The facts are these.
Caster Semenya, a South African Middle-distance runner, won the gold medal in the 800 meters race at the Commonwealth Championship in athletics held in Berlin recently, with a time of 1:55:45 in the final. Her record time raised suspicions about her sexual identity. If Ms. Semenya was indeed a woman at all? If not she would be restrospectively disqualified from the race for not being a woman.
Hidden in this question is the assumption that if a woman is too good at what she does, she may in fact not be a woman at all. In organized sport, which today remains one of the most gender-insensitive domains in the world, this discrimination against women has felled several victims. If its not performance-enhancing drugs, it is the fact that a woman has some masculine attributes that contribute to her extraordinary success.
The IAAF recently made public Ms. Semenya's test results which illustrated that she had no ovaries, uterus and possessed internal testes. This the IAAF did to handle the accusation leveled against it that the body was rascist and was violating the privacy of an African runner.
It is bad enough that Ms. Semenya has had to deal with the loss of her sexuality as an individual, it is a hundred times worse that this has happened in public with several thousand people viewing her 'intersex' condition as tragic, pitiable, freakish, unwomanly. In short the world has robbed Ms. Semenya of her sexual identity.
This entire case has made me think very very hard about what it means to be a woman. Author of The Second Sex, Simone deBeauvoir, famously wrote that she was not born a woman, she became one. That is to say, the condition of womanhood goes beyond being born with a certain set of biological parts. It is conferred upon a girl, or she is shoved into womanhood (whichever way you want to look at it) by a broad set of social constructs that condition behavior, dress, and role in society.
Ms. Semenya's birth certificate states she is 'female'. She grew up as a girl, she probably played with dolls, dressed as a woman, was featured on the cover of Vogue magazine (in a rather pathetic attempt to reclaim her femininity), competed as a woman, was probably subjected to routine humiliations that women across the world suffer, probably was expected to do womanly things (cook, clean, iron, etc). Her career was based on athletics. Her downfall was that she wasn't bad at it.
It is quite possible that many 'women' are born with this abnormality. They are not to be blamed for it. The entire debate about Ms. Semenya has centered on her biology. Almost as if biology alone makes you a woman. There are several thousand women on earth who lose their breasts to breast cancer, their uterus to hysterectomies and are unable to bear children for a variety of other reasons. All of them face a crisis of womanhood for sure, because ingrained in us is this idea that a woman is somehow never more than the sum total of her body parts. This is true for most men as well, who face a crisis of masculinity upon losing a testicle (remember the debate about Lance Armstrong?).
Given that Ms. Semenya has endured the life-experiences of being a woman, I say she be allowed to hold on to her womanhood instead of being disqualified from the cult of femininity. Her experiences make her more of a woman than her biology ever did.
In the same way, I find her appearance on the cover of Vogue a poor sop to the strong argument that can be made in her favor. A ton of make-up, lipstick and rouge do not make one a woman. The ability to stuff yourself into very tight, lacy lingerie or a tight black dress does not make one a woman. The ability to walk for miles in insanely high heels does not make anyone a woman (are the transvestites listening?). If the idea was to make Ms. Semenya appear just frail enough, it failed. She is not frail and she need not be. Women need not be frail and weak in order to be considered women. Their strength need not be emotional and internal, on display only in crisis situations. Most women on earth today do back-breaking work on the fields, in the house, much beyond their physical capacities. Yet they do it.
When Santhi Soundarajan was 25 years old she won the silver medal in the 800m at the 2006 Asian Games. A similar gender test was administered to this Tamil track star from humble beginnings. She failed the test and lost her medal, and the ability to ever compete in women's athletics. Apparently she had androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) in which a person is genetically male, but because of insensitivity to male sex hormones, the body appears feminine. Soundarajan's personal life was affected, her mental health disturbed (there were rumors of suicide attempts) and now she runs a, athletics coaching institute in Tamil Nadu. Plans of returning to competitive athletics have long been abandoned.
She has something to say to Ms. Semenya, "You are a woman, full stop. A gender test cannot take away from you who you are." (quoted in TIME).
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Globalization and the Commodification of the Female Form
Lecture/Discussion at the Goldman School
Transcript of whatever I said
“Factory owners want to hire women because they are docile and submissive. This is how they have become the largest pool of cheap labor in the world.”
These lines are spoken by an observer in China in the controversial documentary China Blue, which documents the lives of a few female workers in a denim-based sweatshop. We screened China Blue in a class today on Chinese political economy and here is some of what we learned. Today China is witnessing the largest human migration in history. 130 million peasants are moving to urban areas – most of them are women. Working long hours which stretch up to 20 hours a day, being paid on a piecemeal wage rate and having to pay for their dorms and hot water to wash with, these Chinese women start work at a very early age and earn 6 cents an hour all of which goes into subsidizing the family, the cost of a brother's education, their marriages and day to day spending in their rural family. They deal with the disappointment of their parents on being given a girl child and stretch themselves to their natural physical limits to earn money. Their work, their bodies, their lives have been commodified and chained to the shop floor where they work as thread cutters, zip-stitchers, seamstresses and other forms of manufacturing which require delicate hands and nimble fingers.
Good evening. I am Vasundhara Sirnate and I hope you watched the documentaries this evening with as much rapt attention as I have.
Recently, I encountered a very interesting cab driver. In our fifteen-minute drive together he asked me where I was from, why I had a strange accent and then had a business proposition. Why, he said, don’t we have more Indian women coming over to the US and becoming wives? Why, I asked him, would people want an Indian wife? He said, well they don’t argue and nag and they are very gentle and well.. nice.
In many ways the cabdriver echoed the same view that the observer in China Blue had.
I must confess I was not exactly gobsmacked upon hearing what the cab driver said about Indian women. There are many popular stereotypes of women from South Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, China and Russia which tend to construct these women as exotic and beautiful for sure, but also submissive in personal and economic relations. But what did strike me was his business model. He clearly saw this as a way of making money. And the product being sold was the Indian woman. But what skills/services did this woman provide – housework, sexual services, subsidizing a man’s lifestyle and enabling him to be a productive person in the economic set up. At a psychological level this woman would apparently not challenge the man, destabilize the relationship or interrogate the structure of patriarchy.
Today’s discussion is going to be focused more on the South Asian context and more specifically the Indian context. By starting out with China Blue I did however, want to place women’s commodification in a slightly more comparative perspective.
The cab driver’s monologue coupled with the observation of the speaker in China Blue has made me think a little harder about the economic worth of a woman’s body, a woman’s work – in short, its commodification. My previous work has concentrated on the visible impact of religious fundamentalism on the roles women played in the home and outside. I tried to understand why gender never emerged as a significant political identity as opposed to race, ethnicity and religion in India. What the cab driver said made me rethink most of the theory I had read about gender. I began situating theories of gender produced in the West in more local and regional contexts and found many theories lacking. For instance, the very idea of patriarchy has never been adequately disaggregated. In India moving from one region to another women slip in and slide out of different structures of patriarchy. In many regions women themselves are carriers and perpetuators of patriarchal values, best evinced in the saas-bahu or mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dialectic.
When I shared the cab driver’s proposition with my American colleague here at Berkeley, she was somewhat incensed. She felt the cab-driver had insulted American women by assuming that because women in America were more career oriented, they did not believe in the structure of the family or values linked to the family. The range of reactions which the cab-driver's proposition evoked from people actually helped me think about commodification, what its scope is and how it is applied in a variety of contexts to mean a variety of things.
Before I proceed with a discussion of the two documentaries on India, I want to disaggregate the very notion of commodification and in doing so enhance our own understanding of the term. Commodification occurs when something, which previously did not have an economic value, gets assigned some such value. Recently, many services industries have arisen centered around the female body – mail-order brides, surrogate motherhood and of course prostitution, strip clubs etc. Women’s work, however, is a classic example of a phenomenon that is curiously absent from National Income Accounting. There are various arguments for and against commodification, which I am sure you have been exposed to in the earlier parts of this series, so I will skip that for the moment. Also, I wish to flag that in the South Asian context both men and women have been commodified in varying degrees. However, since we are really talking about women here, I will restrict myself to women’s commodification.
I propose to think of commodification in terms of the following sub-types.
1. Legal versus illegal commodification: Legalized prostitution which function as recognized industries and are governed by rules enforced by the state would come under legal commodification. This is different from illegal commodification where women are often trafficked and sold across international borders and forced into prostitution or pornography. In the absence of rules and their enforcement the economic and human rights of such women and children cannot be secured.
2. Public versus private commodification: Public commodification involves placing an economic value on women’s bodies in the public sphere. For instance, commodification through advertising or glamour magazines, beauty contests, strip clubs, etc. On the other hand, private commodification takes place within the confines of the family. For instance, there is more value attached in South Asia to a woman who bears a son. The indirect logic being that a son will be an economic agent in the future.
In the Indian state of Haryana the rise of the cult of Paro has become another example of private commodification. A cultural preference for sons over daughters has led to an adverse sex ratio in many Indian states. In Haryana the ratio is 861 females per thousand males, well below the national average of 927 females per thousand males. Paros are women who are sold into marriage for about 200-300 dollars to men in women-deficient states like Haryana. Mostly, these women are tribal or tend to be from lower caste families. A recent estimate which found its ways into a BBC news report, stated that about 45000 women from the Eastern state of Jharkhand had found their way as bought-brides in Haryana. Sadly, the emergence of this ‘bride-price’ has come about in India because of the scarcity of women and not because people hold them in high regard. Paro’s are required to work on farms in rural areas, produce more labor for the household run farm and take care of the extended family. In many cases, poorer families who cannot afford to buy more than one ‘Paro’ often marry the girl off to two or three brothers, each of whom exercises his conjugal rights over her.
3. Commodification during war or in peacetime: Commodification during wartime is often a response to exacerbated economic conditions. It can also be forced like in the case of the comfort women used by the Japanese army during the Second World War. Commodification during war is inherently problematic. Why is that? First, war situations are imbued with much uncertainty about economic and political outcomes. Second, there is a huge psychological dimension to war as well. One in which sexual domination over the women of one community or country is a sign of victory or assertion of one paradigm over another. Similarly, in situations of ethnic conflict and communal strife women’s bodies often become the site of violence or the battleground on which the battle between the two communities is fought. It is not surprising therefore that the woman-object and the manner of her dress, her role in society and family is often constructed and reconstructed by different fundamentalisms and nationalisms.
4. Voluntary versus involuntary commodification: There is a strong involuntary aspect to commodifictaion of women. This however, is a very thorny issue. On the one hand, many women supposedly enter fields of commodification ‘voluntarily’. For instance the increase in levels of prostitution in the Post-Soviet world has led many people to recognize the importance of ‘choice’, ie, women enter the trade knowingly. Other women enter the trade ‘involuntarily’, i.e, they are forced into prostitution, trafficked across international borders etc. However, in the Russian case for instance, sex work is emerging as a recognized economic activity, but this may have less to do with ‘choice’ and more to do with the structure of the economy, where it is harder for lesser skilled women to find jobs. Given that there may also operate a strong male-preference in job allocations, even skilled women may find themselevs out of the job-market. So my question really is, if what you’re doing is in some way conditioned by structure, does it remain a choice at all? Many left leaning feminists also adopt this stance. But I reiterate this is a very very hard thing to measure.
We can locate the two documentaries we saw somewhere within this schematic. I will however, advance a more critical perspective on the documentaries rather than recapitulate what the documentaries are saying.
I wish to advance the dialectic between public and private commodification of women. Both the documentaries which we have seen deal with a separate aspect of my two pronged classification. The documentary about Punjabi brides talks about the aspirations of these women. They want to be independent, they want to be economic agents and basically escape what some of them perceive to be an oppressive, patriarchal structure. However, they find themselves stranded between two patriarchies – the Punjabi one and the Western one. Those who cross over have often just crossed over to a different system of patriarchy. The interesting thing is that often moving out of one patriarchal structure is termed liberation, but in fact women are simply moving to another perhaps less evident system of domination. These systems of domination occur and are reproduced within the realm of the diasporic family. A classic case study conducted by Sunita Puri found that there was a history of sex selection amongst South Asian families in the Bay Area. Also, women who came over here from South Asia and then had girl children were often abused by their in-laws and husbands. This somehow begs the question of how these women were viewed – as incubators, which would produce a male heir? While this is a harder question to answer, what is in fact increasingly common is the crossing over of South Asian women to work as wives (and notice I say work as wives, not ‘be’ wives) for service professionals here or even as wives for illegal immigrants. The dynamics of the two groups of women are substantially different. The women who come here on an H-4 visa are better off than their illegally brought in or those who are wives of blue collar workers. In the H-4 case, the husband has a respectable income and the women are mostly upper caste Hindus, who are educated and in worst case scenarios are able to access the state for immediate redressal. This is not common though. Mostly, women rely on their informal social and same-caste networks to address any family problems. This informal, social, same-caste network basically replaces the extended family in say the Indian setting for instance.
In the illegal immigrant/blue-collar workers case, it is my instinct that the women are worse off. A friend of mine who works with abused women at the Red Cross here once mentioned to me that not only do these women have a problem with speaking in English, they are also thoroughly dependent on their husbands and less skilled than their upper-caste contemporaries and often through counseling my friend unfortunately finds she has to send them back into the same abusive structure, because returning to India is not an option. She finds the case to be similar for many Mexican women who have crossed over illegally. In this case, such women cannot even access the state’s legal apparatus for redressal because they run the risk of being caught and deported along with their husbands.
The documentary on Punjabi brides does not explore these aspects, which is why I chose to raise them here.
But here’s the real question before us? Hasn’t commodification always been there? Arguably, yes! SO what is so new about it? I think that with the rise of new technology for the dissemination of information commodification has infact increased and is taking place on a scale never before seen. Processes of economic internationalization, defined as an exogenous easing of international trade, have led to the rise of new economies, sectors and industries. This has been coupled with a rapid increase in communication technology and shifts in processes of production and forming links with the international economy. All of this has affected social relations at local levels and has changed gender dynamics and given rise to what is called in India 'competing masculinities' which have caste and religious dimensions. I would be happy to go into some cases to establish this during the question and answer session.
But is commodification really taking place on a globalized scale? I wish to introduce you to some statistics collected by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women to establish the global proportions of a certain kind of commodification, i.e., commodification in the sex trade.
(Reads from a report)
“Global trafficking is a $7 Billion industry (UNICRI) ? According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, human trafficking generates an estimated $9.5 billion in annual revenue. In Thailand, trafficking is a 500 billion Baht annual business (equivalent to approximately 124 million U.S. dollars), which represents a value equal to around 60 per cent of the government budget (CATW). ? In Korea, sex industry profits reached 24.0712 trillion won, which is equivalent to 4.4% of 578.8 trillion national GDP and was the same as the profits from agriculture and fishery industry. ? Pornography/Cybersex industry generates approximately $ 1B annually and is expected to grow to 55-7B over the next 5 years”
Let me assault you with some more statistics.
“Each week 60,000 Victorian men spend $7M on prostitution, with the legalized industry turning over more than $360M a year and drawing on some 4500 prostituted women and girls (Jeffreys) Italy: 1 of 6 (or almost 17%) Italian men uses women in prostitution. Differently stated, this means that in Italy, 9 million men use an estimated 50,000 women in prostitution (International Conference, 2004). Germany: 18% of German men regularly pay for sex Adolf Gallwitz,” 2003). One million prostitute-users buy women daily in Germany for sexual activities (Herz, 2003). UK: 10% of London’s male population buys women for the sex of prostitution (Brown, 2000) USA: Estimated one half of the adult male population are frequent prostitute-users, and that 69% of the same population had purchased women for sexual activities at least once (Brown, 2000). o Thailand : 5.1 million sexual tourists a year, 450,000 local customers buy sex every day (Barry). 75% of Thai men were prostitution buyers, almost 50% had their first sexual intercourse with women in prostitution (Brown, 2000) Vietnam: 70% of those caught in brothels are reported to be state officials, 60% to 70% of men in Cambodia have purchased women for sexual activities”
And these are just statistics about trafficking and the sex industry. With this we can club other forms of commodification which are public – strip clubs, the beauty industry and cross-border private commodification such as in the case of the Punjabi brides.
SO there is indeed a global and an economic element to commodification. Another aspect of commodification which I have not found highlighted in many theoretical articles is the idea of replacement. So technically an object is commodified if it can also be replaced easily. Can the Punjabi brides be replaced as well? Apparently yes. First, in foreign lands the geographic distance that separates the husband and wife from their extended family and insulates them from social pressures, also makes it easier for divorces to occur. Simply, because society does not frown upon divorces as much. Second, in some Punjabi villages (not covered by the documentary) grooms sometimes return whenever they run out of money abroad. They marry a girl, collect a hefty dowry and move back promising to file for immigration. Of course, marrying an NRI comes at a price!!
The documentary about call centers in India is somewhat tangential to these broader ideas of commodification. While it is unclear if women’s work in a call center can be considered commodification, there is no doubt that the rise of call centers has in fact led to a fundamental reordering of women’s roles in the family. In Indian call centers women often work all night, something that would probably have shocked an Indian upper-caste family twenty years ago.
It is now more commonplace to see women outside in the wee hours of the morning. One of the reasons for this change in attitude is the hefty pay packets that call-center employees earn. This is sometimes substantially generous and even equals the money earned by a girls’ parents. Girls are encouraged to use their English language skills and hospitable upbringing and use that to earn money. In return parents overlook the long hours, the nights spent in a call center and the out-station trips taken in the company of male colleagues. Like I said, twenty years ago this would have raised eyebrows.
A consequence of this increased visibility of women as Prem Chowdhry’s study of the National Capital Region and Haryana reveals, is a dramatic rise in the number of rapes reported in Delhi. Not all are linked to call-centers of course. But is a function of more women working outside of the house more generally and more women actually reporting rapes. A couple of years ago, The Haryana govt., which is where most call –centers are located tried to protect women by saying they could not work night shifts. The logic was this would somehow “protect” them from violence and aggression. However, this did not come into effect. Interestingly, the way you rise through the ranks of a call center is by servicing more and more customers. While every call center has a separate incentive structure most do involve answering as many phone calls as you can and finishing your quotas set by your team leader. It is during the night-shifts that Indian call centers are ringing off the hooks because of the time difference. If women were prohibited from working the night shifts it would take them substantially longer to live up to the incentive structure laid down and they would climb the ranks much more slowly.
Recently call centers have imposed a dress code on women. They could wear Indian outfits and Western outfits, but no sleeveless outfits, short skirts or something uncomfortably tight. Cleavages were meant to be hidden and no mid-riff could peep out. Apparently, bare arms lead to more aggression and violence against women, or so the flawed logic stated. This is a common assumption that has led to the imposition of dress codes across the country. Women who reveal their bodies are more likely to be victims of sexual aggression. While there is simply no empirical evidence to back this, such ideas permeate the patriarchal wisdom.
