Have you always wanted to be a good Sanskari girl but the Sanskar have evaded you? Fret not! Our ten-step guide on how to learn and embody the Sanskar is here for you. Apply at your own risk.
Written by Aarushi Ahluwalia
Do you want to be a real sanskari girl who sets the proud example of an ever-suffering silent goddess for society? Have you been shunned, alienated from society and been made to feel like you don’t belong? Do you desperately crave the Sanskar that will validate your existence as an Indian woman?
Here’s how you can have it:
1. Oil your hair regularly, which will help it grow lush and long for when a man has to inevitably use it to climb up to rescue you from a trap of his making. Sanskari girls have long hair. Short hair are for lesbians, feminists, prostitutes and sluts. Those aren’t very sanskari things to be.
2. In case of rape, for the love of god, don’t take a nap or have an emotional crisis before you go to the police or every judge in the land is going to think you did not uphold your Indian morality well enough to be a real victim of rape. Sanskari girls don’t sleep after being raped. They miraculously change into white clothes, go to the police and then come home and sit fully clothed on the bathroom floor pouring buckets of water over their heads. Haven’t you ever watched a movie?
3. Dress in beautiful clothing which covers your legs, hips, stomach, back, chest, neck, arms, fingers, chin, ears, feet, nose, head but make sure it’s colourful and not black clothing. Black clothing like that might have you disqualified not only from sanskar but also from being a citizen of this country.
4. Lean in, sankari women lean in to the inevitability of marriage. Spend your whole life dreaming about the most perfect day of your life, be enthusiastic about potential social captivity. A great way to show your enthusiasm is to keep up on the colours that trend each year during wedding season and make a scrap-book, you can display the scrap book alongside your dissertation.
5. Remember! Sanskari girls always hush the fuck up about their education. Your degrees are not meant to get you jobs, money, stature or respect. Their purpose is to measure your value on the marital market and for that purpose you must get at least some degrees. You must never, however, use your education to display your intelligence and participate in discourse that might do so. Your intelligence, once measured by the grades of your last degree, is locked in. You can’t increase it by making rational, valid points in conversation or asking insightful questions, so just focus on bags and stuff.
6. Always get pregnant through immaculate conception. In India the process of immaculate conception involves three-minutes of top-half clothed sex in which the woman is to look to her left and think about god while reciting mantras comprised of the rate-list du jour of vegetables, while the man makes a pained face of concentration towards the right and thinks about the secret porn in his phone until he ejaculates and after it is over you go the rest of your life maintaining a physical distance from one another that is so intense the idea of the two of you having sex disgusts and baffles your children to the point where they just can’t believe sex could have occurred. It’s sort of immaculate in retrospect if you think about it.
7. A sanskari girl never has sex out of marriage and she never initiates sex with her husband. She must always display reluctance when propositioned by her husband even if she wants it, so that we can continue to call that the sanctity of marriage and use it as an excuse not to outlaw marital rape. A sanskari girl must never ever enjoy sex. That’s for boys.
8. If a sanskari girl has to live out of her house for studies or a job (which contrary to popular belief about the sect of sanskaris, women can have until they are married because they do need pocket money to buy sarees and stuff), make sure you live in a more-expensive women’s hostel that has all of the following rules (which you should be following even if you don’t live in a hostel):
- Curfew before sundown lest you get raped.
- Conservative clothing because men cannot be trusted so you must cover your body and take responsibility for all of their actions.
- High-level monitoring of visitors so you don’t miss the neighbourhood-aunty feeling when you are away from home.
9. If anyone says the words “pinjara tod” around you, run. Run away. Run fast. Find a pinjara asap or we’ll put you in jail, which is a less figurative representation of the not-that-different jail you were in before but with even less agency.
10. Sanskari girls stay away from feminists. Follow the example of the chairwoman of our great National Council for Women (NCW) and just say no to feminism. She’s the head of the women’s council, if she says she doesn’t like this word “feminist” surely that is a good enough reason to believe? Do you think we would put a misogynistic woman in-charge of a national women’s organisation because we just don’t want to give women rights and problematic figureheads are a great way to stall real change? Of course not.
So what are you waiting for? Go get that sanskar girl!
The Pamphleteer 