One particularly striking photograph emerged from a protest in Delhi on 4 October. It shows a young woman jumping out of a bus window to escape police detention. Remarkably, she isn’t even looking at the ground as she leaps. The photograph clearly shows that all the hands reaching up to catch her as she falls backwards belong to men. The sight brings a mixture of surprise, joy and hope. Because in the world we are accustomed to, so many men’s hands surrounding a woman usually suggest something ominous. But this photograph raises another question: what kind of trust gives a young woman the courage to take such a leap?
To understand this, we need to look closely at a few more photographs. In them, women are staging sit-ins on roads, blocking traffic, climbing police barricades, being detained, returning again and again, and chanting slogans with clenched fists raised in the air. In the process, their clothes get torn, their hair comes loose, their sandals go missing, and photographs capture them in poses that could hardly be called ‘ladylike‘. Pictures like these of men have been a familiar sight at almost every protest. But women appearing in them in such large numbers is a relatively recent phenomenon.
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From childhood, women are taught how they should look, sit, walk and laugh in front of others—even how they should express anger or shed tears. Yet the women in these protests seem utterly unconcerned with such expectations. Their attention is not on looking beautiful or presentable in photographs and videos, but on what they are doing. This, too, is a kind of freedom that rarely gets talked about.
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