I will conclude by highlighting once more by looking at possible areas of investigation for future research.
1. We need to take a closer look at commodification and break it up or disaggregate it perhaps along the lines of my suggestion
2. We need to disaggregate patriarchy as this monolithic overarching concept and look at how structures of patriarchy differ with respect to culture and region. We also need to understand that women slip into and slide out of different structures of patriarchy and that this needs to be drawn out more in theory.
3. As I have tried to show commodification has a deep impact on the rights of women as citizens and individuals and economic actors. We need this debate to be reflected in a more strident manner at domestic and international levels.
4. We need to problematize models of development, as they exist – neo-liberal economics, which have engendered a certain sexual division of labor in developing countries. Terms like feminization of the labor force conceal more than they reveal. Although I do not talk about this aspect at length, I would be happy to address questions related to this during the question and answer session.
Transcript of whatever I said
“Factory owners want to hire women because they are docile and submissive. This is how they have become the largest pool of cheap labor in the world.”
These lines are spoken by an observer in China in the controversial documentary China Blue, which documents the lives of a few female workers in a denim-based sweatshop. We screened China Blue in a class today on Chinese political economy and here is some of what we learned. Today China is witnessing the largest human migration in history. 130 million peasants are moving to urban areas – most of them are women. Working long hours which stretch up to 20 hours a day, being paid on a piecemeal wage rate and having to pay for their dorms and hot water to wash with, these Chinese women start work at a very early age and earn 6 cents an hour all of which goes into subsidizing the family, the cost of a brother's education, their marriages and day to day spending in their rural family. They deal with the disappointment of their parents on being given a girl child and stretch themselves to their natural physical limits to earn money. Their work, their bodies, their lives have been commodified and chained to the shop floor where they work as thread cutters, zip-stitchers, seamstresses and other forms of manufacturing which require delicate hands and nimble fingers.
Good evening. I am Vasundhara Sirnate and I hope you watched the documentaries this evening with as much rapt attention as I have.
Recently, I encountered a very interesting cab driver. In our fifteen-minute drive together he asked me where I was from, why I had a strange accent and then had a business proposition. Why, he said, don’t we have more Indian women coming over to the US and becoming wives? Why, I asked him, would people want an Indian wife? He said, well they don’t argue and nag and they are very gentle and well.. nice.
In many ways the cabdriver echoed the same view that the observer in China Blue had.
I must confess I was not exactly gobsmacked upon hearing what the cab driver said about Indian women. There are many popular stereotypes of women from South Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, China and Russia which tend to construct these women as exotic and beautiful for sure, but also submissive in personal and economic relations. But what did strike me was his business model. He clearly saw this as a way of making money. And the product being sold was the Indian woman. But what skills/services did this woman provide – housework, sexual services, subsidizing a man’s lifestyle and enabling him to be a productive person in the economic set up. At a psychological level this woman would apparently not challenge the man, destabilize the relationship or interrogate the structure of patriarchy.
Today’s discussion is going to be focused more on the South Asian context and more specifically the Indian context. By starting out with China Blue I did however, want to place women’s commodification in a slightly more comparative perspective.
The cab driver’s monologue coupled with the observation of the speaker in China Blue has made me think a little harder about the economic worth of a woman’s body, a woman’s work – in short, its commodification. My previous work has concentrated on the visible impact of religious fundamentalism on the roles women played in the home and outside. I tried to understand why gender never emerged as a significant political identity as opposed to race, ethnicity and religion in India. What the cab driver said made me rethink most of the theory I had read about gender. I began situating theories of gender produced in the West in more local and regional contexts and found many theories lacking. For instance, the very idea of patriarchy has never been adequately disaggregated. In India moving from one region to another women slip in and slide out of different structures of patriarchy. In many regions women themselves are carriers and perpetuators of patriarchal values, best evinced in the saas-bahu or mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dialectic.
When I shared the cab driver’s proposition with my American colleague here at Berkeley, she was somewhat incensed. She felt the cab-driver had insulted American women by assuming that because women in America were more career oriented, they did not believe in the structure of the family or values linked to the family. The range of reactions which the cab-driver's proposition evoked from people actually helped me think about commodification, what its scope is and how it is applied in a variety of contexts to mean a variety of things.
Before I proceed with a discussion of the two documentaries on India, I want to disaggregate the very notion of commodification and in doing so enhance our own understanding of the term. Commodification occurs when something, which previously did not have an economic value, gets assigned some such value. Recently, many services industries have arisen centered around the female body – mail-order brides, surrogate motherhood and of course prostitution, strip clubs etc. Women’s work, however, is a classic example of a phenomenon that is curiously absent from National Income Accounting. There are various arguments for and against commodification, which I am sure you have been exposed to in the earlier parts of this series, so I will skip that for the moment. Also, I wish to flag that in the South Asian context both men and women have been commodified in varying degrees. However, since we are really talking about women here, I will restrict myself to women’s commodification.
I propose to think of commodification in terms of the following sub-types.
1. Legal versus illegal commodification: Legalized prostitution which function as recognized industries and are governed by rules enforced by the state would come under legal commodification. This is different from illegal commodification where women are often trafficked and sold across international borders and forced into prostitution or pornography. In the absence of rules and their enforcement the economic and human rights of such women and children cannot be secured.
2. Public versus private commodification: Public commodification involves placing an economic value on women’s bodies in the public sphere. For instance, commodification through advertising or glamour magazines, beauty contests, strip clubs, etc. On the other hand, private commodification takes place within the confines of the family. For instance, there is more value attached in South Asia to a woman who bears a son. The indirect logic being that a son will be an economic agent in the future.
In the Indian state of Haryana the rise of the cult of Paro has become another example of private commodification. A cultural preference for sons over daughters has led to an adverse sex ratio in many Indian states. In Haryana the ratio is 861 females per thousand males, well below the national average of 927 females per thousand males. Paros are women who are sold into marriage for about 200-300 dollars to men in women-deficient states like Haryana. Mostly, these women are tribal or tend to be from lower caste families. A recent estimate which found its ways into a BBC news report, stated that about 45000 women from the Eastern state of Jharkhand had found their way as bought-brides in Haryana. Sadly, the emergence of this ‘bride-price’ has come about in India because of the scarcity of women and not because people hold them in high regard. Paro’s are required to work on farms in rural areas, produce more labor for the household run farm and take care of the extended family. In many cases, poorer families who cannot afford to buy more than one ‘Paro’ often marry the girl off to two or three brothers, each of whom exercises his conjugal rights over her.
3. Commodification during war or in peacetime: Commodification during wartime is often a response to exacerbated economic conditions. It can also be forced like in the case of the comfort women used by the Japanese army during the Second World War. Commodification during war is inherently problematic. Why is that? First, war situations are imbued with much uncertainty about economic and political outcomes. Second, there is a huge psychological dimension to war as well. One in which sexual domination over the women of one community or country is a sign of victory or assertion of one paradigm over another. Similarly, in situations of ethnic conflict and communal strife women’s bodies often become the site of violence or the battleground on which the battle between the two communities is fought. It is not surprising therefore that the woman-object and the manner of her dress, her role in society and family is often constructed and reconstructed by different fundamentalisms and nationalisms.
4. Voluntary versus involuntary commodification: There is a strong involuntary aspect to commodifictaion of women. This however, is a very thorny issue. On the one hand, many women supposedly enter fields of commodification ‘voluntarily’. For instance the increase in levels of prostitution in the Post-Soviet world has led many people to recognize the importance of ‘choice’, ie, women enter the trade knowingly. Other women enter the trade ‘involuntarily’, i.e, they are forced into prostitution, trafficked across international borders etc. However, in the Russian case for instance, sex work is emerging as a recognized economic activity, but this may have less to do with ‘choice’ and more to do with the structure of the economy, where it is harder for lesser skilled women to find jobs. Given that there may also operate a strong male-preference in job allocations, even skilled women may find themselevs out of the job-market. So my question really is, if what you’re doing is in some way conditioned by structure, does it remain a choice at all? Many left leaning feminists also adopt this stance. But I reiterate this is a very very hard thing to measure.
We can locate the two documentaries we saw somewhere within this schematic. I will however, advance a more critical perspective on the documentaries rather than recapitulate what the documentaries are saying.
I wish to advance the dialectic between public and private commodification of women. Both the documentaries which we have seen deal with a separate aspect of my two pronged classification. The documentary about Punjabi brides talks about the aspirations of these women. They want to be independent, they want to be economic agents and basically escape what some of them perceive to be an oppressive, patriarchal structure. However, they find themselves stranded between two patriarchies – the Punjabi one and the Western one. Those who cross over have often just crossed over to a different system of patriarchy. The interesting thing is that often moving out of one patriarchal structure is termed liberation, but in fact women are simply moving to another perhaps less evident system of domination. These systems of domination occur and are reproduced within the realm of the diasporic family. A classic case study conducted by Sunita Puri found that there was a history of sex selection amongst South Asian families in the Bay Area. Also, women who came over here from South Asia and then had girl children were often abused by their in-laws and husbands. This somehow begs the question of how these women were viewed – as incubators, which would produce a male heir? While this is a harder question to answer, what is in fact increasingly common is the crossing over of South Asian women to work as wives (and notice I say work as wives, not ‘be’ wives) for service professionals here or even as wives for illegal immigrants. The dynamics of the two groups of women are substantially different. The women who come here on an H-4 visa are better off than their illegally brought in or those who are wives of blue collar workers. In the H-4 case, the husband has a respectable income and the women are mostly upper caste Hindus, who are educated and in worst case scenarios are able to access the state for immediate redressal. This is not common though. Mostly, women rely on their informal social and same-caste networks to address any family problems. This informal, social, same-caste network basically replaces the extended family in say the Indian setting for instance.
In the illegal immigrant/blue-collar workers case, it is my instinct that the women are worse off. A friend of mine who works with abused women at the Red Cross here once mentioned to me that not only do these women have a problem with speaking in English, they are also thoroughly dependent on their husbands and less skilled than their upper-caste contemporaries and often through counseling my friend unfortunately finds she has to send them back into the same abusive structure, because returning to India is not an option. She finds the case to be similar for many Mexican women who have crossed over illegally. In this case, such women cannot even access the state’s legal apparatus for redressal because they run the risk of being caught and deported along with their husbands.
The documentary on Punjabi brides does not explore these aspects, which is why I chose to raise them here.
But here’s the real question before us? Hasn’t commodification always been there? Arguably, yes! SO what is so new about it? I think that with the rise of new technology for the dissemination of information commodification has infact increased and is taking place on a scale never before seen. Processes of economic internationalization, defined as an exogenous easing of international trade, have led to the rise of new economies, sectors and industries. This has been coupled with a rapid increase in communication technology and shifts in processes of production and forming links with the international economy. All of this has affected social relations at local levels and has changed gender dynamics and given rise to what is called in India 'competing masculinities' which have caste and religious dimensions. I would be happy to go into some cases to establish this during the question and answer session.
But is commodification really taking place on a globalized scale? I wish to introduce you to some statistics collected by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women to establish the global proportions of a certain kind of commodification, i.e., commodification in the sex trade.
(Reads from a report)
“Global trafficking is a $7 Billion industry (UNICRI) ? According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, human trafficking generates an estimated $9.5 billion in annual revenue. In Thailand, trafficking is a 500 billion Baht annual business (equivalent to approximately 124 million U.S. dollars), which represents a value equal to around 60 per cent of the government budget (CATW). ? In Korea, sex industry profits reached 24.0712 trillion won, which is equivalent to 4.4% of 578.8 trillion national GDP and was the same as the profits from agriculture and fishery industry. ? Pornography/Cybersex industry generates approximately $ 1B annually and is expected to grow to 55-7B over the next 5 years”
Let me assault you with some more statistics.
“Each week 60,000 Victorian men spend $7M on prostitution, with the legalized industry turning over more than $360M a year and drawing on some 4500 prostituted women and girls (Jeffreys) Italy: 1 of 6 (or almost 17%) Italian men uses women in prostitution. Differently stated, this means that in Italy, 9 million men use an estimated 50,000 women in prostitution (International Conference, 2004). Germany: 18% of German men regularly pay for sex Adolf Gallwitz,” 2003). One million prostitute-users buy women daily in Germany for sexual activities (Herz, 2003). UK: 10% of London’s male population buys women for the sex of prostitution (Brown, 2000) USA: Estimated one half of the adult male population are frequent prostitute-users, and that 69% of the same population had purchased women for sexual activities at least once (Brown, 2000). o Thailand : 5.1 million sexual tourists a year, 450,000 local customers buy sex every day (Barry). 75% of Thai men were prostitution buyers, almost 50% had their first sexual intercourse with women in prostitution (Brown, 2000) Vietnam: 70% of those caught in brothels are reported to be state officials, 60% to 70% of men in Cambodia have purchased women for sexual activities”
And these are just statistics about trafficking and the sex industry. With this we can club other forms of commodification which are public – strip clubs, the beauty industry and cross-border private commodification such as in the case of the Punjabi brides.
SO there is indeed a global and an economic element to commodification. Another aspect of commodification which I have not found highlighted in many theoretical articles is the idea of replacement. So technically an object is commodified if it can also be replaced easily. Can the Punjabi brides be replaced as well? Apparently yes. First, in foreign lands the geographic distance that separates the husband and wife from their extended family and insulates them from social pressures, also makes it easier for divorces to occur. Simply, because society does not frown upon divorces as much. Second, in some Punjabi villages (not covered by the documentary) grooms sometimes return whenever they run out of money abroad. They marry a girl, collect a hefty dowry and move back promising to file for immigration. Of course, marrying an NRI comes at a price!!
The documentary about call centers in India is somewhat tangential to these broader ideas of commodification. While it is unclear if women’s work in a call center can be considered commodification, there is no doubt that the rise of call centers has in fact led to a fundamental reordering of women’s roles in the family. In Indian call centers women often work all night, something that would probably have shocked an Indian upper-caste family twenty years ago.
It is now more commonplace to see women outside in the wee hours of the morning. One of the reasons for this change in attitude is the hefty pay packets that call-center employees earn. This is sometimes substantially generous and even equals the money earned by a girls’ parents. Girls are encouraged to use their English language skills and hospitable upbringing and use that to earn money. In return parents overlook the long hours, the nights spent in a call center and the out-station trips taken in the company of male colleagues. Like I said, twenty years ago this would have raised eyebrows.
A consequence of this increased visibility of women as Prem Chowdhry’s study of the National Capital Region and Haryana reveals, is a dramatic rise in the number of rapes reported in Delhi. Not all are linked to call-centers of course. But is a function of more women working outside of the house more generally and more women actually reporting rapes. A couple of years ago, The Haryana govt., which is where most call –centers are located tried to protect women by saying they could not work night shifts. The logic was this would somehow “protect” them from violence and aggression. However, this did not come into effect. Interestingly, the way you rise through the ranks of a call center is by servicing more and more customers. While every call center has a separate incentive structure most do involve answering as many phone calls as you can and finishing your quotas set by your team leader. It is during the night-shifts that Indian call centers are ringing off the hooks because of the time difference. If women were prohibited from working the night shifts it would take them substantially longer to live up to the incentive structure laid down and they would climb the ranks much more slowly.
Recently call centers have imposed a dress code on women. They could wear Indian outfits and Western outfits, but no sleeveless outfits, short skirts or something uncomfortably tight. Cleavages were meant to be hidden and no mid-riff could peep out. Apparently, bare arms lead to more aggression and violence against women, or so the flawed logic stated. This is a common assumption that has led to the imposition of dress codes across the country. Women who reveal their bodies are more likely to be victims of sexual aggression. While there is simply no empirical evidence to back this, such ideas permeate the patriarchal wisdom.
I will conclude by highlighting once more by looking at possible areas of investigation for future research.
1. We need to take a closer look at commodification and break it up or disaggregate it perhaps along the lines of my suggestion
2. We need to disaggregate patriarchy as this monolithic overarching concept and look at how structures of patriarchy differ with respect to culture and region. We also need to understand that women slip into and slide out of different structures of patriarchy and that this needs to be drawn out more in theory.
3. As I have tried to show commodification has a deep impact on the rights of women as citizens and individuals and economic actors. We need this debate to be reflected in a more strident manner at domestic and international levels.
4. We need to problematize models of development, as they exist – neo-liberal economics, which have engendered a certain sexual division of labor in developing countries. Terms like feminization of the labor force conceal more than they reveal. Although I do not talk about this aspect at length, I would be happy to address questions related to this during the question and answer session.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Right Price, Rice Price: Competitive Populism in the 2009 Election
The Congress and the BJP have learned much from NT Rama Rao. In the early 1980’s Rao decided to cheapen the price of a kg of rice to Rs 2 after discovering that the state of Andhra Pradesh, one of the leading producers of rice in India, also housed an agricultural labor population that could not access rice due to inefficiencies and corruption in the public distribution system of the state. In the current election the Congress (I) has promised 25 kg of rice or wheat at Rs 3 per kg for all families below the poverty line. It also pledged to abolish all central and state level indirect taxes and introduce a moderate goods and services tax (GST). Not be left behind, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) has promised 35 kg of rice or wheat at Rs 2 per kg to BPL families along with income tax exemptions of up to Rs 3 lakhs for the salaried class, complete exemption from income tax for jawans plus one rank, one pension for ex-servicemen, waiving of agricultural loans interest ceiling on the same at 4 per cent. In short, our national parties have been promising populist policy measures to win the electoral affections of the voting population.
Populism, as a term, has been used very loosely to apply to all brands of “catch all” politics. It has often been seen as a concept that addresses the need for an assertion of those groups who have limited access to certain spheres of state and society. Populism is not a one-dimensional phenomenon and has been found to be quite compatible with various brands of politics and regime types including fascism and socialism. It involves political, economic and socio-cultural posturing aimed at influencing or capturing the imagination and loyalties of voters either by envisioning a new national or political order and/or by offering broad incentives to groups. In recent years many have come to associate populism with economic policies, tax breaks, etc.
In the last century in India, Mahatma Gandhi is often referred to as a populist leader whose articulation of the nation as an agglomeration of non-hierarchical groups did capture the imagination of erstwhile untouchables, middle-classes, peasants, workers, upper-middle classes and also cut across religious and regional divides. After Independence the Congress forged a history of populism with Indira Gandhi launching her ‘Garibi Hatao’ campaign in 1970-71 in the aftermath of her bid to break free from the “Syndicate” within the party. Mrs. Gandhi attempted to centralize power within her hands; she nationalized banks in 1969 (which also led to a split within the Indian National Congress) for the end result of providing micro-credit to the nation’s agricultural poor living in rural India. Her various piecemeal anti-poverty programs did help a narrow section of the poor and the resonance that the Twenty Point Economic Program had with the electorate, made successive governments extremely wary of getting rid of the agenda completely. Since then quick-fix poverty alleviation programs targeted to briefly ease suffering caused by structural poverty have been a strategy employed by the central government in many states. Several regional parties in India that became increasingly strident in the decade of the 80’s and 90’s have also engineered populist agendas – the DMK, AIADMK, BSP, Telugu Desam, Asom Gana Parishad, Janta Dal, Samajwadi Janta Party, Rashtriya Janta Dal.
