Mister or Miss?

The five-column headline, “Tibetan poetess under house arrest”, in a leading Indian newspaper surprised me. Not because I doubted the existence of poetry in Tibet. Nor because I felt that the only people empowered to arrest Tibetans — the Chinese – would have any compunction about doing so. But the word “poetess” jarred on me as being in the same forbidden category as tigress, Negress and Jewess.

Left to myself, I would probably have stuck unthinkingly to the old forms. But the rising tide of political correctness all around has made me increasingly conscious of treading on the corns of other people’s sensitivities. It was a tremendous relief, therefore, to hear my neighbour Moon Moon Sen speak the other day of an “actress”, a word that I thought had been banished to the dungeons where male chauvinist pigs languish in chains. She only laughed and said, “If you’ve been a star you can afford to say ‘actress’!”
I wish others did, too. But in older English literature, if a woman is “actressy”, she is a trifle showy, too loud perhaps, or even what used to be called a little fast. If the adjective is derogatory, so must the noun be. Calling actresses actors implies either that males on stage or screen are paragons of virtue, or else the lack of virtue ceases to be a sin if it embraces both sexes. Between you and me, it’s the actors — I mean the male ones who constantly cavort on television — that I find more than a little actressy!
It’s difficult to think of Kareena Kapoor or Aishwarya Rai as “actors”. The images the word conjures up are of that ubiquitous pair, Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan. If anyone insists that an actor is a woman, then I imagine some deep-voiced, moustachioed, suited and booted female from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I’ll be accused of stereotyping but isn’t that what culture is all about? We are all shaped in the crucible of family and society, history and geography, and that’s what forms ideas and thinking.
That’s why “Chair” to me is a piece of furniture, not the person sitting in it. That’s the Chairman or Chairwoman or even Chairperson, though there’s no harm in promoting lesser occupants to chairman. After all, Meira Kumar is Shrimati Speaker not Speakeress. Chair reduces flesh and blood to wood or, more likely nowadays, plastic.
Some women just crave to be men, as Mrs Indira Gandhi seemed to when she objected to being introduced at a public meeting in Australia as “this remarkable woman”. Ambition knows no bounds. When she heard that President Johnson had asked how to address her, she chuckled, “He can call me Sir!”
No “Madam” for the only man in a Cabinet of women. Madam was all right for Perle Mesta, a Washington hostess who became US ambassador to and inspired the 1953 musical Call Me Madam. Madam — or, rather, its French version, Madame — was out for Mrs Gandhi since it was the preferred suffix of her aunt, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, who stuck to it despite Winston Churchill’s scolding that it was sheer affectation.
Now, France’s Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, has bowed to feminist pressure, outlawed Mademoiselle and decreed that all women, married or unmarried, should be Madame. According to a feminist, Mademoiselle “harks back to the term ‘oiselle’ which means ‘virgin’ or ‘simpleton’”. It’s not that there are no more virgins (or simpletons) left in France; it’s just that they don’t want the matter proclaimed. The equivalent French word for unmarried men, Damoiseau, fell out of use long ago.
It seems at first sight as if egalitarian Britain is free of such complexes. Not a bit of it. Though the British long ago introduced a general Ms on the grounds that no one needs to know whether or not a woman is married, everybody knows that a woman who calls herself Ms is trying to make a point. Either she is single and doesn’t want anyone to know, or she is divorced and is similarly secretive. Some women with a partner (male or female) use Ms to confuse others. It’s also been suggested that some older women call themselves Ms in hopes of being taken for someone younger.
Rarely does a happily married woman, with husband, house and children, call herself Ms. She is usually content to be common or garden Mrs. No one is Miss.
Thanks heavens, we are free of such hang-ups in India. Shri and Shrimati give away no dark marital secrets. I opted for Shri when I was 16 to stop my father making me the laughing stock of the English boys I lived with in Manchester by addressing letters to me as “Master”. Being a stickler for rules, he argued that any male under 18 was Master. But he agreed to address me as Shri, only he wrote Sri in a slanting hand that provoked my mates to even greater ridicule. Deliberately misreading Sri, they would mock me as “Sir Sunanda!”
Another kind of confusion has chased me unto old age. The late Manohar Mulgaonkar, whom I never met but whose novels I greatly enjoyed, once even devoted a column to my name which he misinterpreted until Rahul Singh corrected him. No one corrected the kindly man at an Indian embassy abroad whose email last week started with “Dear Madam”. I have stopped trying to explain that distinguished linguists have assured me that my spelling of “Sunanda” is absolutely correct and that the K that follows (for Kisor, not Kumar as some eager-beavers sometimes make it) confirms gender.
But what’s the point? You never can win.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author