By Zuneera Shah for Dawn
(Image/Credit: Dawn)
When society is against the mere idea of women gathering outside the home, pulling off such an event is no easy task
When news of the Aurat March flooded my social media in the days leading up to March 8, I squealed in joy every time I saw a mention of it.
I couldn’t help but think about my younger sister zealously informing me, “the etymology of the word ‘aurat’ is misogynistic.”
The etymological roots of ‘aurat’ give us meanings that range from ‘vulnerability’ to ‘genitals’, and later, to ‘wife’, thus reducing women to, of course, their weakness, reproductive organs and their relation to husbands.
I was not surprised at the revelation, but definitely amused, for the phenomenon is not unique to our language. The word ‘woman’ can also be traced back to the meaning ‘little man’. And ‘woman’, too, later became used to indicate ‘wife’.
Building our vocabulary
When I saw that the mobilisers were using ‘aurat’ instead of ‘women’, the distinction meant everything to me. While the choice to label what is obviously a women’s march in local terms may seem pedantic to some, it has strong bearings on how South Asian activists and feminists can and will vernacularise the fight for women’s rights.
It is no secret that feminism is often co-opted by many to be viewed as a Western construct which marginalises non-Western identities. Western hegemony over feminist movements then feeds into a repulsion towards feminism that is found in countries such as Pakistan.
We have grassroot feminist efforts working on the question of gender, yet we still lack a vernacular that can be used to refer to issues of gender inequality.
While our languages are extremely evocative in expressing the full range of human emotion, it is a shame that we still have to rely on words such as ‘zyadti’ (excess) or ‘zina-bil-jabr’ (adultery by force) or ‘asmat-dari’ (defloration) to refer to incidents such as rape.
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Dawn… Aurat March
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Dawn
Transcultural Knowledges 