When I was born, I was passed from the nurse’s arms into my mother’s. After she held me close to her bare chest, skin to skin, she passed this naked baby into the arms of the Male Gaze. To a child, the Male Gaze became a member of the family. Like a Governess, who my mother had brought with her into her husband’s house.

All of us children grew up with this Governess as our supervisor.  She would correct my arched back in the presence of a male member of the family. She would point my mother towards my stretched legs, and under her influence, my mother would ask me to sit “properly” with my limbs crossed. I like to believe that my mother, too, had this Governess that she grew up with. Overseeing and shaping her each move. She passed it down to me as her mother passed it down to her – unknowingly, in the form of generational inheritance.

We were to treat the Male Gaze as our primary audience, adjusting our stance according to its reactions, repeating actions for its accolades. Our activities were shaped by the Governess, who had a stick in its hand to reprimand and inculcate this Gaze. This Governess traveled with you on the bus. Swinging right on your forearm while you hold on for balance. The Governess came to the fittings with you. It tailored your clothes and loosened the inch-tape around your young waist. As you grow old, sometimes the gaze peeks back at your blooming upper lip from the mirror or sits on your gut pouch, and even though you want to swat it away from you, it flies and lands on your face.

The idea of the feminine thus emerges through the structures which shape the performance of a woman as an individual; of a human being that is born into a world that is a stage. As a child, one is imprinted with what they are surrounded by. It is by its mimetic nature that a child learns sounds, reactions, and words. When a mother constantly repeats the two syllabled MA-MA to her baby, for the child it comes to acquiring the shape of MaMa, its mother. As the impressionable child grows into a distinctive adult, it encounters the normative, and being surprised, quickly jiggles itself into the queue that was already delineated for it. Making it seemingly easier to perform; without much thought.

A performance requires an outsider’s gaze from beyond the performer’s own perception. Often looking for reaffirmation from the outside, the acknowledgement that the performer receives from its audience hardens her impression of herself. Where the man is the head of the family, the gaze lingers in each corner. In societies such as the one I come from, the female—a reproductive creature, mother—is conditioned and shelled inside a performative role. The repetitive act of performing for the man turns into her primary desire. The eyes of her audience follow her, even when there is no one watching. Walk out of the house, and there on the street you will find it slithering along the narrow alleys. Sitting on the cow dung, like flies, stinking the cow’s afterthoughts with its stench. 

This stench stays with you and hovers over your activities. Live long enough next to the dumping ground, you will get accustomed to the stench. So the Male Gaze enters your nose and makes shelter in your eyes. It becomes harder to differentiate whether it is your vision or something through which you are seeing. It transforms your desire in order to fit a mould. Wherever you go, you act in accordance with the Male Gaze. Not just how you dress, but the way you think, the way you clean, the way you cook, and the way you take up space. It is always keeping in mind the Male Gaze, never in isolation from it.  

My mother always tells me that ultimately the woman has to find a partner. That the girl, shaped by the Gaze of the man, has to grow up to satisfy the same. I can now differentiate between her voice and the voice of the Governess, who asserts her beliefs through my mother. In Kashmir, such a performance is part of the traditional representation of women, throughout families. As a child, the Male Gaze comes as a protective shield. There is not much explicit sexualization, but the need to protect arises from the same. The little girl playing on the streets is not allowed to wander too far away from home. As a child, my father would restrict me from going to our neighbours’ houses to play with my fellow little females. My brother was allowed to roam about with his friends but I was  not to leave the house without any elders. 

As the child grows up, the Male Gaze looks at the female as a subject of his desire. Or an object for his engagement. The woman waits for the man and the man engages. The gaze occupies so much space in the life of the woman that she has very little perception of herself. This self-perception is restricted due to the manner in which the Male Gaze is unknowingly shaping the idea of the female in her own head. She caters to this Gaze unknowingly, by thinking of it as her own desire. Wherever she goes, the Gaze looms over her. Her own thoughts circle back to the murmuring of the Governess walking with her in the presence of the overseeing gaze.

The women in my family speak the language of the Governess. Often misunderstanding it as their personal thought, as if it were not the Governess that I can clearly make out is sitting beside them, whispering hapless premonitions in their ears.

