For three years or so, I've been part of a project that seeks to understand how domestic violence survivors access help and justice. Some of their stories are heartbreakingly familiar. One has seen so many variations all of one's life that I went from rejecting that women should fast and pray for good husbands to thinking that they desperately needed to because good men and good marriages seemed so rare. Nothing in our world was going to hand a woman romantic or marital happiness on a platter.
When I was young, the first bad marriages I heard of were those of the women who sometimes worked in our homes. Their husbands would snatch away their salaries, spend them on alcohol and then beat them. I heard of this often enough that I am very, very uncomfortable around men who drink alcohol. The alcohol-battery association was so real to them that it is still real to me. (On another day, I will write more about this.)
No, as many of the survivors in our project said, it was not the alcohol that made them abusive. The alcohol gave them the courage to act on their abusive ideas and it became a pretext to grant them impunity. Alcohol does not cause abuse but particularly in India, women in most communities have pinpointed to alcohol consumption, alcoholism and the presence of alcohol stores as a source of insecurity to them.
I now hear young people I work with say they are uncomfortable with this association. And they have a point when they say it comes loaded with class prejudice. But when you hold consultations with trade union women and self-help groups, one of the first things they point to is the location of their local TASMAC store.
When I grew a little older, in the films I saw, marital families would ill-treat their daughters-in-law and demand more and more dowry. With the advent of Doordarshan, we saw these themes of dutiful and abused daughters-in-law, mistreated wives and endless dowry harassment in films screened in every Indian language--in the Marathi and Gujarati films on Saturday evenings, in the Hindi films on Sunday evenings and in the other regional films they began to show on Sunday afternoons. In Indian films made as late as the 1970s, the long-suffering Sita-heroine was featured either to glorify patriarchal culture or to showcase 'social evils' in the service of the new nation-state. Marriage was inevitable but almost always quite a miserable state of affairs.
And it was very hard to miss the messaging about dowry: Dowry was evil, dowry was bad, dowry led to domestic violence. The government assiduously communicated that giving and taking dowry were punishable by law.
In the 1980s, one read about an epidemic of bride-burnings and kitchen accidents that were all related to dowry demands. Women's groups protested and filed complaints and insisted on investigations. We now recognise dowry deaths in Indian Penal Code. We read of these things scandalised--who were these people still giving and taking dowry?
In families like mine, dowry had not been a part of weddings for two generations and the simpler the wedding, the more proudly people remembered it--one ceremony, cotton sarees, small guest lists, temple weddings, court weddings. I learned that it was not the wedding that mattered but the marriage.
I was out of India between 1992-2003, and in this decade, it seems as if all of this socialisation was just tossed aside. Weddings became ostentatious--actually, weddings became an industry and ostentation was now merely a minimalist expression! I was shocked to meet people whose weddings still involved a discussion and then display of dowry given. Whoa! Where had they come from?
They were always there. We never quite rooted out the idea that we had to get rid of our daughters somehow. That they were not on their own good enough but their lack of value had to be compensated through gifts of cash and consumer durables. That we needed to bribe men to marry them. That our own value was reflected in how much we devalued our daughters by sending them off with large dowries. We were always like this.
A few years ago, at a college training, I added a slide on the Dowry Act passed in 1961. It still shocks me to think of the young women who came up after the session to say they had no idea that there was a law prohibiting dowry. Some time later, students interviewing me for their magazine told me that they felt obliged to have destination or theme weddings. Every single serial treats marriage as the only end-game for female characters.
What happened along the way? How did I grow up in exactly the same country and culture and turn out so differently? For that matter, so many of the women I know and young women I work with--how were we so lucky as to escape this?
This research project has brought home some other horrific realities. Young women beaten or raped on their suhaag raat (first wedding night), keeping quiet and asking friends discreetly--is this what marriage is? Because they have no clue. They are married, whether at 16 or at 22, before they are ready to be in a marriage or understand what that partnership should be like. All around them, they have only seen abuse. And in this post, I am talking only about physical and some sexual abuse--I haven't got to verbal or emotional abuse at all.
Women have no confidence in their ability to survive. We are raising unconfident daughters in an age when male hubris is nauseating--and powerful. Women also have no confidence that their families, their communities or their government will support them at all. If anything, many women see that all of these support the powerful--in this case, their abusers. If the first months of the pandemic saw a lot of 'woke' discussion on the 'shadow pandemic,' the matter stopped with the discussions--we have not improved our support infrastructure significantly enough that a repeat of the situation would not leave women just as helpless.
We tend to characterise public spaces as unsafe for women and homes as safe havens. It is time to acknowledge that give what a misogynistic culture we are, any place where we are present is inherently unsafe. Women and girls and boys must fear the sexual predators in their homes. Women and girls must survive structural deprivations such as being fed the least, being a low priority for education and health care. Girls grow up being told they are a burden and in a crisis, getting rid of them through marriage becomes a solution for family troubles. Relationships are unequal, fraught and violent and each generation teaches the next to expect violence as normal.
I can type these words. I have lots of words. But the question is: When will this change? How will this change? Will it ever change? Will young people see marriage or other relationships as partnerships rather than hierarchal transactions?
It is so hard to have hope in such a dismal world.
No comments:
Post a Comment