#nosgbv For the sake of the daughters who did not survive

Amartya Sen made the idea of "missing women" famous--those baby girls who should be walking among us but are not because someone aborted them as a foetus or killed them as an infant or simply neglected them so much that they did not survive ordinary childhood illnesses. Our mothers and aunts and sisters and daughters and nieces who should have been with us. 

I think about them a lot. Many years ago, trying to connect gender to security when it was not a thriving subfield with its own conference circuit, I began to look at sex ratios. In the districts from which my parents came, and whose attitudes you might have expected them to possess, the sex ratio began to decline around the year of my birth. Everytime I think of that, I think how luck I am that my parents did not choose to get rid of me while hoping for a son.

From that lucky fact, my life has been blessed with good fortune. My parents thought it appropriate to feed me, to school me, to nurture me and to encourage me. Most girls barely get to enjoy one of those things. For every one of these blessings, I sink deeper into debt.

What do I owe the daughters who did not make it? Where do I begin to calculate that?

For sure, I owe it to them to make the most of opportunities and gifts I have received. And I owe it to them to re-invest those in creating a world where fewer and fewer women go missing. 

How do you re-write male child preference into a genuine ability to care for all children of all genders with the open heart that they show adults until trained otherwise? 

Punishments will take you only so far and incentives are almost as shallow. But if we can start pushing at the reasons that people give and showing them that they are not valid, maybe something will shift? 

You tell me you want a son to take care of you when you are old. I show you a generation of children of any gender who are unlikely to live at home and take care of you. And I can also show you daughters who take care of older parents. 

You tell me that your son will cremate you and perform your shradhdha every year and I can tell you that now daughters are doing the same. What is more, maybe neither of your children will believe in the customs and so no one will do this for you. And when you are dead, how do you know you will care?

You tell me that your son will carry on the family name. Daughters keep their names nowadays and your son may choose not to have children. What would you have paid for the probability of extending your family lineage? 

People argue that they have the right to choose the genders of their children. By extension, also the skin colour and IQ and so on. This is just wrong. 

The fact that India's missing women in the last century make up the population of more than one medium-sized country makes me so angry that I don't even think we need a rationale for why pre-natal sex selection and femicide are wrong. 

But if you needed instrumental reasons, and we live in a cost-benefit driven age where the most convincing arguments either address money or security or both--then the work that Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer did more than twenty years ago on 'Bare Branches' may convince you. They found that when the numbers of men outnumbered women in a society, society was prone to enter a period of unrest and civil war. The available women married men of high status and those who were left unmarried and without families went off to join gangs and militias. 

We also know in Indian states where the sex ratio has been very lopsided that a shortage of brides has resulted in the importation of women from other regions. But because families cannot afford more than one bride, several brothers and sometimes the father-in-law share them. I do not think I need to say more about the plight of a woman trapped in a strange place with strange men and no right to say no. 

In patriarchal societies, even shortages don't raise the value of women. 

My grandmother had six daughters. When neighbours came over to her mother's place, ready to lament, இன்னும் ஒரு பெண்ணா? (Innum oru penna--or ponna, in the colloquial? One more girl?), my feisty greatgrandmother would say, yes, playing on the word for gold, பொன் (pon)--more gold! Her faith that women were gold, that they had minds and hearts that could do anything, that they could speak out and challenge and be themselves and her lessons in solidarity make me a fourth generation feminist.

For these four generations of women who survived and thrived, and for the children of all genders of the fifth and sixth that we are raising, and for the sake of the daughters who did not survive and are missing--I must find the small tasks everyday that will contribute towards changing this world.

 

Review & Reflections: Vaasanthi's "Birthright"

I spent Sunday evening reading Vasantha Surya's translation of Vaasanthi's Tamil novel, Kadaisee Varai. Titled Birthright in English, the novel is about female foeticide. I wanted to read this book but didn't know what to expect--a tirade? a Tamil soap (unlikely but..)? a weepy rant?

I did not expect Dr. Mano, Vaasanthi's complex protagonist, an obstetrician-gyanaecologist practising in a village in Salem district. I did not expect a protagonist who performs scans and abortions for the desperate women who flock her clinic. Vaasanthi's protagonist is not even a conservative product of patriarchal society who believes that male children are inherently more desirable. It's her completely matter-of-fact approach to the scanning and abortions that is most shocking. Chilling, even.

So you willingly follow Vaasanthi on the journey through Mano's psyche.

Never feeling wanted or adequate just because she was a daughter--and not just that, an only child who was a daughter--Dr. Mano expresses her anger and disappoinment with the world in her own way. Knowing full well that her willingness to scan and abort female foetuses is against the law, she calmly acquiesces when desperate village women beg for her help. Just as calmly as they face the prospect of abortion. There's a very sad, shocking and heartbreaking exchange between her and her sociologist (and feminist) friend visiting from Delhi as they look at a female foetus on her scan screen.

"'Do you still have the heart to do it, after you've seen this?' she said softly, in an awed voice. Smiling a little, my eyes still on the screen, I told her, 'You wouldn't understand how merciful a creature I really am.'... Arguing about this thing with a person who doesn't have the slightest idea what it is to breathe the air in these parts is especially meaningless." (page 10-11)

Later in the novel, Dr. Mano reflects:

"Women asked me to destroy the females in their wombs, pleading, "There's no other way for me!" Our epics and legends say that a woman who wants to achieve anything at all must renounce not only sexual desire, but every sign of femaleness." And as Dr. Mano remembers Auvaiyaar, Karaikkaal Ammaiyaar, Kannagi and Andal, heroines from Tamil epic and mythic ages, she compares herself and Raasamma, their housekeeper, to them, thinking, "Our outlets for the sacrificial impulse were different, that was all. The TV screen for her, the scan screen for me." (page 49)

Vaasanthi's skill as a writer is that she is able to make us feel compassion for this person who is educated, privileged and still does this thing that is morally reprehensible, not to say criminal. Moreover, she lets you into the pain of every woman who comes to Dr. Mano for an abortion, sometimes after trying more rustic methods first.

And when Dr. Mano "speaks" these words, they speak to something inside many, many women--including me.

"This loneliness that's been haunting me since my birth--I'm the only one who knows what that is like. That's why it has never been enough for me to be just myself, I need a larger frame." (page 22)

The push to do more, do more, do more, because what you are is not enough becomes a theme in many lives. It's the contemporary, maybe feminist, equivalent of dowry--a way of compensating for who you accidentally and inadequately are--a woman.

I can only hope that generations of girls after Dr. Mano and me can never relate to these words. I can only hope that the idea that they're "only" girls or that they "can never be men" is so extinct that when they chance upon this blogpost, they want to discuss it in class as a historical curiosity.

Read this book. It's very sad but very worthwhile and if you can read it in Tamil, I am sure it will be even more powerful.

Vaasanthi, Birthright, translated by Vasantha Surya, Zubaan, New Delhi, 2004. 


Related post: And what if their baby could choose?