It’s on my Maanam
Image: Unsplash
At this point, so many months after, I’m sure every Tamil person knows the news, has seen the headlines and heard the rumours. Dhanush and Aishwarya announced their separation and divorce in January of this year, and it commenced a swirl of articles and gossip. Months later, in March, Aishwarya removed Dhanush’s name from her social media and there began another flood of comments and TMZ-like reporting.
Truthfully, I have little interest in speculating about their divorce, much less writing about it. It was a piece of sensational news, told to me some weeks or months after it was announced because my inability to keep up with headlines is so severe it’s almost a moral failing. I remember being told, my reaction to it. It was given to me in a “did you know” statement. I, as it turned out, did not. I remember my disbelief, my mouth dropping slightly, eyebrows pulling up together, my “oh my god, really?” I remember my next thought, the one that tumbled carelessly off my tongue, the one I scorn and cringe at, the oddly conservative one that popped out of what I pride to be a modern, leftist brain – “I can’t believe Dhanush would shame Rajinikanth’s daughter like that.” I am interested in contemplating that thought, that whole line of antiquated thinking, how deeply pervasive the connotations of divorce in Tamil society runs, and how it manifested in me.
There are two aspects of that thought that I feel the need to deconstruct: the absence of Aishwarya Rajinikanth’s name and my automatic coupling of divorce with shame, a woman and her family’s shame, in particular. In that instant, and it had only taken an instant, I reduced Aishwarya, a full human being, living and breathing and thinking in her own right, to something of a property, “belonging to her father” now, given that she was “rejected by her husband.” It’s a gross notion, utterly antifeminist, archaic, antediluvian. Nonetheless, something deep in my brain, close to where my thoughts are based, was wired to jump to that idea, and so I, thoughtlessly, stripped away Aishwarya’s personhood and replaced it with her father’s. I afforded her no sense of autonomy as if this was a decision she could not have possibly made but rather some misfortune thrust upon her family to smear their name and bring about misery. It both horrifies and mortifies me now, in hindsight, paying attention to the meaning of my words and to what can be inferred from them. This thought, my words, are reminiscent of how girls are discussed among aunties – potential brides but until then costly baggage to be made appealing and alluring for someone to pick up for themselves one day. My mother told me often, tells me often, “You can do whatever you want when you’re married. You won’t be mine to take care of then.” And I look forward to when I can do whatever I want. With a thaali around my neck, I think I’ll get a sleeve, have rings dot along the cartilage of my ears, an industrial pierced through its helix. I’ve been looking forward to doing a number of cool, fun things that spurn my parents, who would be my previous owners, not paying mind, not critically thinking, about how I feel able to because another will be said to own me, will, ideally, permit me to do as I wish, as if permission, rather than acceptance, is something I need to be granted at all.
Shame, honour, maanam, have been deeply entangled with divorce in the Tamil context; it trails behind discussions of divorce, holding profound social consequences. Intellectually, I rebel against this association, and despise it for how it traps spouses and children in abusive, toxic, or simply unhappy situations. Freedom of choice, without the baggage of penalties, is what I try to champion. Nevertheless, and quite evidently, a lifetime marinating in the gossip aunties and grandmothers in my community have traded back and forth about the inherent shame of divorce has enabled that same idea to worm its way into my brain. In truth, divorce is something I fear. I’m young, only twenty-one, and am some years from getting married. Nonetheless, the idea of divorce, and the consequential stain to my family’s maanam, fills me with the cement of dread. I know it would be difficult to marry another Tamil person, especially as a woman. Any daughters I might have are likely to have the same fate. There would be the inevitable disappointment from my parents. Mild shunning, definite gossip from the community. The pervasive feeling of being wrong, of scratching deep crevices through what should be the shiny, solid gold plate of my family’s honour. There are reasons that stretches beyond his daughter’s happiness, I suspect, that Rajinikanth has tried his best to prevent Aishwarya’s and Dhanush’s divorce, or so it is said.
I’ve thought about why divorce is so undesirable, so taboo, especially for women in a heteronormative setting. I think, in part, it’s because of this concept of purity, the pressure to be “pure” and virginal when entering a marriage. A once married woman is, one may assume, not so. The possibility of marrying again, or existing, simply, unbound to man, is difficult. I think it is also the sting of rejection made public and the subsequential rumours and ideas that one is not fitting, must not have been good, to be turned away and “returned.” These reasons are steeped in old, conservative thinking, lines of thought that plague us, or at least me, still. It’s old water I haven’t been able to shake off, I haven’t been able to unclog my ears and let those ideas spill from my ears. It’s embarrassing. This piece of honesty that shows that the condemned ways I have observed and, inadvertently, been taught to perceive people, to think of women have stuck, embarrasses me. I’m hoping my honesty with myself, and with whomever will read this, will help me pick out and banish these antiquated ideas from where they have been woven into the jagged folds of my brain where I have not been able to notice. I’m hoping my honesty will help others do the same.
It has occurred to me, while writing this, how interesting it is that, as a community, we are willing to sacrifice love, happiness, peace for the sake of maanam. I think my parents would beg me to do anything but a divorce. Though it may present a solution to any number of issues, I think they would beg me to maintain the family’s reputation. Under their pressure, under the community’s, and my own fear of the social consequences, I think I could only avoid a divorce until I was the one served with the papers, and perhaps even avoid it then. This is telling of what is collectively valued. It is also sad – these values that are being taught and passed down, the inevitable urge to give up the good things in life, the possibility of living a good, content life, in order to save face and appear to be happy and “respectable.”
I don’t mean to label Dhanush and Aishwarya’s divorce an act of bravery nor something of politic, cultural significance by any means. Both of them are famous and cushioned by their generational wealth, no matter how much their names are traded and scrutinized. The consequences that plague us, the proletariat, are not so drastic for them. Their divorce was a decision made with autonomy by the two of them, we can assume. A good decision, hopefully, for the both of them. I hope the rest of us, Tamil people as a whole, will become more equipped to make similarly good decisions for their own happiness without the fear of repercussion.
