A young woman comes home and says a man on the bus would not leave her alone.

In my opening scene the judge is a woman, so this is not simply men against women.

You do not need to be a man to sit in this court.

Imagine a scene. It is invented, but few of us would find it foreign. A young woman comes home and says a man on the bus would not leave her alone. The oldest woman in the house is quiet for a moment, then says gently, “Ek haath se taali nahin bajti.” One hand cannot clap. And that is the end of the conversation. Nobody has accused the girl of anything, nobody has asked what the man did, and he has not been mentioned at all. Yet a verdict has been given, and its meaning is plain: whatever happened, you had a hand in it. No evidence was asked for. No witness was called. No appeal was left open. I am a man, and in this court I have at different times been the defendant, the judge and, most often, a spectator who kept his seat. That is reason enough not to write about it as an outsider. English speakers have a cousin of this proverb in “it takes two to tango”, and the family resemblance is instructive. Both sound like common sense, and both tend to be brought out at the moment someone is trying to say that something was done to them. My argument is that a proverb’s power lies less in its words than in the occasion on which it is spoken. In a collection of sayings, “one hand cannot clap” is harmless, even faintly charming. Said straight after a complaint, it stops being a sentence and becomes an act, and the act is to close the discussion. Three features give it that force. It is short, so everyone remembers it. It is anonymous, so there is no author to cross-examine. And it passes for the distilled wisdom of experience, so the burden of proof falls on whoever questions it rather than on the proverb itself. In this court the burden is turned upside down: the woman who complained must now prove she is blameless. I should be honest that the subject is not untouched. Researchers in Pakistan have been studying how women appear in proverbs for some years: Sanauddin’s doctoral thesis at Glasgow on Pashtun proverbs (2015), Khan, Mustafa and Ali on Punjabi (2017), and Sagheer and Zubair (2020), who found Punjabi proverbs presenting women as weak and dependent on men. The picture is not one-sided, though. A small study of forty Urdu proverbs built on animal comparisons found negative portrayals of men (21)........

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