Boyish is a monthly newsletter discussing how gender stereotypes affect boys in India and telling inspirational stories of Indian 🇮🇳 men who defied these stereotypes.
Sent on the first Saturday of the month.
and heard 🎙️ on BrownPeopleWeKnow, Pops In A Pod
Men weren’t really the enemy. They were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
Boyish is a 12 part essay series delivered over the course of a year which discusses masculinity and the growing up experience for boys in India. Each essay tackles a stereotype that boys often have to deal with growing up and then tells the story of an Indian 🇮🇳 man who defied the stereotype.
Many boys choose professions & lives based on how they perceive masculinity. They are bound to the demands and duties of manhood. With a poor understanding of what being masculine means, they often miss out on their true and happy self.
Boyish is an attempt to change that. It will nudge you to think more deeply about masculinity and how we raise boys in the context of India 🇮🇳 and hopefully provide you and young boys in your family with newer role models.
👋🏼, I am Rajat Mittal!
Producer & Writer
Previously, I've been the maker of 2 educational books for girls: Menstrupedia and She Can You Can.
By working on projects focused on education and empowerment of girls, I slowly began to realise that gender stereotypes hurt not just girls but boys as well. This is honestly why I created Boyish.
With Boyish, my aim is to unlearn my own conditioning and to invite others to think more deeply about masculinity and how we raise boys in India.
Ajin Mohan
Illustrator
Mrinalini Khattar
Editor
Rachel Aneesha Rao
Supporting Writer & Research Aid
Samira Shaikh
Supporting Writer & Research Aid
I grew up here👇🏼 in India in the 1990s:
A very middle class upbringing in small rural towns in Uttar Pradesh(U.P.), trying really hard to become cities. Back in the 1990s in these interior towns of U.P., gender roles were strictly defined and rarely “broken”. More disturbingly, they were rarely questioned.
Moving upwards in life meant moving to cities, and that is what I did too. But when I got there in my post-teens, something was unsettling. My value system was set and it was often at conflict with the more fluid, liberal take on gender roles that I found in the cities.
I was not alone. There was a sea of other boys and girls who were part of this migration and with such tremendous change, so much newness and possibilities, many of us clung to what was familiar and what our conditioning had taught us. It was the one way we felt normal. The kids who grew up in the cities were not much different, mind you! Kind of a tomato-tomahto situation.
The early 20s is an exciting time. Boys are on the cusp of becoming independent, of becoming a man. The sense of masculinity is taking shape. But while our culture and media taught me that men are defined by machismo, a small opening had opened up, via which a slightly softer version of masculinity seeped in.
And it felt more natural and relaxing to me.
Change takes time. I was well in my late 20s, perhaps early 30s by when that small stream had grown into a sizable pool almost. I was getting more comfortable in my own skin, with my own body and the “man” I had become. And my biggest gripe with the comfort was, why so late? What could have happened if this happened earlier for me.
Growing up, I was a skinny, frail boy who was constantly at the short end of the stick on the masculinity metric. It taught me a lot of anti-patterns and cost me a lot of precious time. There was no room to question this toxic version of masculinity.
But now that I am in a safe space, I want to open a dialogue about it. And with that intent, this series is born, where I share one essay every month. In each month’s essay, I will discuss a stereotype about masculinity and tell the story of an Indian man who has defied that particular stereotype.
If this is a topic of interest for you, I invite you to this discourse. These stories will ask you, as they have me, to think more deeply about masculinity and taken together, this series will hopefully nudge you to open a meaningful discourse about it. This is not a scholarly researched paper or provocative clickbait content. I am not a gender expert or compensated by page views. Rather, this is a common man analysis of what one man learnt about masculinity growing up.