Facebook motherhood dare is sexist. Indian women must take offence

A couple of days ago, one of my girlfriends who is also a mother introduced me to Facebook's "Motherhood dare" - a sort of viral "challenge" that urged mothers to post a series of intimate snaps that made them "proud to be a mother" and alongside tag other women who they considered "great mothers".

My friend went on and on about what she thought was an extremely socially-conscious campaign that rewarded, in her words, a thankless and gruelling job like motherhood and was comparable to the #100saripact that would gravitate towards building a community of care-givers, uniting mothers universally and become something of a validation, creating a memory bank of smiling, toothless infants, changing soiled diapers, Cindrella-themed birthday parties, toothless grins, first day at school, troubled teenage years et al.

I listened patiently till she said, "Oh sorry re, I didn't realise how shitty this must make you feel. Touching 40 and still single. I know just how much you love kids. You should adopt, you know. Nothing like motherhood to complete a woman. It's the best part about marriage too…"

There was an awkward pause. I hung up, pondering on her last words and suddenly co-relating all the fuss this campaign was creating with the emptiness it actually represented and how it segregated women into a superficial and selfish bracket of haves and have-nots - those whose womanhood was validated by marriage and motherhood, and those who - like me - have remained single, childless, or married women who live with the stigma of being barren. I recalled how while researching for my second book, Sita's Curse, I had interacted with a young, 20-something, housewife from Jaipur who was traumatised and made to suffer the tainted self image of a "baanjh", when it was her husband, who suffered from erectile dysfunction.

How she was made to drink cow's urine daily and fast and pray, and how she was paraded to a 60-plus family Guruji in Indore who raped her, under the false pretext of examining her womb - who took away so much from an innocent human life - I wondered if that girl was now also partaking of this online motherhood challenge - of whether a social media-led campaign was always meant to be happy, just the way virtual reality makes us believe in things that don't exist.

I thought of my maid in Kolkata - how every child she had was conceived because she was molested and beaten up by her elderly, drunkard, ganja smoking husband who had starved her when he got to know that she had sought the help of a local health counselor and gone on Nirod - a contraceptive - an over the counter, "garv nirodak goli", as the ad proclaims.

"He kicked me, and forced himself from the rear when I was eight-months pregnant. He wanted sex all the time. Every time he gambled and lost, he would beat me and keep having sex till I bled. I used to run away from the village, but he kept coming to my mother's home to take me back. My mother saying I would again return with a baby bump in no time. Her words… if only I had listened, I wouldn't have so many mouths to feed today," she often reminisces painfully, wiping her eyes with the corner of her faded tangail sari, softened after several washes.

As I scroll down, my timeline is flooded with collages that boast about the motherhood pact - and I ask myself if this posturing takes into view the dismal condition of family planning in this grossly overpopulated nation, where abysmal female literacy levels and the lack of the widespread availability of birth-control methods blemishes the use of contraception. Where despite awareness of contraception among married women, the vast majority of married Indians (76 per cent in a 2009 study) reported significant problems in accessing a choice of contraceptive methods, with a mere 48.4 per cent of married women estimated to use a contraceptive method, that is, more than half of all married women did not.

Where three-fourths of these were relying on female sterilisation, by far, the most prevalent birth-control method in India. Condoms, at three per cent, were the next most prevalent method. Meghalaya, at 20 per cent, reported the lowest usage of contraception among all Indian states. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were the other two states that reported usage below 30 per cent.

Was the motherhood dare a blind shot at glorifying the condition of motherhood, as something divinely blessed that some women were privileged to enjoy, sans any real empowerment, per say?

Is it a sexist, class-conscious campaign that doesn't really empathise with women who failed at motherhood, suffered numerous miscarriages or are tagged "barren baanjh" because they can't conceive? In the same breath, there are also women - single mothers, from economically impoverished backgrounds for instance who suffer to raise kids and don't make pretty pictures.

In a country where even birth control isn't a woman's choice - is boasting of motherhood just a smug way to segregate women?

How come there are no pictures of women from economically impoverished backgrounds who have to scrub utensils and dirty commodes to earn enough to send their kids to school, of women battling with post-partum depression, of ugly stretch marks and weight gain, of women exiting the workforce after becoming mothers, even as a section of corporate India was opting for gender-sensitive policies like flexible hours and crèche services for working mothers - of the many cases of women who face discrimination and harassment when they announce that they are pregnant.

An advertising agency in Mumbai was served a legal notice in January 2015, for instance, for allegedly denying maternity leave to an employee and firing her. And what becomes of unmarried women - does this relate to the disparaging references to "abhi tak kuwari hain" spinsters? From Lady Macbeth to Mrs Danvers in Rebecca, women who are portrayed as being deprived of their natural purpose and who descend into a sort of seminal madness?

I ask my own mother as I write this column, why she stopped at one child, having suffered a miscarriage before I was born. It was a boy. She looks away. Frowning. "One was enough - god it was so painful," she mutters. I smile. I think of my friend who also battled a bad marriage and now probably hides behind the valor of motherhood and a Facebook stimulated campaign that makes it easier for her to snigger at women who didn't make the final cut - those lesser than herself.

I think of how smug she sounded on that call - and whether motherhood is a searing judgment of women by other women. And how it's like a trophy we must flaunt. At the end. After the vermillion has spread all over our tresses. The first night. The first month. The first year. The first cut.

How it could be a judgment on your marriage. The way society views your marital well-being and completion as a woman. I think of another friend in Mumbai who, after spending lakhs on failed IVFs and IUIs, has now decided to give her body and mind some rest. She's still reeling under a scarring weight gain, thanks to a harsh regime of hormonal pills and injections.

"I will adopt dogs, I have always felt they are my children," she whispers, her voice quivering.

Is she any less of a mother? Am I any less of a woman? Can we qualify for the dare? Or is the dare a pretence?