May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (16 page)

Within each caste are hundreds of subcastes, which change from region to region, and, like the main castes, were originally connected with specific professions. The Indian Constitution did not abolish caste, but it did outlaw discrimination on the basis of caste. In the cities, caste is to some extent disappearing, and people generally do not have to make their livings according to the accident of birth. But in the villages, caste was as insidious as ever and in large part predetermined the course of a person’s life. The education of the younger generation was only slowly changing things.

The subcaste of mustard-oil makers in Khajuron, for example, lived together in their own little grouping of mud huts and still, for the most part, made oil from mustard seeds. The clay-pot makers still made clay pots and lived in a little community near one of the village hand pumps. The Kurmis, or large farmers, lived in relatively sizable houses not far from Shardul Singh’s gates; most of them still worked the land for a living, although some of their sons had found jobs in Lucknow. The Pasis, who traditionally had been pig tenders, were farmers, too, although with smaller holdings. They were one group whose occupation had changed, yet their former calling would forever classify them as Harijans. This had not prevented them, however, from creating castes within their outcaste. Those Pasis who had been born in Khajuron—the old families—lived in the heart of the Harijan section, called Pasitolla; those who had arrived only in the last few decades lived on the outskirts of the village, closer to the dirt road. The two Pasi groups did not mix much and even supported different candidates in the election for village pradhan.

Steve and I arrived in Khajuron to begin our work in September 1987, four months after I first met Dr. Singh. (A year later, even after sharing a shed with him, and putting our charpoys side by side under the stars, we never called him anything but Dr. Singh. We were always “Mrs. Elisabeth” and “Mr. Steve.”) Dr. Singh and three of his daughters stayed with us at the home of his brother, who turned out to be the second-largest landowner in the village. Without our ever requesting it, the entire Singh family had become involved in our project.
There were, I think, several reasons for this. Most of all, Dr. Singh wanted to make absolutely certain that his American guests were comfortable and stayed out of trouble. But I also think our research interested him and gave him a fresh glimpse of his roots.

Unfortunately, staying with the Singhs aligned us with the upper-caste landlords in the eyes of the rest of the villagers, and in the beginning I had trouble talking with some of the Harijan women because of our living arrangements. Rameshwar Prasad, the Harijan leader and, I later learned, a blood enemy of the landlords, actually went so far as to report Steve and me to the local police as possible American spies. It is difficult to know what the CIA might have learned in Khajuron, and, needless to say, nothing ever came of Prasad’s harassment. Yet I fretted about our decision to live with the village landlords, even though I never figured out an alternative. Living with the Harijans would simply have aligned me with them, against the landlords, whose good graces I needed to remain in the village. Beyond that, it was unrealistic to think of living with anyone but a family that had space for us and could afford to feed us. Eventually it worked out. In the end, I was able to talk with plenty of Harijan women, I made peace with Prasad, and Bhabhiji and her husband could not have been more generous hosts.

Their house was one of the largest in Khajuron, built so that all family activity occurred in the central courtyard open to the sky. Once a week, the mud floor was smoothed with fresh greenish-brown cow dung, believed to be a disinfectant. In the hot weather, Bhabhiji and her husband slept on their charpoys in the courtyard; in the cold weather, they slept in one of the enclosed storage rooms off this courtyard, which contained five-foot-tall mud urns that held wheat and rice. Bhabhiji’s mud stove, or chulha, was built into the floor of the courtyard in a protected corner. There was no electricity, and at night we ate by the light of an oil lamp.

In the mornings after breakfast (fried Indian bread and potatoes for Dr. Singh; omelettes and white bread for us, because that is the sort of breakfast Americans were supposed to eat), Steve would leave with Dr. Singh for Gurha. I would go with one, two or three of Dr. Singh’s five daughters—different ones came along on each trip—to begin my interviews in Khajuron. My Hindi was passable for Bhabhiji’s house, but the lower castes spoke a local dialect and could scarcely understand me. I had an easier time understanding them, but I still needed Dr. Singh’s daughters to translate. I selected the women by caste, so that
I would have a representative sampling. I would arrive at a woman’s house, tell her I was writing a book about women in India and ask if she would answer a few questions for me. The “few questions” claim was not exactly accurate, but I needed to get my foot in the door. The truth was that I had prepared a somewhat nightmarish list of 193 questions with my Hindi teacher in Delhi, covering work, education, living conditions, family relationships, health, education, religion, politics, popular culture and knowledge of the world outside Khajuron and India. Only rarely had I written out questions for interviews before, but then, I had never tried to interview so many uneducated women, in a foreign language, and in depth.

