I have for long thought of myself as a feminist, partly as the result of growing up in a matrilineal Kerala family; and to this day I marvel at how much more solicitous Kerala men are about their womenfolk as compared to the experiences of my female friends from other parts of the country. That is not, by any means, to claim that all is wonderful in Kerala for women, but let’s defer that for a moment.

What startles me is how the official feminist movement seems to have deteriorated sharply over the last few years, to the extent that I now hesitate to count myself among them. In essence, I believe that the movement has been infiltrated and hijacked by vested interests, so that it is a travesty of the legitimate struggle for women’s empowerment that it once was.

It is also the case that, despite much propaganda, it is the Western woman who has always had the need for empowerment and agency. There is a telling statistic. The Bible suggests that a woman is worth 72 shekels to 100 for a man. The latest data I have found suggests that, after decades of struggle, a Western woman now earns 82 per cent of what a man earns. That is not much progress in 2,000 years for white women. I suspect in India, at least in professional positions, there is less of a wage gap.

Furthermore, the problems of white women are different from those of Indian women. It comes from societal attitudes. A white woman is defined by her sexual attractiveness, so she is at her most powerful in her twenties, with an unlined face and firm breasts and cellulite-free thighs. Many fortyish women are abandoned by their husbands for their 25-year-old secretaries. All this is in contrast with how women gain power as they age and become matriarchs in India. So it’s facile and false to assume that there’s a ‘white woman’s burden’ to ‘civilise’ Indian women, or that their solutions are appropriate in our context.

The ‘mother’ meme is much more important in India as compared to the West. This can be seen in the very positioning of Christianity: in the West, the Madonna is a relatively unimportant figure, and it is the males that are key. In India, however, to appeal to the mother figure, the Velankanni Madonna cult is brought to the forefront, and it does work.