In the literature on populism correlations have been made between populist policies and inward looking protectionist economies during early phases of import substitution industrialization. Following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, the costs of sustaining such industrialization strategies rose phenomenally plunging many African and Latin American countries into borrowing and debt. The 1980’s came to be known as Latin America’s ‘lost decade’. In Mexico, Brazil and Argentina while populist leaders were credited with delivering on their promises, many also blamed these very policies for plunging the countries deeper into debt after a vicious cycle of hyperinflation leading to low growth and high interest rates culminating in a debt crisis. The implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs across Latin American countries ushered in a new phase of export-led growth and economic internationalization. Yet it seemed that populism never went away and found ways and means to coexist alongside the market. Kurt Weyland found that often times populist leaders and market-reform strategists had common ground. Both were opposed to pre-existing vested interests – business, lobbies and organized labor.
The implementation of the Washington Consensus across several Less Developed Countries (LDC’s) in the late 1980’s and in India in the 1990’s has also resulted in increasing polarization of incomes reflected in larger Ginis in the short-term. Alongside these troubling economic indicators, the growing relevance of populism as an electoral strategy during periods of unconsolidated market-oriented reforms has also been highlighted. Economic reforms are fundamentally destabilizing because they overturn and challenge existing economic and political coalitions that undergird the status quo. As new political and economic actors begin to take center stage, incumbent governments are hard pressed to respond to newer demands of this emergent middle-class and deal with large-scale migration to urban areas as well. Many demands made by an increasingly vocal middle-class are at odds with the demands of those groups that are excluded from market-reform strategies.
There is ample evidence from around the globe to indicate that populism and market-reform policies have often gone together – Carlos Menem in Argentina, Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Fernando Collor in Brazil won elections on populist strategies, as did Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Lech Walesa in Poland. The difference between the Latin American cases and India, however, is that often leaders like Menem and Fujimori tended to announce populist agendas without the support of party structures, when party structures were weak (as indicated by high electoral volatility) and leaders found themselves at odds with party organizations.
While India ostensibly boasts of a middle class last approximated at about 350 million, majority of our citizens still hover in low-income brackets or plainly live below the poverty line. As many have commented, it is also this group that is most likely to show up and vote in an election, clearly seeing the act of voting as perhaps the only right or claim they are allowed to make on the state. The challenge before our political parties is therefore clear. While ostensibly articulating middle-class anxieties about security, infrastructural development and good old fashioned rising GDP, our parties have also introduced populist policies to carry in their chariots or palms those for whom cheaper rice and repayment of agricultural loans are more important than a safe, non-proliferating nuclear program.
Currently in India the two national parties, Congress (I) and the BJP have adopted populist manifestos in a bid to outdo each other. Often the lack of a clear ideology, or an ideology in crisis (like the BJP’s) prompts adoption of populist measures to lend some measure of coherence to an otherwise crumbling political ideal. Such policies are clear, leave no room for negotiation or doubt and have much resonance with an electorate that is exhausted with political rhetoric and intangible results. These policies offer the electorate individual gains – be it cheaper prices of essential commodities. tax breaks or loan waivers. Populist policies have often worked alongside market-reform strategies also because they help dissipate widespread resentment against uncomfortable liberalization measures.
The BJP has had to compete with the Congress this time around since the vastly popular NREGS scheme and Bharat Nirman project of the incumbent UPA government combined with higher Minimum Support Prices for agricultural crops had allowed purchasing power to rise in rural areas, all of which, says Pranab Mukherjee, contributed to the maintenance of 6.5 per cent growth rate as compared to zero growth in countries in Europe, Latin America. Further, the Indian electorate has not shown much patience for Hindutva rhetoric this time around, except as an entertaining sideshow. The predictable rabble-rousing and threatening speeches against the Indian Muslim community by BJP candidates like Varun Gandhi, have generated some controversy, but quick action by an alert Election Commission against such blatant violations of the Model Code of Conduct and the Representation of People’s Act, 1951, have resulted in a structured and measured response both by political parties and the electorate.
Populism is never a good long-term strategy. It drains the state of income and places heavy financial burdens on the state along with severely constraining the government’s ability to mobilize financial resources. This has happened once in 1982 in Andhra Pradesh. The Mid-Day Meal Scheme which was supposed to cover 60 lakh children across the state ended up costing the state 82 crores. Further, once elected the representatives often roll back some of their policies and cannot be held to account. Finally, populism is also better at alleviating symptoms of poverty rather than its entrenched structural nature moored in lop-sided development practices and semi-feudal modes of production in rural areas. In short, populist policies address symptoms, not causes of poverty and inequality.
Populism, as a term, has been used very loosely to apply to all brands of “catch all” politics. It has often been seen as a concept that addresses the need for an assertion of those groups who have limited access to certain spheres of state and society. Populism is not a one-dimensional phenomenon and has been found to be quite compatible with various brands of politics and regime types including fascism and socialism. It involves political, economic and socio-cultural posturing aimed at influencing or capturing the imagination and loyalties of voters either by envisioning a new national or political order and/or by offering broad incentives to groups. In recent years many have come to associate populism with economic policies, tax breaks, etc.
In the last century in India, Mahatma Gandhi is often referred to as a populist leader whose articulation of the nation as an agglomeration of non-hierarchical groups did capture the imagination of erstwhile untouchables, middle-classes, peasants, workers, upper-middle classes and also cut across religious and regional divides. After Independence the Congress forged a history of populism with Indira Gandhi launching her ‘Garibi Hatao’ campaign in 1970-71 in the aftermath of her bid to break free from the “Syndicate” within the party. Mrs. Gandhi attempted to centralize power within her hands; she nationalized banks in 1969 (which also led to a split within the Indian National Congress) for the end result of providing micro-credit to the nation’s agricultural poor living in rural India. Her various piecemeal anti-poverty programs did help a narrow section of the poor and the resonance that the Twenty Point Economic Program had with the electorate, made successive governments extremely wary of getting rid of the agenda completely. Since then quick-fix poverty alleviation programs targeted to briefly ease suffering caused by structural poverty have been a strategy employed by the central government in many states. Several regional parties in India that became increasingly strident in the decade of the 80’s and 90’s have also engineered populist agendas – the DMK, AIADMK, BSP, Telugu Desam, Asom Gana Parishad, Janta Dal, Samajwadi Janta Party, Rashtriya Janta Dal.
In the literature on populism correlations have been made between populist policies and inward looking protectionist economies during early phases of import substitution industrialization. Following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, the costs of sustaining such industrialization strategies rose phenomenally plunging many African and Latin American countries into borrowing and debt. The 1980’s came to be known as Latin America’s ‘lost decade’. In Mexico, Brazil and Argentina while populist leaders were credited with delivering on their promises, many also blamed these very policies for plunging the countries deeper into debt after a vicious cycle of hyperinflation leading to low growth and high interest rates culminating in a debt crisis. The implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs across Latin American countries ushered in a new phase of export-led growth and economic internationalization. Yet it seemed that populism never went away and found ways and means to coexist alongside the market. Kurt Weyland found that often times populist leaders and market-reform strategists had common ground. Both were opposed to pre-existing vested interests – business, lobbies and organized labor.
The implementation of the Washington Consensus across several Less Developed Countries (LDC’s) in the late 1980’s and in India in the 1990’s has also resulted in increasing polarization of incomes reflected in larger Ginis in the short-term. Alongside these troubling economic indicators, the growing relevance of populism as an electoral strategy during periods of unconsolidated market-oriented reforms has also been highlighted. Economic reforms are fundamentally destabilizing because they overturn and challenge existing economic and political coalitions that undergird the status quo. As new political and economic actors begin to take center stage, incumbent governments are hard pressed to respond to newer demands of this emergent middle-class and deal with large-scale migration to urban areas as well. Many demands made by an increasingly vocal middle-class are at odds with the demands of those groups that are excluded from market-reform strategies.
There is ample evidence from around the globe to indicate that populism and market-reform policies have often gone together – Carlos Menem in Argentina, Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Fernando Collor in Brazil won elections on populist strategies, as did Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Lech Walesa in Poland. The difference between the Latin American cases and India, however, is that often leaders like Menem and Fujimori tended to announce populist agendas without the support of party structures, when party structures were weak (as indicated by high electoral volatility) and leaders found themselves at odds with party organizations.
While India ostensibly boasts of a middle class last approximated at about 350 million, majority of our citizens still hover in low-income brackets or plainly live below the poverty line. As many have commented, it is also this group that is most likely to show up and vote in an election, clearly seeing the act of voting as perhaps the only right or claim they are allowed to make on the state. The challenge before our political parties is therefore clear. While ostensibly articulating middle-class anxieties about security, infrastructural development and good old fashioned rising GDP, our parties have also introduced populist policies to carry in their chariots or palms those for whom cheaper rice and repayment of agricultural loans are more important than a safe, non-proliferating nuclear program.
Currently in India the two national parties, Congress (I) and the BJP have adopted populist manifestos in a bid to outdo each other. Often the lack of a clear ideology, or an ideology in crisis (like the BJP’s) prompts adoption of populist measures to lend some measure of coherence to an otherwise crumbling political ideal. Such policies are clear, leave no room for negotiation or doubt and have much resonance with an electorate that is exhausted with political rhetoric and intangible results. These policies offer the electorate individual gains – be it cheaper prices of essential commodities. tax breaks or loan waivers. Populist policies have often worked alongside market-reform strategies also because they help dissipate widespread resentment against uncomfortable liberalization measures.
The BJP has had to compete with the Congress this time around since the vastly popular NREGS scheme and Bharat Nirman project of the incumbent UPA government combined with higher Minimum Support Prices for agricultural crops had allowed purchasing power to rise in rural areas, all of which, says Pranab Mukherjee, contributed to the maintenance of 6.5 per cent growth rate as compared to zero growth in countries in Europe, Latin America. Further, the Indian electorate has not shown much patience for Hindutva rhetoric this time around, except as an entertaining sideshow. The predictable rabble-rousing and threatening speeches against the Indian Muslim community by BJP candidates like Varun Gandhi, have generated some controversy, but quick action by an alert Election Commission against such blatant violations of the Model Code of Conduct and the Representation of People’s Act, 1951, have resulted in a structured and measured response both by political parties and the electorate.
Populism is never a good long-term strategy. It drains the state of income and places heavy financial burdens on the state along with severely constraining the government’s ability to mobilize financial resources. This has happened once in 1982 in Andhra Pradesh. The Mid-Day Meal Scheme which was supposed to cover 60 lakh children across the state ended up costing the state 82 crores. Further, once elected the representatives often roll back some of their policies and cannot be held to account. Finally, populism is also better at alleviating symptoms of poverty rather than its entrenched structural nature moored in lop-sided development practices and semi-feudal modes of production in rural areas. In short, populist policies address symptoms, not causes of poverty and inequality.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Women in India: Gender and Hindu Nationalism
This is one of the most insanely passionate lectures I ever gave... :) about 4 years ago...
Recent literature on the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India suggests two strands of academic work that bring forth two different kinds of theories about the ascendancy of this movement. One set of theories explains this phenomenon as the result of decades of systematic, painstaking, organizational work and imaginative political strategies ; while the second strand interprets Hindu Nationalism in more cultural and historical terms, arguing that the Hindu nationalists could be successful because they were drawing on older reserves of “religious nationalism” that were always central to most forms of Indian nationalism. A third and much contested argument explains the resurgence of this movement in terms of a larger transformation taking place within the practice of democratic politics in India . TB Hansen terms this the strategy of ‘conservative populism’ and argues that Hindu nationalism is successful due to its ability to successfully ‘articulate fractured desires and anxieties in both urban and rural India.’ The use of post-modern notions of Lacanian ‘lack’ and ‘theft of jouissance’, experienced by the Hindu community, enables Hansen to describe the process whereby Hindu nationalists treat the ‘outsider as enemy’ and focus on the process of ‘othering’ Muslims that is especially crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Jaffrelot on the other hand, argues that the Hindu nationalists have used the universalistic language of democracy to further their own particularistic ends and their adherence to democracy does not validate their democratic and secular credentials.
In this session, we will dwell on some issues about the description of gender in Hindu nationalism.
To begin with, there is no singular or one-dimensional understanding of the women’s movement in India. Feminist scholars have motioned towards four phases of what can be called the Indian women’s movement. In the first phase, women were called upon to join hands with the nationalist leaders and fight the colonial empire. The second phase describes the post-1947 scenario where women’s rights took a back-seat to the development of the Nehruvian state that they hoped would address issues of gender inequality. In the third phase, the disbanded women’s movement came together to express a common critique of what they called the benevolent-patriarchal state. The fourth phase includes the decades from the 80’s onwards that have seen grassroots women’s activism against immediate concerns like domestic violence and alcoholism.
Yet Indian feminists are divided about how to classify women’s movement(s) in India – is there one women’s movement or are there a multitude of such movements? Instinct favors the elaboration of women’s activism in India as a collection of many movements – national and subaltern, pervading different spheres of activism and spanning various issues from environmentalism to representation, violence to class structure. There are women from the Indian elite that have aligned themselves with the Western women’s movement and then there are the subaltern women’s movements that are not connected to the elite movement. But here we are more concerned with the place accorded to women in the ideology of the Hindu right.
Undoubtedly, women are crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Women are also viewed by scholars as being positioned in two ways in the Hindutva framework. First, they are seen as helpless victims of a discourse that has shaped who women are and what they should be doing. Second, many Hindu women are seen as active participants in the Right’s ideology.
In this lecture we will try and recover lost ground between both these positions. We will argue that the Hindu right constructs Hindu women differently from the manner in which it constructs women from minority communities, like Muslims. We will focus on the Hindu woman/Muslim woman antagonism which has found its most rabid expression in 2002 in the Indian state of Gujarat. In a state-supported pogrom against Muslims, most of the casualties were women and children. The assertion of Hindu masculine superiority over the entire Muslim community was done by treating Muslim women as the site where this superiority could be demonstrated through their sexual violation, humiliation and ultimate murder.
But for now, let us focus on our two main readings for this session. Sikata Banerjee seeks to explain women’s involvement with the Hindu right as the result of an incentive framework. She says that the Shiv Sena intricately constructs an incentive structure by combining emotional with economic incentives to attract women’s support for the. This framework places Hindu women in the position of followers of male Shiv Sainiks. However, in doing so Banerjee conceives of such women as incapable of controlling their own decisions and sees them as pawns in a broad discourse of Hindutva or as individuals exercising rational choice. While this is probably not an incorrect argument, we must treat it with some caution.
Explaining women’s rational choice in terms of ‘emotions and economics’ is a rigid framework and ignores the interplay of political events with ideology which also structure ‘choice’. If women respond only to economics and emotion, it seems they lack the capacity to make political judgments based on factors like governmental performance, policies etc - in short, the factors that are used to explain men’s decision making. Banerjee’s argument also fails to give a clear explanation of how women mobilized by the Shiv Sena exercise their power as ‘workers, wives and warriors’ (pp 1221). Further, even after it is clear that women can never exercise actual power in the domain of masculine politics, why do women still continue to support the Shiv Sena?
Differing from Banerjee’s argument is Paola Bacchetta’s argument which does not view women in the Hindu right as mere tools in the hands of the masculine leaders. Instead, Bacchetta treats right-wing women as individuals who participate in this ideology willingly.
Paola Bacchetta brings out the role Hindu women of the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti play in the right’s ideology and sees women’s involvement in the hindutva project as an active choice exercised by Hindu women (Bacchetta, 2004). Problematically, we are only going to deal with women’s role in the Hindu right vis-à-vis two right-wing organizations – the RSS and the Shiv Sena. A third group called the Durga Vahini (women’s wing of the VHP) has practically no scholarship that could lend itself for our discussion purposes. So not only, is academic resource on gender and hindutva scarce, what exists is probably insufficient to enable us to understand women’s involvement in a notoriously anti-woman ideology.
Bacchetta notes the manner in which the Sevika Samiti constructs itself in opposition to its masculine counterpart by emphasizing both the masculine and feminine principles. The feminine principle is of course absent in the elaboration of the Rashtriyia Swayamsewak Sangh. Further, she notes how the ‘Swayam’ or ‘self’ is absent from the Sevika Samiti – a crucial signal that women do not see themselves as individuals. Individualism is the preserve of men. Women can only exist as parts of communities and in opposition to the male within these communities.
Perhaps the starting point on any discussion on gender and the Hindu right must necessarily focus on how the Hindu right sees the nation- state. For VD Savarkar and other ideologues of the RSS, the nation is a ‘mother’ , a female entity that must be protected from invaders (Muslims) who are placed in the role of rapists. The inclusion of warring female Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon is again symbolic of the power of the female. But, the female only exists as part of or in opposition to the male. Therefore, a woman can be powerful as a mother, sister and sometimes as a wife; but this power is circumscribed by the masculine domain.
A Hindu woman is portrayed as a reservoir of moral virtue and all things pure. She is systematically desexualized and her sexual role as a wife is underplayed while her role as a mother is deemed sacred due to the procreative process, which is considered divine. This is nothing new. Even during the national movement women were placed in the role of the keepers (never rulers) of the ‘inner domain’ of the family, while men were ‘forced’ to negotiate the ‘world outside this sacred space’. As is revealed by Tagore’s Ghare Bahire (The Home and the World) and Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) women essentially were involved in the national movement as focal points around which the cult of the Mother Goddess was resurrected and yet the women in his novels remained under the overarching control of the male nationalist.
Therefore, when questions of women being empowered are broached the more important issue is to consider in which domain women are looking for empowerment. Even in the family women exercise their power only in terms of rituals and symbols. For instance, they are the executors of auspicious rituals. But when it comes to women’s assertion in the political domain, they are left out due to a number of binding traditional and institutional factors (internal party female representation, etc). The problem then, it seems is twofold – do women join Hindu nationalist groups as an alternative means of entering the political domain; or do they rationalize their choices ‘economically and emotionally’ thinking that this is the closest they can get to empowerment (as Banerjee suggests), without challenging masculine domination over politics?
Going along with Bacchetta’s argument there is little room for doubting the fact that women constitute an extremely conscious and active group in the Hindu right. This assertion gains a political dimension when Hindu women are placed in opposition to Muslim women and the latter are hypersexualised in response to the former’s desexualization. So, Muslim women are presented as baby-factories, prostitutes, suppressed, craving attention from the Hindu male . Hindu women are both chaste and pure and are equated with the nation-state. They constitute an inviolable domain. Muslim virility is to be controlled and one way to emasculate the Muslim is to attack Muslim women. The Muslim woman’s body then becomes the site of violence in a battle between Hindu men against Muslim men. Sexual domination over Muslim women becomes political domination over the Muslim community.
