good; it means you care enough. 

I also met M at the site. The first time I saw her, I noticed her sharp jawline. Then I noticed the way her hair moves gently against her face under the yellow light from the bulb running on the generator at the site. She spoke softly; it was amazing how I could still hear her against the horns and evening chatter at the city center. Then it dawned on me that you don’t need to scream to be heard; you just need to be listened to well. 

I used her name throughout our conversation careful not to use any pronouns at all (If you are sure you will cause damage in a room, avoid the room altogether, what freaking escapist behavior this is, I think, it might not require so much effort to use language consciously: there always are two voices in my head and they are sisters that don’t get along well). M spoke about theories that thrilled the literature student in me. At some point, I felt that M was speaking in such a way that it ensured space between M and me, enough space for M to not get hurt. I noticed my fingers entangling themselves, my feet tapping to check for solid ground, and my heart beating faster. I looked at myself in the reflection on the surface of the metal bottle I was holding. Something in the reflection told me that I’m someone who could inflict hurt. This knowledge hurts me before it hurts anyone else. And I stayed quiet, listening to M. At some point, I realized M prefers the pronouns she/her.

In Malayalam, the common feminine vocative marker to address a woman is ‘edi’, which can come across as disrespectful. While the male version, ‘eda’, is a neutral, even endearing term used to address a friend. I do understand that it is hurtful to address someone identified as a male at birth and now identifies as a woman with a masculine form of address. I’m suddenly perplexed, even angry and hurt, to understand the lack of a respectful Malayalam word to address a woman.  All this while, I, myself, have been addressed in the borrowed vocabulary designed for a man. I was (taught to be) okay about it, and it is a shame that I learned, and learned it without questioning it. Every time a friend called me ‘Eda’, I answered. Every time I called a girlfriend of mine, ‘Eda’, they turned and looked at me, answering me as well. All of a sudden, I felt betrayed. It is as if every time my parents decorated our home for my birthday, the décor was repurposed from my brother’s birthday. Nothing was for me. There was no language for women, even less so for Trans women. There was only language for men, and in my mouth, my tongue stumbled when addressing a Trans non-binary person. It should have been easier for me to address Harsh using male pronouns; still, I said ‘her’ and ‘aval’ when talking about him to someone else.

At first, I didn’t tell Harsh about any of this. This is all in my head, I told myself, and my head needs to find a better vocabulary before I stub my feet on the chair again, so I start to read. 

Raewyn Connell talks of the concept of ‘patriarchal dividend’ (in Masculinities), referring to the advantage men gain from the overall subordination of women as a group in patriarchal society. Even a man who supports gender equality benefits from gender inequality; the collective marginalisation of genders (except that of a cisgender man)  benefits a man, for he is still living in a world where he is less likely to face harassment at night, more likely to be promoted at work, or taken more seriously in both personal and professional discussions. A variant of this institutionalized male advantage becomes especially visible in language, as language is one of the most powerful sites where social hierarchies are naturalized. When masculine terms of address are the “default,” they materialise this systemic male privilege at the level of grammar and everyday speech. Using “he/him” or “man” to refer to people identifying with different genders alike (e.g., “man is a rational animal”) treats and privileges “man” as the universal, neutral category. This linguistic habit embodies Connell’s concept of the Patriarchal Dividend: men occupy the structural center, and women occupy the margins.

Similarly, the use of the masculine address term ‘eda’ in Malayalam to address everyone shows that patriarchal structure privileges men not only in material ways but through the cultural imagination as well. This also points to the semantic drift that sustains and privileges a male-centered vocabulary. Historically, ‘eda’ was the informal, sometimes rude term used to address boys or men, and ‘edi’ was the feminine equivalent. However, over time, “eda” became a neutral and even friendly term of address, while “edi” metamorphosed into a disrespectful term, at times derogatory, rarely affectionate, except in intimate women’s circles. This shift showed how masculine terms can gain positive semantic value, while feminine forms remain marked, controlled, and degraded. This is precisely the symbolic dimension of Connell’s patriarchal dividend: Even when both forms start out structurally parallel, the masculine acquires status uplift, while the feminine stagnates or loses value.

