Twinkle Khanna: Indian women’s aspirations have changed

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0:30Find out more at polandyourplacetogrow.com. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and namaste. I'm BBC correspondent Tevina Gupta. And this is the interview from the BBC World Service.

1:18The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. I'm disappointed in him. I had a deal done four times and then you go home and you see just attack a nursing home in Kiev. I said, what the hell was that all about? I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me, but I was still 15 years old and I did not know who I was. I love singing and so my goal was always to do better and better at it. Today we are spending trivians on war and peanuts on peace. For this interview, I met the author and columnist Twinkle Khanna in India's financial capital, Mumbai.

1:58Born into a family of Bollywood royalty, she followed her parents Dimple Kapadia and Rajesh Khanna into acting. However, despite appearing in dozens of films and receiving accolades for her performances, Twinkle calls herself a failed actress. After a short stint as an interior designer, she turned her hand to writing and soon realized how much she could make people laugh. Her column, Mrs. Funny Bones in the Times of India, captures the contradictions of being a modern Indian woman. One day praying to a cow, the next filing a tax return. It was turned into a book in 2015 that sold over 100 ,000 copies in its first year alone.

2:40As a prominent writer, however, Khanna has faced significant backlash, including for comments challenging both traditional roles within marriage and religious customs that label women impure during menstruation. Her outspoken views on gender norms and marital expectations have led to heated debate on social media and made her the subject of widespread trolling. So with the follow-up, Mrs. Funnybone's book coming out over a decade later, she's now asking the much larger question. What, if anything, has changed for Indian women in that time? When it comes to women's lives, things have progressed, maybe not always in a linear way.

3:21I think a lot more women are seeking education, both in rural and urban areas. A lot more women have bank accounts. They now have different aspirations, but their life has not changed. They have to still manage all the cooking of the house. Even if you're going to work, that hasn't changed. Fathers, husbands, brothers making decisions, that hasn't changed. So for me, it's very interesting to see that while India is progressing in, you know, sort of financially and we would say in infrastructure, this part is sort of stagnant. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Twinkle Khanna.

4:06Let's start about the book that you've written, Mrs. Funny Bones. It was in 2015 when the first one came out. And now you're coming out with the second book, Mrs. Funny Bone Returns in this league. Ten years have passed. How has India changed? I think anybody who reads a few newspapers will tell you that at least when it comes to women's lives, things have progressed, maybe not always in a linear way. I think a lot more women are seeking education, both in rural and urban areas. A lot more women have bank accounts. But I feel that the social structure of India in the last 10 years hasn't really changed.

4:45Even though we've got social media, and what that's done is for somebody even from the upper middle class to the lower middle class, they now have different aspirations, but their life has not changed. And I see that across all classes. I see that while the upper middle class woman is now dreaming of a wine tasting holiday in Italy and her helper is dreaming of an iPhone and branded makeup, they both have to still manage all the cooking of the house. Whether you're physically cooking or you're making menus or saying that you have to make this, even if you're going to work, that hasn't changed.

5:23Fathers, husbands, brothers making decisions, that hasn't changed. So for me, it's very interesting to see that while India is progressing in, you know, sort of financially and we would say in infrastructure, this part is sort of stagnant. In your latest book, you've written men were not needed in your household while growing up. Now, how did that experience shape your view of what you see in the society and the gender dynamics that you talked about? I'm probably one of those women that have taken a step back to equality. I always thought we were superior. I grew up with that notion. I grew up with a single mom.

6:04We were all women in the house and I had lived with my aunts and uncles and grandparents, but my mother was the earning member. I have this very distinct vision. You know, my sister and I used to have mattresses on the floor and we would share the room with my mother and my aunt. And my mother would wake up at five every morning. She had three shifts to do and she would put on this Jane Fonda tape and she would work out around us because as an actress, she also had to look good while doing all of this. So it was on mute and she would work out around us and I would look up at her and she was my superwoman.

6:36She was even wearing tights. But that I think set a precedent for me that you have to be independent. Every woman has to be independent. And your self-worth and value lies in being able to not need anybody. The only person you can rely on is yourself. And from there, I had to come a little bit, you know, sort of to the back and say that, okay, it's okay to, you know, rely on a whole bunch of people, but you still have to be independent. So we never really spoke about feminism. This word wasn't there, but it was very apparent that this was the way it was going to be. And that has shaped your choices in your life as well?