The point this lecture is trying to impress is that the Hindu Nationalists in India have resurrected a sacred feminine myth and inserted it into the overarching patriarchal myth of the nation. So women are not essentially reduced to appendages of men and their ideologies, but in fact do have their own space within the discourse of the Hindu nation. What results, in our view, is the strengthening of Hindu women as carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy. This movement of Hindu women is in some senses posited against the Western feminist movement led by elite Indian women.
So the overarching problem that women in India seem to be grappling with is not whether there is need for reform (there is an agreement that there is), but where should this reform take place? Should the reform take place within the existing religion/culture/tradition? Should the process of reform and empowerment align itself with Western notions of reform and then launch an offensive against parochial ideologies? This process of interrogation has produced diverse responses ranging from Hindu women seeking to empower themselves in abstract notions of purity and finding a ritualistic voice that is sought only in times of communal crisis and solely for purposes of jingoism and incitement; to grassroots mobilization and finally the elite-led liberal and left traditions.
For instance, Tanika Sarkar points us to the ‘voice of Sadhvi Rithambara’. The Sadhvi is a female holy-woman involved with the right’s political parties and organizations. She is most known for delivering hateful speeches where she decries the Muslim community. In doing so Sadhvi Rithambara also legitimizes all acts of violence carried out against the Muslim community, especially women. Her ‘voice’ is a proxy for voices of Hindu women who incite their husbands, brothers etc to go ahead and battle Muslims. More importantly as one writer puts it, women in the Hindu right are ‘ideological pallbearers’. They drag the right-wing patriarchal ideology along with them into the arenas of family, politics and state. To reaffirm a point made earlier - in doing so they are carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy.
The appropriation of gender by the Hindu right in India posits a serious challenge to notions of gender equality based on universal principles of liberty and equality. Again, appropriating gender is crucial to the Hindu right since without the inclusion of women, they can never portray the Hindu community as an un-fractured, collective whole. The Hindu right’s appropriation of the feminist agenda is a grave setback to Indian women’s movement(s) as a whole. Within this agenda, Hindu women cannot interrogate Hinduism and patriarchy; Muslim women are targets of communal hatred and violence, and liberal feminists cannot talk in terms of equality, entitlements and a uniform civil code for fear of unwittingly aligning themselves with the Hindu right. To conclude, women in the Hindu right can be mothers, sisters, wives, sages, – but never queens (in the political sense)!
Recent literature on the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India suggests two strands of academic work that bring forth two different kinds of theories about the ascendancy of this movement. One set of theories explains this phenomenon as the result of decades of systematic, painstaking, organizational work and imaginative political strategies ; while the second strand interprets Hindu Nationalism in more cultural and historical terms, arguing that the Hindu nationalists could be successful because they were drawing on older reserves of “religious nationalism” that were always central to most forms of Indian nationalism. A third and much contested argument explains the resurgence of this movement in terms of a larger transformation taking place within the practice of democratic politics in India . TB Hansen terms this the strategy of ‘conservative populism’ and argues that Hindu nationalism is successful due to its ability to successfully ‘articulate fractured desires and anxieties in both urban and rural India.’ The use of post-modern notions of Lacanian ‘lack’ and ‘theft of jouissance’, experienced by the Hindu community, enables Hansen to describe the process whereby Hindu nationalists treat the ‘outsider as enemy’ and focus on the process of ‘othering’ Muslims that is especially crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Jaffrelot on the other hand, argues that the Hindu nationalists have used the universalistic language of democracy to further their own particularistic ends and their adherence to democracy does not validate their democratic and secular credentials.
In this session, we will dwell on some issues about the description of gender in Hindu nationalism.
To begin with, there is no singular or one-dimensional understanding of the women’s movement in India. Feminist scholars have motioned towards four phases of what can be called the Indian women’s movement. In the first phase, women were called upon to join hands with the nationalist leaders and fight the colonial empire. The second phase describes the post-1947 scenario where women’s rights took a back-seat to the development of the Nehruvian state that they hoped would address issues of gender inequality. In the third phase, the disbanded women’s movement came together to express a common critique of what they called the benevolent-patriarchal state. The fourth phase includes the decades from the 80’s onwards that have seen grassroots women’s activism against immediate concerns like domestic violence and alcoholism.
Yet Indian feminists are divided about how to classify women’s movement(s) in India – is there one women’s movement or are there a multitude of such movements? Instinct favors the elaboration of women’s activism in India as a collection of many movements – national and subaltern, pervading different spheres of activism and spanning various issues from environmentalism to representation, violence to class structure. There are women from the Indian elite that have aligned themselves with the Western women’s movement and then there are the subaltern women’s movements that are not connected to the elite movement. But here we are more concerned with the place accorded to women in the ideology of the Hindu right.
Undoubtedly, women are crucial to the project of Hindu nationalism. Women are also viewed by scholars as being positioned in two ways in the Hindutva framework. First, they are seen as helpless victims of a discourse that has shaped who women are and what they should be doing. Second, many Hindu women are seen as active participants in the Right’s ideology.
In this lecture we will try and recover lost ground between both these positions. We will argue that the Hindu right constructs Hindu women differently from the manner in which it constructs women from minority communities, like Muslims. We will focus on the Hindu woman/Muslim woman antagonism which has found its most rabid expression in 2002 in the Indian state of Gujarat. In a state-supported pogrom against Muslims, most of the casualties were women and children. The assertion of Hindu masculine superiority over the entire Muslim community was done by treating Muslim women as the site where this superiority could be demonstrated through their sexual violation, humiliation and ultimate murder.
But for now, let us focus on our two main readings for this session. Sikata Banerjee seeks to explain women’s involvement with the Hindu right as the result of an incentive framework. She says that the Shiv Sena intricately constructs an incentive structure by combining emotional with economic incentives to attract women’s support for the. This framework places Hindu women in the position of followers of male Shiv Sainiks. However, in doing so Banerjee conceives of such women as incapable of controlling their own decisions and sees them as pawns in a broad discourse of Hindutva or as individuals exercising rational choice. While this is probably not an incorrect argument, we must treat it with some caution.
Explaining women’s rational choice in terms of ‘emotions and economics’ is a rigid framework and ignores the interplay of political events with ideology which also structure ‘choice’. If women respond only to economics and emotion, it seems they lack the capacity to make political judgments based on factors like governmental performance, policies etc - in short, the factors that are used to explain men’s decision making. Banerjee’s argument also fails to give a clear explanation of how women mobilized by the Shiv Sena exercise their power as ‘workers, wives and warriors’ (pp 1221). Further, even after it is clear that women can never exercise actual power in the domain of masculine politics, why do women still continue to support the Shiv Sena?
Differing from Banerjee’s argument is Paola Bacchetta’s argument which does not view women in the Hindu right as mere tools in the hands of the masculine leaders. Instead, Bacchetta treats right-wing women as individuals who participate in this ideology willingly.
Paola Bacchetta brings out the role Hindu women of the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti play in the right’s ideology and sees women’s involvement in the hindutva project as an active choice exercised by Hindu women (Bacchetta, 2004). Problematically, we are only going to deal with women’s role in the Hindu right vis-à-vis two right-wing organizations – the RSS and the Shiv Sena. A third group called the Durga Vahini (women’s wing of the VHP) has practically no scholarship that could lend itself for our discussion purposes. So not only, is academic resource on gender and hindutva scarce, what exists is probably insufficient to enable us to understand women’s involvement in a notoriously anti-woman ideology.
Bacchetta notes the manner in which the Sevika Samiti constructs itself in opposition to its masculine counterpart by emphasizing both the masculine and feminine principles. The feminine principle is of course absent in the elaboration of the Rashtriyia Swayamsewak Sangh. Further, she notes how the ‘Swayam’ or ‘self’ is absent from the Sevika Samiti – a crucial signal that women do not see themselves as individuals. Individualism is the preserve of men. Women can only exist as parts of communities and in opposition to the male within these communities.
Perhaps the starting point on any discussion on gender and the Hindu right must necessarily focus on how the Hindu right sees the nation- state. For VD Savarkar and other ideologues of the RSS, the nation is a ‘mother’ , a female entity that must be protected from invaders (Muslims) who are placed in the role of rapists. The inclusion of warring female Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon is again symbolic of the power of the female. But, the female only exists as part of or in opposition to the male. Therefore, a woman can be powerful as a mother, sister and sometimes as a wife; but this power is circumscribed by the masculine domain.
A Hindu woman is portrayed as a reservoir of moral virtue and all things pure. She is systematically desexualized and her sexual role as a wife is underplayed while her role as a mother is deemed sacred due to the procreative process, which is considered divine. This is nothing new. Even during the national movement women were placed in the role of the keepers (never rulers) of the ‘inner domain’ of the family, while men were ‘forced’ to negotiate the ‘world outside this sacred space’. As is revealed by Tagore’s Ghare Bahire (The Home and the World) and Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) women essentially were involved in the national movement as focal points around which the cult of the Mother Goddess was resurrected and yet the women in his novels remained under the overarching control of the male nationalist.
Therefore, when questions of women being empowered are broached the more important issue is to consider in which domain women are looking for empowerment. Even in the family women exercise their power only in terms of rituals and symbols. For instance, they are the executors of auspicious rituals. But when it comes to women’s assertion in the political domain, they are left out due to a number of binding traditional and institutional factors (internal party female representation, etc). The problem then, it seems is twofold – do women join Hindu nationalist groups as an alternative means of entering the political domain; or do they rationalize their choices ‘economically and emotionally’ thinking that this is the closest they can get to empowerment (as Banerjee suggests), without challenging masculine domination over politics?
Going along with Bacchetta’s argument there is little room for doubting the fact that women constitute an extremely conscious and active group in the Hindu right. This assertion gains a political dimension when Hindu women are placed in opposition to Muslim women and the latter are hypersexualised in response to the former’s desexualization. So, Muslim women are presented as baby-factories, prostitutes, suppressed, craving attention from the Hindu male . Hindu women are both chaste and pure and are equated with the nation-state. They constitute an inviolable domain. Muslim virility is to be controlled and one way to emasculate the Muslim is to attack Muslim women. The Muslim woman’s body then becomes the site of violence in a battle between Hindu men against Muslim men. Sexual domination over Muslim women becomes political domination over the Muslim community.
The point this lecture is trying to impress is that the Hindu Nationalists in India have resurrected a sacred feminine myth and inserted it into the overarching patriarchal myth of the nation. So women are not essentially reduced to appendages of men and their ideologies, but in fact do have their own space within the discourse of the Hindu nation. What results, in our view, is the strengthening of Hindu women as carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy. This movement of Hindu women is in some senses posited against the Western feminist movement led by elite Indian women.
So the overarching problem that women in India seem to be grappling with is not whether there is need for reform (there is an agreement that there is), but where should this reform take place? Should the reform take place within the existing religion/culture/tradition? Should the process of reform and empowerment align itself with Western notions of reform and then launch an offensive against parochial ideologies? This process of interrogation has produced diverse responses ranging from Hindu women seeking to empower themselves in abstract notions of purity and finding a ritualistic voice that is sought only in times of communal crisis and solely for purposes of jingoism and incitement; to grassroots mobilization and finally the elite-led liberal and left traditions.
For instance, Tanika Sarkar points us to the ‘voice of Sadhvi Rithambara’. The Sadhvi is a female holy-woman involved with the right’s political parties and organizations. She is most known for delivering hateful speeches where she decries the Muslim community. In doing so Sadhvi Rithambara also legitimizes all acts of violence carried out against the Muslim community, especially women. Her ‘voice’ is a proxy for voices of Hindu women who incite their husbands, brothers etc to go ahead and battle Muslims. More importantly as one writer puts it, women in the Hindu right are ‘ideological pallbearers’. They drag the right-wing patriarchal ideology along with them into the arenas of family, politics and state. To reaffirm a point made earlier - in doing so they are carriers and perpetuators of patriarchy.
The appropriation of gender by the Hindu right in India posits a serious challenge to notions of gender equality based on universal principles of liberty and equality. Again, appropriating gender is crucial to the Hindu right since without the inclusion of women, they can never portray the Hindu community as an un-fractured, collective whole. The Hindu right’s appropriation of the feminist agenda is a grave setback to Indian women’s movement(s) as a whole. Within this agenda, Hindu women cannot interrogate Hinduism and patriarchy; Muslim women are targets of communal hatred and violence, and liberal feminists cannot talk in terms of equality, entitlements and a uniform civil code for fear of unwittingly aligning themselves with the Hindu right. To conclude, women in the Hindu right can be mothers, sisters, wives, sages, – but never queens (in the political sense)!
Women in India: Gender and Personal Laws
From a lecture I delivered two years ago...
The Indian state has at times adopted progressive legislation for Indian women. Recently, a new Domestic Violence Act was passed by the Indian Parliament which is a welcome addition to the existing repertoire of laws. Although it has taken ten long years for Parliament to pass this Act, it breaks precedence by covering women even in live-in relationships to seek redress under the law. This suggests a remarkable change in opinion at the highest levels of the state in a country where non-marital relationships between men and women are frowned upon. The Act also specifies that women in live-in relationships and under married conditions cannot be evicted from the premises they occupy. They have been identified as co-owners even though such women may not possess title or deeds to the property in their name.
We need to qualify this optimism by looking at the previous record of the Indian state with respect to legislation on women’s issues. This record is a mixed bag. In the past the Indian state has implemented legislation which on the surface seems progressive, yet militates against women in ways we will discuss in this session. There are two points that we will make in this session. First, citizenship in India is granted to groups and not individuals. This has unique repercussions for the Indian women’s movement. Second, law itself furthers the fragmentation of the movement in two ways – at local levels law interacts with the socially dominant group and its version of patriarchy and, law furthers the fragmentation of the ‘female’ since law itself is not independent of moral visions that guide ideas of justice. Finally, we will argue that the women’s movement in India is fragmented because the subject of the movement – the ‘woman’ – is fragmented.
This fragmented woman has become the subject of law making in India leading to laws which privilege equality over difference. This has unique consequences for Indian women. The principle of equality privileges ‘sameness’ under law, i.e., women should be treated the same as men by law. However, this ignores the fact that gender is a socially constructed category and women’s lives are diverse and affected by the various communal spaces they occupy. Therefore, treating women equally under law can end up reinforcing or even worsening their differences (Kapur and Crossman, 2001).
Since most laws do not address the varying experiences of women from different communities, they end up perpetuating the fragmentation of the female identity.
First, we will attempt to situate gender-specific laws in India in a historical context. Second, we will then focus on specific issues/judgments - abortion, the Shah Bano controversy and the Bhanwari Devi rape judgment to argue that one of the main problems the women’s movement faces in India is the fact that citizenship rights have been granted to groups not individuals. What follows from this understanding is the idea that a woman is first Hindu or Muslim, i.e., her membership in a community is prior and more important than her existence as an individual. Indian laws have internalized this conception and have been guided by an Anglo-Brahminical idea of justice.
The existing framework of laws related to women has a particular historical trajectory which pre-dates colonialism. Flavia Agnes describes this trajectory and claims that what we see in India today is a culmination of Brahminical Hindu law, Shari’ah based Muslim law and finally the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition (Agnes, 1999).
For Agnes, existing laws have been framed by a unique legal experience. The British attempted to simplify existing laws in society but also tried to achieve this by not disturbing existing legal traditions. They called on pandits and qazis to interpret traditional laws. The clerics on their part offered a selective interpretation of traditional law under which women’s rights were slowly, but surely, taken away. For instance, Hindu women had the right to their ‘stridhana’ (all possessions given to them at the time of their marriage). Through this process of filtering law, by 1949 Hindu women had lost this right. As another example, Islam (being a trade specific religion) treated marriage as a contract with rights for both men and women. This contractual nature of marriage turned into a morally binding one by 1949 with disproportionately more rights for men. Finally, Hindu women’s limited right to share in the family’s property was taken away (Agnes, 1999).
It must be emphasized here that the British were operating under the moral vision of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which saw women as commodities and less-than-equal beings. British women did not have the right to property on marriage. The post-Independence Indian state adopted a synthesized legal framework which stripped women of many economic and social rights.
The overarching vision of law that dominates India is one that has been filtered through the colonial experience. As Partha Chatterjee notes the prime task of the nationalist movement and its leaders was to first and foremost present the indigenous community as un-fragmented. One way by which this was achieved was by making a difference between the ‘inner realm’ and ‘outer realm’ of society. The inner realm was the realm of tradition and family which the woman guaranteed in her role as the reservoir of all virtue. The outer realm was the public realm of politics and the Raj. While the Raj could dominate the outer realm, the inner realm had to be kept uncontaminated. This purity of the inner realm was to be maintained at all costs through many tactics. Perhaps one of these tactics was the standardization of laws for the community. In this process women were relegated to an inferior position. Their demands were seen as subversions of the unity of the community. This notion of community and women’s subversion has played out in modern day politics in India.
We will now turn to specific controversial issues and legislation.
Many observers have commented on the fact that India has progressive legislation with respect to women. One of the arguments invoked to support this observation is the fact that India has made abortions legal. However, abortions in India are not legal because of any protracted movement that pressurized the state into making them legal. Instead, the simple reason given is that abortions are legal in India since they are linked to the success of family planning as a state policy.
In 1994 the Supreme Court implemented the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act. Under this Act, state governments were issued directives to take steps to ensure that gender determination through ultrasound and amniocentesis did not occur. Amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of and selectively abort female fetuses. The catch in the ruling was that this law applied only to government run clinics and hospitals. In 2002, the Supreme Court hauled up the governments of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and inquired about the steps taken to curb female feticide. The petitioner was CEHAT which claimed that these governments had actually been giving licenses to ultrasound clinics and so had undermined the Supreme Court’s judgment.
This sequence of events reveals a few points. First, legal abortions in India were being used against future women through the ‘femicide of foetuses’ (Menon 2005). Second, the state demonstrated that it could only curb the activities of state-run clinics. Third, implementation at the local level was never carried out in accordance with the decree of the Supreme Court. Fourth, provisions in the law did not recognize that women in India do not control their own sexuality. Decisions about abortion are not taken by individual women but are taken by the husband and his family. The abortion law laid out conditions under which abortion was legal, but also stated that if it could be proved that the abortion was unnecessary and had been done by the woman without any pressure, she would be held liable and would be punished. The burden of proof was placed on the woman who would undergo an abortion. (Menon 2005). Fifth, the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques law demonstrates the interaction of local patriarchies with the state.
