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Emancipating India's Women
Discrimination as Part of Hindu Culture

http://www.nzz.ch/english/background/2001/01/31india.html

India's women are still far from living in a state of equality with men. They suffer a great deal of injustice and humiliation. But their demand for equality has become a political factor in the land, and progress on the road to emancipation is being made thanks to the work of private organizations.

Roger Bernheim

(The author was the NZZ correspondent in Delhi for many years, and has been traveling around India regularly since 1990)

Neue Zürcher Zeitung AG


Can one speak of a women's movement in India? Not if what one means by that is a monolithic phenomenon. The position of women varies from one part of the country to another, from city to countryside, from religion to religion, caste to caste and class to class. Accordingly, the women's movement is fragmented into countless groups of various kinds, representing different interests, pursuing different goals and, to some extent, making contradictory demands. There are few points common without exception to all Indian women, or even all Hindu women. But with these qualifications, it may certainly be said that there is a women's movement in India, and it is active, draws attention to itself, and fights.

Passive State, Private Initiative

Today, political decisions have to take account of women's concerns, and progress has been made in the emancipation of Indian women. But government officials and agencies have not done much in this area. It is the numerous women's rights groups that inform women of their rights in India's villages and urban slums and tell them how to go about securing those rights. The groups also organize street theater, put out easily understood leaflets, posters and illustrated booklets in conjunction with literacy instruction. With these methods they make headway, often against serious and sometimes violent resistance from orthodox and reactionary circles and many village potentates, who want to keep their women in the darkness of ignorance.

All over the country, and right down to the villages, more and more women are becoming aware of their rights and are showing an increasing willingness to fight for them. The frequent rapes of women and girls by policemen, soldiers, officials and social and economic "superiors" - long kept secret, but an almost everyday occurrence in the villages - are now being made public and combated. More girls attend school than was formerly the case, even in the villages, though by no means all. At the universities there are almost as many women students as men. Daughters of the urban middle class are now given more freedom of movement than their mothers enjoyed, and also have more of a voice in affairs affecting them, including the choice of a groom, though that is still generally decided by the parents.

But Indian women are still far from enjoying equality with men, whether it be equality before the law, in marriage, the family or society. India's constitution guarantees equality for all persons, but neither that nor the many laws which have been passed to improve the lot of women are widely implemented. There is a lack of will to do so among politicians, judges, the police and, ultimately, men in general.

The Battle Against Abortion and Infanticide

The women an outsider sees going to work on motor bikes or in cars, the women professors and managers he encounters, the women writers and journalists whose books and newspaper articles he reads, constitute a tiny minority and belong, almost without exception, to the elite of the urban middle class. They should not be allowed to mask the fact that the country's patriarchal attitudes and social structures are still largely intact. To a more or less great extent, an Indian woman is still regarded as inferior to a man, and is disadvantaged accordingly. The discrimination varies by region, religion and caste. In crude terms, it is worse in the northwestern part of India than in the south, sharper in the countryside than in the cities, and more profound among higher-caste Hindus than among the lower castes. But it exists throughout the entire country, among all religions and all social classes.

A woman is discriminated against as a daughter, a wife, a widow, at home, out in society, in the workplace, at religious festivals, with respect to schooling, food, health care, sexuality, inheritance - in all matters, in every respect, throughout her entire life. Sons are always given preference: as heir, as old-age insurance for their parents, and among Hindus also in carrying out death rites, which only sons may perform. Daughters are perceived as a burden, among other things because of the dowry which must be paid if she is to marry and which can bring ruin to poor and middle-class families. The legal ban on the dowry is not enforced.

Countless newborn daughters are still killed immediately after birth, especially in the states of Rajasthan, Bihar and Tamil Nadu. In the villages of Bihar, a midwife is paid 10 rupees for delivering a boy, five for a daughter - and 100 rupees if she immediately kills the female infant at the family's orders. Since it has become possible to determine the sex of a fetus in utero, tens of thousands of female fetuses are aborted every year. The laws forbidding this are likewise neither obeyed nor enforced.

The Husband as God

Discrimination against women is rooted in the ancient scriptures Hindus regard as sacred. All those writings agree that a woman must subordinate herself to a man, must serve her husband and worship him as her god, even if he is the worst kind of sinner or criminal.

Under British colonial rule, there was a counter-movement in the 19th century, to which the British themselves contributed. They established India's first schools for girls, drafted laws against the immolation of widows, against child marriage, against the killing of female newborns, and granting a widow the right to a portion of her deceased husband's assets. The laws were hardly observed, but at least they aroused public debate on women's rights.

Social reform movements launched during the 19th century among the rising Indian bourgeoisie fought against the discrimination of women, among other things. These movements were initially led by men, but women jumped into the fray toward the end of that century. At the same time, women began joining the national independence movement. In 1917 a woman was elected president of the congress Party for the first time; she was a British woman named Annie Besant, who had come to India in 1893. In 1925, another woman, Sarojini Naidu, was chosen to occupy the same post. The first significant women's organizations were also formed at about that time.

