May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (3 page)

I cannot pretend to have included every kind of Indian woman in this book, nor can I claim that the women I have chosen are a representative sampling in a country as diverse as India. Most of the women in this book are Hindus, representing the country’s majority religion, although I have included Muslims, Sikhs and Christians as well. I selected the women because they interested me, like Aparna Sen, the Calcutta director who made a beautiful and controversial film about an upper-middle-class housewife who commits the unforgivable sin of having an affair. Others are here because they inspired me, like Ela Bhatt, the quiet revolutionary who organized thousands of illiterate women vegetable vendors, quilt makers and trash pickers into powerful trade unions, changing the definition of “work” and also the way a woman looked at herself. Some are here because their lives illustrate important issues, like A. P. Christian, a village health worker who worried that her pay would be docked if she didn’t produce her yearly quota of couples for sterilization operations. Many are here because their stories need to be told. In the state of Rajasthan, in September 1987, an eighteen-year-old widow named Roop Kanwar was burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. No one will ever know whether an educated young woman committed sati willingly, or was pushed. In south India, I met Muthaye and her husband, Mohanasundaram, poor farm workers who said they had been forced to kill their day-old infant daughter because they couldn’t afford the cost of her dowry. In their part of the country, it was something that people did, although no one liked to talk about it. In Bombay, I met Assumpta
D’Sylva, a middle-class Roman Catholic woman who was undergoing a test, called a chorionic villus sampling, to determine whether the baby she was carrying was a boy or a girl. She already had two daughters, and if this child was a girl, she would have her aborted. The state government made testing for this purpose illegal a year later, but at the time Assumpta D’Sylva was relieved she could do it. It wasn’t that she and her husband didn’t have the money for a dowry. It was simply that India was a country where the birth of a girl was often viewed as a calamity, and where almost every woman had heard the Sanskrit saying “May you be the mother of a hundred sons.” It was a well-known blessing, given to a Hindu woman at the time of her wedding, which I eventually came to see as a curse. “Our society makes you feel so bad if you don’t have a son,” Assumpta D’Sylva explained. “Especially when I go out for parties, people say, ‘How many children?’ and I say, ‘Two girls,’ and they say, ‘Oh, too bad, no boy.’ ”

It is often said of a country as complex as India that for any one statement made, the exact opposite is also true. Certainly most declarations of fact must take into account conflicting evidence. Economists in and out of the government, for example, believe that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. But they also know that India has abolished the old specter of famine, and that most Indians are generally better off now than they were at the beginning of independence from the British four decades ago. Women are in an especially paradoxical situation. The country that is home to hundreds of millions of illiterate and impoverished village women is also the nation that produced Indira Gandhi, one of the most powerful women in the world. Most Indian women may belong to what one government report calls the country’s “single largest group of backward citizens,” who suffer double discrimination because they are both female and poor, but in the larger cities highly educated women are beginning to transform modern Indian society. Indian men may beat their wives, but they worship goddesses; some of the mightiest deities in the Hindu pantheon are women, like Durga and the especially monstrous Kali, who murdered her victims and then gorged herself on their flesh and blood. The condition of some Indian women is so wretched that if their plight received the attention given to that of ethnic and racial minorities in other parts of the world, their cause would be taken up by human rights groups. And yet, in the tradition of great visionaries like Mohandas K. Gandhi, the “Mahatma,” or “Great Soul,” whose principles of nonviolence inspired political change throughout the
world, there are also Indian women who are doing such innovative work among the poor—especially women—that they are bringing about radical change in a peaceful way.

The “typical” Indian woman, representing about 75 percent of the four hundred million women and female children in India, lives in a village. She comes from a small peasant family that owns less than an acre of land, or from a landless family that depends on the whims of big farmers for sporadic work and wages. She can neither read nor write, although she would like to, and has rarely traveled more than twenty miles from her place of birth. In many cases she does not know who the prime minister of India is and cannot identify her country on a map. Sometimes she does not know about the existence of her own village panchayat, or governing council, but even if she does, she is rarely aware that there is a place reserved for a woman member, because only men attend the meetings. She does not own land in her own name, or even jointly with her husband. She believes that she catches colds and fevers from evil spirits that lurk in trees. Her occupation is field work, chiefly harvesting, planting and weeding, for which she often receives less than fifty cents a day—in many cases, half the wage that a man receives for the same amount of work.