Our second case moves away from the realm of female sexuality into the sphere of civil rights and citizenship. The Shah Bano controversy is a well known one in India. She was a 68 year old Muslim woman whose husband divorced her by uttering the word ‘talaq’ thrice. According to shari’ah law, the husband is supposed to maintain his wife for the duration of the ‘iddat’ – three months from the date of the divorce. Shah Bano approached the courts to claim alimony from her husband beyond that period. Therefore, she asked to be treated the same as other Indian women who could claim alimony/maintenance from their husbands. The Supreme Court in a piece of progressive legislation upheld Shah Bano’s status as an Indian citizen. She was entitled to her maintenance. Justice Chandrachud’s ruling also called into question the logic of existing community-based personal laws in as much as they militated against specific individuals within the community. He expressed a desire for implementing the Uniform Civil Code. Matters were complicated when in 1986 the Rajiv Gandhi government in overturned the Court’s ruling by adopting legislation in Parliament which reinstated the primacy of the Shari’ah based Muslim Personal Law in governing the rights of Muslim women. This step was taken after the Congress (a political party) suffered in by-elections in a couple of states and interpreted that as a loss of Muslim support (Hasan 2000).
The Shah Bano controversy highlighted the following. First, the Court in this case tried to follow the norm of equality but was scuttled in its endeavor by the government, who capitulated under pressure from the Muslim Personal Law Board and individual clerics. Second, the issue also demonstrated the will of the government to preserve harmony between communities at the cost of the ‘minority within the minority’ (Hasan 2000). Third, the debate surrounding Muslim women was construed as a debate about communities not women, much less Muslim women. Fourth, Muslim women were not granted access to legislation under Section 125 of the CrPC which could be accessed by other women. This emphasized their difference. Finally, the government and community leaders obfuscated the issue by treating women as members of a community first and citizens of the country later.
Bhanwari Devi Rape Case
Bhanwari Devi was a saathin with the Women’s Development Program in the state Rajasthan who was working against child marriage. Upper caste men from a community which supported the practice raped her in an attempt to discipline her. When the matter went to court, following the intervention of women’s groups, the verdict stunned everyone. The local court ruled that since Bhanwari Devi was a low caste (SC) woman it was unthinkable to allege that anyone from the upper-caste community could rape her (Menon 2001).
The above discussion reveals that women are treated in India as members of a community before they are treated as citizens of the state. While abortion laws militate against individual women on the basis of their membership in the female community, the Shah Bano controversy demonstrates how rights are conferred upon communities to the detriment of individual women within the community. The Bhanwari Devi case examines the manner in which Bhanwari Devi was disprivileged for being a low caste woman who could not benefit from the state’s legal apparatus. The state apparatus viewed Bhanwari Devi’s underprivileged social status as grounds to refute the charges she leveled.
What we have hoped to demonstrate is that the implementation of law is indeed divorced from the spirit of the law at the local levels. But more importantly we have argued that law and justice are separate concepts. Justice is more of a moral vision of the common and individual good; while law is derived from justice and therefore from moral visions that prevail in society at any given point in time (Menon 2005). In India, maintaining harmony between communities has remained high on the state’s agenda to the detriment of women. The state interacts with community-based structures of patriarchy at all levels to produce competing versions of the Indian woman. So the Indian woman is not a single identity.
This difficulty in pinning down the ‘woman’ has resulted in a general incoherence in the Indian women’s movement. There can be no singular movement if the subject of that movement is amorphous. In fact, as of today, there are many separate women’s movements across the country which articulate particular anxieties framed by different ‘fields of protest’ (Ray 1999). Indeed, the gender identity is fragmented. But this is precisely because gender is a socially constructed category which defines particular roles for both men and women. What fragments the ‘woman’ further are laws which seek to universalize women’s experiences in the name of equality (Kapur and Crossman, 2001). Therefore, law itself must be scrutinized to reveal what it enshrines as its guiding principles.
The Indian state has at times adopted progressive legislation for Indian women. Recently, a new Domestic Violence Act was passed by the Indian Parliament which is a welcome addition to the existing repertoire of laws. Although it has taken ten long years for Parliament to pass this Act, it breaks precedence by covering women even in live-in relationships to seek redress under the law. This suggests a remarkable change in opinion at the highest levels of the state in a country where non-marital relationships between men and women are frowned upon. The Act also specifies that women in live-in relationships and under married conditions cannot be evicted from the premises they occupy. They have been identified as co-owners even though such women may not possess title or deeds to the property in their name.
We need to qualify this optimism by looking at the previous record of the Indian state with respect to legislation on women’s issues. This record is a mixed bag. In the past the Indian state has implemented legislation which on the surface seems progressive, yet militates against women in ways we will discuss in this session. There are two points that we will make in this session. First, citizenship in India is granted to groups and not individuals. This has unique repercussions for the Indian women’s movement. Second, law itself furthers the fragmentation of the movement in two ways – at local levels law interacts with the socially dominant group and its version of patriarchy and, law furthers the fragmentation of the ‘female’ since law itself is not independent of moral visions that guide ideas of justice. Finally, we will argue that the women’s movement in India is fragmented because the subject of the movement – the ‘woman’ – is fragmented.
This fragmented woman has become the subject of law making in India leading to laws which privilege equality over difference. This has unique consequences for Indian women. The principle of equality privileges ‘sameness’ under law, i.e., women should be treated the same as men by law. However, this ignores the fact that gender is a socially constructed category and women’s lives are diverse and affected by the various communal spaces they occupy. Therefore, treating women equally under law can end up reinforcing or even worsening their differences (Kapur and Crossman, 2001).
Since most laws do not address the varying experiences of women from different communities, they end up perpetuating the fragmentation of the female identity.
First, we will attempt to situate gender-specific laws in India in a historical context. Second, we will then focus on specific issues/judgments - abortion, the Shah Bano controversy and the Bhanwari Devi rape judgment to argue that one of the main problems the women’s movement faces in India is the fact that citizenship rights have been granted to groups not individuals. What follows from this understanding is the idea that a woman is first Hindu or Muslim, i.e., her membership in a community is prior and more important than her existence as an individual. Indian laws have internalized this conception and have been guided by an Anglo-Brahminical idea of justice.
The existing framework of laws related to women has a particular historical trajectory which pre-dates colonialism. Flavia Agnes describes this trajectory and claims that what we see in India today is a culmination of Brahminical Hindu law, Shari’ah based Muslim law and finally the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition (Agnes, 1999).
For Agnes, existing laws have been framed by a unique legal experience. The British attempted to simplify existing laws in society but also tried to achieve this by not disturbing existing legal traditions. They called on pandits and qazis to interpret traditional laws. The clerics on their part offered a selective interpretation of traditional law under which women’s rights were slowly, but surely, taken away. For instance, Hindu women had the right to their ‘stridhana’ (all possessions given to them at the time of their marriage). Through this process of filtering law, by 1949 Hindu women had lost this right. As another example, Islam (being a trade specific religion) treated marriage as a contract with rights for both men and women. This contractual nature of marriage turned into a morally binding one by 1949 with disproportionately more rights for men. Finally, Hindu women’s limited right to share in the family’s property was taken away (Agnes, 1999).
It must be emphasized here that the British were operating under the moral vision of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which saw women as commodities and less-than-equal beings. British women did not have the right to property on marriage. The post-Independence Indian state adopted a synthesized legal framework which stripped women of many economic and social rights.
The overarching vision of law that dominates India is one that has been filtered through the colonial experience. As Partha Chatterjee notes the prime task of the nationalist movement and its leaders was to first and foremost present the indigenous community as un-fragmented. One way by which this was achieved was by making a difference between the ‘inner realm’ and ‘outer realm’ of society. The inner realm was the realm of tradition and family which the woman guaranteed in her role as the reservoir of all virtue. The outer realm was the public realm of politics and the Raj. While the Raj could dominate the outer realm, the inner realm had to be kept uncontaminated. This purity of the inner realm was to be maintained at all costs through many tactics. Perhaps one of these tactics was the standardization of laws for the community. In this process women were relegated to an inferior position. Their demands were seen as subversions of the unity of the community. This notion of community and women’s subversion has played out in modern day politics in India.
We will now turn to specific controversial issues and legislation.
Many observers have commented on the fact that India has progressive legislation with respect to women. One of the arguments invoked to support this observation is the fact that India has made abortions legal. However, abortions in India are not legal because of any protracted movement that pressurized the state into making them legal. Instead, the simple reason given is that abortions are legal in India since they are linked to the success of family planning as a state policy.
In 1994 the Supreme Court implemented the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act. Under this Act, state governments were issued directives to take steps to ensure that gender determination through ultrasound and amniocentesis did not occur. Amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of and selectively abort female fetuses. The catch in the ruling was that this law applied only to government run clinics and hospitals. In 2002, the Supreme Court hauled up the governments of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and inquired about the steps taken to curb female feticide. The petitioner was CEHAT which claimed that these governments had actually been giving licenses to ultrasound clinics and so had undermined the Supreme Court’s judgment.
This sequence of events reveals a few points. First, legal abortions in India were being used against future women through the ‘femicide of foetuses’ (Menon 2005). Second, the state demonstrated that it could only curb the activities of state-run clinics. Third, implementation at the local level was never carried out in accordance with the decree of the Supreme Court. Fourth, provisions in the law did not recognize that women in India do not control their own sexuality. Decisions about abortion are not taken by individual women but are taken by the husband and his family. The abortion law laid out conditions under which abortion was legal, but also stated that if it could be proved that the abortion was unnecessary and had been done by the woman without any pressure, she would be held liable and would be punished. The burden of proof was placed on the woman who would undergo an abortion. (Menon 2005). Fifth, the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques law demonstrates the interaction of local patriarchies with the state.
Our second case moves away from the realm of female sexuality into the sphere of civil rights and citizenship. The Shah Bano controversy is a well known one in India. She was a 68 year old Muslim woman whose husband divorced her by uttering the word ‘talaq’ thrice. According to shari’ah law, the husband is supposed to maintain his wife for the duration of the ‘iddat’ – three months from the date of the divorce. Shah Bano approached the courts to claim alimony from her husband beyond that period. Therefore, she asked to be treated the same as other Indian women who could claim alimony/maintenance from their husbands. The Supreme Court in a piece of progressive legislation upheld Shah Bano’s status as an Indian citizen. She was entitled to her maintenance. Justice Chandrachud’s ruling also called into question the logic of existing community-based personal laws in as much as they militated against specific individuals within the community. He expressed a desire for implementing the Uniform Civil Code. Matters were complicated when in 1986 the Rajiv Gandhi government in overturned the Court’s ruling by adopting legislation in Parliament which reinstated the primacy of the Shari’ah based Muslim Personal Law in governing the rights of Muslim women. This step was taken after the Congress (a political party) suffered in by-elections in a couple of states and interpreted that as a loss of Muslim support (Hasan 2000).
The Shah Bano controversy highlighted the following. First, the Court in this case tried to follow the norm of equality but was scuttled in its endeavor by the government, who capitulated under pressure from the Muslim Personal Law Board and individual clerics. Second, the issue also demonstrated the will of the government to preserve harmony between communities at the cost of the ‘minority within the minority’ (Hasan 2000). Third, the debate surrounding Muslim women was construed as a debate about communities not women, much less Muslim women. Fourth, Muslim women were not granted access to legislation under Section 125 of the CrPC which could be accessed by other women. This emphasized their difference. Finally, the government and community leaders obfuscated the issue by treating women as members of a community first and citizens of the country later.
Bhanwari Devi Rape Case
Bhanwari Devi was a saathin with the Women’s Development Program in the state Rajasthan who was working against child marriage. Upper caste men from a community which supported the practice raped her in an attempt to discipline her. When the matter went to court, following the intervention of women’s groups, the verdict stunned everyone. The local court ruled that since Bhanwari Devi was a low caste (SC) woman it was unthinkable to allege that anyone from the upper-caste community could rape her (Menon 2001).
The above discussion reveals that women are treated in India as members of a community before they are treated as citizens of the state. While abortion laws militate against individual women on the basis of their membership in the female community, the Shah Bano controversy demonstrates how rights are conferred upon communities to the detriment of individual women within the community. The Bhanwari Devi case examines the manner in which Bhanwari Devi was disprivileged for being a low caste woman who could not benefit from the state’s legal apparatus. The state apparatus viewed Bhanwari Devi’s underprivileged social status as grounds to refute the charges she leveled.
What we have hoped to demonstrate is that the implementation of law is indeed divorced from the spirit of the law at the local levels. But more importantly we have argued that law and justice are separate concepts. Justice is more of a moral vision of the common and individual good; while law is derived from justice and therefore from moral visions that prevail in society at any given point in time (Menon 2005). In India, maintaining harmony between communities has remained high on the state’s agenda to the detriment of women. The state interacts with community-based structures of patriarchy at all levels to produce competing versions of the Indian woman. So the Indian woman is not a single identity.
This difficulty in pinning down the ‘woman’ has resulted in a general incoherence in the Indian women’s movement. There can be no singular movement if the subject of that movement is amorphous. In fact, as of today, there are many separate women’s movements across the country which articulate particular anxieties framed by different ‘fields of protest’ (Ray 1999). Indeed, the gender identity is fragmented. But this is precisely because gender is a socially constructed category which defines particular roles for both men and women. What fragments the ‘woman’ further are laws which seek to universalize women’s experiences in the name of equality (Kapur and Crossman, 2001). Therefore, law itself must be scrutinized to reveal what it enshrines as its guiding principles.
Women in India: The Missing Girl Child
A few years ago Manish Jha’s first feature film Matrubhoomi shocked a nation which had been touted as one the world’s emerging economic giants. In Matrubhoomi a village girl Kalki is married off to five men because the dearth of women in the village helps rewrite the rules of marriage and conjugality. Matrubhoomi is a futuristic vision of India, albeit a bleak one. The sex ratio in this bleak future is adverse to the extent that reenactments of the Pandavas conquest of Draupadi are almost commonplace. Matrubhoomi’s India is not an economic giant. It is instead an India where the perpetuation of a regressive mindset has destroyed the sanctity of the feminine. It is in this future that Kalki seeks to find her identity as a human first, an individual, a woman and a mother. Kalki's story is heartbreaking. It breathes and seethes at the intersection of family, caste, religion, class and gender. As each of her husbands exercises his conjugal rights over her in turn she is likened to cattle, she is repeatedly raped and becomes a sub-human being, stripped off her rights, her clothes, her dignity.
In 1994 the Supreme Court implemented the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act. Under this Act, state governments were issued directives to take steps to ensure that gender determination through ultrasound and amniocentesis did not occur. In 2002, the Supreme Court hauled up the governments of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and inquired about the steps taken to curb female feticide. CEHAT, the petitioner, claimed that these governments had actually been giving licenses to ultrasound clinics and so had undermined the Supreme Court’s judgment. With the introduction of portable ultrasound machines doctors visit villages in India and offer gender selection services.
Last year a first year medical student from UCSF-Berkeley, Sunita Puri, outlined the extent of sex-selection among the Bay Area’s South Asian families (mostly Indians). The birth of a female child led to the ill-treatment of the mother at the hands of her in-laws and husband in the Bay Area. Many Indian wives across the region suffer under abusive husbands, whose only claim to fame is their job profile which more often than not boasts of an impressive engineering degree from reputed institutions across India and the world.
Gen-Select is a small American firm that specializes in medical kits that help determine the sex of a fetus. Women can program their fetuses simply by taking some “nutriceuticals” and sticking to a certain diet plan and conjugal schedule. GenSelect placed an innocuous advertisement in an Indian newspaper and according to the management it received an overwhelming response form its Indian market. Priced at about 200 to 450 dollars, a customer can get this FDA approved kit and have a baby of either sex. In India the kit was offered for about 6000 INR. The company also assures customers of a 96% success rate with the gender selection process and even offers a money back guarantee if the procedure fails.
The above information is an attempt by me to contextualize the magnitude of the problem confronting the missing girl child in India. Matrubhoomi shocked audiences throughout the country, but many did not bother to look at the present day situation in the country where sex-selective abortions, although deemed illegal, continue to occur. A British medical journal recently reported that over the last decade or so oven 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in India by families and individuals keen on begetting a male heir. The sex ratio according to the 2001 census on an average for India is 933:1000. Northern Indian states have lower sex ratios as compared to their southern counterparts. However, since 1986, southern Indian states with the exception of Kerala have not done too well either on the sex ratio front. Arnold and Roy claim that the sex ratios at birth for children whose mothers had ultrasound or amniocentesis “about 5 per cent of female foetuses in India are aborted among women who have these tests. In Haryana, it is estimated that 43 per cent of the female foetuses are likely to have been aborted for these same women. Another indication of the use of sex selective abortions in India is the very low sex ratios of births to women with no living sons, particularly in states with strong parental preferences for sons.”
We can invoke countless figures that testify to the magnitude of the problem before the country. The problem stated simply is this – we are a nation that kills off our girl children. The girl child is ‘missing’, because she is not allowed to live.
In India abortion is not illegal. Indeed the very foundation of population control in India rests on the existence of legal abortion. In fact if abortion were illegal, abortion related deaths in India would increase amongst the category of young fertile women since they would be conducted by unskilled doctors and quacks under unhygienic conditions using questionable practices.
On the surface there is really nothing amiss about detecting the state of a fetus. Ultrasounds help detect deformities in a fetus and may help in overcoming obstacles during childbirth. However, there is really no way of stopping a doctor from determining the sex of a fetus. Many families in turn when given this information choose to abort a female fetus. Why does this happen? It is not big mystery that in India sons are preferred over daughters. Daughters are seen as liabilities and any expenditure on daughters is done reluctantly since the only possible life path open to a daughter is that of a wife. Sons on the other hand are seen as assets who will turn into bread winners later on in life and take care of aged parents. Be it discrimination in employment, education, capability enhancement, or even religious practice, Indian women have lived under the bell-jar like oppression of this mindset for centuries.
Dreze and Sen in their study of female education in India revealed the low enrollment rates and high dropout rates in female primary school enrollment in north Indian states and concluded that one of the factors that contributed to this was a traditional mindset that saw expenditure on female education as wasteful.
There is a pressing need to highlight the overall impact of a conservative and militant mindset on the life chances of the girl child. The reason I choose to write about this is because this mindset is not endemic only to India, but has in fact migrated to foreign shores. Puri’s account of the disturbing trends amongst South Asian families in the Bay Areas leads me to a larger issue about the migration of ideas. It is obvious then that level and extent of education and economic security has very little to do with the destruction of certain notions. The danger really arises from men and women who perpetuate such beliefs and notions in the process delivering a shattering blow to any notion of progress we may take pride in.
Products like GenSelect are another weapon for the anti-girl child individuals and families in India. Less torturous than methods like selective abortion, the product nevertheless contributes to the growing problem of missing women in India.
