The
Bulldozer Is the Latest Symbol of Toxic Masculinity to Create Havoc in the
Populace
The Wire,
13th May 2022
So, let’s
begin with the horse. From amidst the wealth of literature on the relationship
between man and the horse, we zoom directly to Andrienne C Frie’s
report in the Oxford Journal of Archaeoolgy, October 2017, on an archaeological
examination of burial ground culture at a site in Slovenia. Entitled Horses and
the Embodiment of Elite Masculinity in the Dolenjska Hallstatt Culture, the
author declares quite unambiguously, that “horses
have long been noted as an aspect of elite male status…….. as part of the elite
warrior package that developed as a transcultural phenomenon in the Bronze Age,
and that continued to be an important expression of elite masculinity in the
Early Iron Age……..These elite warriors likely represent a hegemonic masculinity
– that……. was a complex presentation of self that drew on politics of gender,
power, status, and the potential for violence.”
American Academic Monica Mattfield
who has a work on how horsemanship was utterly masculine in 17th-18th century
England, brings in a new element. This is the political and “in this
understanding the man represented the ruling monarchy (the father), and the
horse the nation (the rest of his household)”. She explains that to “many men, horses were indivisible from their
masculinity, their ability to govern successfully. Similarities with today’s
bulldozer are now clearer. By the second millennium BC, horses were harnessed
to chariots, and archers mounted on them spread terror among peasants and
foot-soldiers all over the Eurasian heartland. Arthur Cotterell in his book Chariot:
The Astounding Rise and Fall of the World’s First
War Machine called them the “world’s first war machine” and his descriptions of the havoc
they wreaked among the helpless populace are so chillingly familiar with the
depredations let loose by bulldozers in Modi’s raj.
Let us move on
to the motor car and the motorcycle that replaced the horse. In his On Men and
Cars: An Ethnographic Study of Gendered, Risky and Dangerous Relations, Dag
Balkmar touches upon several psychological issues inexorably linked to men (and
some women as well) in Sweden and how cars are actually “extended
selves”, “provocative” and that why “driving is daring”. Hollywood has scores of movies on
risk driving, like Mad Max, Fury, Baby Driver, The Driver and so on — inspiring
or corrupting several generations of young men (some women just can’t be kept out nowadays) into foolhardy and life-risking
antics with the engines revving up and roaring. The macho stamp is simply
unmistakable and with it comes gendered domination and a pseudo-sadistic kick
from hegemony over the rest of humanity, that, to these daredevils is just “chicken”. To a section, the “feeling
of oneness” with the motor car was almost as thrilling as merging with the
horse was previously. The restless power of the powerful almost-uncontrollable
beasts they had mastered conferred glory and demonstrated the hegemony of the
ultra-virile. A western analyst concluded: “Hegemonic
masculinity is intrinsically tied up with the notion of competition, leading to
fights over who’s stronger and
smarter — not necessarily on the bigger metaphorical dick”. Car culture didn’t create the toxic masculinity. But it certainly used
its worst tropes to its advantage from its start — and not just when it comes
to car ads.
Motorcycling is
equally if not more masculine to a large section and is certainly closer to the
horse. The exhilarating union between motorcycle and rider is only formed in
relation to other bodies, non-motorcycles and non-riders, and exists as a form
of exclusionary discourse from the surrounding world. We need not even discuss
the animal-like sense of overpowering bystanders once a motorcycle is bursting
with fury and the essential point, its dominance, emanates from the panic it
creates. When the rider ploughs through crowds and does his somersaults, he
demonstrates not only his total control over the ferocious electro-mechanical
horse, but he petrifies his audience, deriving an unmatched thrill from it. To
be fair, the motorbike is not just the preserve of men in the west, but the
percentage of female participation in nowhere near that of daredevil men, who
challenge death at every moment. There are good works on how motorbikes
represent different visions of power, style and technology to the genders and
one is also reminded of Paulo Coelho’s
encounter with audacious women riders in The Valkyries.
Nevertheless, the
hyper-male type derives a sadistic pleasure in the sheer bullying power of the
horse, the motorbike or the powerful automobile in cowing down others and
romanticising this power was/is part of the lore. The bulldozer represents only
the logical extension of this psychological pursuit. It reeks of power,
trampling and occupation by the pretended machismo. Sanjay Gandhi put it to
devastating use during the Emergency as he razed to the ground the hutments of
the poor at Turkman Gate. The next honour for ‘popularising’ its use for
similar reasons goes to Yogi Adityanath, who dispatched his bulldozer hordes to
subjugate the wretched but the defiant in countless places in Uttar Pradesh. He
realised that the sheer terror and awe with which the bulldozer was held by the
dominated, which, incidentally, was many times more than what a totally
unimpressive pipsqueak in saffron could ever command. His delirious sense of
duty to cleanse his state of ‘the other’ was further heightened as the bulldozer pulverised the
will and stand of those he despised and its long ungainly arms wrenched the
dwellings of his targets,
From Khargone in MP to Jahangirpuri in
Delhi, the bulldozer is now the preferred weapon of toxic masculine and unless
the courts halt the mayhem or the weak devise their Vietcong defences, it will
continue to rampage. The machine bestow upon those who direct their operations
the wild powers of unstoppable Juggernauts, as they imagine themselves as the
ultimate macho men. After all, the colossal ultra-thick blade plates of
bulldozers sweep clean what the hooves of the horse had struggled to clear and
the wheels of the motorised vehicles had stumbled upon but could barely crush.
As Sakshi Maharaj the terribly controversial BJP MP from UP has pronounced: “while Lord Ram and Krishna had dhanush (bow) and sudarshan
chakra respectively, our baba (Yogi Adityanath) has a bulldozer.” So have his
other colleagues elsewhere, who tear apart the very structures of plurality,
democracy and dissent — with the indulgence of the mastermind.