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When I ran out of the house to catch my school bus, with a heavy bag jiggling on my back, I found out that the Governess was running with me. At first, I thought she would stop at the bus door, but when she also leaped inside with me, I realized it was going to be hard to get rid of her. She followed me around during the lunch break. She would stand next to my teacher in class and just to tease me, would whisper into her ears. The teacher, intoxicated with her words, would walk up to me to pull on my pink bra strap that was peeking out. Almost mouthing the words, “Why are you wearing this color?”  

She had a way with the women in my family. She was able to easily convince them that she meant nothing but good. The good meant that their husbands, who were the ultimate executioners of the Male Gaze, would be pleased. It was, after all, for the pleasure of their men that these women were performing. Of course, with corrupted desire. When performing for their husbands, the women reared children within that Gaze. This gaze had a prominent presence in all other institutions of my life. Just like in schools, where in the name of decorum, tight-fitted clothes were shamed upon. It felt like this phantom-wisp-of-a-supervisor was more active in the world than I was. It had more of a presence than me, even though it was a figment of my own informed imagination. Otherwise for the children, the Governess tried to seep into games, plays, colors and what not. At the playground, when a girl-friend of mine would tell me that cricket is a man’s game, my eyes would roll at the swinging feet of the governess sitting beside us on the bench. It seemed like the school had admitted the governess even before it admitted me. But every now and then, I would mix up the white uniform with a neon brassiere and run off to school to start a tiff with the Governess. 

Each person probably struggles with shrugging the Governess off of their shoulders. To some, after years, it becomes the Betaal of their lives guiding and leading them to their pathway. To my Grandmother, the Governess was older than her. So as she would go on her expeditions, her weak-in-the-knees-friend would stay back. I like to believe that the Burkha that she would put on had the ability to avert the all-seeing Male Gaze governing the streets too. In that Burkha, she stopped performing for any audience. Solemnly experiencing the outside world. My mother too, took up the Burkha when she crossed her forties. She said it was the easiest thing to wear, as she didn’t have to think about the outfits for the office too much. She did not seem to enjoy performing for a Gaze as much anyway. Especially when it came to the presentation of the body. Even though she enforced those ideas on me for which I blame the Governess, she did not herself participate in it much. Even though my mother was deeply invested in all her feminine roles, it was motherhood that pushed her beyond the horizon of the Gaze. It was that and her job. 

For my grandmother, I often wonder, when her husband passed away, did the Governess distance herself from her or convince her that she was not an object of desire anymore? 

The individual’s desire runs parallel with the demands of the performance. Commitment to the role puppeteers the passions of the performer and informs her intentions. The male gaze oozes through the depths of institutional structures, like the family. Within the household, the dampness of patriarchy swells the wall paint. It colours the desires of a female for her. “In the end everyone has to get married,” my mother would conclude every time I would ramble on over the question ‘What are you trying to be?’ Whispers of the governess, I tell you. Desire is the force pushing you to tread a path. A woman ill with the murmurs of the Governess, lets her desires be infected by her too. 

Even though the Governess came with my mother, it was imperative for her, like every other individual, to shrug her off. So, she would tell the Governess to watch the kids as she would leave for a day of work. My mother would grab the purse from the Almirah, and balancing its swinging motion with each step, would leave for work. She would then walk more than a kilometer to her office. Sometimes, she would take me or my brother along. To us, the world of my mother’s daily routine seemed like an unknown place, which we would visit, wallowing in its mysteries. She would make us sit in her office, pass us a pen and paper to while our time away, while she completed her work. There she would be a different person. A different character playing a different role. But of course, in the flesh and feeling of my mother.

The clutch of the Governess was tight on the women. But it was not missing from the men. It was, after all, their reinforcement too. As the female child grows into her teenage years, the Gaze increases. Suddenly the silhouette that the girl is asked to mask, becomes more and more see through. The body becomes a lining, to be traced again and again with every passerby on the street, in the bus, school mates, sometimes a distant uncle. The males of the family had the same perception presumably, that is how they recognised the potential of that Gaze on the growing children. So the girls in our household were barred from wearing jeans, pants, and short kurtas. It was proudly boasted, by a certain uncle,“I have long ago stopped allowing F to wear pants…”  

Long legs, deep necks, skin exposed to air was bad dressing. Clothing mattered too much for the Governess. The act was almost reduced to costumes.