Even though the 2001 Census recorded an increase in the sex ratio for the second time in five decades, the troubling figure is not the average sex ratio, but is in fact the sex ratio in the 0-6 age group. The 2001 Census reveals that the child sex ration dropped from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2002. Each state also registered a decline with the exceptions of Kerala, Sikkim, Mizoram and Tripura where an increase was recorded. In Punjab the ratio fell 82 points to 793, by 59 points in Haryana, 54 points in Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh, 50 points in Gujarat and Delhi and 42 points in Uttaranchal. Many people have explained the vicissitudes of the sex ratio in India as a result of migrations across the country or problems in census data collection. However, the consistency of certain figures like that of the child sex ratio is disconcerting to the extent that the repeated patters across the same states testify to the fact that there may indeed be a deeper problem.
There are a number of reasons that I can identify that contribute to the adverse sex ratio. First, the son-preference maxim is still strong across India and even more deeply entrenched in north Indian states. Second, the lack of concerted pressure from society as a whole translates into sex selection as a legally unacceptable but socially sanctioned practice. Third, the failure of the legal system at various levels compounds the problem. While acts are fine in letter and spirit, the lack of political will to enforce them and mete out punishment to people indulging in sex selection is absent. Fourth, the awareness of the missing girl child as a problem confronting the country exists only in a very elite circle of activists, academicians, and professionals. The vast majority of the country is not concerned with indicators like the sex ratio and the general apathy of people results in little popular activism against the problem.
In 1994 the Supreme Court implemented the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act. Under this Act, state governments were issued directives to take steps to ensure that gender determination through ultrasound and amniocentesis did not occur. In 2002, the Supreme Court hauled up the governments of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and inquired about the steps taken to curb female feticide. CEHAT, the petitioner, claimed that these governments had actually been giving licenses to ultrasound clinics and so had undermined the Supreme Court’s judgment. With the introduction of portable ultrasound machines doctors visit villages in India and offer gender selection services.
Last year a first year medical student from UCSF-Berkeley, Sunita Puri, outlined the extent of sex-selection among the Bay Area’s South Asian families (mostly Indians). The birth of a female child led to the ill-treatment of the mother at the hands of her in-laws and husband in the Bay Area. Many Indian wives across the region suffer under abusive husbands, whose only claim to fame is their job profile which more often than not boasts of an impressive engineering degree from reputed institutions across India and the world.
Gen-Select is a small American firm that specializes in medical kits that help determine the sex of a fetus. Women can program their fetuses simply by taking some “nutriceuticals” and sticking to a certain diet plan and conjugal schedule. GenSelect placed an innocuous advertisement in an Indian newspaper and according to the management it received an overwhelming response form its Indian market. Priced at about 200 to 450 dollars, a customer can get this FDA approved kit and have a baby of either sex. In India the kit was offered for about 6000 INR. The company also assures customers of a 96% success rate with the gender selection process and even offers a money back guarantee if the procedure fails.
The above information is an attempt by me to contextualize the magnitude of the problem confronting the missing girl child in India. Matrubhoomi shocked audiences throughout the country, but many did not bother to look at the present day situation in the country where sex-selective abortions, although deemed illegal, continue to occur. A British medical journal recently reported that over the last decade or so oven 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in India by families and individuals keen on begetting a male heir. The sex ratio according to the 2001 census on an average for India is 933:1000. Northern Indian states have lower sex ratios as compared to their southern counterparts. However, since 1986, southern Indian states with the exception of Kerala have not done too well either on the sex ratio front. Arnold and Roy claim that the sex ratios at birth for children whose mothers had ultrasound or amniocentesis “about 5 per cent of female foetuses in India are aborted among women who have these tests. In Haryana, it is estimated that 43 per cent of the female foetuses are likely to have been aborted for these same women. Another indication of the use of sex selective abortions in India is the very low sex ratios of births to women with no living sons, particularly in states with strong parental preferences for sons.”
We can invoke countless figures that testify to the magnitude of the problem before the country. The problem stated simply is this – we are a nation that kills off our girl children. The girl child is ‘missing’, because she is not allowed to live.
In India abortion is not illegal. Indeed the very foundation of population control in India rests on the existence of legal abortion. In fact if abortion were illegal, abortion related deaths in India would increase amongst the category of young fertile women since they would be conducted by unskilled doctors and quacks under unhygienic conditions using questionable practices.
On the surface there is really nothing amiss about detecting the state of a fetus. Ultrasounds help detect deformities in a fetus and may help in overcoming obstacles during childbirth. However, there is really no way of stopping a doctor from determining the sex of a fetus. Many families in turn when given this information choose to abort a female fetus. Why does this happen? It is not big mystery that in India sons are preferred over daughters. Daughters are seen as liabilities and any expenditure on daughters is done reluctantly since the only possible life path open to a daughter is that of a wife. Sons on the other hand are seen as assets who will turn into bread winners later on in life and take care of aged parents. Be it discrimination in employment, education, capability enhancement, or even religious practice, Indian women have lived under the bell-jar like oppression of this mindset for centuries.
Dreze and Sen in their study of female education in India revealed the low enrollment rates and high dropout rates in female primary school enrollment in north Indian states and concluded that one of the factors that contributed to this was a traditional mindset that saw expenditure on female education as wasteful.
There is a pressing need to highlight the overall impact of a conservative and militant mindset on the life chances of the girl child. The reason I choose to write about this is because this mindset is not endemic only to India, but has in fact migrated to foreign shores. Puri’s account of the disturbing trends amongst South Asian families in the Bay Areas leads me to a larger issue about the migration of ideas. It is obvious then that level and extent of education and economic security has very little to do with the destruction of certain notions. The danger really arises from men and women who perpetuate such beliefs and notions in the process delivering a shattering blow to any notion of progress we may take pride in.
Products like GenSelect are another weapon for the anti-girl child individuals and families in India. Less torturous than methods like selective abortion, the product nevertheless contributes to the growing problem of missing women in India.
Even though the 2001 Census recorded an increase in the sex ratio for the second time in five decades, the troubling figure is not the average sex ratio, but is in fact the sex ratio in the 0-6 age group. The 2001 Census reveals that the child sex ration dropped from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2002. Each state also registered a decline with the exceptions of Kerala, Sikkim, Mizoram and Tripura where an increase was recorded. In Punjab the ratio fell 82 points to 793, by 59 points in Haryana, 54 points in Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh, 50 points in Gujarat and Delhi and 42 points in Uttaranchal. Many people have explained the vicissitudes of the sex ratio in India as a result of migrations across the country or problems in census data collection. However, the consistency of certain figures like that of the child sex ratio is disconcerting to the extent that the repeated patters across the same states testify to the fact that there may indeed be a deeper problem.
There are a number of reasons that I can identify that contribute to the adverse sex ratio. First, the son-preference maxim is still strong across India and even more deeply entrenched in north Indian states. Second, the lack of concerted pressure from society as a whole translates into sex selection as a legally unacceptable but socially sanctioned practice. Third, the failure of the legal system at various levels compounds the problem. While acts are fine in letter and spirit, the lack of political will to enforce them and mete out punishment to people indulging in sex selection is absent. Fourth, the awareness of the missing girl child as a problem confronting the country exists only in a very elite circle of activists, academicians, and professionals. The vast majority of the country is not concerned with indicators like the sex ratio and the general apathy of people results in little popular activism against the problem.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Grave Outside Aizawl
The first time I saw Sai was in a photograph pinned to the inside wall of a closet in Delhi. She was standing in a pink frock, looking sullenly into the camera like a petulant child forced to stand still when she would rather have been doing something else, like tossing a ball and chasing puppies. I remember this photograph and I remember her sister, Marie, describing the whole family to me. For a year every time that closet was opened, Sai peeped out at me. Eleven years later I met Sai for the first time on 19th April 2009, buried in the hills outside of Aizawl, six-feet under. I swallowed a lump in my throat and cried myself to sleep that night. I was grieving for a child I had never known, a person whose voice I had never heard. All that kept coming back to me was her face from inside the closet, her body in the pink frock, her body under the earth. It all seemed like such a waste.
I stood staring at Sai’s grave, prayed for a while as Marie stood beside me and bowed her head. The sun turned orange and sank behind the hills and after a while Sai’s grave winked out of sight. I do not know how long the two of us stood there in silence. There was nothing else both of us could do. We drove back to my hotel and talked about how our lives had changed in eleven years. I was Marie’s first ‘mainland’ Indian friend to ever visit Mizoram. But I was bitter and angrier than I had been for a long time. I knew even without being told that Sai had died violently. Marie just wasn’t telling me how.
“So what happened to her?” I finally asked Marie.
“We got a call one night from the Delhi police. They asked us if she was our family. They told us she had died at AIIMS.”
“Was she sick?”
“No they found her by the side of the road in May 2007. One inspector Khan found her and they took her to AIIMS. She was there for a few days and must have given our information to the authorities. The cop himself was a minority. He did his best to help us.”
“What did the doctors say?”
‘Two liters of blood in her stomach. She had been hemorrhaging for some time.”
“Then she was obviously physically abused.” I hesitated, but I needed to know. “Was she sexually abused as well?”
“Yes, it was clear she had been beaten up. But we don’t know about rape.”
“What else did the police find?”
“They tried to pursue it. It seemed she had an African boyfriend and was into drugs.”
This was the third story I had come across of supposedly organized groups of ‘African’ students, who would indulge college going Indian women and involve them in drug-peddling rackets. While it was unclear to the police what Sai’s level of involvement was in the racket, there was no doubt she was also a drug user.
In her last days at the hospital twenty-year-old Sai had shown withdrawal symptoms, been abusive and shivered uncontrollably as the hospital staff had tried to calm her down. Somewhere in that phase she had been coherent enough to provide an address and a phone number in Aizawl. Even while her siblings were booking their tickets to Delhi, the police had called to say she had not survived the night. Marie had identified Sai’s body in the morgue and made arrangements to bring her back to Mizoram. She had also tried to follow the case up with police. There were no leads. Sai was a recluse. Her Mizo friends did not know who her boyfriend was and they did not include her in their activities. The so-called ‘boyfriend’ had disappeared somewhere into the gullies and by lanes of Delhi and would probably not be tracked down.
“What was Sai anyway to anyone in Delhi?” said Marie taking a drag of her cigarette. “Just another northeastern girl found by the side of the road.”
Marie’s cynicism was not lost on me. The category of the ‘northeast’ as a cluster of similar states has been reified in the imagination of ‘mainland’ India. Most north Indians do not know the difference between a Khasi and a Mizo, and quite truthfully, neither did I till I began studying the region. However, the essentialization of the northeast and its people has been complete and constructed over decades. In discussions with women in the northeast they say that they are more likely to be socially and sexually preyed upon in Delhi, than women of other ethnicities, because of a stereotype that has defined them as sexually promiscuous and ‘available’. They struggle with the consequences of this stereotype. They are forced to be more aggressive than usual in their dealings with people, and, many feel their natural dressing habits are curbed because they have to deal with the manner in which north Indians have a tendency to censure ‘inappropriate’ dressing with their gaze.
Northeastern people are blacklisted amongst certain communities of landlords for their non-vegetarian, treyf food habits. They are often pejoratively referred to as “chinkis” or “kanchas”. Whether we want to admit it or not the fact is there is widespread racism against the northeastern people in the rest of India. Racism! There I said it! Racism is not a fully developed debate in our country, for, the logic goes, how can a country of brown-skinned people be racist? Is that not something endemic to Western countries? It is about time that we began talking about levels of racism within our own country. Whether it is forcing dark-skinned women to be fair by artificial cosmetic products, or referring to Black people as “kallus” or “negroes”, or expressing racism in the form of excluding certain groups of people like northeasterners and Kashmiri’s from renting places; the fact remains we Indians are an extremely bigoted lot.
The problem really gets complicated when we impute some qualities to certain races and ethnic groups. The associations in the mind become permanent. For instance, say “Muslim” and many would automatically think “terrorist”. “Mizo girl” would mean “easy” for many simply because she belonged to a certain ethnic stock where the women had been unnaturally and incorrectly defined as sexually promiscuous. There is tyranny, which comes with such categorizations, and these are not imagined word associations or categories.
We can only speculate what happened to Sai. She may have been the victim of a hate-crime, abuse by her boyfriend, or like many other women in Delhi, another statistic in the crime graph against women of all ethnicities. We will not know. But what we do know is that the police did not pursue the case possibly because Sai was Mizo. It did not seem important enough to pursue when other more high profile cases were probably around waiting to be flashed on our news networks. Everyone forgot about Sai because she was a minority from a state that commands a grand total of one seat in the Lok Sabha.
This is at one level a story about representation. In the US there is a term to describe the importance given to cases of violence against white women or their disappearance as compared to how much coverage similarly treated black women get. It is called the Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS). Some stories are just more newsworthy. People would rather consume a story about a white Natalee Holloway than a black Natalee Holloway. Similarly, urban young women in India are more likely to make headlines once felled by violence than a similarly placed woman from a minority community.
Sai came from a broken home and from a society that was uniquely ordered and controlled by the Presbyterian Church.
The extremely strict norms of permissible behavior, social interaction and the structuring of life around the Church, its looming presence in politics and society had created, said Marie, youth that “went crazy” when they went to other cities. A second interviewee, who wished to stay anonymous, said Mizo youth did everything in extremes in Bangalore and Delhi. Many could not cope with curriculum requirements and switched streams often jumping from sciences to arts.
Sai had fought to go study in Delhi. She lasted all of two years there. Her family said she was conscious of her differentness in Delhi, never an introvert she turned into one. She became a loner, grew quieter and got into a relationship that no one seemed to know anything about. The drug use started with the relationship and possibly ended with it too and her death.
Did the big city do her in? Or was it her own society that had curtailed her to the extent that she could not adjust to the pressures of urban living and contestation. Or was it just a lousy boyfriend? The blame game could possibly go on forever but her family thinks it was a little bit of all. And, as Marie stated, there was lack of a social network of Mizos that could present a united front and take care of their own in Delhi by recreating a social geometry of the displaced. Others disagreed. They said such networks were in place in Delhi University. The Mizos did have Church services every week in Green Park. It seemed Sai had just not known how to tap into one of these support systems.
Twenty-year-old Sai had been incapable of dealing with urban adult life. The tragic and violent end that she faced alone, inconsolable, angry, depressed and despondent reveals the extent of her mental trauma. To fit in, be part of a social scene where she could be included and seen as popular, her sister commented, she caved into social pressure about substance abuse and its “coolness” quotient. But the unraveling, I think, began long ago. It began with coming from a uniquely ordered society, transitioning to a city that can only function at a frenzied pace, being exposed to the rigors of urban living, competition and lacking the skills to cope with upheavals, and being marked as different.
The awareness of being the “other” is a unique one and can be psychologically crippling. I am an “other” in the US, an “other” in the northeast. Sai was an “other” amongst many in Delhi. She was probably conscious of her disempowerment, of her status as being part of the lot that didn’t count as much, the lot that could easily be excluded. Her loss of control over her social dynamics, her failure to deal with peer pressure and stresses of urban living compounded the choices before her. Not surprisingly, in the absence of a mature support system the choices she made were self-destructive, but probably seemed rational to her at the time because in many ways they empowered her temporarily, however false that empowerment may sound to our ears.
Sai simply ceased in May 2007. But like her many young men and women from Mizoram, from the northeast struggle to come to terms with their identities, face discrimination in various ways and ultimately find themselves ghettoized into small communities in urban India. Politically, the consequences of this process are translated into a macro-level distrust between the central Indian state and the entire region, and its disparate units.
Sai’s story is intensely personal for me. She was someone I knew and didn’t know. I knew about her childhood and her family, yet I never spoke to her. I knew who she was through her sister, yet I never once thought of her as the unknown Mizo girl by the side of the road. In writing about her death, trying to reconstruct her life through the eyes of those who knew her, by piecing together a story, a narrative of what became of her and how it all ended for her; I hope to resurrect her.
So I stood looking at her grave and thought about what I would say. This was it!
I stood staring at Sai’s grave, prayed for a while as Marie stood beside me and bowed her head. The sun turned orange and sank behind the hills and after a while Sai’s grave winked out of sight. I do not know how long the two of us stood there in silence. There was nothing else both of us could do. We drove back to my hotel and talked about how our lives had changed in eleven years. I was Marie’s first ‘mainland’ Indian friend to ever visit Mizoram. But I was bitter and angrier than I had been for a long time. I knew even without being told that Sai had died violently. Marie just wasn’t telling me how.
“So what happened to her?” I finally asked Marie.
“We got a call one night from the Delhi police. They asked us if she was our family. They told us she had died at AIIMS.”
“Was she sick?”
“No they found her by the side of the road in May 2007. One inspector Khan found her and they took her to AIIMS. She was there for a few days and must have given our information to the authorities. The cop himself was a minority. He did his best to help us.”
“What did the doctors say?”
‘Two liters of blood in her stomach. She had been hemorrhaging for some time.”
“Then she was obviously physically abused.” I hesitated, but I needed to know. “Was she sexually abused as well?”
“Yes, it was clear she had been beaten up. But we don’t know about rape.”
“What else did the police find?”
“They tried to pursue it. It seemed she had an African boyfriend and was into drugs.”
This was the third story I had come across of supposedly organized groups of ‘African’ students, who would indulge college going Indian women and involve them in drug-peddling rackets. While it was unclear to the police what Sai’s level of involvement was in the racket, there was no doubt she was also a drug user.
In her last days at the hospital twenty-year-old Sai had shown withdrawal symptoms, been abusive and shivered uncontrollably as the hospital staff had tried to calm her down. Somewhere in that phase she had been coherent enough to provide an address and a phone number in Aizawl. Even while her siblings were booking their tickets to Delhi, the police had called to say she had not survived the night. Marie had identified Sai’s body in the morgue and made arrangements to bring her back to Mizoram. She had also tried to follow the case up with police. There were no leads. Sai was a recluse. Her Mizo friends did not know who her boyfriend was and they did not include her in their activities. The so-called ‘boyfriend’ had disappeared somewhere into the gullies and by lanes of Delhi and would probably not be tracked down.
“What was Sai anyway to anyone in Delhi?” said Marie taking a drag of her cigarette. “Just another northeastern girl found by the side of the road.”
Marie’s cynicism was not lost on me. The category of the ‘northeast’ as a cluster of similar states has been reified in the imagination of ‘mainland’ India. Most north Indians do not know the difference between a Khasi and a Mizo, and quite truthfully, neither did I till I began studying the region. However, the essentialization of the northeast and its people has been complete and constructed over decades. In discussions with women in the northeast they say that they are more likely to be socially and sexually preyed upon in Delhi, than women of other ethnicities, because of a stereotype that has defined them as sexually promiscuous and ‘available’. They struggle with the consequences of this stereotype. They are forced to be more aggressive than usual in their dealings with people, and, many feel their natural dressing habits are curbed because they have to deal with the manner in which north Indians have a tendency to censure ‘inappropriate’ dressing with their gaze.
