Fieldwork As A Sex Object
by Meena Kandasamy
Harper Collins, India
ISBN: 978-93-6989-604-2
Reviewed by AKANKSHYA ABISMRUTA
Meena Kandasamy is known for her direct and often disturbing descriptions of abuse, making her works difficult to digest even for the most progressive mind. Fieldwork As A Sex Object is no different in terms of impact, but readability can be debated between people well versed in the internet lingo and Marxist praxis vis-à-vis a population that demands that for a novel to be literary it needs to needs to satisfy certain conventions.
Fieldwork explores the aftermath of a deepfake video of Amrita ‘Amy’ Chaturvedi’s face going viral. She is a London-based Brahmin-Marxist who has been vocal about her dissent against the ruling regime in India. One day she wakes up to a porn video forwarded many times, with her face but not the body. The face of the man in the video remains out of the screen at all times. Amy’s friend Nimmi comes to her aid, her crisis management skills come in handy when Amy isn’t able to think of anything, while her mother insists that she stays in London, and not return to Delhi under the current circumstances. Both the women suspect that the video is not a deepfake, and that it might be her.
Positionality and Agency
Amy’s story is framed between a Foreword and Afterword in which Meena Kandasamy becomes merely the character who brings Amy’s words to us. Amy meets Kandasamy in Pondicherry to share the document in a flash drive. She says, “It’s my story. It’s everything, really. I’m no good at summarising but please, please read it for my sake.” Kandasamy then ends the Foreword with, “This is the book she left behind.” The next page reveals the title to be Lovers, Losers, Loners: An Intimate Study of Indian Manosphere.
This framing ensures that readers don’t read it as Kandasamy’s experience, as has been the case in When I Hit You. While there’s no harm in a fiction inspired by personal events, it can be easily assumed that Fieldwork is the case for one anti-caste activist’s experience. So, this framing then ensures that this can be any woman’s story. And in making Amy a Brahmin woman living outside India, she bestows all the privileges to her character who is still victimised by the rise of AI which can easily morph a person’s face into another body.
Like any chronically online millennial today, Amy is well-versed in internet lingo which might make the book difficult to read for some people. The narrative might become indecipherable in a few decades, considering the short life of internet slang. But this is how the internet functions today, how people talk about themselves, and how they are too self-focused while failing to turn that awareness into actions.
So, when a person is merely consumed as an object across the internet, in WhatsApp groups, and in TV newsroom debates, in giving Amy her space to convey her words, Kandasamy attempts to return some agency to her character.
An Unlikeable Protagonist
Amy is a woman shamed, her character assassinated across platforms, and that’s precisely why she needs to convey her story. She receives an email from a publisher midway through her collapse, a publisher who is keen on expressing how much she is in awe of Amy for speaking up against the regime and its far-right followers. As she begins to write, she says, “I realise writing has breathed some semblance of life back into me. The rhythm of my fingers tapping keys, a music that is also movement, is creating a space between who I was then—who I am becoming now.” (101)
Amy’s narration comes across as fragmented chapters, with the titles beginning in lower case. This format of writing might remind readers of another book, Sheena Patel’s I Am A Fan. The similarity extends itself into describing what a chronically online person’s writing today looks like. The fragmentary form reflects a public-facing mind that hasn’t processed the trauma, as if written in a notes app or maybe as social media captions, to be consumed inattentively. Yet, nothing about Amy’s words is easy. To begin with, expletives like “fuck”, “cunt”, and “cock” appear many times. Like Patel’s protagonist, Amy here isn’t a conventionally likeable character or a perfect victim for that matter. She admits in the beginning, “I have made home videos with exes, lovers, random hook-ups, always, almost always on my phone. I have a trademark pout. I have a favourite filter. These angles aren’t mine. This video is wrong.” (9) Later in the book, when the online abuse translates into offline action against her, she confesses that, “The online war going offline is a danger I had not banked on. I’ve been playing with fire—fingering the fascists is one thing, getting away with it is another.” (192)
Support And Solidarity or A Lack Thereof
Kandasamy uses this crisis as a way of exploring Amy’s relationship with her mother. Amy grew up in the posh Defence Colony in Delhi with a hotshot lawyer for a father. Her mother, while absent many times in her childhood, believes that everything can be solved by being outside India. It is a rather curious case when instead of shaming her daughter, here comes an upper-caste, upper-class woman who insists that Amy not shy away from this incident and resist it by being a feminist whose privacy has been attacked. Kandasamy’s humour, more often dark than not, shines the most between the mother-daughter interactions.
Meanwhile, Amy’s London-educated lower-caste chronically offline friend, Nimmi, comes to her aid but insists nonetheless that “When all is said and done, this system always comes together to protect its own.” (131) One wonders then, that would a lower-caste woman or a Muslim woman been truly stoned to death if such an incident had happened to her. In creating Amy—a socio-politically privileged woman who owns her sexuality and expresses it on social media—Kandasamy does seem to convey that people deserve solidarity against injustices, irrespective of who they are.
The Indian Manosphere
Amy refrains from calling the people working in ruling party’s IT cells as incels. Incel is a particular label given to heterosexual white men who are unable to find romantic and sexual partners and hence, assert themselves as bullies, to say the least, online towards feminists. But in India, these online trolls could easily be married conservative men who want to make India Hindu again, follow Manusmriti to the T, and create deepfake photos and to drag down any voice against the ruling party. They are especially focussed on empowered women who vocalise their dissent. In patriarchy, character assassination has been the punishment for women’s transgression, and the present-day internet manosphere acts on the same. And these are driven with a political agenda and are funded by the party.
As she tries to figure out the source of the deepfake, Amy writes, “I’m not a person to them. I’m a line item in their metrics, a key performance indicator, a deliverable on a timeline. Somewhere in these folders are instructions to destroy someone exactly like me, step by step, with the efficiency of an assembly line.” (180) She further wonders, “How many lives are being systematically dismantled while institutions look the other way? This isn’t about me anymore. It’s about every woman, every inconvenient truth they want to silence.” (181)
Women who speak against the authoritarian government in India have been on the receiving end of many death and rape threats and constant berating slangs in every online platform. Some will recall the false auction of Muslim women on the internet, others will claim the misogyny with which a young woman was shamed directly by the prime minister of India and the media channels when young people protested on the streets of Delhi this year. As is now recorded women swearing is a cultural shock but their assault, harassment, and rape isn’t. The saying online now goes that if you are accused of rape, you will likely be promoted in the ruling party. To add to this, many of the ruling party handles on X recently shared a deepfake photo of a politician in the opposition.
When this blatant misogyny is the face of the ruling party, what might one expect from its anonymous minions fighting the war against vocal anti-authoritarian feminist women online? It also brings to question, something that Kandasamy also explores in the book: can we trust our family members’ love and care to protect us during a witch hunt? Where does a person’s loyalty lie when the choice is between a family member and an authoritarian regime that directly impacts their work life, if nothing else?
In Fieldwork As A Sex Object, Kandasamy provides agency to someone unlikeable, insisting that she deserves our solidarity. In doing so, she unveils the mechanism of a system designed to oppress women endlessly, inflicting fear to control them from speaking out. Amy’s story is easier to read compared to Kandasamy’s previous works. However, the novel’s textual surface is raw, rough even, and provocative. It might come across as a shock to readers outside India who aren’t intricately aware of bodies of oppression here. But to Indian readers, it might simply provide an archive of these times.