Tired of the eyes on me, one day I decided to go out wearing one of my mothers’ Abayas.  Walking alongside my grandmother, donned in the loose fit fabric, I realized that the eyes still followed me. I could, even with a cloak on, be too perceivable as a body. It felt like one was being consumed by these eyes. It was another reason that women dressed their children averse to the pleasures of this Gaze. The growing child was covered or exposed accordingly. It is not until you reach the age of marriage, when the body has matured, that they become permissibly attractive. The Governess whispers into your family’s ear that the girl is ready to perform, like her mother, grandmother, and so on, for her own husband, for her own man, who she has been preparing you for. So much so, that the Governess navigates the ways of loving or feeling for you. The way you will perceive your life and your life partners. Especially for the woman, the Gaze becomes so intrinsic that she does not remember to take the lens off of her eyeballs. When she looks at the world, instead of seeing a limitless horizon, she sees only limits. Limits constructed within this Gaze for which you play a role. So often, I heard my mother say, “Kori mohneu chakh, Luk hund gari chue gasun” You are a girl…You are to go to another person’s house. For me, the sentence always reaffirmed the presence of the performance, especially for the “other,” where I, as a female, was already predestined for an audience I didn’t know. I was to listen to the Governess, prepare a role, and then act it out in her eternal presence. The Governess was a hard fly to swat. She would buzz around and sit on other people’s faces. I, as a child, demanded her out of the room at every opportunity I got. I would have to pick a fight to oppose the Governess. But my mother was favorable towards her. 

It was between me and my brother that we sometimes would find a moment away from the Governess as two children cocooning into a blanket. But she did manage to intervene as we grew older. We started playing with each other less. He practicing his wrestling skills on me was even more frowned upon. He could not even pull on my cheeks, because the Governess did not find it appeasing the Male Gaze. I remember while we were crossing the road as teenagers, my brother pointed out how even if a girl and a boy are siblings walking hand-in-hand, they would anyway assume them to be a couple.  The “they” he referred to was none other than the corruptive Male Gaze.

As a child, my rejection of the Gaze also came from asking questions that arose from the performance. “But what does it matter how tight the kurta is?” or, “So what, if the bra is pink?” Asking these questions would put the ancestral Governess into a state of self-examination. She would wriggle like a ghost sprayed with the holy water, dissipating into thin air. On some harder days, to chase the Governess away one would have to start dancing in an empty room all by oneself, just to feel your body twirling away from the clingy Gaze. Only until the Governess would bring your grandmother into the room to scream at you. And then, you would have to question back. The act of questioning made one less desirable in the eyes of the Governess and the Male Gaze. A pre-scripted role allows no improvisation. One couldn’t ask too many questions of the Governess, because she would collapse. But one sees that the women had their own ways of making the Governess deliberately fall over.

In retrospect, I realize that it was not that the Gaze had vanished for my mother or grandmother through their individual efforts, but they rejected the presence of the Governess for themselves. Instead of listening to the Governess, in their personal moments, they chose to discredit it by showing the Governess that they had a space just for themselves. For my mother, her office, and for my grandmother, inside her Burkha. Spaces where they naturally perform but not as per the Gaze or to a fixed audience. These became spaces that the Governess had no power over. Redefined and personalized corners of existence, where they gathered parts of themselves that were nurtured away from the Gaze. But does one completely throw the Governess away from their house?

Not in mine. She haunts me, but enjoys fresh fruit with my family. If anything, the Governess bonds them into a big happy family. But I see her true nature. I see her enchanting ways when she gives me a nudge to make my knees touch each other. She is the one who sometimes makes me twiddle while I am scribbling in a cafe and a cute guy walks in. As an act of consciousness, one shakes her head and picks up an object, as an amulet — like a pen, a purse, or a burkha, to keep the Governess at bay. Such objects place you outside of performance, and allow you to step off the stage. They make you an observer rather than an object to be observed. Performance finds less and less space in your existence when you realize that you have the ability to be the audience. Instead of thinking that you are here to blend into a role, the world becomes the earth for you to extend your roots into. The world is not for performance, but for participation. The only way to take power away from the Governess was thus by resisting her power. Even if just for a day’s work or going on a walk to explore. Each time you would shake the family tree, the grafted branch of the Governess would weaken, hopefully to be separated from the tree altogether.