Bole toh, what's in a name?

Regardless of what actor Sanjay Dutt may have to say on the subject, I get on fairly well with my brother’s wife, thank you. So do many of you, I hope. Had Dutt been feasting on too many of Ekta Kapoor’s soaps before he said that — even though they are deemed distinctly unfashionable now? What else is one to make of a statement such as “all sisters have a problem with their brother’s wife”? As a grossly sexist remark, it comes close to, “women don’t like each other” that cavemen-who-didn’t-go extinct still believe in, and the other Indian favourite about MILs and DILs (though in the West, it is the men who usually have a problem with their mothers-in-law).

But while we can laugh off Dutt’s views as they deserve to be, his next bombshell, directed not just at his sister and now rival Priya Dutt but against all women who didn’t change their last names after they got married, is more irksome. Dutt, on to his third marriage, suggests that there are only “one Mr and Mrs Dutt (in Pali Hill)” and that’s him and his wife. He also goes on to say that he would have been seriously “offended” had his wife not changed her surname after marriage. Quite apart from the fact that the wife’s original maiden name (and surname) seems to be in some doubt, this is a statement that will shock anyone who holds that women are now free in this country to decide their own lives and such trivial matters as by what last name, Mrs or Ms, chairman or chairperson, they’d like to be addressed. I mean, do these things even matter in 2009?

Evidently they do to a few good men in the country, whose tribe may also include a couple of antiquated Parliamentarians (does anyone remember the “par kati” description lavished upon women with short hair?), bullies and crooks, as also the Noida rapists who decided to celebrate a cricket win by raping a hapless management student because they didn’t quite approve of her “morality”. No one, of course, ever seems to have told these paragons of virtue that India is not their fiefdom but a free country and that women have 100 per cent citizenship rights — to get hair cuts, to read books, visit shopping malls with or without boyfriends, to even play cricket and not get raped!

But while one can understand where these people, seeped in a feudal mindset, are coming from, you can’t understand a person like Dutt at all: Someone from a privileged background, enlightened parents, and public school education.

If you go to Kasauli, check out the photo studio in the middle of the town with pictures of a young Sanju baba at Lawrence School, Sanawar. The owner happily talks about the old days when the pampered son of Nargis and Sunil Dutt would visit, well known even then because of his famous parents. At Kwality, a restaurant in central Delhi, known for its chole bhature and its au gratin dating back to pre-Independence, an old waiter once told me about Nargis being a regular with her children when she came to attend Parliament. Did none of this socialising rub off?

If Dutt believes that women must change their last names, does he also believe that they must keep their heads (or faces) covered? Not venture out of home (in an interview, Manyata says she takes her husband’s permission to go to dinner), change not just surnames but even first names as in my great-grandparents’ times? Because all these, however ridiculous, are an extension of that same thought process. Finally, how can the son of one of the icons of feminism in India make such a retarded statement. And it is that. Even before Mother India, Nargis was an independent, working woman. For her son to come out now with an ideal of womanhood so far removed is such a pity.