She has to juggle this labor with her other full-time job, the care of the house and the children. Her husband does not help her; indeed, he does not even consider what she does at home as work. No American woman who struggles with family and career can completely imagine what this means in India. A village woman starts her life from scratch every day. Even a single chapati, the Indian flat bread, has behind it a chain of drudgery that has not changed in thousands of years. To make a chapati, a woman needs water, which is often several miles away by foot. She also needs wheat, which she must harvest by scythe, under a blazing sun, in a back-breaking bent-forward motion, and then grind by hand. To cook the bread she needs fuel, either firewood, which she collects herself, or cow-dung cakes, which she makes herself. To get the dung she must feed the cow, and to feed the cow she must walk several miles to collect suitable grasses. (This assumes that the family is lucky enough to even have a cow; many do not.) The bread is at last prepared over a small mud stove built into the dirt floor of her hut. While she cooks, she breast-feeds one child and watches three others. If she fails in any of these tasks, or performs them too slowly, her husband often feels it is his perogative to beat her. And yet invariably she considers her husband a god and says that
she loves him. I used to ask village women exactly why they loved their husbands, a question that always confused them. “I love him because he gives me food and clothes” was the usual answer. My favorite response came from a thirty-year-old village woman named Malti Devi, who in a leap of logic explained that she loved her husband “because if I don’t, he will beat me.”

Such a woman rarely has control over her own fertility, despite the Indian government’s commitment to the present five-year, three-billion-dollar family-planning program. At the time of her menstrual period she is considered impure, and in one isolated part of India I discovered that women were made to sleep outside their family homes until the bleeding was over. That was in the village of Malapatti, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where one night I met a thirty-year-old field laborer named Bommakka who was about to lie down in some clumps of dried tree roots and dirt, which had been designated as the spot where the women of the village should sleep during their periods. Bommakka was convinced that if she returned to her home she would go blind or eventually be punished—perhaps her husband or son would fall sick, or the harvest would fail. “Whoever comes to tell us that this is not true,” she said, meaning me, “we will not listen.”

A woman like this may begin producing babies as early as the age of fourteen. She delivers them on the floor of her hut, usually with the help of her mother-in-law or a dai, an untrained village midwife. There is a good chance the child will grow up malnourished, with iron and vitamin A deficiencies, and without basic inoculations to protect against polio, typhoid, diphtheria and tetanus. One in ten children in India will not live to be a year old. If the child is a girl, there is an even smaller chance that she will survive, even though girls are biologically stronger at birth than boys. This is because the girl will often be given less food and care than her brother. Assuming she lives, she may go, erratically, to a one-room village school but will be pulled out whenever her mother needs help with the other children and the chores in the house. Her education is over when she is married off as a teenager to a young man she has never met; from then on, she will begin a new life with her husband’s family as a virtual beast of burden. “I am like an animal,” Phula, the forty-year-old wife of a farmer, told me in a village in India’s northern plains.

So pressing is the problem of women that the World Bank has now cited it as one of the most urgent tasks it must face. As Barber Conable, the president of the World Bank, said in his 1986 inaugural address in
Washington: “Women do two-thirds of the world’s work. They produce 60 to 80 percent of Africa’s and Asia’s food, 40 percent of Latin America’s. Yet they earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one percent of the world’s property. They are among the poorest of the world’s poor.”