Gandhi's Ambivalence

The leader in the process of India's decolonization, Mahatma Gandhi, mobilized women in the struggle for freedom and saw their participation not only as welcome reinforcement but also as a means to their emancipation. He advocated it, encouraged it, but wanted to keep it within bounds. On the one hand, he wrote that keeping women tied to household duties was a form of "barbaric slavery" and that men who wanted to imprison women in the kitchen were "antediluvian fossils." At the same time, he postulated that "a woman's duty is to see to house and home."

A more emphatic promoter of women's emancipation was Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister. He declared that a country's greatest revolution is that concerning the status and living conditions of its women. Nehru drafted various laws to improve the status of women, but despite his popularity he could not prevent traditional-minded parliamentarians from seriously watering down his proposals.

In 1971, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi established the Committee on the Status of Women to research all relevant problems. The committee's report, issued in 1974, shocked the nation by the extent of the discrimination, repression, mockery, and physical and emotional torture it reported as being suffered by the overwhelming majority of India's women throughout their lives, in the family and in society. Few of the report's recommendations were implemented by the government.

Various limited local campaigns brought national significance to the women's movement. There was the so-called Chipko movement in 1974, in the northwestern part of the state of Uttar Pradesh, where women and men together successfully blocked the continued destruction of their forests. Women were strongly involved in the campaign against construction of a dam which would have submerged a natural area rich in bird and plant species in Kerala's Silent Valley. The current battle against construction of the controversial Narmada Dam is led by women. Also important was the Bodhgaya movement in Bihar in the late 1970s, in which women fought for, and won, the right to have at least part of the land which was to be distributed to the poor as part of a land reform program registered in their names.

All those campaigns were restricted to individual villages or regions. But the national press reported them and thus stimulated the women's movement. Nationwide campaigns, however, ultimately revealed to the entire people the direct or indirect experience of male violence common to all Indian women, especially rape, which was tolerated as an acceptable masculine amusement or a means of punishment until well into the 1980s. In 1979, when a judge exonerated two policemen who had demonstrably raped a 16-year-old girl named Mathura in a police station, his verdict triggered independent India's first mass demonstration of women from all classes and all parts of the country.

More mass demonstrations by women were sparked by the exoneration of five men who had raped a social worker named Bhanwari Devi, an Untouchable, in the presence of her bound husband, as punishment for the woman's objections to the marriage of a 1-year-old girl in her village. The judge ruled that a rape could not possibly have taken place, because "Hindus, respected citizens, members of a high caste, one even a Brahman, never sink so low" as to rape a woman, especially an Untouchable. Actually, members of the higher castes, and Brahmans in particular, regard it as their God-given right to rape low-born women, particularly Untouchables. The old sacred books containing the laws of Brahmanism, indeed, provide explicit rituals with which upper-caste men can purify themselves after sexual contact with Untouchables.

Excitement was also generated by the remark of a judge regarding the case of two policemen who, having been ordered to a remote region in 1994, raped two women there. He wrote: "When policemen are away from home, their sexual instincts are strongly aroused at the sight of women. That must be taken into account in evaluating this case."

In 1983 the Indian parliament passed some laws to better protect women against such violation. A special category of serious crime was delineated for the rape of wards and dependents in the exploitation of a work relationship or an official position. In such cases, among other things, the burden of proof was shifted from the plaintiff to the defendant. But this law is seldom enforced.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly admonished lower courts to consider, in cases of rape, that in India's strongly patriarchal society, which places a high value on a woman's chastity and ostracizes raped women, a woman or girl would not bring such charges lightly and thereby risk her reputation and her chances of marriage. To date, such admonitions have had little impact. But at least a few judges have lately begun voluntarily to seek the advice of women's organizations about women's problems in dealing with police and the judiciary.

Independents, the Left and Fundamentalists

Progress in this area is hampered by differences within the women's movement - differences, for example, between independent feminists and extreme left-wing groups, nationalists and religious fundamentalists. The independents see the struggle for women's rights as a battle of the sexes, which can be eliminated only if women unite against the patriarchy. The far left, on the other hand, views the cause as part of the class struggle and insists that the emancipation of women can be achieved only through a victory of the working class over capitalism. Hindu fundamentalists and Hindu nationalists, for their part, accuse the feminists of propagating Western ideas and spurning their Indian heritage - though the only thing they accept as the "Indian heritage" is Brahmanism.

The figure of Sita in the 2000-year-old "Ramayana" epic has become a focal point in the debate over the position and role of women. Sita is the wife of Rama, and the epic depicts her abduction by the demon Ravana and her rescue by Rama. After her liberation, Sita undergoes a trial by fire in order to prove to her jealous and suspicious spouse that she had remained faithful to him while in Ravana's realm. Nevertheless Rama continues to doubt her faithfulness and banishes her, after which she remains faithful and obedient to him even in exile.

To Hindu traditionalists and fundamentalists, Sita is the model of the dutiful wife, unquestioningly submissive to her husband. That is how it is taught in the nation's schools and in most Hindu families. Recently, however, some feminists have reinterpreted the Sita legend. They no longer see her as a model, but as typifying the faithful and humble wife who is physically and emotionally mistreated by a typically egotistical, heartless and unfeeling husband.

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