The Pink Petal of the Saffron Flower: On Shobhaa De's "Closet Bhakt" Confession
So Shobhaa De is "a bhakt of her own beliefs." How charming. How original. How utterly, depressingly familiar.
Reading her latest column in The Print — that breezy little victory dance over Mamata Banerjee's defeat in Bengal, complete with the obligatory ellipses and the obligatory Yay and the obligatory martyr-pose about being trolled — I felt something I have not felt in a while. Not anger, exactly. Not even disappointment, because to be disappointed you must first have expected something. What I felt was a kind of weary recognition. Because we have read this column before. We have read it for forty years. Only the political object of affection keeps changing.
In the eighties, it was the glamour of Bombay's high society. In the nineties, it was the giddy promise of liberalisation. In the noughties, it was the page-three carousel of designers and starlets and royals. And now, in 2026, with the bulldozers running and the lynch mobs televised and the women of Manipur still waiting for justice, it is the lotus. Let a thousand lotuses bloom, she writes, and one wonders whether she has paused, even once, to ask what soil they bloom in. Whose blood waters them. Whose home was demolished to make room for the flower bed.
The cognac and the cough syrup
The column's most revealing line is also its most casual. Jyoti Basu, sipping cognac in the lounge of the Bengal Club, is "sophisticated, erudite, urbane." Mamata Banerjee, swigging cough syrup from a Maruti's glove compartment as she tears across the villages of Bengal building a movement that will eventually unseat the very man in the lounge, is a "tiny energy ball." A curiosity. A slightly comic figure. A woman who must be told, by Shobhaa De, to improve her Bangla.
You could not, even if you tried, write a more perfect distillation of the politics at work. The Bhadralok male, with his snifter and his erudition, gets the dignity. The mofussil woman, with her movement and her mass base, gets the patronising pat on the head. This is not commentary. This is the ancient snobbery of the salon, dressed up in the language of feminism and mailed out as a column. And let us be honest: there is plenty to indict Mamata for. Her cynical communalism. Her party of thugs. Her abandonment of the women of Sandeshkhali. Her failure of the young doctor at R.G. Kar — Abhaya, whose name we will speak in a moment because it must be spoken. But none of that is what De is doing. De is simply doing what she has always done, which is to read Indian politics through the lens of who would or would not be welcome in her drawing room.
The alibi of the unwavering self
When the trolls came, as trolls do, De gave us the line that was clearly pre-loaded and waiting: "A bhakt of my own beliefs, which do not waver. Never have."
It is a beautiful sentence, in the way that all alibis are beautiful. It says nothing and protects everything. It allows her to bank the credit of dissent — look, I am being trolled, I am being attacked, I am the brave individual standing alone — while quietly cashing the cheque of consensus. It is the signature move of every upwardly mobile commentator who has decided, in some quiet moment, that the cultural and economic order she inhabits is worth more than the people being crushed beneath it.
And what, we are entitled to ask, are these unwavering beliefs? The column will not tell us. There is not a single sentence in it about Bilkis Bano. Not a syllable about Hathras. Not a word about the women of Manipur paraded naked through their own villages while the state looked the other way. Not a whisper about the mahapanchayats where men in saffron call for the boycott of Muslim shopkeepers, the boycott of Muslim labourers, the boycott of Muslim lives. There is the airy phrase "anyone was better than Didi. Even the BJP." That little word — even — is the whole column. It is the moral knowledge of what the BJP is, and the simultaneous decision to look past it. It is conscience filed away in the glove compartment, next to the cough syrup.
The risqué as a market stall
We have to talk about the longer arc, because the column does not exist in isolation. It is the latest issue of a magazine Shobhaa De has been publishing for four decades, and the magazine has a name. Call it Liberation As Lifestyle. Call it Ambition As Ethics. Call it whatever you like. It is the brand she built in the eighties on the back of frank-talk-about-sex and naughty-aunty mischief, and which read, in that earlier moment, as transgression. It was never transgression. It was a market position. It was the discovery that you could sell a great deal of newsprint by performing the appearance of female liberation while never, not for a single paragraph, troubling the structures of caste, class, capital, and brahminical patriarchy that produce the mass sexual violence in this country to begin with.
This is the feminism that now occupies, like an army of occupation, what used to be progressive space in urban India. It is feminism as careerism. Feminism as personal brand. Feminism as the right of the upper-caste woman to be as ruthlessly ambitious as the upper-caste man, and to call that ambition a politics. It is anti-woman in the deepest sense, because it is anti-working-class-woman, anti-Dalit-woman, anti-Muslim-woman, anti-Adivasi-woman. It speaks of "the women of West Bengal" in the airy collective and names not a single one of them. It celebrates the vote of women whose lives it will never inquire into, on behalf of a party whose record on women's lives it will never examine.
