Summary
- A young woman comes home and says a man on the bus would not leave her alone.
- In my opening scene the judge is a woman, so this is not simply men against women.
- You do not need to be a man to sit in this court.
Imagine a scene. It is invented, but few of us would find it foreign. A young woman comes home and says a man on the bus would not leave her alone. The oldest woman in the house is quiet for a moment, then says gently, “Ek haath se taali nahin bajti.” One hand cannot clap. And that is the end of the conversation. Nobody has accused the girl of anything, nobody has asked what the man did, and he has not been mentioned at all. Yet a verdict has been given, and its meaning is plain: whatever happened, you had a hand in it. No evidence was asked for. No witness was called. No appeal was left open. I am a man, and in this court I have at different times been the defendant, the judge and, most often, a spectator who kept his seat. That is reason enough not to write about it as an outsider.
English speakers have a cousin of this proverb in “it takes two to tango”, and the family resemblance is instructive. Both sound like common sense, and both tend to be brought out at the moment someone is trying to say that something was done to them. My argument is that a proverb’s power lies less in its words than in the occasion on which it is spoken. In a collection of sayings, “one hand cannot clap” is harmless, even faintly charming. Said straight after a complaint, it stops being a sentence and becomes an act, and the act is to close the discussion. Three features give it that force. It is short, so everyone remembers it. It is anonymous, so there is no author to cross-examine. And it passes for the distilled wisdom of experience, so the burden of proof falls on whoever questions it rather than on the proverb itself. In this court the burden is turned upside down: the woman who complained must now prove she is blameless.
I should be honest that the subject is not untouched. Researchers in Pakistan have been studying how women appear in proverbs for some years: Sanauddin’s doctoral thesis at Glasgow on Pashtun proverbs (2015), Khan, Mustafa and Ali on Punjabi (2017), and Sagheer and Zubair (2020), who found Punjabi proverbs presenting women as weak and dependent on men. The picture is not one-sided, though. A small study of forty Urdu proverbs built on animal comparisons found negative portrayals of men (21) outnumbering negative portrayals of women (18). A 2024 study asked whether proverbs have been given too much of the blame for women’s subordination, noting that women also use them to their own advantage. As far as I can tell, most of this work counts proverbs collected from dictionaries and archives. But a proverb in a dictionary and a proverb spoken in a kitchen are not the same thing. The question worth asking is less what proverbs say about women than what people do by saying them.
Linguistics has had a vocabulary for part of this for half a century. In 1975 Muriel Schulz looked at English pairs such as lord and lady, governor and governess, master and mistress, and showed how the female term kept sliding downhill, often ending up with a sexual or demeaning meaning. That is a study of English, and whether Urdu follows the same pattern is something to be tested, not assumed. Still, everyday usage gives pause. We say “doctor” and “lady doctor”, which makes the man the default and the woman a variant that needs a label. To fight like a man is praise, and to do something like a girl is a jibe. Urdu has the same shape: a coward is told to put on bangles, as if the surest way to insult a man were to compare him to a woman. A good many curses in a quarrel are aimed at the mother or sister of the man being cursed, so that she becomes the weapon in a fight she has no part in. These are my observations from ordinary life, not counts, and they need proper study.
The second move is the disappearance of the doer. When Urdu says “izzat lut gayi”, her honour was plundered, no plunderer appears. The verb is intransitive, so the grammar does not require one. Honour becomes an object that has gone missing, and the person it happened to is the one left holding the loss. The perpetrator slips out of the sentence while the shame stays with the woman. In English, Nancy Henley, Michelle Miller and Jo Anne Beazley showed in 1995 that passive constructions turn up more often in accounts of sexual violence, and that they can lower the blame readers assign to the man. I know of no equivalent experiment in Urdu, but if the same principle holds, a headline about honour in tatters is less a report of a crime than a verdict on the victim. “One hand cannot clap” does the same job by other means. It takes a one-sided offence and recasts it as a transaction between two parties, and responsibility is divided up like a bill.
