We need a new way to swear … one that doesn’t demean the women of India

<span>Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

I was shocked. Scrolling through my Twitter feed, I stopped at an exchange between a women’s rights activist I know and a troll in which the activist, someone who often talked to me about the gendered nature of our cuss words responded using maa-behen ki gaali (misogynistic abuse).

My mind went round and round, trying to decipher if this was hypocrisy or an unconscious expression of rage. I settled for the latter, as gendered slurs are so embedded in our everyday speech that we use them (mostly in angry or in stresss) without stopping to think. In unguarded moments, we spit them out.

My father would direct all sorts of gendered curses at my mother, generally in anger. My mother would tell him, “don’t use these abuses, they are demeaning”.

I was too young to understand this Bengali swearing. My first language at school was English, so I was unversed in regional slang. Years later, I asked my partner the meaning of some of these words, and the answers left me red in the face. I owe my mother a hug for calling out these words every time they were uttered within my hearing, making it clear to me that they were not to be repeated.

ADVERTISEMENT

“Children are so impressionable,” says Sunil Jaglan, in the northern state of Haryana, who runs a project called Gaali Bandh Ghar (No Abuses Household). It started in 2014 when Jaglan was the village head. One day his daughter came home and asked him the meaning of a curse she had picked up from the playground.

“I, too, have grown up with these slurs, and might have even used them without thinking about their meaning,” he says. “And here I was, red-faced, trying to explain to my daughter the meaning of a slur that was completely misogynistic.”

A woman walks past a mural by artist Jas Charanjiva in Mumbai, India
A Mumbai mural by street artist Jas Charanjiva seeks to empower women in a culture where language is regularly used to demean them. Photograph: Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images

In 2015, a website published an article curating the top swearwords from 17 Indian languages. It has become a trend to use gendered curses, largely thanks to the rising popularity of standup shows where comics feel that using such abuse is proportional to how funny they can be.

Can we not pledge to get rid of every behaviour that humiliates and demeans women in our daily life?

Narendra Modi, prime minister of India

ADVERTISEMENT

Our prime minister addressed the problem in his Independence Day speech last year, “We have been casually using expletives and cuss words which are abusive and against our women,” Narendra Modi thundered. “Can we not pledge to get rid of every behaviour, culture that humiliates and demeans women in our daily life?”

Indian feminists have highlighted the need to remove gender from swearing. But languages, as Australian feminist Dale Spender wrote in 1985, are essentially male, because they were constructed by those in power in society. She explained how we construct our world according to “manmade rules” and “one of the crucial factors in our construction of this reality is language”.

Spender argued that linguistic sexism enhances “the position of males, and males have had control over the production of cultural forms”.

Language is a common way for men to undermine women everywhere, but more so in patriarchal societies such as India. If swearwords are about power dynamics, it is only natural that in a world where – according to UN data – gender equality is still 130 years away, they would be exploited.

Sexist slurs are at the foundation of toxic masculinity, rape culture and boys’ club syndrome. When I discuss this with male friends, they are perplexed. One said: “The sole purpose of hurling abuse is to offend. So there can never be an element of political correctness because the entire purpose is defeated if you are politically correct.” I agreed to disagree.

ADVERTISEMENT

, this gendered language of anger is still contributing to propagation of a culture of toxic masculinity. That men are blind to it just speaks to the entitlement they enjoy.

In 2020, in India, two women started the Gaali (Hindi for cuss words) Project that sought to ungender the language of anger. People sent in 1,500 words from more than 20 Indian languages, bottomless pits of sexist slurs.

A hand writing on a message board during a protest named the ‘Slut Walk’ in New Delhi, India.
Women fight back against sexual harassment by adding to a message board during a protest named the ‘Slut Walk’ in New Delhi, India. Photograph: Anindito Mukherjee/EPA

A report that studied gendered aggression on Twitter found more than 2.9m tweets in one week that included gendered insults ( slut and whore among them), averaging 419,000 sexist slurs a day.

Researchers found that “hostile, sexist tweets are strategic in nature. They aim to promote traditional, cultural beliefs about femininity, such as beauty ideals, and they shame victims by accusing them of falling short of these standards.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Jaglan visits schools across India, encouraging them to use a chart to list the swearwords they hear. One family in the city of Gurugram recorded 70-80 gendered slurs every day. After a year of charting them, the number was cut in half.

Related: Cut the cussing: the Indian man on a mission to end sexist swearing

“People laugh at me – they say: how is a chart going to help?,” Jaglan says. “I say that when you see the abuse you utter every day so easily, written down in black and white, it has a shock value.”