Priyali Sur at TEDx: How Gender Equality is a Man’s Fight as Well

Priyali Sur is an award winning journalist. She covers gender violence stories. She shares her story and other ones.

Priyali Sur is an award-winning long format journalist. She has contributed articles to The Quint involving the exodus of people and conflict in places like Serbia and Croatia. Sur deals with gender violence and disparity issues across borders.

She has recently delivered a talk at a TEDx where she has dealt with these various issues, and shared the horrible life story of being a sexual abuse and intimate partner violence survivor –an incident which scarred her for her life.

Read the transcript of her talk below.

(Before I start), I have a confession to make - that ever since I wrote my talk scripts, I have thought about changing it every day. Even as I stand here few seconds away from giving my talk, I’m still thinking should I change it? But the thing is that giving a sanitized version of my talk would mean me not being honest and would pretty much defeat the exact purpose of me being here. So here I am open to being judged by one and all. The fact is that for a very long time I have been lying to myself and to everybody else.

I have often been asked that I do a lot of work on gender-based violence and do I have a personal story and every time I have said no. I don’t have a personal story. Maybe because I did not want the focus to be me or may be because I was scared.

The truth is that I myself have been a victim of sexual and intimate partner violence and it gets difficult to say this but I have been beaten publicly and privately. The first time it happened I found myself in the lobby of a hotel in India. I was slapped and beaten (while there were a lot of) people who stood there and watched.

(There were) men and women and no I wasn’t hoping that anybody would come help me but really nobody did. I remember I wanted to be strong. I didn’t want to cry but there were tears in my eyes. So I picked up my bag and pretended like nothing happened and I walked outside the lobby outside the hotel took a cab and I went home.

I was only fifteen years old and it scarred me for life. Over the next few years I met different people and unfortunately different episodes of violence happened. So I continuously questioned myself that why me? Why was this happening to me again and again? Maybe I was at fault and I blamed myself and I became more and more vulnerable. I never spoke about it to anybody because I wanted to protect myself. I never spoke about it to the nearest ones, to the dearest ones, to my family, to my parents until now.

And maybe when they’ll see this video they will feel shattered. But what it did to me is, it made me very cynical, it made me very cynical towards men and towards the patriarchal society we live in. In 2005, exactly 10 years ago I became a television journalist and a few years later, I started reporting on gender-based violence. I think I was automatically drawn towards interviewing women who had suffered as I had and in fact women who had suffered much more than I had.

I interviewed young girls had been rape survivors but were not scared to show the story. I interviewed girls who had been acid attack survivors; whose faces had been burnt by acid by jilted lovers.

This girl, a seventeen-year-old Chanchal, she faced my camera and she said she doesn’t have a face that she wants the world to see but she’s not shy because she wants her story to go out there, to reach people like you. So that something someway might change, somebody might change. And as I interviewed these girls and I wrote the scripts and put it out on television. Behind the very same camera, I continued to be a victim and remain cynical towards men and completely unforgiving. About two years later, in fact two years ago my supervising editor called me and he said that he wanted me to do a documentary - I’m a long format journalist- on men fighting for women’s rights.

And the feminist that I am, I said why should we talk about men fighting for women’s rights. Why not women fighting for women’s rights? There are many women. But it was a big project. I took it up and I travelled to a place called Sangli which is about three hours drive from Mumbai.

When I went to Sangli I went to meet this man called Mahadev. I found him here sitting on a charpai which is a bed and surrounded by his fields and he looked at me and we started rolling the camera and we start the interview. And he said, “The fields you see around me are all on my name, not on my wife’s name. She’s a woman.”

He said, “My wife takes care of the children, not me. And if she disobeys me, I even beat her up.”

At this point I was like am I interviewing the right man and I was filled with rage. And, I was about to turn off the camera and go away and he looked me straight in the eye and he said, “It’s wrong and I know it is it wrong. I just realized it a bit too late and now I have changed that”.

So Mahadev really change that. He wrote his entire property in his wife’s name which is unheard of in rural India. In a country like India where marital rape is not seen as a crime, Mahadev is going door to door talking to people and saying that it is wrong, it is a crime to have forced sex with your partner or your wife.

He doesn’t get paid for doing that. In fact, he is ridiculed by people. I know all of you must be wondering that what was the epiphany moment in Mahadev’s life. What really made him change and ask him that myself. I asked him what brought about the change and he said, “I don’t have that one moment. It perhaps was my family or maybe the love for my wife.”

So Mahadev didn’t have a defining moment but Mahadev’s story became a defining moment for my life. It made me rethink aspects of my own life and it made me believe that men can be given a second chance. And yes let’s just say that that men can be given a second chance at the risk of lots of women’s rights activist, lots of feminists, lot of organizations saying that I’m submissive and weak but forgiving is not a sign of weakness but rather strength.

I found somewhere in the internet and I thought it really did a lot to me and I hope it does to you. So I am going to read it out.

“Forgiveness doesn’t always mean you have to make amends with who hurt you. It also doesn’t mean letting injustice reign. It’s about creating your own justice and your own destiny. It’s about getting back on your feet and deciding that the rest of your life is not going to be miserable because of what happened to you. It means saying you are not going to let what happened to you define you any longer. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you’re giving up all of your power, it only means you’re finally ready to take your power back. And, just like that I was not a victim anymore but a survivor. I had let Mahadev’s story and my own story heal me. And somewhere had given a second chance to people who had violated and humiliated me and given them a chance to change themselves.

Fighting gender-based violence I think is not just about calling men perpetrators and women victims. It’s about both men and women taking that extra step. It is about men like Mahadev realizing their mistake and saying we’re going to change and about women like his wife be open to giving second chances.

I remember a friend of mine once told me that “you’re frightened to be called a victim” and I looked at him and I said I’m an independent, working woman a journalist I’m not frightened. But the truth is I was scared and I’m even scared now standing here. I’m scared that what I say about giving second chances to men and about men and women joining this fight together may be proved wrong and it may be proved wrong by none other but by you and me because we will fail to trust and we will fail to change.

So today standing here I ask of you to prove this right, to prove that together we can actually stop the horrific violence that women face every day in every part of the world in every country. As an Indian woman especially with India under the spotlight of gender-based violence I call out of the Indian men. I call out to them and I want to say that prove the cynics wrong. Prove that a second chances are worth it. Prove that you can join the fight.

Show that India’s much more than stories like the Delhi gang-rape. Those are horrific realities which will always exist but you can change the track from here, you can make positive stories and together we can make this a united fight.

Thank you