And when this kind of feminism is finally asked, as it has now been asked, to take a side on Hindutva — it takes the side that protects the drawing room. Of course it does. It was never going to do anything else. The risqué and the saffron were always going to find each other in the end, because they were always children of the same parent, which is the market and its hatred of the woman who will not be its commodity.
The pink petal and the saffron petal are petals of the same flower.
My Pishimoni's feminism
Let me tell you about another kind of feminism. Not because I want to make this personal — though it is personal, all of this is personal, all of this has always been personal — but because there is no honest way to write about feminism in Bengal, in India, in any of the worlds I come from, without sitting for a moment at the feet of the women who actually taught me what the word means.
My Pishimoni was an AIDWA woman. She was, until the day her body finally stopped, a foot-soldier of the All India Democratic Women's Association — a member, an organiser, a comrade. She did not write columns. She did not have a verified handle. She did not have, to my knowledge, an opinion on the Met Gala. What she had, instead, was a life — a long, patient, unglamorous, magnificent life spent walking into fields where the women had not been paid for the harvest, walking into villages where the panchayat had decided a Dalit girl's rape was a matter to be settled with cash, walking into bastis where the landlord had cut off the water, walking into police stations where the constable did not want to write the FIR. She did this work for decades. She did it in a cotton sari. She did it without applause.
My grandmother, before her, did her version of the same work in her own way, in her own time, in the long dawn before any of these acronyms existed.
If you had asked Pishimoni what feminism was, I do not think she would have used the word at all. She would have looked at you with the slight impatience of a woman who has somewhere to be, and she would have said: there is a woman in the next village whose husband has not been paid in three months, the children are hungry, we are going. And the going was the politics. The walking was the politics. The standing in the rain outside the BDO's office for six hours was the politics. The sitting on the floor with a peasant woman and a glass of water and listening, really listening, while she explained what the moneylender had done — that was the politics. There was no podcast about it. There was no column. There was the work, and the work was the theory, and the theory was the work, and the two could not be separated because in her life they had never been separate.
Her feminism — and this is the sentence I want to write very carefully, because it is the sentence that matters — asked one question, and only one question. How can I lend my body to the struggle of another woman who has been rendered voiceless by a structure she did not build?
That was it. That was the whole thing. The body, lent. The struggle, shared. The voicelessness, named and refused. The structure — feudalism, racial capitalism, brahminical patriarchy, the long arm of imperialism reaching into the village — recognised as a structure, not a misfortune. Not a personal failing. Not bad luck. A structure. Something built by human hands, and therefore something that could be unbuilt by human hands. By her hands. By the hands of the woman next to her. By the hands of the women who would come after.
Compare this — please, for one moment, compare this — to the question that organises the Shobhaa De brand of feminism. How do I rearrange myself, my desires, my body, my voice, my politics, to optimise my position in the market? How do I become more visible, more saleable, more quotable, more invited, more followed, more brand-aligned, more relevant? That is the whole architecture. The market is the horizon. The self is the project. The other woman, if she appears at all, appears as a competitor, a foil, a punchline, a Mamata to be condescended to, a Met Gala attendee to be ranked.
One feminism asks: how can I be useful? The other asks: how can I be optimised?
One feminism walks into the field at four in the morning because the harvest must be counted before the landlord arrives. The other writes a reel from a Mumbai apartment because the algorithm rewards quick reactions to election results.
One feminism dies, as Pishimoni died, with very few possessions and a very large family of grieving comrades who came from villages I had never heard of, who sat with us for days, who told stories about strikes and rallies and arrests and small, immense victories that would never be in any newspaper. The other will die, eventually, with a memoir contract.
I do not write this to be cruel. I write it because the contrast is the argument. The contrast is the whole argument. Because Pishimoni was not extraordinary. That is the most important thing to understand. She was one of thousands of women who have done this work in this country, who are doing it right now, this morning, while you read this — in Telangana, in Kerala, in the villages outside Kolkata, in the slums of Mumbai that Shobhaa De's apartment overlooks but does not see. They are the actual feminist movement of this country. They always have been. The columnists are a footnote. The columnists are a press release issued in the language of the rulers, on behalf of the rulers, for the consumption of the rulers, periodically reissued under the masthead of feminism.
The feminism that fought for Abhaya
Now let me tell you, because Shobhaa De will not, what was happening in Bengal while she was sketching her cough-syrup-and-cognac vignettes for the amusement of The Print's readership.
