What is the role of the brother in the South Asian and Muslim household?

*Images courtesy of Dalia Al-Dujaili. The images included in this piece bear no relation to the writer or the content of the article, and are used for artistic purposes only.*

Words by Dania Quadri

“Boys only want one thing,” my father would warn defeatedly, when he knew I had been out spending time with my closest friend at the time, Manas, a whole shocking boy. I’d pretend to vomit, then smirk at the fact that the only thing Manas did want from me was to be set up with my friend Shreya he was so (and still is) besotted by. But how could I explain primary school dating complexities to my father? So I just nodded, and giggled about it later.

While my father distrusted most men when it came to his daughters, my mother seemed to have some sort of denial about who could cause harm. In case of any crisis in which a manly presence was deemed necessary, she’d cite her experiences with her own male cousins and friends, and refer to them as ‘brotherly.’ In other words, ‘brotherly’ men were always trustworthy protegees.

This pervasive idea is the plot of most commercial Indian films: the brotherly protagonist protects the damsel in distress from the unbrotherly antagonists, and then somehow becomes a love interest by replicating toxic behaviours of the unbrotherly? Don’t ask.

Beyond Indian cinema, in school too, the way a male friend would imply that they were safe was to say, ‘you’re like my sister, rey’, and that cemented the safety. If boys only wanted one thing, and boys who were our brothers did not want that, that being sex, then surely brothers were sexless and always deemed to be safe?

By safe, I think schoolboys implied that they were not attracted to you, so wouldn’t manipulate your friendship to fulfil their sexual desires. And well, with male cousins, it was taken for granted that they could not have these desires for you. So, although I did not realise it at the time, I sorted the men in my life into two camps. The brotherly protegees and the unbrotherly creeps. There was no in-between. The brotherly included any male who was deemed to be sexless when it concerned me, by either relation or stated intention. The unbrotherly were everyone else who had the potential to be attracted to you, and by extension, violent.

Unfortunately, my childhood and early adult life were replete with incidences that should have made it obvious to me that the premise of my argument was illogical. But instead, they culminated in unsafe experiences and confused boundaries. For instance, when I was 6 years old playing hide and seek with my cousins who were all male, I remember an older cousin winking at me and then switching the lights off to come over and put his hand down my underwear. Soon I learnt that other relatives were dealing with similar if not worse instances.

Trying to make sense of the happenings around me, I started to break the issue up from an individual point of view, and then scale upward. First, I began to muse whether this was an issue in my own family. But enough anecdotes from friends, and strangers in books and all over the internet had proved otherwise.

Then I considered the religious and cultural traditions of my upbringing. I am a Muslim, and we’re allowed to marry some of the men of we are related to, under certain circumstances. So, was this concept responsible for the blurred boundaries that not only resulted in attraction, but also the abuse committed by the males I knew?

I thought about my friends who came from different religious traditions with different rules about with whom marriage was permissible. While marrying our parents’ siblings in Islam is considered forbidden, I knew this was a norm in certain South Indian Hindu cultures. So perhaps all our religious traditions were to blame.

But soon enough anomalies became evident that had nothing to do with these religious structures. I thought of the countless stories of abusive fathers, husbands, and biological brothers. Social constructs that had definitive boundaries still resulted in abuse. Something didn’t seem to add up. Things became even murkier when I started dating a lad in school. Which camp would my love interest fit into? Definitely not the brotherly. Perhaps the unbrotherly? But did this mean he was inherently unsafe? To make matters more complicated, he did end up making me feel quite unsafe in many regards.

On the flipside, there were instances where different men had expressed their attraction towards me, but it resulted in absolutely no harm. I thought of all my close male friends and the cousins with whom I shared healthy relationships. While these did not negate the non-consensual experiences that I was subjected to by men who I thought had had my best interests in mind, I realised that my classifications no longer made sense.

By now I had experienced all possible combinations of harm and safety with both the brotherly and unbrotherly. The way I sorted men in my head was completely illogical. Sexual attraction did not determine sexual harm, or unsafe experiences of any nature. While this may seem obvious, the events in my life had blinded me to this.

So at the ripe old age of 26 I have finally done away with the camps of the brotherly and unbrotherly while navigating the world of dating and friendships. This has made my life much easier. I no longer second-guess my intuition if I feel unsafe, and focus on how someone makes me feel instead of predetermining interactions based on sociocultural constructs.

Many of my cousins who were present that day are now young men with their own families. While I have forgiven them, I can only hope that they are teaching the younger men around them everything that they never learnt at their age.

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Are brothers the protegees we really need?