Old sexism dies hard

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the place of the woman in India. Walking miles to fetch water, carrying large rocks and branches on their heads, bending double for hours to pick in the fields, village women are strong as oxen – yet they say they understand when their husbands beat them. Even Gandhi abused his wife. He always resented being forced into marriage at a young age, as many Indian men and women still are today.

If not from this burden, marital estrangement comes from the unfamiliarity bred by a lifetime of forced abstinence and division from the opposite sex. In order to live together before marriage, a friend of mine and her boyfriend had to tell everyone in their apartment complex that they were siblings. They had to hide their love for each other the way one turns down music to avoid disrupting the neighbors. So when they got married they had to move.

From their very births many women in India are endangered. I’ll never forget the story a village woman named Lata told me about the baby girl she tried to save. The parents already had two daughters, and the man swore that if a third came he would leave. Indeed the third baby was a girl, and the mother planned to kill her. “Please give me the girl,” Lata begged them. “Why should we give her to you?” they said. The next day Lata returned to find the baby dead, fed tobacco and smothered. A full life snuffed away at the dawn of consciousness.

I asked my flat mate Parul how, considering all the work village women do, they could be so cheapened. Besides the high cost of dowries, she said, “a woman is always seen as a liability, something that you have to look after. She’s not going to be part of the family for a very long time; she’ll have to be married off to another family soon. You’re investing in her, giving her an education and all, but it’s not going to reap you any benefits. That’s the sad theory behind it.”

While infanticide is not uncommon in the villages, feticide has become tragically frequent in many cities, as more and more people can afford sonograms and abortions. A 2001 law banned “sex determination” tests, but like many Indian laws the idea is far from the reality – you can’t outlaw sonograms in a democracy. India’s gender ratio is dangerously unbalanced: just over 900 girls are born for every 1000 boys, and that number is trending down; in the West the ratio is 1050 to 1000. In some of the worst areas, such as Punjab and Gujarat, it’s lower than 800 to 1000. According to Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods, families in the most extreme areas will sometimes import women from elsewhere in India to serve – and I do mean serve – as a wife for several men at the same time.

Most of my experiences in villages have confirmed the imbalance of power between the genders. The few times I’ve seen men gather to debate village-wide issues, I’ve seen the women on the periphery, wielding about as much influence as me, an outsider who can’t understand the language. When I had lunch there, we men would fraternize together in the living room while she emerged from the kitchen only to refill our plates, waiting to eat until we had finished.

In the villages it seems women are so often in the shadows that they fear being noticed. One hot afternoon I found myself surrounded by village schoolchildren and an insurmountable language barrier. I pulled out my digital camera, and eyes bulged. It was as if I had just shot flames from my hand. When I pointed it at the boys, they would crowd towards it, even shoving each other to get in the frame. But when I pointed toward the girls they scattered, even hiding their faces – except for the very youngest, the five year olds, who were perhaps too young to understand their place in society.

After India beat Sri Lanka to win the Cricket World Cup for the first time since 1983, the city was pandemonium. My friends and I spilled out into the streets with what must have been hundreds of thousands of others, flowing deliriously down Mahatma Gandhi Road, one of the main roads in Pune, for hours. I lost myself in the drums, in the dancing, in the innumerable Indian smiles inspired by the sight of a Westerner celebrating their country. All down the line, men took pictures and videos of me, hoisted me up on their cars, handed me huge Indian flags to wave. I might never have felt so joyous and free in my life.

But for our white female friends it was a different story. One was relatively comfortable, dancing with little boys along the way. Another was fine until someone grabbed her ass; she shoved him against a car, but her night was over. Another friend could never get into the festivities – she felt the stares around her and walked nervously alongside us, relieved when it was all over. It was only part way through the impromptu populist parade that I realized all the Indian women were standing firmly on the sidewalks, arms crossed or holding their young daughters’ hand, watching.

A few weeks ago some friends and I went to Goa and rented huts on an isolated beach. At night we sat on the beach, drinking beers and listening to our friend Kristie play the most enchanting music. It was the one thing we didn’t pay for those nights, and it was the most memorable. One woman strumming a guitar; another holding up sheet music and a light; all three women harmonizing together. Three men sipping beers, occasionally joining in song but mostly just letting the chills run down our spines. Women bringing their social group together through music, uninterrupted by men – it seemed like a scene that could only happen in the most modern of Indian circles. And it wasn’t that they were playing for us, more that we were lucky enough to be there listening to them.

You lose something, I thought to myself, when you take women out of a culture.

*After talking about this post with some Indian women at work I realized I painted this piece with very broad strokes. As they said, “There is no one Indian woman” – the female experience varies among the incredibly diverse regions, cultures, classes, castes, religions, races, languages, and urban vs rural spaces of India. A middle class woman in Pune will generally be afforded more respect than one in Delhi. Muslim and Hindu families may have very different ideas of what to do with their daughters; those decisions will take on new forms between city and village. At the same time, my colleagues suggested that domestic abuse is universal, even outside of India. My sense is that it’s much more pervasive in the Indian middle class than in the American middle class (the only one I’m familiar with); whether or not that’s true their opinion may give some insight into Indian perspectives on gender relations. In my piece “Every little thing” I report back with a further developed understanding.