A young doctor, working a thirty-six-hour shift at R.G. Kar Medical College, lay down to rest in a seminar hall and never woke up. Her body was found brutalised. The state machinery, under the woman De once playfully called Didi, did what state machineries do — it tried to make her disappear. Tried to compress her into a settlement. Tried to call it suicide. Tried to silence her parents. We know her as Abhaya.
And it was the left — yes, the same left that the salons of South Bombay have spent twenty years declaring dead — that refused to let her go. Minakshi Mukherjee, who has never once been called sophisticated by Shobhaa De and never will be, marched at the front. Dipshita Dhar marched. The women of the SFI marched. The women of AIDWA — Pishimoni's AIDWA, the AIDWA of the cotton sari and the four o'clock harvest — marched, as they have always marched. They took the lathis of the TMC police on their bodies. They were beaten and they got up and they marched again. They named the rape. They named the cover-up. They named the rot. They refused, with a clarity that should shame every English-language columnist in this country, the false choice between Mamata's goons and Modi's lotus. They knew — because the working-class woman always knows what the columnist must be told — that the man with the lathi and the man with the bulldozer are paid by the same employer.
This is feminism. This. The woman on the street at midnight with a candle and a slogan and the certainty that her sister will not be erased. The woman who organises the domestic worker, the anganwadi worker, the construction labourer, the woman whose children sleep on the pavement outside the buildings where the columnists write their columns. The woman who fights both the saffron of Hindutva and the gleaming, frictionless cruelty of the free market that produces it, because she has understood — and we must understand — that they are not two enemies but one.
What the column does not say
You can always tell the truth of a column by what it carefully avoids saying. De's column does not say Abhaya's name. It does not say Sandeshkhali's name now that Sandeshkhali has served its electoral purpose and may be returned to the warehouse with the other props. It does not say the word caste. It does not say the word Muslim. It does not ask, even once, what the thousand lotuses will mean for the people on whose soil they are being planted.
This is not absentmindedness. This is the form. The form of upper-caste neoliberal feminism is the form of a beautifully arranged silence — the silence at the centre of every sentence, the silence around which the prose curls so prettily. The silence where the working-class woman should be. The silence where the Muslim woman should be. The silence where the Dalit woman should be. The silence where Abhaya should be. The silence where my Pishimoni, walking into a field at four in the morning, has been all along.
The work in front of us
I write this as a heterosexual upper-caste man, and I want to be honest about what that means. It means I have inherited, without asking for it and without earning it, the precise location from which men like me have, for generations, been the silent beneficiaries of every structure Pishimoni was walking into the field to dismantle. I do not write this to absolve myself of that. I write it because the absolution is not the point. The work is the point. And the work, for men like me, begins with the recognition that we are not the protagonists of this story and never were, and that our task is the unglamorous one of clearing space — material, political, intellectual, domestic — for the people who are.
Which brings me to what the left must do, and what the left must refuse.
The fight in front of us is not a fight against Hindutva alone, though it is that. It is not a fight against the unrestrained market alone, though it is that too. It is the fight against the deeper machinery of which Hindutva and the market are two faces — the patriarchal-capitalist-imperial order that produces both the bulldozer and the brand, the lynch mob and the lifestyle column, the rapist constable and the columnist who will write past his crimes to celebrate his party's victory. We have to be able to see all of it at once, and we have to be willing to fight all of it at once, because partial vision is how we got here, and partial fights are how we will be defeated again.
This means refusing not only the obvious enemies but the more comfortable ones — the ones who arrive draped in the languages we love. The careerist who has learned to speak in our vocabulary. The columnist who has discovered that intersectionality sells. The NGO that has converted a movement into a brochure. The corporate diversity programme that has converted Ambedkar's portrait into a wall decoration. The performer of radicalism who is, in the end, performing for the same market that pays the bulldozer's diesel. All of it. We must be willing to name all of it. Because the patriarchal market is endlessly creative in its capacity to capture our struggles, dress them up, sell them back to us, and call the transaction liberation.
A genuine left politics is, at its core, a politics of solidarity made material. It is a politics in which a man like me asks, of every room I enter and every sentence I write, whether I am clearing space or occupying it. It is a politics that takes its instruction from the woman in the field at four in the morning, from the doctor who did not come home from her shift, from the AIDWA cadre with the lathi-bruise on her shoulder, from the Muslim mother whose home was bulldozed last Tuesday, from the Dalit girl whose rape was settled with cash. It is a politics that has no patience for the columnist's Yay and no use for the brand's saffron-or-pink choice of petals, because it is a politics that has understood the flower itself.
Pishimoni would not have called any of this radical. She would have called it ordinary. She would have said: there is a woman in the next village, the children are hungry, we are going. And then she would have gone.
That is the politics. That has always been the politics. The columnists can keep their lotus. We have work to do.