Every single interview was excruciatingly slow and difficult. Many lasted for two hours, the limit of my patience, and considerably beyond the limits of patience of many of the women. Although a few were amazed that someone was actually interested in their opinions, and appeared ready to talk all day, most were shy and nervous. Many times a woman had to breast-feed her baby and peel potatoes while she was talking to me. Sometimes her husband would try to speak for her, although I usually asked the husbands to leave. Other times friends would wander in and offer their opinions, or a swarm of kids would stand around giggling. They called me “the Ameriki poochnee wallee,” which means “the American question-asking woman.” The weather was usually suffocatingly hot, and flies buzzed incessantly around my head.

At times I lost heart and decided the questionnaire was a bad idea and was not getting me anywhere. I knew a lot of the answers were made up, and that the artificial situation I had constructed—an interview—was not the best way to learn the truth about rural women’s lives. And yet it was a beginning, a way of getting to know them. The interviews allowed me to sit in their houses for hours. I watched them knead the chapati dough, saw how they massaged their babies with mustard oil and listened to them fight with their mothers-in-law. The women were poor, but this did not mean they all had inhibited personalities. When I asked the village pradhan’s daughter-in-law, Santosh Kumari, if she had any say in her arranged marriage, she laughed and gestured toward the mud floor and crumbling brick walls of her home. “If they had asked me, I wouldn’t have come to this house,” she said. “I would have gone to a much better place.” When I asked if her mother-in-law treated her well, she laughed again. “If my mother-in-law is bad,” she said, “will you bring me a nice one?”

People I knew in rural development had advised me to be as specific as possible in my questions. I would get nowhere, they said, dealing in abstract concepts like fairness and equality. So I devised my questions as simple building blocks on basic themes. For example: “What is your education?” “Would you like to know how to read and write?” “Why did you not go to school?” “Do your children go to school?” “Who is it more important to educate—your son or your daughter?” Invariably, the sons were sent to school and the daughters stayed at home.

I also asked the women to tell me precisely how they had spent the day before, from the moment they got up to the time they went to bed. The minutiae always led me to the same conclusion: the women worked harder than the men. Phula, for example, was forty years old, a mother of four, the wife of a prosperous Pasi farmer who had lived in Khajuron all his life. He grew sugarcane, potatoes, rice, coriander and wheat. During the harvest, he employed up to fifteen people a day, and he made close to $1,000 each year. In the government census, a man like Phula’s husband would be listed as the head of household, which he was, but a wife like Phula would be considered a nonworking dependent. And yet consider what she did all day: “Yesterday I got up at five in the morning,” she told me as we sat in a dark, cramped room off her central courtyard. After rising, Phula walked half an hour into the fields, because the family had no latrine, then half an hour back. When she returned, she cleaned the pots used for the meal the night before. Soap was a luxury, so she used mud and water, scraping with her bare hands. She swept the floor of the house, squatting over a short-handled broom, then walked back to the fields to collect tall grasses for her cows to eat. This took several hours because she had to remove all the thorns. She fed the animals, then went into the house to make lunch for herself and her husband—the lentil stew called dal, and chapaties and rice. She rested during the heat of the afternoon, then got up to wash the pots before dinner. A dozen times during the day she had to fetch water from the well outside her house; she also had to make cow-dung cakes for fuel. And this was a leisurely time of year. In a few weeks, when the wheat was ready for harvesting, she would have to spend most of her time in the fields, managing her household chores in between. She felt her husband treated her well, although he was, after all, entitled to certain rights as the head of the family. “Sometimes he beats me if I make a mistake, or if I forget to give fodder to the animals,” she said matter-of-factly. Phula had been
married at seven and had begun living with her husband at fourteen. She had never learned to read and write because her parents had not sent her to school. “If I had been educated,” she said, “I would have done some work.” By “work” she meant paid work; she did not take into account the hard physical labor that she did all day.