Northeastern people are blacklisted amongst certain communities of landlords for their non-vegetarian, treyf food habits. They are often pejoratively referred to as “chinkis” or “kanchas”. Whether we want to admit it or not the fact is there is widespread racism against the northeastern people in the rest of India. Racism! There I said it! Racism is not a fully developed debate in our country, for, the logic goes, how can a country of brown-skinned people be racist? Is that not something endemic to Western countries? It is about time that we began talking about levels of racism within our own country. Whether it is forcing dark-skinned women to be fair by artificial cosmetic products, or referring to Black people as “kallus” or “negroes”, or expressing racism in the form of excluding certain groups of people like northeasterners and Kashmiri’s from renting places; the fact remains we Indians are an extremely bigoted lot.
The problem really gets complicated when we impute some qualities to certain races and ethnic groups. The associations in the mind become permanent. For instance, say “Muslim” and many would automatically think “terrorist”. “Mizo girl” would mean “easy” for many simply because she belonged to a certain ethnic stock where the women had been unnaturally and incorrectly defined as sexually promiscuous. There is tyranny, which comes with such categorizations, and these are not imagined word associations or categories.
We can only speculate what happened to Sai. She may have been the victim of a hate-crime, abuse by her boyfriend, or like many other women in Delhi, another statistic in the crime graph against women of all ethnicities. We will not know. But what we do know is that the police did not pursue the case possibly because Sai was Mizo. It did not seem important enough to pursue when other more high profile cases were probably around waiting to be flashed on our news networks. Everyone forgot about Sai because she was a minority from a state that commands a grand total of one seat in the Lok Sabha.
This is at one level a story about representation. In the US there is a term to describe the importance given to cases of violence against white women or their disappearance as compared to how much coverage similarly treated black women get. It is called the Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS). Some stories are just more newsworthy. People would rather consume a story about a white Natalee Holloway than a black Natalee Holloway. Similarly, urban young women in India are more likely to make headlines once felled by violence than a similarly placed woman from a minority community.
Sai came from a broken home and from a society that was uniquely ordered and controlled by the Presbyterian Church.
The extremely strict norms of permissible behavior, social interaction and the structuring of life around the Church, its looming presence in politics and society had created, said Marie, youth that “went crazy” when they went to other cities. A second interviewee, who wished to stay anonymous, said Mizo youth did everything in extremes in Bangalore and Delhi. Many could not cope with curriculum requirements and switched streams often jumping from sciences to arts.
Sai had fought to go study in Delhi. She lasted all of two years there. Her family said she was conscious of her differentness in Delhi, never an introvert she turned into one. She became a loner, grew quieter and got into a relationship that no one seemed to know anything about. The drug use started with the relationship and possibly ended with it too and her death.
Did the big city do her in? Or was it her own society that had curtailed her to the extent that she could not adjust to the pressures of urban living and contestation. Or was it just a lousy boyfriend? The blame game could possibly go on forever but her family thinks it was a little bit of all. And, as Marie stated, there was lack of a social network of Mizos that could present a united front and take care of their own in Delhi by recreating a social geometry of the displaced. Others disagreed. They said such networks were in place in Delhi University. The Mizos did have Church services every week in Green Park. It seemed Sai had just not known how to tap into one of these support systems.
Twenty-year-old Sai had been incapable of dealing with urban adult life. The tragic and violent end that she faced alone, inconsolable, angry, depressed and despondent reveals the extent of her mental trauma. To fit in, be part of a social scene where she could be included and seen as popular, her sister commented, she caved into social pressure about substance abuse and its “coolness” quotient. But the unraveling, I think, began long ago. It began with coming from a uniquely ordered society, transitioning to a city that can only function at a frenzied pace, being exposed to the rigors of urban living, competition and lacking the skills to cope with upheavals, and being marked as different.
The awareness of being the “other” is a unique one and can be psychologically crippling. I am an “other” in the US, an “other” in the northeast. Sai was an “other” amongst many in Delhi. She was probably conscious of her disempowerment, of her status as being part of the lot that didn’t count as much, the lot that could easily be excluded. Her loss of control over her social dynamics, her failure to deal with peer pressure and stresses of urban living compounded the choices before her. Not surprisingly, in the absence of a mature support system the choices she made were self-destructive, but probably seemed rational to her at the time because in many ways they empowered her temporarily, however false that empowerment may sound to our ears.
Sai simply ceased in May 2007. But like her many young men and women from Mizoram, from the northeast struggle to come to terms with their identities, face discrimination in various ways and ultimately find themselves ghettoized into small communities in urban India. Politically, the consequences of this process are translated into a macro-level distrust between the central Indian state and the entire region, and its disparate units.
Sai’s story is intensely personal for me. She was someone I knew and didn’t know. I knew about her childhood and her family, yet I never spoke to her. I knew who she was through her sister, yet I never once thought of her as the unknown Mizo girl by the side of the road. In writing about her death, trying to reconstruct her life through the eyes of those who knew her, by piecing together a story, a narrative of what became of her and how it all ended for her; I hope to resurrect her.
So I stood looking at her grave and thought about what I would say. This was it!
Friday, March 27, 2009
Agartala, Tripura
I am standing in the middle of an amusement park. There is no one else around, except the workers who operate the rides. It is 35 degrees Celsius in the shade. I am melting in my linen kurta and gently burning in the sun. The carousel is silent; the horses look like candied wax, silently staring down at their suspended hooves. On the sound system an unfortunate song blares.
No no no no
NO no no no
No- na no no no no
No no no no
No no no no
No no
NO ENTRY!
Who is the veritable Einstein who thought that up? It seemed to have worked. No one was there. Except me, the melting visitor.
ROSE VALLEY! The sign had said.
I sneer!
Where the fuck are the bloody roses? They’re burning in the sun like my sanity and patience.
I paid a dollar to get in. Outside the amusement park in the little casbah people no doubt lived on a dollar a day or even lesser, even as a big billboard proclaims Tripura Rising.
I am so bloody sick of these empty promises.
INDIA SHINING
TRIPURA RISING
JAI HO
Give me a frackin’ break!
The local Congress MLA is contesting Lok Sabha elections so he can make some money off the AICC. He gets 70-80 lakhs for his constituency. He will lose the election, but he can still make some money. The commies keep winning. Hurrah!
I have been told not to venture into the interiors. Meningitis and militants can kill me. I am not too keen on going to the interiors anyhow. I know what its like to drive where there are no roads. Its not pleasant and your lungs exchange places with your kidneys. NO no, I am assured. The roads are there. Maybe 16 villages don’t have road connectivity or electricity. I am pleased to hear this. The commies are doing SOMETHING right, even if it is the obsession to get people from point A to point B and giving them the ability to reflect on their own poverty in the glow of a naked bulb. So if you have meningitis you can’t blame the government for killing you. They gave you a road right? Get on it and get to a hospital!
I am somehow reminded of the Potato Eaters.
My heart bleeds a bit!
The sun is killing me now. I can feel beads of sweat trickle under my kurta, down my spine. It is beginning to cling to me. The FabIndia label digs into my neck. I have wrapped the strap of my Nikon around my wrist, so I don’t drop it. If it falls, the marriage is certainly over. I begin clicking. The workers wonder if I will actually take a ride. I will not. I smile at them and wave. They are a bit stunned. Not many women wave at them I guess. I am just being nice. Appreciating them for doing a thankless job.
In India we don’t thank the hired help. It is one way of asserting superiority over them. Make them feel like scum, so you can escape feeling like scum. I’m nice. I thank everyone. I don’t feel like scum. I feel like me.
We’re a very scummy country. And when we get tired of the “u”, we turn into a very scammy country. We love mixing our vowels and moving our bowels.
I return to my vehicle. I reflect as the uniformed driver drives me away from my amusement park experience. CHECK!
How was it madam?
Nice. Very nice.
I am a bloody born liar and actress.
The unsettling feeling returns. My lips curl of their own accord and settle again in a sneer.
Amidst indicators that at some point resemble those from sub-Saharan Africa, someone clever thought people needed to amuse themselves. That’s not such a bad idea I muse. Give them an amusement park, in the middle of nowhere, charge a dollar to get in and hope someone makes some money. Amusement parks encourage family time, and after all, is not the foundation of a stable state rooted in a holistic concept of family, the basic unit of society. Aristotle anyone?
We race to the Indo-Bangla border.
Ten minutes later we are there. The uniformed driver tells me to wait. He runs up to a couple of other uniformed BSF men and nods his head in my direction. I observe from behind my sunglasses. After a few brief words. The three men walk up to me. One opens the door.
Good afternoon madam.
Can I take my camera with me, sahib.
I do not ask. This is a command. I know it will be respected.
Yes madam, of course, please come with us.
They escort me to Bangladesh and back, weapons dangling carelessly. There is some bonhomie between nations after all. The sahib (non-commissioned officers need to be called sahibs, my dad had said, you cannot reduce them to bhaiyyas or sahayaks, titles reserved for normal jawans. I am good at reading ranks.)
Madam where are you from?
Delhi.
What job do you do?
Journalist.
Explaining researcher, Ph.D candidate is difficult. I point at the heavy-duty Nikon as I say journalist. They are satisfied.
I take pictures of the zero line, Bangladesh (looks the same as India) and a border village that straddles the two countries. No Mans Land is a narrow strip of green territory. They cannot broaden it because it reduces arable farmland for both sides. I am done with the border in ten minutes.
I return to the BSF camp, peel of my sticky clothing and turn on the air-conditioning. I wait to die. It doesn’t happen.
If I meet another pot-bellied neta who is sugary sweet, but who gets so incensed with my line of questioning about the opposition that he starts dictating what I should write down in my little notebook, snitching and bitching about the ruling party, I will bludgeon him to death.
Something about pot-bellied men and women when there is so much rampant starvation in India bothers me. But I understand. We live in a country where the poor want to look like the pot-bellied rich, and the pot-bellied rich (especially the women) want to look as emaciated as the poor.
Makes complete sense!
I meet a group of journalists. Their office is tiny with worn out and threadbare carpeting.
Good afternoon. I am V.S.S.
I fold my hands in a Namaste. I never extend my hand, don’t know how men will react to women wanting to shake hands. Journo 1 extends his hand. I take it delicately.
Please sit.
*I intend to, brother*
I introduce myself, give him my visiting card and explain what the hell has brought me here. There are a few men sitting on terminals. I see them trying to listen and watch without so much as turning. One man appears from an inside room and smiling takes my card into the other room.
Eat your heart out buster.
I suddenly wish I could speak Bengali. I am missing some humorous subtext of which I am most certainly the subject.
I am suddenly threatened. I stop smiling. I will not let people make sport of me. My game face comes on. The serious one- when I don’t blink, or move a muscle. When my nostrils flare a little bit, but only because I only want to show the right bit of emotion. And aggression. I have decided I need to be aggressive here, these guys have decided not to take me seriously. I meet Journo 1’s eyes and don’t look away. I pretend the room has dissolved around me.
I keep talking. Journo 1 starts listening. Finally, I have his attention. He throws something about Anthony Smith. I have read the book. I throw a critique of the book back at him. I bloody taught nations and nationalism. Journo 1 and me have an understanding now. I know what I am talking about, and I muse he is not a complete idiot. We start chatting a little more amicably.
I don’t blink or take my eyes off his face… for about an hour.
He gets uncomfortable.
I get tea.
He lights up, then remembers he should ask me if I mind him smoking.
I shake my head.
*Not my funeral, Journo 1.*
I hate people smoking in windowless rooms. I hate my hair smelling of cigarette smoke. That’s my biggest grouse against smoking. I hate the way my hair smells when someone blows ciggy-smoke into it.
I have shampooed my hair that morning.
SHIT! I will be shampooing like mad again.
Journo 2 walks in.
He is jovial and cordial, but also prepared to be non-serious. He is older than me. I stand up, and take his extended hand.
I am not going to waste my time anymore. I begin talking. He asks me for a poll prediction. I give him one as detailed as I can. Someone from one of the terminals turns and smirks.
The game face is still on.
My analysis is based on CSDS predictions. Yogendra Yadav zindabad.
I think of Seinfeld and “SERENITY NOW” to calm down.
I imagine everyone naked. A smile appears and disappears faintly around the corners of my mouth.
I like Journo 2 a little more readily. He begins lecturing on the militants in the state.
Save your breath, I have known about the NLFT for a very long time. How? Well, they tried to kill my uncle twice. I heard about this even before I knew I was going to work on the northeast. They blew up his cavalcade many years ago. They hit his ambassador car, misfired and the projectile hit a wheel. The car flew up into the air, tumbled several times and fell on the ground burning. He is my mom’s brother. He survived. His reinforced and bulletproofed ambassador had somehow protected him. The bonnet and the windshield, he said, had fused together. He lost a few men that day.
That was the first time a state called Tripura had become relevant for me.
He swears by ambassador cars and was very certain that when I went to Agartala I would not stay in a civilian area by myself. I understand his concern and I respect it.
Two days ago I spent an entire day reading confessions of NLFT militants. I was left alone in the room with two huge folders full of neat, typed up reports. I now know motivations, names, training camps, points of exit and entry. I could not take notes, scan, and copy or do anything else. I only read. Like an exciting spy novel. Except these are real 18 -25 year olds, with real names, real families and real lives. They are weak, affected youth with no jobs. I am sorry for them. Some of them are married. Others are just running away from something. But their lives are al here in these typed up reports. Who they know, whether they have a preference for ‘ladies’, what they wear, what they were caught with, names of their families, friends and associates.
These are people – starving, suppurating, severed from land, socially dislocated, straying, and dealing with meningitis in some pockets, surviving on limited means and still standing.
Yes, Mr. Sarkar, we surely need another amusement park here to take their minds off their own individually tragic lives.
I am somehow reminded of the song Naxalite, by the Asian Dub Foundation...
Brothers and sisters of the soul unite
We are one, indivisible and strong
They may try to break us
But they dare not underestimate us
They know our memories are long
A mass of sleeping villages
That's how they're pitching it
At least that's what they try to pretend
But check out our history
So rich and revolutionary
A prophecy
That we will rise again!
Like springing tigers
We encircle the cities
To the future we will take an oath
High up in the mountains
Deep in the forest
Our home is the undergrowth.
And we must never give up
Until the land is ours
No never give in
'Til we have taken the power.
Because, I am just a Naxalite Warrior
Fighting for survival and Equality
Policeman beating up me, my brother and my father
My mother crying 'can't believe this reality'
Iron like a lion from Zion
This one going out to all youth, man and woman
Original Master 'D' 'pon the microphone stand
Cater for no sceptical man me don't give a damn!
'Cos me a Naxalite Warrior.....
Naxalite warriors sitting in the comfort of London, right ADF? All this sounds great on a full stomach and a full wallet. Reality is different, it is not color-saturated and packaged for consumption. It just IS... and I am here visiting it, brushing with it, making it a part of me and dying of grief a little bit everyday.
So say we all!
No no no no
NO no no no
No- na no no no no
No no no no
No no no no
No no
NO ENTRY!
Who is the veritable Einstein who thought that up? It seemed to have worked. No one was there. Except me, the melting visitor.
ROSE VALLEY! The sign had said.
I sneer!
Where the fuck are the bloody roses? They’re burning in the sun like my sanity and patience.
I paid a dollar to get in. Outside the amusement park in the little casbah people no doubt lived on a dollar a day or even lesser, even as a big billboard proclaims Tripura Rising.
I am so bloody sick of these empty promises.
INDIA SHINING
TRIPURA RISING
JAI HO
Give me a frackin’ break!
The local Congress MLA is contesting Lok Sabha elections so he can make some money off the AICC. He gets 70-80 lakhs for his constituency. He will lose the election, but he can still make some money. The commies keep winning. Hurrah!
I have been told not to venture into the interiors. Meningitis and militants can kill me. I am not too keen on going to the interiors anyhow. I know what its like to drive where there are no roads. Its not pleasant and your lungs exchange places with your kidneys. NO no, I am assured. The roads are there. Maybe 16 villages don’t have road connectivity or electricity. I am pleased to hear this. The commies are doing SOMETHING right, even if it is the obsession to get people from point A to point B and giving them the ability to reflect on their own poverty in the glow of a naked bulb. So if you have meningitis you can’t blame the government for killing you. They gave you a road right? Get on it and get to a hospital!
I am somehow reminded of the Potato Eaters.
My heart bleeds a bit!
The sun is killing me now. I can feel beads of sweat trickle under my kurta, down my spine. It is beginning to cling to me. The FabIndia label digs into my neck. I have wrapped the strap of my Nikon around my wrist, so I don’t drop it. If it falls, the marriage is certainly over. I begin clicking. The workers wonder if I will actually take a ride. I will not. I smile at them and wave. They are a bit stunned. Not many women wave at them I guess. I am just being nice. Appreciating them for doing a thankless job.
In India we don’t thank the hired help. It is one way of asserting superiority over them. Make them feel like scum, so you can escape feeling like scum. I’m nice. I thank everyone. I don’t feel like scum. I feel like me.
We’re a very scummy country. And when we get tired of the “u”, we turn into a very scammy country. We love mixing our vowels and moving our bowels.
I return to my vehicle. I reflect as the uniformed driver drives me away from my amusement park experience. CHECK!
How was it madam?
Nice. Very nice.
I am a bloody born liar and actress.
The unsettling feeling returns. My lips curl of their own accord and settle again in a sneer.
Amidst indicators that at some point resemble those from sub-Saharan Africa, someone clever thought people needed to amuse themselves. That’s not such a bad idea I muse. Give them an amusement park, in the middle of nowhere, charge a dollar to get in and hope someone makes some money. Amusement parks encourage family time, and after all, is not the foundation of a stable state rooted in a holistic concept of family, the basic unit of society. Aristotle anyone?
We race to the Indo-Bangla border.
Ten minutes later we are there. The uniformed driver tells me to wait. He runs up to a couple of other uniformed BSF men and nods his head in my direction. I observe from behind my sunglasses. After a few brief words. The three men walk up to me. One opens the door.
Good afternoon madam.
Can I take my camera with me, sahib.
I do not ask. This is a command. I know it will be respected.
Yes madam, of course, please come with us.
They escort me to Bangladesh and back, weapons dangling carelessly. There is some bonhomie between nations after all. The sahib (non-commissioned officers need to be called sahibs, my dad had said, you cannot reduce them to bhaiyyas or sahayaks, titles reserved for normal jawans. I am good at reading ranks.)
Madam where are you from?
Delhi.
What job do you do?
Journalist.
Explaining researcher, Ph.D candidate is difficult. I point at the heavy-duty Nikon as I say journalist. They are satisfied.
I take pictures of the zero line, Bangladesh (looks the same as India) and a border village that straddles the two countries. No Mans Land is a narrow strip of green territory. They cannot broaden it because it reduces arable farmland for both sides. I am done with the border in ten minutes.