7:15clearly I think I've been married for about 25 odd years so has my sister and at that point of time again like I said feminism was not in our lexicon but we never changed our last name we are the Khanna sisters and I have a you know crazy batty aunt who keeps saying that you know y 'all are not Khanna sisters y 'all are Pagal sisters you know why haven't you changed yeah mad sisters why haven't you changed your name and I said if I had to change you know my name I changed my first name. It's Twinkle. I like Kanna. I would rather be known as something else. So again, these are not things that we thought about.

7:47It just didn't occur to us that we had to change our last name. And as you said that a lot of women in India would not probably have the same privilege, isn't it? A lot of them would have to bow down to patriarchy even today. But again, there is a large component of how you're raised. There's a large component of what the restrictions around you are, I was very fortunate. Again, I was very fortunate that I didn't even realize patriarchy existed till I was in my 30s. I had no clue because my worldview was shaped in such a way where I thought we are equal, we are superior, we are everything. So every time I came across an incident, which was blatant patriarchy, I brushed it away.

8:25For example, when I started working as a young actress, if the actor came late and nobody said a word to him, but I was fired, even if I was 15 minutes late, or if he had a bigger room, or, you know, he had his own hours, he was called much later than I was called. I just brushed it away thinking he's more successful, he's famous, he's senior. I didn't realize that it was only because he was a man and I was a woman. It took me a long time to figure that out, because I had never seen that. I had never seen inequality within my home. In your recent book, you've mentioned a line which resonated with me, which is about women run a relay race dressed in stilettos and shaping underwear, yet remain underpaid.

9:07Now, we're talking about educated women here. We're talking about working women in urban India. Why do you think they're still held back? It's the system. And the system is run by men. In fact, I remember reading something about research that said that AI was also favoring white older men with more pay because all the data I got was already biased because white men were anyway paid more. So it kind of projected the fact that they would continue getting paid more. So even the data that's coming in was biased. And once the system is completely dismantled, I think that's when change will come. We are pushing.

9:46Everyone is pushing for it. So what's the system, if you want to define it in the Indian context, what's the system are we talking about? It's not just in the Indian context. I think it's across the world. is a system made by men and has been running by men for, you know, hundreds of years. So it is going to take time for us to dismantle it. India still has one of the lowest female participation in the labor force among the major economies. And we are a growing economy here. From your perspective, then, what can be done to change that? When I look at the life of a working woman, and this is coming from personal experience, just last month, we were, you know, at a shoot all month and they were very long hours.

10:25And my helper and me were having the same discussion. She said she had to get up at four to cook a meal for her son because she doesn't want him to eat outside food. And I was going on grumbling that even during this hectic shoot where I couldn't go to the bathroom for five hours, I wasn't drinking any water. I still had to somehow manage to see is everybody okay? Who's picking my daughter up from school? Has she already left for her football class, it still comes down to the woman. We may talk about equality, but it's very clear that even for someone like me, who is in a position where I could throw this away, there's conditioning, including my own, where I am doing these things aside from working.

11:06Till that balances out, how are women really going to step into the working field completely? I keep saying that behind every great man, there isn't a woman. She's beside him and she's telling him he's wrong all the time. And for her to climb, it's not him. It's other women are holding the ladder and they're holding it so that she can climb up. It's always other women. It's your mother. It's your sisters. It's your helper. All of them. It's not the men. They'll stand and clap on the side, but it's other women who hold it up. A lot of women are not even allowed to get out of their homes to work and have these experiences or even have a short at balancing their lives.

11:43Does it require a policy change? Does it require more women to come out and say, listen, we need our space and reclaim that space in public life? Voices help, platforms help, but eventually policy and power will make a difference. And I think the way that we look at our lives, the way that we sort of put our biology aside is going to make a dent. I think it's also so many things that we believe within ourselves, only we can do this properly. For some reason, because it's convenient, we've been tasked with this title of multitasker. What does it mean? Are we really multitaskers? Does our brain work that differently from a man's?

