A Seat on the Bus and Other Gender Issues

There is much separation in Kerala between members of the opposite sexes. Gender roles are very sharply defined and nearly always abided by. There is a very strongly felt notion that men should be the providers outside the home, while women should provide the needs within a home, and men and women occupy different spaces in Kerala, both figuratively and literally.

Go into any church throughout the state and you will find men on the left side and women on the right. Families do not sit together, and even the children, who are often further separated, sit on opposite sides of the church depending on their sex. After church, board any bus, and you will notice that men sit in one section while women sit in another. Once in a while, you will see a couple sitting together, but this occasion is rare.

All buses operate a little differently. On some, men’s seats are in the back, while women’s are in the front. On others, like in churches, men’s seats are on the left, while women’s are on the right. No matter the chosen method of segregation, however, you can count on the fact that all buses will have three sections: “men,” “women,” and “whoever gets there first,” which, as it happens, is nearly always a man.

The bus system really bugs me. It seems utterly absurd to me that, even when there are empty seats on a bus, people are standing because those empty seats are not in the appropriate section. But what really fires me up is the way the men hoard the seats.

Yesterday I got on a bus, which was far from full. There were about double-seats occupied by eight women at the back of the bus. The rest of the seats were occupied by men, while extra women stood around holding tightly onto the poles. But no one should have been standing at all. Although each and every seat had someone in it, there were plenty more spots to go around. But the women wouldn’t sit because each of those spots was next to a man. And the men occupying the spots in the “whoever gets there first” section didn’t have the courtesy to get up and join a man sitting solo in the men’s section so that a woman could sit down.

Now, I know it’s not very missionary-like for me to say this, but I was pissed off. I glared at a few of the men who were sitting where women could have been, but when they didn’t get the message, I had a big decision to make. Was I going to stand there silently, holding on for dear life, like the oppressed women of this culture, or was I going to take a stand by sitting down next to a man? I decided that this situation called for taking a stand, and so, just like that, I sat down in an empty seat next to a man, who was ever-so-politely occupying his allotted space in the men’s section.

He let me sit there; no one made a big deal about it, and no one ever will – as long as it’s a white woman who they can ignore while assuming she doesn’t know any better. I took my stand, but I don’t think I made a point. Women were still standing up, and they will continue to stand up, without standing up for themselves. I’m not hopeless, but I’m not optimistic either. This male-dominated society is pretty set in its ways, and it’s going to take more than some know-nothing white woman to stir things up somewhere other than on the stovetop.