In ‘Men at Home’, Gyanendra Pandey offers a detailed exploration of men’s conduct at home and their ambiguous commitment to it.

What men touched depended on class, status, and self-esteem. Those who thought of themselves as belonging to the “better classes” turned away from anything they considered low-brow or mundane. They handled only the more “important” tasks in the domestic sphere, tasks in which mistakes were deemed to be risky. They kept control of property and wealth, including bank accounts, checkbooks, and hidden treasuries in the home, even when they handed keys or papers to women and other trusted family members for specific errands. They decided on the purchase of the grander, more expensive items: electronic goods, refrigerators, cars, and houses in recent times; perhaps elephants, carriages, cattle, and land earlier. Men participated in, even conducted, major rituals in the home—on the most important days of the religious calendar, at significant festivals, at marriages, and so on. The “minor” occasions and practices, including daily prayers and the maintenance of a prayer room or shrine on a shelf, and much of the preparation for larger rituals, were typically left to women and underlings.
Men of upper- and middle-class background in South Asia avoided physical labor, contact with body waste and other polluting substances, work that soiled them in any way. They steered clear of routine domestic work: looking after children and elders, cutting vegetables and cooking food, cleaning floors and furniture, dirty clothes and dirty bodies (except their own). The clothes and shoes they needed for work, or after a bath, were ready for them; in aristocratic households and those aspiring to aristocratic status, servants, wives, or children might help men put them on. The cleaning and washing of infants and little children was largely left to the women, including older daughters and nieces, sometimes still children themselves, and to servants. This applied even to fathers who wanted to see their children, admired the little fingers and toes and expressions of infants, or watched the progress of older children in schoolwork and extracurricular activities, as Akhtar Husain Raipuri did.
There were variations, of course, depending on individual personalities, inclinations, and contexts. Gandhi cleaned his own toilet and forced his wife, Kasturba, to do the same, despite her considerable discomfort. Premchand lent a hand in cutting vegetables, feeding and dressing the children, and caring for the sick, when need arose. Ambedkar “occasionally, on a holiday, . . .cooked for himself,” recalls Devi Dayal, employed as a young man to look after Ambedkar’s library; whenever he did so, “he invited others to share the meal.” Dayal records one instance from 1944, in the period between Ambedkar’s first and second marriages, when he “prepared seven dishes, which took him three hours.” As regular routine, however, women and servants did the cooking. The dirtier work of clearing human excreta, bloodstained clothes, and garbage was handled by Untouchables.
In a comment on the domestic needs and cares of her father, Kasim Beg Chughtai (1861–1936), who was a judge in the princely courts of western India in the early twentieth century, trailblazing feminist writer and critic Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991) sums up the prevailing conditions of domestic order in many elite households. One day, perhaps in the early 1930s, her father was appointed as a judge in a small principality in Rajputana (today’s Rajasthan.) At the news, “everything turned upside down” in their Aligarh home. “Father could not manage a moment without Mother.” The parents left for Rajasthan, taking along one of their children—an older brother of Ismat’s who battled severe illness for years before his death in 1941 at the age of forty-two. The four younger boys were left in the care of the eldest son and his wife in Aligarh. Of the four daughters, the older ones were already married, the younger ones, including Ismat, in boarding school. “Father simply sent . . . the money to cover their costs.”
For Ismat’s mother, Nusrat Khanum, who was born probably in the 1870s and died in 1967, the experience of domesticity and childcare was very different. Her writer daughter points to a critical part of it as follows: “We were so many children [four sisters and six brothers] that my mother was nauseated by the very sight of us. We had tumbled out one after another, pummeling and battering her womb. Suffering continually from nausea and labor pains, she saw us as nothing more than a punishment. Her body had spread out like a front porch when she was still young. By the age of 35, she had also become a grandmother—subject to all kinds of new demands.” The “punishment” of looking after ten children, and an eleventh in her husband, in addition to the servants and other domestic requirements.
The next generation, that of Ismat and her husband, did not have as many children as their parents and grandparents, though contraception continued to be frowned on and progeny was still seen as a gift of God. Yet in other respects, as we have seen, men’s—and, albeit far more circumspectly, women’s—assessment of the rights and responsibilities of men and women remained largely unchanged.
Recall the daily life of Bachchan’s grandfather Bholanath, a lower-level official of respectable inheritance, caste, and social standing. In his youth and again in his mature years, that is, before and after his tenure as a jailer in the post-1857 British colonial administration when his leisure time would have been somewhat reduced, he lived the life of a gentleman of leisure in his hometown of Allahabad. His room in the men’s section of the house contained his bed, handwritten manuscripts of texts he had copied, and his spectacles, pen and ink, spittoon, and hookah. Often a chessboard took center stage and consumed his and his fellow chess players’ day. They interrupted the game only when forced to do so: by the call of nature, as they might have said, or to eat, following repeated entreaties from denizens of the inner quarters—including the women, who could not eat until the men had eaten.
The latter rule was observed through Bachchan’s father’s time as well. Pratap, employed as a clerk in a press in Allahabad, woke at 3 a.m., took a ritual bath in the river Ganga several miles away, and left for work at nine after his morning meal. If the meal was not ready and he left without eating, a servant, family member, or neighbor brought it to him and waited to see him eat, so the women at home could also eat. Pratap often spent twelve hours at the press, especially when he was still low in rank. At the time, he regularly got home well after dark. The younger children were often in bed, and all he himself could do was eat and fall asleep.
I will round off this rehearsal of “respectable” men’s routines and what they touched in the home with two examples from the next generation, living through the high tide of anti-colonial struggle and Independence—the poet and university teacher Bachchan, and the writer and educationist Akhtar Husain Raipuri. For most of their careers, Raipuri and Bachchan lived with their immediate, nuclear families in small, modern houses, without the strict division of men’s and women’s spaces that was observed in their parents’ and grandparents’ homes. In neither case would the spouses in the two families fit popular ideas of a run-of-the-mill middle-class South Asian housewife or husband: that is to say, until they did!
As Akhtar’s wife, Hameeda, recalled it, her husband’s work routine varied little from the day they married in 1935 to the end of his life in 1992. His waking hours were organized fixatedly around pen, paper, and office, even when the office was a room at home, or a table and chair on one side of a room, as it was at some points. During his last years, when he was virtually blind, he still woke early, walked a little, shaved, bathed, dressed as if for the office, and sat down to breakfast “punctually at eight.” His sons and wife read to him through part of the morning. Presumably, he rested, listened to the radio, and drank something cold or warm between times, before his lunch at 1 p.m. After that, he withdrew to his room, listened to the radio and slept, woke at four, bathed, and dressed for tea, before another walk and an evening spent, ideally, with visitors (mostly men, but now sometimes including women and curious children) and animated conversation in his “court”—what Bengalis call “adda.” The round of activities matched earlier decades when he was a busy educationist and bureaucrat, if on a reduced and slower scale.
Compare Bachchan, the poet, who writes of the continuous quest for companionship and love in his personal life, a search fulfilled very substantially in his second marriage, with Teji. Throughout this highly educated, accomplished, and famous couple’s time together, Bachchan kept away from touching any housework, childcare, shopping, or planning for the household. Teji shouldered the burden, even the buying of cars and refrigerators, to leave her husband free, as he puts it, for his intellectual and creative work.

This excerpt from Gyanendra Pandey’s ‘Men at Home’ has been published with permission from Orient BlackSwan.

Courtesy The Print