12:19But there is another biological link. A man leaves his house, he does not think about his child. It doesn't occur to him, has my child had his lunch? Where is my child? Whereas a woman will be thinking, every working woman lives with this, with this part. You're constantly guilty. You're guilty at work and you're guilty at home because you feel that you're not fulfilling either of your roles. I've now stopped feeling guilty. I've shut that part of my brain down. I don't feel guilty. I'm here. I have a purpose on this planet. And it is, as much as I love being a mother, there is a lot more that I want to do beyond that.

12:53And like anybody else, regardless of my gender, I'm going to go out and do it.

13:07the world.

13:39If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the Apartment Bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:36Twinkle was very relaxed throughout our interview, wearing a denim shirt and jeans, and was exceptionally warm and friendly. We met on the day that election ballots were being counted in the eastern state of Bihar, so it was natural that our conversation often turned to politics. Bihar is one of India's poorest states that's known for high turnouts of women voters. We discussed whether this election would play out in favour of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Hindu Nationalist Party, the BJP. He's been looking to regain his voter base after the BJP lost an outright majority in the last national elections.

15:17Modi, along with many other prominent figures of Indian politics, has featured in Twinkle's writing several times over the last decade, often with a particular focus on the rise of nationalism in India under his rule. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Twinkle Khanna. The conditioning that you talked about is patriarchy, and you've explored it in various ways in your writing. But do you think it's easier when people are able to laugh when they read your column because of the humor in it, that you can make them think about it and try and be that change that India needs? I try and talk about it in two different ways.

15:55In fiction, I try and do it in a more serious way and a deeper, more reflective manner. In the column, I believe that it's like an antibiotic syrup. You have to have some strawberry flavoring to make it more palatable. And that's what I do. And I also believe that once you laugh at something, you can't really look at it the same way again. So I try to interject as much humor as I can in quite serious subjects. and from patriarchy to feminism to inequality, financial inequality, I think there are two things. One, I'm very fortunate that stories follow me. And two, I find them wherever I go because absurd things keep happening.

16:34And I, for some reason, keep recalling them. I mean, I just went to a funeral and I was sitting there quietly. There are people crying all around me. And this 80-year-old auntie comes up to me and she says, you know, you have big hips and I have big boobs. I'm like, what, auntie? What are you saying? She's like, I told you this in Dubai and you said, auntie, you always criticize me. And I'm looking at a stunt when I had a funeral. How is this happening? But I know that I will take this and I will use it in a column or a book at some point. And it will reflect a sort of viewpoint where even in a funeral, people are talking about appearances.

17:09There was another mother who was berating her 45-year-old daughter about being plump at this funeral. So I think maybe now I'll do a funeral piece. Well, I look forward to reading that and seeing how you turn it around. But I think of all the gisms, as you say it in your book as well, you've talked about ageism as well. Yeah. And older women are judged more harshly, you say, than men. And you have mentioned that you have stopped caring about it now as you turn older. How do you cope with that? Like what made you change? And how do you reach that stage where you just don't care? It's fine, whoever you are.

17:44I can't say that I don't care. I would have to be extremely enlightened and I'd have to do yoga five hours a day to say I don't care. I do care. But by and large, especially Indian men, most of them, they grow up looking like the back of a dented bus and they continue in that manner. So nothing changes for them. Whereas Indian women are slightly more pleasing to the eye and they are conditioned to enhance that feature. So as you get older, you realize that your value is disappearing, at least the value that you felt you had and other people felt you had. And then I think for a lot of upper class women, they start emptying their bank account and filling their dermatologists.

18:27I had a friend who I would say she looked frozen and it wasn't the title of the Disney movie. She actually looked frozen and she thought that that was ageless. And I think at that point, you have to make a decision that what is the next thing that you have that you are going to use to make yourself feel that you have value and you have worth. Someone like me, maybe because I grew up, you know, I was round like a teapot. In fact, people used to make fun of me. It wasn't like twinkle, twinkle, little star. It was, you know, twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are up above the world so high, like a teapot in the sky because I was round.

19:05It wasn't such a tragic thing. Don't feel so bad for me. I gave it back to them both with my fists and my tongue. But I think it changed the entire graph of my life. I never took this, you know, whole appearance bit seriously. And it paid off. You've always been in a limelight. I mean, be it your acting career, you've been also born in a family of superstars. You're married to another famous Indian actor of the Hindi cinema. You're a published author in your own right. You have your own talk show, but there are also criticisms. There are also controversies. How do you deal with that pressure? How do you deal with trolling?