Of the twenty-five women I interviewed, nineteen had never been to school. The other six had at least a grade-school education; three of them were Brahmins, and three were from prosperous middle-caste farming families. Almost all of the men had more education, however rudimentary, than the women, which meant they could at least read the local Hindi newspapers and participate in discussions about politics and other issues affecting their lives. It was almost always the men who went shopping, either by foot or bicycle, at the wooden stalls that lined the main road through Gurha, and so it was the men who dealt quite literally in the ideas of the marketplace. Even the lower-caste women who ignored purdah rarely went to the market. When I asked why, they usually said they did not want to go, either because it was too far, or because they did not like the way the men treated them. Whatever the reason, it further isolated the women from society, and from each other.

Almost every illiterate woman I spoke to said she would have liked an education, and when I took that a step further and asked each woman what she thought an education might have done for her, a large number firmly believed that schooling would have pulled them out of the village and saved them from a life of drudgery. “If I had been educated, I would be a big person and I would not be doing all of this,” said Sada Vati, the forty-year-old wife of a middle-caste farmer. I asked her what a “big person’s” job would be. “Service,” she replied, which was the village description for work in government service in an office in a town or city, perhaps even Lucknow, typically as a low-level clerk behind a desk with a salary guaranteed for life. In the village, any work that did not involve hard physical labor was considered almost glamorous. “I want to sit on a chair and do work,” said Rajban, a tailor and the mother of five. It was naïve, of course, for the women to think education would have guaranteed them a job. One of India’s biggest problems was its millions of young men with high school and college educations who could not find work.

The one encouraging sign was that the women of Khajuron were beginning to send their daughters to school, however sporadically. There were ninety-three boys and eighty-eight girls registered at the
village’s two-room schoolhouse. “At first, girls were not educated,” Cheta Lal, the headmaster, told me. “But now they are coming a little bit more.” That was just grade school, however; 80 percent of the boys went on to the high school in Gurha, but only 20 percent of the girls did. And although almost every woman I spoke to said it was important to educate sons and daughters equally—I am sure they said this because they thought it was what I wanted to hear—the reality, when I pressed, was that the boys were sent to school more often than the girls. It was practical economics in a country with no social security system. When money was scarce in a family, it made more sense to educate the boy, who would remain with his parents and support them in their old age. A girl was a wasted investment because she would leave her parents after her marriage and live at her in-laws’ house. As Sada Vati, the farmer’s wife who wanted to do “service,” explained about her son and daughter: “The boy will live here, but my girl will go.” Sada Vati had complained about her lack of education, and yet she was not sending her seven-year-old daughter to school, just as her mother had not sent her.

One of the more serious problems of the women in the village was their lack of access to adequate medical care. Although there was a government-trained midwife assigned to the village, she lived in Gurha and was so overburdened with her work there and in one other village that she rarely got to Khajuron. Only a third of the women I interviewed used her, even though her services were free. Most of them went to a Dr. Kamlesh in Gurha, who charged more than one dollar—two days’ wages for field work—per visit. On his wall he displayed a photograph of himself standing next to a cadaver in medical school. Those seriously ill had to go all the way to Bachharawan, or even Lucknow. Most women delivered their babies on the floors of their huts, and at least half had lost one or more children during childbirth or in the first few years of the baby’s life. Three women I interviewed admitted they were trying to limit the size of their families, but two of them were doing it by only now and then taking birth control pills. The other woman, a Brahmin, had been given an IUD by a doctor in Bachharawan after the birth of her fifth child. The average number of living children per family appeared to be three or four, but Sheela, the thirty-year-old wife of the village silversmith, had eight. She was more than ready to stop, but her husband refused to allow her to have a government-funded sterilization operation. “There is no need,” he insisted. Sheela, who was sitting on a nearby charpoy, just shrugged. “He is afraid it will make me weak,” she said.