I return to the BSF camp, peel of my sticky clothing and turn on the air-conditioning. I wait to die. It doesn’t happen.
If I meet another pot-bellied neta who is sugary sweet, but who gets so incensed with my line of questioning about the opposition that he starts dictating what I should write down in my little notebook, snitching and bitching about the ruling party, I will bludgeon him to death.
Something about pot-bellied men and women when there is so much rampant starvation in India bothers me. But I understand. We live in a country where the poor want to look like the pot-bellied rich, and the pot-bellied rich (especially the women) want to look as emaciated as the poor.
Makes complete sense!
I meet a group of journalists. Their office is tiny with worn out and threadbare carpeting.
Good afternoon. I am V.S.S.
I fold my hands in a Namaste. I never extend my hand, don’t know how men will react to women wanting to shake hands. Journo 1 extends his hand. I take it delicately.
Please sit.
*I intend to, brother*
I introduce myself, give him my visiting card and explain what the hell has brought me here. There are a few men sitting on terminals. I see them trying to listen and watch without so much as turning. One man appears from an inside room and smiling takes my card into the other room.
Eat your heart out buster.
I suddenly wish I could speak Bengali. I am missing some humorous subtext of which I am most certainly the subject.
I am suddenly threatened. I stop smiling. I will not let people make sport of me. My game face comes on. The serious one- when I don’t blink, or move a muscle. When my nostrils flare a little bit, but only because I only want to show the right bit of emotion. And aggression. I have decided I need to be aggressive here, these guys have decided not to take me seriously. I meet Journo 1’s eyes and don’t look away. I pretend the room has dissolved around me.
I keep talking. Journo 1 starts listening. Finally, I have his attention. He throws something about Anthony Smith. I have read the book. I throw a critique of the book back at him. I bloody taught nations and nationalism. Journo 1 and me have an understanding now. I know what I am talking about, and I muse he is not a complete idiot. We start chatting a little more amicably.
I don’t blink or take my eyes off his face… for about an hour.
He gets uncomfortable.
I get tea.
He lights up, then remembers he should ask me if I mind him smoking.
I shake my head.
*Not my funeral, Journo 1.*
I hate people smoking in windowless rooms. I hate my hair smelling of cigarette smoke. That’s my biggest grouse against smoking. I hate the way my hair smells when someone blows ciggy-smoke into it.
I have shampooed my hair that morning.
SHIT! I will be shampooing like mad again.
Journo 2 walks in.
He is jovial and cordial, but also prepared to be non-serious. He is older than me. I stand up, and take his extended hand.
I am not going to waste my time anymore. I begin talking. He asks me for a poll prediction. I give him one as detailed as I can. Someone from one of the terminals turns and smirks.
The game face is still on.
My analysis is based on CSDS predictions. Yogendra Yadav zindabad.
I think of Seinfeld and “SERENITY NOW” to calm down.
I imagine everyone naked. A smile appears and disappears faintly around the corners of my mouth.
I like Journo 2 a little more readily. He begins lecturing on the militants in the state.
Save your breath, I have known about the NLFT for a very long time. How? Well, they tried to kill my uncle twice. I heard about this even before I knew I was going to work on the northeast. They blew up his cavalcade many years ago. They hit his ambassador car, misfired and the projectile hit a wheel. The car flew up into the air, tumbled several times and fell on the ground burning. He is my mom’s brother. He survived. His reinforced and bulletproofed ambassador had somehow protected him. The bonnet and the windshield, he said, had fused together. He lost a few men that day.
That was the first time a state called Tripura had become relevant for me.
He swears by ambassador cars and was very certain that when I went to Agartala I would not stay in a civilian area by myself. I understand his concern and I respect it.
Two days ago I spent an entire day reading confessions of NLFT militants. I was left alone in the room with two huge folders full of neat, typed up reports. I now know motivations, names, training camps, points of exit and entry. I could not take notes, scan, and copy or do anything else. I only read. Like an exciting spy novel. Except these are real 18 -25 year olds, with real names, real families and real lives. They are weak, affected youth with no jobs. I am sorry for them. Some of them are married. Others are just running away from something. But their lives are al here in these typed up reports. Who they know, whether they have a preference for ‘ladies’, what they wear, what they were caught with, names of their families, friends and associates.
These are people – starving, suppurating, severed from land, socially dislocated, straying, and dealing with meningitis in some pockets, surviving on limited means and still standing.
Yes, Mr. Sarkar, we surely need another amusement park here to take their minds off their own individually tragic lives.
I am somehow reminded of the song Naxalite, by the Asian Dub Foundation...
Brothers and sisters of the soul unite
We are one, indivisible and strong
They may try to break us
But they dare not underestimate us
They know our memories are long
A mass of sleeping villages
That's how they're pitching it
At least that's what they try to pretend
But check out our history
So rich and revolutionary
A prophecy
That we will rise again!
Like springing tigers
We encircle the cities
To the future we will take an oath
High up in the mountains
Deep in the forest
Our home is the undergrowth.
And we must never give up
Until the land is ours
No never give in
'Til we have taken the power.
Because, I am just a Naxalite Warrior
Fighting for survival and Equality
Policeman beating up me, my brother and my father
My mother crying 'can't believe this reality'
Iron like a lion from Zion
This one going out to all youth, man and woman
Original Master 'D' 'pon the microphone stand
Cater for no sceptical man me don't give a damn!
'Cos me a Naxalite Warrior.....
Naxalite warriors sitting in the comfort of London, right ADF? All this sounds great on a full stomach and a full wallet. Reality is different, it is not color-saturated and packaged for consumption. It just IS... and I am here visiting it, brushing with it, making it a part of me and dying of grief a little bit everyday.
So say we all!
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Anwar and Me
Currently, I sit in my over-expensive coffee shop in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Earth. This Valley saw the largest wealth creation in the history of the world, that we now call the software/dotcom bubble. I sip my now-cold cappuccino and lick the three-dollar foam from the rim. Anwar's memory haunts me. A year and a half has passed and I wonder how tall he has grown, if he is starving, if his sister is alright.
Anwar is another faceless entity in the emotional morass that is poverty in India or anywhere. I think about my arena of privilege and am utterly humbled by the memory of his smile - the broadest, most earnest smile on the planet. So contagious and touching, that it dragged me out of severe field-work related trauma. I smiled back for Anwar; in a smile that reached my eyes after a long, long time of having nothing to smile about.
I smile now as I think of him. And I am suddenly content. The constant trauma of two years dissolves for an instant and nothing is more real right now than my memory of Anwar. I am suddenly ashamed that this life in which I have so much to smile about, I spend most of my time grieving, obsessing, thinking, over analyzing, spending myself on people who do not deserve it. Self-indulgence is a luxury.
The more topsy-turvy your life becomes, the more perspective you gain. I find this to be true. And in my darkest hour of trial, for some reason the one person whose story I keep returning to is a beggar-boy from the streets of Guwahati. There must be a reason for this. And so I share....
Anwar came into my life briefly for a very short span of time - two months, to be precise. Yet every time I think of him my heart gets really heavy, but that heaviness is tinged with another strange emotion - warmth.
Anwar was bright-eyed, sprightly, energetic and cheerful. He was always dressed in the same dirty, ragged shirt with half its buttons missing, had no shoes on his feet and nursed a new scrape or bruise everyday. I saw him the first time I walked into the Cafe Coffee Day at Dighli Pukhuri in Guwahati. He had come scampering up to me and laughed and pointed at a small pan-shop across the street. He had been muttering in Assamese/Bengali and I had not understood. I had ignored him like a fine bourgeois woman must, but he had continued to tug at my kurta and smiled like the devil. I had found myself smiling back and had asked him what he wanted. He pointed at the shop again. I walked with him to it. He pointed to a bag of Kurkure. I bought it for him. I asked him if he wanted something a little healthier - like a packet of biscuits. But he settled for the Indian version of Cheetos.
I went back into the CCD and ordered my expensive coffee.
I was to see Anwar everyday for two months, since I used the CCD as an office. I had discovered that my Tata Indicom USB internet modem did not work in Guwahati and had also discovered that my MacBook was powerful enough to catch a wifi signal called "default". I was hooked and became a wardriver. Plus the coffee and sandwiches sustained me. The cooks at the guest house often confused me asking for vegetarian food as asking for fish, which I am allergic to. Apparently "veg" sounds like "waayyyzzz" and fish also sounds like "phayyzz" to some people in Assam. Hence the confusion.
I was to see Anwar everyday for two months, since I used the CCD as an office. I had discovered that my Tata Indicom USB internet modem did not work in Guwahati and had also discovered that my MacBook was powerful enough to catch a wifi signal called "default". I was hooked and became a wardriver. Plus the coffee and sandwiches sustained me. The cooks at the guest house often confused me asking for vegetarian food as asking for fish, which I am allergic to. Apparently "veg" sounds like "waayyyzzz" and fish also sounds like "phayyzz" to some people in Assam. Hence the confusion.
Anwar was a regular fixture at the CCD. He would appear late in the afternoon and run errands for some of the customers fetching cigarettes, water, lights. The moment he saw me come in, he would abandon whoever he was haunting and point at the pan-shop across the street. I would feign an eye-roll and walk across and buy him whatever he wanted. I remained busy leeching of "default" and wrote and scheduled interviews, dealt with severe alienation and basically just worked day and night. I didn't know anyone, met very few people and always sensed that I was being assessed. My views were always under scrutiny. By the end of my stay I had made some really good friends. I would walk down the street to the NDTV office and hang with the rather awesome couple, Kishalay and Gayatri, who ran the show. I learned a lot from them and they continue to be very good friends. I remember being worried about them and their daughter, Bambi, when Guwahati exploded on 30th October. I had driven to Bodoland with the Minorities Commission that day and had been spared the chaos that ensued. The first to go had been the SMS and phone lines.
Anwar interested me more and more as my awareness about Assamese politics and society grew. He was Muslim. Poor. And spoke a different language which I judged to be Bengali. He was not Assamese. One day he came and sat on the floor next to the outdoor table where I was busy scribbling in a Moleskine. Without looking up I said, "You're here. What do you want today?" "The usual", he had said. "First", I had said, "Tell me where you live?" He had gestured vaguely in the general direction of Latashila Pavilion. "Do you go to school?" "Yes", he had said. "Why aren't you in school then?"
"It got over early."
"It got over early."
I had looked into his smiling face and been disappointed in the knowledge that he was lying through his teeth. If my reading was correct, Anwar was a Bangla migrant who was on the streets or in a slum with his family. The questioning went on.
Who is at home?
Mom and sister, smaller than me.
Father?
He is dead... long ago.
I had not known how to react to this bit of information.
What does your mother do?
Works in other people's houses.
Anwar's mother was a maid somewhere in the middle-class community that surrounded Dighli Pukhuri. They lived in a small hut somewhere in a slum in the vicinity. Anwar, who I could never tell went to school or not, frequented the CCD for freebies and occasionally some money. He entertained himself, didn't have any friends.
I remained busy, bustling about the city collecting interviews, forcing people to talk to me and buying books. I explored the city by myself, trying to shop for mekhla-chadors and failing miserably. At the back of my mind remained one tiny thought, about Anwar. The sight of his unshod feet had bothered me from day one. And I had done nothing about it. As my stint in Guwahati drew to a close I found myself obsessing about buying him a pair of shoes or slippers. I finally went to the Big Bazaar (hate those places) because I was right outside it and proceeded to maneuver my way through hordes of over-eager weekend shoppers, their kids, ancestors and shopping carts to the shoe section. I realized I did not know how big Anwar's feet were. So I made an educated guess.
I bought a pair of sneakers for Anwar using my thumb and middle finger to span an imaginary shoe-size for him. I paid for the sneakers. Then I thought hard about it. By giving him a snazzy pair of sneakers was I going to expose him to local violence within his slum? Anwar was small, other kids may pick on him for his shoes. Slums weren't exactly pretty places. I didn't want to be the angel of consumerism in his life. I wanted him to not expect similar gifts from everyone like me. And I mused the shoes would solve his problem for about two months until he outgrew them. Was I over thinking everything?
I told myself I was. Being used to overanalysing everything to earn a living, I was projecting my theories of sensitive development on to a boy who simply needed a pair of shoes.
I bought the shoes and tried to find Anwar the next day. He did not appear. I waited past my self-imposed 5 pm curfew.
6 pm.
No Anwar.
I went back to the police guest house at Ulubari.
At night I watched the usual programming schedule. Big Boss on some channel, tried to work up an appetite, but the 15 pound weight loss project was underway. I had pretty much stopped eating about a month into the field. I fell asleep with the lights on as usual and thought of how washing my hair was an ordeal. The water was brown with rust. But it cured me of my OCD. Sometimes life teaches you to appreciate the simple things. Like the fact that water sometimes does come out of a tap, even if it is full of rust, and can be heated in a geyser.
The next day was my last in Guwahati. I said goodbye to a few friends - Rakhee and Kishalay and Gayatri. I went as usual to the CCD and began writing and transcribing. Anwar showed up at about 3 pm and made a beeline for me. I was sitting on the patio, melting in the heat to escape the uber-pumped up air conditioning inside. I smiled at Anwar, reached into my bag and pulled out the parcel with his shoes. He took it.
I asked him to try them on. He did. They didn't fit. But he tried to shove his feet in far, so he would not disappoint me.
I told him not to worry that I would get him a bigger pair.
He tried to clean the shoes with his hands. He feared he had soiled them. The shoes had cost me about 500 Rs, 10 US dollars. I spend more than that on so-called fair trade coffee in the US everyday, at bourgeois places pretending to be rebellious as hell. Che-style rebellion, to boot.
I told him to keep the shoes and I caught the first overcharging autowallah to take me back to the Big Bazaar (did I mention I hate big departmental stores?) I fetched a larger pair of shoes and got a pair of 'floaters' for backup. Reached the CCD to find that Anwar had disappeared.
I never saw him again.
I waited until much later that evening and finally walked up to one of the CCD employees and asked if he could give the shoes to the 'beggar boy' Anwar.
Anwar? Is that his name?
Yes, I replied. Anwar.
He is such a nuisance.
No, I said, he is a pesky sweetheart.
Yes Ma'am. We will give him the shoes.
I walked out of the CCD with some amused discussion behind the counter in Assamese about the strange woman buying shoes for beggars.
I didn't look back. It is not in my nature to look back.
------------
Post script: Six months later, in March 2009, I was in Agartala replicating my research design for Tripura. I was being hosted at the Salbagan BSF encampment on the outskirts of Agartala. Ten minutes away from the encampment as one approached the city, a CCD existed in the perimeter of the Ginger Hotel. On days that I was allowed to get away from the BSF encampment with an escort, I would ask the uniformed and armed driver to make unscheduled stops at the CCD. I REALLY wanted my coffee. The first time I walked in, I ordered my coffee from a barista who wouldn't stop smiling at me.
Finally he said - Ma'am its good to see you. How is your research going?
I did a double take.
He said - I was at the CCD in Guwahati. We remember you there. You left shoes for Anwar.
My heart skipped a beat. I frowned in feigned anger, leaned towards him and said - Tell me you gave him the shoes.
He said - yes of course we did!
Sach much (really?)
He said - Yes ma'am.
Life tasted better for the next hour!
I bought a pair of sneakers for Anwar using my thumb and middle finger to span an imaginary shoe-size for him. I paid for the sneakers. Then I thought hard about it. By giving him a snazzy pair of sneakers was I going to expose him to local violence within his slum? Anwar was small, other kids may pick on him for his shoes. Slums weren't exactly pretty places. I didn't want to be the angel of consumerism in his life. I wanted him to not expect similar gifts from everyone like me. And I mused the shoes would solve his problem for about two months until he outgrew them. Was I over thinking everything?
I told myself I was. Being used to overanalysing everything to earn a living, I was projecting my theories of sensitive development on to a boy who simply needed a pair of shoes.
I bought the shoes and tried to find Anwar the next day. He did not appear. I waited past my self-imposed 5 pm curfew.
6 pm.
No Anwar.
I went back to the police guest house at Ulubari.
At night I watched the usual programming schedule. Big Boss on some channel, tried to work up an appetite, but the 15 pound weight loss project was underway. I had pretty much stopped eating about a month into the field. I fell asleep with the lights on as usual and thought of how washing my hair was an ordeal. The water was brown with rust. But it cured me of my OCD. Sometimes life teaches you to appreciate the simple things. Like the fact that water sometimes does come out of a tap, even if it is full of rust, and can be heated in a geyser.
The next day was my last in Guwahati. I said goodbye to a few friends - Rakhee and Kishalay and Gayatri. I went as usual to the CCD and began writing and transcribing. Anwar showed up at about 3 pm and made a beeline for me. I was sitting on the patio, melting in the heat to escape the uber-pumped up air conditioning inside. I smiled at Anwar, reached into my bag and pulled out the parcel with his shoes. He took it.
I asked him to try them on. He did. They didn't fit. But he tried to shove his feet in far, so he would not disappoint me.
I told him not to worry that I would get him a bigger pair.
He tried to clean the shoes with his hands. He feared he had soiled them. The shoes had cost me about 500 Rs, 10 US dollars. I spend more than that on so-called fair trade coffee in the US everyday, at bourgeois places pretending to be rebellious as hell. Che-style rebellion, to boot.
I told him to keep the shoes and I caught the first overcharging autowallah to take me back to the Big Bazaar (did I mention I hate big departmental stores?) I fetched a larger pair of shoes and got a pair of 'floaters' for backup. Reached the CCD to find that Anwar had disappeared.
I never saw him again.
I waited until much later that evening and finally walked up to one of the CCD employees and asked if he could give the shoes to the 'beggar boy' Anwar.
Anwar? Is that his name?
Yes, I replied. Anwar.
He is such a nuisance.
No, I said, he is a pesky sweetheart.
Yes Ma'am. We will give him the shoes.
I walked out of the CCD with some amused discussion behind the counter in Assamese about the strange woman buying shoes for beggars.
I didn't look back. It is not in my nature to look back.
------------
Post script: Six months later, in March 2009, I was in Agartala replicating my research design for Tripura. I was being hosted at the Salbagan BSF encampment on the outskirts of Agartala. Ten minutes away from the encampment as one approached the city, a CCD existed in the perimeter of the Ginger Hotel. On days that I was allowed to get away from the BSF encampment with an escort, I would ask the uniformed and armed driver to make unscheduled stops at the CCD. I REALLY wanted my coffee. The first time I walked in, I ordered my coffee from a barista who wouldn't stop smiling at me.
Finally he said - Ma'am its good to see you. How is your research going?
I did a double take.
He said - I was at the CCD in Guwahati. We remember you there. You left shoes for Anwar.
My heart skipped a beat. I frowned in feigned anger, leaned towards him and said - Tell me you gave him the shoes.
He said - yes of course we did!
Sach much (really?)
He said - Yes ma'am.
Life tasted better for the next hour!
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