19:43I'm sure that impacts you, your family, your children. How do you explain it to them? How do you come back on track saying, this is life and I will go on? I don't worry about brickbats at all. You know, this is the life I've chosen. You have bookies, you have brickbats. I'm only concerned about, have I prepared thoroughly for this? And have I executed to the best of my ability? The outcome is never in my hands. So I don't worry about it. I learned this very early. And I learned it from my mother, who always said this to me. And it's true. This is the way I live my life. I would have never done so many things in my life.

20:14I had been so worried about what people were saying. I want to talk about the challenges for writers, celebrities. artists in today's age and there is a cancel culture that is there and especially when you're writing about subjects that could be quite sensitive quite complex do you think there is this freedom of expression as a writer that sometimes you might have to check again and again how do you feel and how do you keep that freedom of expression as a writer in your column there are constraints and they happen, you know, especially with a column. There are times when I have to redo things.

20:54I remember once I wrote a column about a god man and the paper said that we can't print it the way it's written. We need to edit out these bits and then we'll print it. And I said, you can't do that because this is what I want to say. Call it psychosomatic or melodramatic. After they didn't print it, my right arm froze. I couldn't really move it. And I was like, oh my God, what's happened to me? What's happened to me? So then I called a homeopath and I said, you know, this is what's happened to me. And I think it's because I'm under this pressure that I could not express myself. And he said, yes, yes, I'll give you some pills.

21:25And he opened his briefcase to give me these white pills. And there I saw this large picture of the same God man. And I was like, I don't think I want to take these pills. What if I get worse? So two things. One that, of course, I feel the pressure. There are things you cannot say. You know, I've had the word lotus taken out from my column sometimes. Why is that? It just happens. Sometimes it does. I do have a lot more freedom than other people, primarily because I use humor. You can get away by saying a lot of things if you make people laugh. But yeah, there have been times that I felt that I did not have enough room to say the things I did.

22:06And I had to shift gears. But again, I've come back to a point where I've managed my way through that as well. I can manage to have some subversive messaging below all the humor as well. Well, it's interesting because that hasn't stopped you from writing about the topics that you do love. In your upcoming book, you've said religion and superstition come in a buy one, get one free offer. I mean, it is a great chapter again, But how do you use humor and write about faith in India? Because religion is becoming quite a sensitive topic for a lot of people. I don't know why this notion of God and government is taken so seriously.

22:48I don't know why we don't have a more tolerant point of view. And I think my boundaries and borders are different because I grew up reading science fiction. So my world is enormous. I have empathy for tentacle creatures that breathe methane and my world is the whole universe. So I've never understood this intolerance for somebody who's different or for somebody who comes from a different race, a different religion, a different caste. So I don't understand these people. Now, Twinkle, you've sat on the sidelines of the Indian society, observing it, writing about it and now talking about it with us as well.

23:28But what kind of India do you see and do you hope that your children should inherit? My notion of India is a very secular country. I grew up in that manner. I grew up also with living in two different cultures. You know, my grandmother is Ismaili. So I grew up with that culture, going to the Jamaat Khana. My father is Hindu. So I grew up going to temples. and I grew up with a lot of harmony between these two sort of factions. I think for me, one of the most beautiful things, my grandmother passed away, the Panditji from, you know, my father's house came. The Hindu priest. The Hindu priest. He came and he touched her feet and he was there in this kabristan and everybody let him do what he had to do.

24:13So the Muslim graveyard, I mean, that's what we're talking about and a Hindu priest walking in, which in India's cultural context talks about secularism in this case. Exactly. And it was really beautiful. And for me, that is the India that I would like to see going ahead for my children as well. I believe in unity, not uniformity. And I want that for the future. Do you think we're going there? I again, unlike the science fiction readers I used to read, I can't predict the future. One never knows.

24:46Thank you for listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in-depth conversations on the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with the Palestinian-American human rights lawyer, Professor Noora Irakat, author Sir Salman Rushdie, and former US Vice President Kamala Harris. Until the next time, namaste. And bye for now.