Steve and I spent some time living with a village family our last year in India, and not once do I remember seeing the woman of the house, Vindhya Devi, or Bhabhiji, as we called her, pause for a moment in a never-ending cycle of cooking and cleaning. She was awake long before I was up, getting the fire started in her mud stove at the first light of dawn, and she went to bed long after I was asleep. Her evenings were spent at the same stove as she waited for the men to finish gossiping under the big neem tree outside. Her husband and his friends liked to sit on string cots under the branches, talking about local politics as twilight arrived. In the winters, they built a small fire to keep warm. I loved sitting with them in its warmth, reveling in the sense of space and release I felt when I looked up at an entire galaxy of stars. Bhabhiji could never be part of this. As a woman of one of the village’s highest castes, she had to live in purdah, or seclusion. Although she was spared from field work, she never ventured farther from her front door than the well that stood fifty feet away. Her husband finally came in to dinner late, but she did not eat until he had finished, and then only what was left. Most of her adult life had been spent entirely within the mud-and-brick walls of her home. Showing her face in the village would have hurt the reputation of her family. Her purdah was a mark of status for her husband; it proved that he was prosperous enough to provide for her and that he had a possession that had to be kept safe from the other men. At the end of my day in the village, when the worst of the heat was over, I used to look forward to walking to an old bathing pool at the edge of the fields and watching the sun go down. It was a five-minute walk from the house, but I don’t think Bhabhiji, in thirty-three years, had ever been there.

And yet, today, India has a scattered though vigorous women’s movement with the growing power to bring about some measure of reform. In 1988 in the Indian Parliament, women accounted for 10 percent of the members, whereas in the United States Congress, women represent 5 percent of the membership of both houses. In India, women have become doctors, lawyers, judges, scientists, business executives and airline pilots. Many married women with children have consuming
careers; their lives and problems are not radically different, on the surface at least, from those of their American counterparts. They receive master’s degrees, work in the offices of advertising agencies and worry about getting their children into the right schools. They go to the beauty parlor, follow national politics and resent it when their husbands’ friends ignore them at parties. The Indian Constitution guarantees them complete equality under the law. Hindu women may divorce; they may inherit nearly as much property as their brothers do. Indian women won the right to abortion, without a fight, in 1971, a year and a half before
Roe v. Wade
legalized abortion in America.

In New Delhi, the Indian government is investing millions of dollars in new programs aimed specifically at rural women. The results have been mixed. But most important, in a revolutionary change from a decade ago, these programs have shifted their approach from welfare to training. Feminists have lobbied the government to treat the poor village mother not as a passive beneficiary of a handout but as a potential resource who can be taught a skill, like raising cattle, that will help in the development of India itself. Studies in Indian villages have shown that raising a rural woman’s income will usually increase the household income, but raising her husband’s earnings generally will not. Women tend to spend all of their wages on their families, while men buy liquor, cigarettes and other treats for themselves. Increasingly, women are seen by development specialists as the real agents for change in rural India. As Gotz Schreiber, a senior economist in the World Bank’s Women in Development Office, explained to me, “If we’re serious about giving the next generation a better life than this one, it requires giving the mothers sufficient control over financial resources.”

Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who infuriated feminists in 1986 by siding with Islamic fundamentalists on a bill that in effect prohibits divorced Muslim women from demanding alimony payments, nonetheless appointed more women to cabinet and sub-cabinet-level positions than did his own mother, Indira Gandhi. He was also the chairman of a national advisory committee on women. Women who worked for him, who admittedly had to be allowed a considerable degree of sycophancy and enthusiasm, used to say they had never seen another minister in the government, even a woman, who took such a personal interest in women’s programs. This simply may be because Gandhi reflected, as the forty-six-year-old product of elite English-language schools and Cambridge University, the evolution in thinking about women that has occurred among his generation and class. During
an interview I had with Rajiv Gandhi in August 1988, he himself brought up the name of Germaine Greer, the feminist, although he admitted he did not have “a strong reaction either way” to her work. “Our society is still very much a male chauvinistic society,” he told me. “It comes out every day.” We were sitting in a conference room at the prime minister’s residence on Race Course Road, and although it was hardly an informal chat, Gandhi, as much as the situation allowed, became discursive. “I mean I have meetings with ministers, with very senior officials,” he said, “and suddenly, you know, they say something and I say, ‘Look, you’re being totally chauvinistic. How can you say that?’ ” He told me about a recent meeting in which he and several ministers were discussing employment for women in such fields as teaching, village work and the police. “And suddenly,” the prime minister complained, “they come out with, ‘Well, how can a woman do this sort of thing?’ Of course it’s not true, a woman can do it.”