Like Connell, Dale Spender (in Man Made Language) also notes that patriarchal societies attribute more value to male-associated terms, and meanings shift to centre men as the norm. The “positive bleaching” of eda (becoming affectionate or neutral) reflects what Spender calls the male-as-default linguistic effect. Similarly, Muriel Schulz’s concept of semantic derogation (in The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader) explains why words for women often become negative over time while masculine equivalents remain neutral. This is not accidental; it is structural. J. Devika further explains how in Malayalam, forms of address encode caste and gender hierarchy, historically (in En-gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early Twentieth-Century Keralam). Male forms of vocabulary historically had higher “address prestige,” whereas Female forms carried relational, domestic, or subordinate connotations. Similar to the linguistic approach to gender, Dalit Bahujan Adivasi (DBA) women were also addressed with more informal or disrespectful terms in public spaces. This broader socio-historical context further explains why only the terms used to address women stay devalued: the linguistic treatment of women has long been tied to regulation, respectability, and caste-coded morality.

The next day, I meet Harsh. I tell him about things I read. He listens. He agrees. “We can always use the term- edo,” he says. That’s the neutral term. We agree on this. Somewhere I say, “It’s still unfair how the term edi became so disrespectful”. “So many things are unfair,” Harsh responds. We are at a protest site where ASHA workers have been protesting for a minimum wage for 258 days (the protest would eventually extend to 266 days). At this point, Larya Chechi (a protesting ASHA worker) comes and says, “Kaalu engane und mone?” “How’s your leg now, son?. Harsh tells her it’s getting better. 

After some time, we go to a salon to get my eyebrows threaded. The parlour is named ‘Salon for Girls’. “It’s not for me,” Harsh says. “Not for me either,” I say. “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman,” we tease each other as we go in. A woman opens the door, welcomes us in, then she looks at Harsh way longer than one is supposed to look at someone. “What are you?” she asks, and we freeze. I’m not sure whether I should be the one to respond here. I wait for Harsh to respond. Then I remember, I remember that being a cisgender woman speaking to another woman, I would have fewer repercussions. I don’t know the right way to respond: “What will you do after knowing?” I say. She responds something along the lines of, ‘Other customers will have problems.’ Harsh sits outside as I go inside, and she starts threading on my right eyebrow. Something in my stomach curdles, my heart beats faster. I begin sweating in the AC room. “What you said was wrong. There was no need for you to ask like that,” I say in one breath. She moves to the left eyebrow. She defends herself: “That girl might have heard that question many times.” I open my eyes and look at her: “It doesn’t mean it would hurt less”. She stops threading abruptly: the thread curls around her fingers without hurting her, “If it hurts you so much, go and get the rest done somewhere else,” she says, and I stand up. “This is not how you treat a customer,” I say. “Even that girl is not this hurt,” she responds. She opens the door, storms out into the room where Harsh is sitting: “Did you get hurt, Moley?” she asks, and Harsh looks at me and then at her, “Yes, of course, it was unnecessary”. Five minutes later, she throws both of us outside the parlour, and before she closes the door, I say, “It’s not Moley, it’s Mone”. I hold Harsh’s hand close as we climb down the stairs: “Sorry,” I say. “I can’t believe you stood up for me,” he replies. “That’s an insult, ” I say, and we laugh at how my eyebrows turned out: one bows down like a ‘well-behaved’ child in front of an elder, the other is a ‘black sheep’: it refuses to bend down. 

We wait for the signal to turn green, we cross one half of the road, I look up and see how the skies are painted in many shades that refuse one name, and I quietly witness how I’m no longer the person I was in September, nothing is the same, in my hometown where I have a home, I start feeling the safest in a protest site, no one stares at my friend here, no one even needs to know our names or genders or whereabouts to ask whether we ate anything, whether we want anything, yet the protest goes on. This is our October Revolution. “Multitudes,” I say, looking at the sky, “we live in multitudes, don’t we?” I ask Harsh as we stand at the divider on the center of the road, opposite to us, at the protest site, Mini Chechi is giving tea to everyone. There will be two cups of tea waiting for us. Harsh puts his 15-year-old Canon 5D Mark 2 in front of his eyes. “Yes,” he says as he takes in all the warmth in front of us. I put my hand around his waist, making sure he doesn’t fall down. 

References

Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Devika, J. (2007). En-gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Twentieth Century Keralam. India: Orient Longman.

Schulz, M. (1990). The Semantic Derogation of Women. In: Cameron, D., Ed., The Feminist Critique of Language, Routledge, London, 134-147.

Spender, D. (1980). Man made language. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul.