When Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor tied the knot, social media users felt they somehow had a stake in the proceedings even though they distinctly didn’t. Maneuvering a private life under the constant focus of the public eye has proven troublesome for celebrities since the phenomenon of celebration started. Even though it’s ironic to say that the celebrity class that sits pretty atop our social ladder is in some way oppressed by the masses, matters are complicated by the predatory gaze of misogynists on the Internet.
So, when Alia and Ranbir welcomed their child into the world, the internet counted backward and arrived at the conclusion that Alia must have been pregnant months before her wedding. In India, a variety of actions, gestures, and non-actions are considered transgressive, with premarital sex (or any kind of sex at all) between straight couples meaning a medal for the man and a loss of virtue for the woman. A man having sex before marriage is not a subject of discussion because why would you discuss something that occurs naturally in society? What deserves to be discussed, of course, is a crime, which is what a woman seems to commit when she sleeps with someone before marriage.
Premarital sex and virtue-vigilantes
As writer Arundhati Roy puts it, India lives in several different centuries at once. On one hand, there is an entire generation with the light in their eyes fading amid a deluge of 1-AM “u up?” texts on dating apps, and on the other, there are women- even as privileged as Alia Bhatt- whose bodies are policed with an iron fist by virtue-vigilantes.
The possibility that Alia got pregnant after premarital sex thus spurred countless Instagram comments, news articles and caused one KRK to tweet: “Congratulations to #RanbirKapoor and #AliaBhatt for becoming proud parents of a beautiful daughter within 7 months.” The “7 months” clearly had to be mentioned because doing it in nine months wouldn’t have been as worthy of congratulation. Everybody knows pregnancy is actually a marathon and that’s what KRK wanted to congratulate the couple for finishing.
Since you checked the calendar KRK, did you by chance notice it's 2022? The world has moved on.— Kajol Srinivasan – Ticked off Peasant (@LOLrakshak) November 7, 2022
Health and power
Though this problem would not arise for Alia with her shield of class and caste privilege, the vitriol directed at her really falls directly into the share of women who do not have these benefits. The ‘Health Over Stigma’ campaign started by young women in Delhi stated in a 2018 report that 53% of the women surveyed weren’t sure if the sexual health problem they were facing was grave enough to warrant a visit to the gynaecologist, 14% were concerned about confidentiality and 9.5% were scared that they might be judged for their sexuality. A whopping 70% women gathered knowledge about sexual and reproductive health rights not from qualified sources, but from their friends. The perils of this need no explaining.
A study called ‘Premarital Sex in India: Issues of Class and Gender’ by Lekha Subaiya, published in Economic & Political Weekly in 2008 stated that instances of sexual coercion, unwanted pregnancy, abortion and its consequences, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) might result from people’s inability to make healthy choices due to “lack of knowledge or lack of power, or both”.
Who listens when you shame Alia?
The whole “[Famous person] won’t see your tweet but your [friend/acquaintance/random person on Twitter] will” adage has turned into a bit of a shtick, but it is exactly what operates in this scenario. The message social media users have been sending Alia might be a distant echo within her palatial home (or it might not be; the internet, after all, does not turn off merely with a snapped data connection), but for all the women outside of it, this message dissuades them from seeking the medical help they need.
As has been variously said in the context of abortion rights in the US, policing women’s bodies does not curb their natural functions; it just makes it difficult- fatal, even- for them to access the care they need afterward.
In 2014, a Delhi court’s Additional Sessions Judge Virender Bhat said pre-marital sex is “immoral” and against the “tenets of every religion”. Thus, it is wrong to place the onus entirely upon the people who ogle at women’s bodies on social media and possibly express their self-disgust at feeling lust for those bodies by channeling it into shaming comments. They are, after all, the products of a puritanical system that has fostered feudal values for much too long.
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