A woman’s identity in this vocabulary also arrives through her relations: somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. To call a daughter “paraya dhan”, another person’s wealth, is to make her a deposit held on behalf of its real owner. It would be too easy to stop there, because our language is far from stingy with praise. Every child has heard that paradise lies at the feet of mothers. Scholars debate the chain of transmission of that saying, a discussion I leave to them, since my question is a different one: what do we do with the reverence? Look at the virtues we praise, patience, sacrifice, silence and modesty, and you notice that nearly all of them serve other people. When praise hardens into duty, a woman who refuses to be patient is not merely disobedient. She has fallen short of her own compliment. The ideal woman becomes a cage with golden bars, and the person inside quietly loses the right to complain.
Three objections deserve a straight answer. The first is that language reflects a society and does not make it; oppression lives in property, wages and power, not in sentences. There is truth in that, and few linguists today accept the strong claim that a language imprisons thought. But language is not merely a mirror. It is where injustice learns to sound reasonable. When a ready-made sentence exists for a wrong, the wrong becomes easier to commit and easier to tell the victim to endure, because nobody has to invent a new excuse. The second objection is that men have proverbs written about them too and, as we saw, some studies find them portrayed no more kindly. Quite so. My claim is about function, not frequency. My impression is that sayings about women tend to restrain and to blame, while some of the most popular sayings about men work as pardons. English has “boys will be boys”, and the Urdu equivalent, “mard hai, ghalti ho jati hai”, he is a man, mistakes happen, is familiar enough. I offer this as a hypothesis that can be tested, not a finding, and the test would be to record when and by whom such sentences are actually spoken. The third objection is the deepest. In my opening scene the judge is a woman, so this is not simply men against women. I accept that. You do not need to be a man to sit in this court. You need only to believe in its law.
Women have kept a counter-record of their own, quietly. Boliyan, the Punjabi couplets usually sung by women, work by call and response, one voice leading and the others answering, and are handed down by ear from one generation to the next. In a well-known Punjabi wedding song, “Saada Chiryaan Da Chamba”, a bride tells her father that they are a flock of sparrows. The version most people know today carries a poem by Anwar Maqsood alongside Suraiya Khanum’s voice, so before calling it pure folk song one should separate the traditional refrain from the modern addition. Urdu poets such as Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed opened a path for saying a woman’s experience directly. All of this shows that one language can be an instrument of oppression and of resistance at once. What differs is whose words are granted the status of wisdom and whose are filed as complaint.
What should be done? Banning proverbs is neither possible nor wise. In Verbal Hygiene (1995), Deborah Cameron argued that attempts to tidy and regulate language are found in every society and should be understood and not merely dismissed, because they reveal how people try to put their social world in order. So my proposals are about scrutiny, not prohibition. First, we can learn to treat a proverb as evidence and not as a verdict. When one is produced, ask three questions: on what occasion was it said, what discussion did it end, and who gained from the ending. Second, newspapers can make the doer visible in crime reports, so that “her honour was lost” becomes a plain account of who did what; that is a matter of editorial style and needs no law. Third, schools that teach proverbs can add one more question: through whose eyes does this saying see the world? Fourth, and most important, linguistics departments could move beyond tallying lists of proverbs and record when, by whom and for what purpose they are used in real homes, offices, courtrooms and television studios. Until then we can argue, but we cannot prove.
Back to the scene. I will not call the old woman a villain. She may be repeating her own fear, and the proverb may be the only protection she knows against the cost of a girl’s reputation. But intention and effect are different things. The next time the proverb comes out, it can be put, politely, in front of a question: if it takes two hands to clap, who is the second hand, and what did he do? The proverb will survive the question. What may change is that, for once, the hearing goes ahead with both sides in the room. And for those of us who are men, who tend to sit quietly in this court, the harder task is to accept that our silence has been testimony too.
