Eve-Teasing

Independent India is discovering social problems undreamed of in Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy. As the caste system and the traditional Hindu family begin to crumble, the barrier between the sexes in India is no longer the formidable fence it used to be. Last week in Agra--where India's two most famous lovers, the Mogul Emperor Shah Jehan and his queen, lie buried under the Taj Mahal--the Indian Youth Association held a solemn seminar about a new kind of problem: the sidewalk dalliance that Indian youth calls "Eve-teasing."

"The minds of today's young men are a madhouse," wailed Chief Minister Sam-purnanand of Uttar Pradesh, one of India's foremost amateur astrologers. No longer, he complained, can "every young woman walk the streets with the confidence that every young man she meets will be as a brother to her." An indignant college professor joined in. "Individually as well as in groups," he complained, his students "discuss the proportions of maidens, their adipose tissues and their coy looks." And the coeds? "Bearing and dress publicly shout at you: 'Come and look at me.' " 50 Screams. Some of the assembled savants were inclined to blame the new looseness on the movies ("That unmitigated evil") and cigarette smoking: "It is a biological fact that habitual smoking stimulates the oral erotic zone and the mind starts wandering." One speaker described a survey he had made indicating that 36.9% of India's people suffer from boredom, 49.7% from blighted hopes, 26.7% from emotional depression, 6.4% from sexual frustration, 49.9% from "a polluted and unwholesome atmosphere." A girl from New Delhi won the biggest cheer of the day with her complaint that "it's not her age, her beauty or her other qualifications" that win a young woman a job, "but just how far she is prepared to accommodate her boss."

But even if her boss doesn't bother her, agreed the assemblage, an Indian girl's modesty in the big city is under constant assault nowadays--if only visually and verbally. "We get 50 screams for help every week from girls whom men are trying to pick up," says a Bombay cop. Last week, 17 teen-agers were rounded up in Allahabad for talking to girls in the street, though 14 were merely reprimanded and sent home. In Lucknow, one harried police inspector prefers more direct action: "I just take them to the lockup and thrash them."

Campus Eye-Openers. Inevitably, one pale male at last week's seminar countered with a charge of Adam-teasing. Complaining of the girls' gauzy saris, low-cut cholis (blouses) and flimsy salwar (trousers), a student cried: "There is always too much visible." Conceded a Lucknow University coed: "At times we also tease boys." And for sheer devilish ingenuity, few Eve-teasers could match the New Delhi girl who telephones males at random, starting conversations that are hard for many an innocent husband to explain. If a wife answers, this Adam-teaser hangs up with the shocked cry: "He never told me he was married!"

After all the charges and countercharges had been debated, the seminar wound up earnestly deploring "a loss of respect for women among young men," and calling on students to form "squads to apprehend and check" disrespectful behavior. All but lost in the righteous furor was the quietly reasonable voice of one male student. "Tell me," he asked, "is there any country in the world where the boys do not indulge in this game?"

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