“The Wonders of India” – women in “noodle strap tops” and jeans being dragged by the hair out of a pub and beaten in Mangalore by Ram Sena, a group of moral vigilantes149;
“Fight against Domestic Violence” – particularly Indian types of abuse being sati (widow burning), dowry killing, and beating or abandonment for not bearing a son150
“Father Throws Baby into Well” – female infanticide by parents expecting a son 151
“Father and Daughter: Law is Silent on a Bitter Shame” – incest between fathers and daughters (reportedly 54% of children sexually abused) – and it was not illegal!152
“17-year-old Boy seeks Divorce from Girl, 14” – child marriage forced by family members seeking to “strengthen family ties”153
Sipping my morning chai while trying to digest such news stories, I kept hoping that somehow they were unusual, but instead I began wondering how many stories went unreported. Since James and I seek first-hand knowledge, we also began broaching these topics with people we met and developed friendships with. We were, after all, in a Hindu culture that valued the Goddess, so wouldn’t women therefore be treated in kind? A basic thesis of Venus and Her Lover was that a culture’s myths – the big stories – were reflected in people’s individual stories. Why was I getting the feeling that India wanted to blast our theory to bits?
Ambika
The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.
~ Ernest Hemingway
On the Karnataka coast, the Shiva-pilgrimage town of Gokarna sits amid a vast palm grove. In the days that we relaxed on the beaches there (but not the main beach, which doubled as a garbage dump and public bathroom), we befriended a shop owner named Ambika.
Her diminutive form, properly wrapped in salwar kameez and dupatta, scarcely covered up the tigress who could emerge with a roar at the least provocation. When we first met, I was browsing through her shop – really a humble shack with one dangling light bulb – admiring the excellent Rajasthani weavings she had, and chatting with her. When a German man entered the shop, she resumed an apparently long-running conversation with him on the price of a wall hanging. Finally she said, “Look, you come into my shop every day and change the price you want. Why don’t you just buy it? I’m giving you a good price – take it or leave it!”
Shocked at her tone, the man put both hands in front of him as if to push back her words, stepped backward, and left the shop.
“Stupid man!” Ambika snorted with a breath of fire, her dark brown eyes flashing.
James and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. This was definitely the most plain-speaking woman we had met in months. So we struck up a friendship with Ambika, visiting her every morning and evening on our way to and from the beach. Without delay she told us she was from “a scheduled caste” (a formerly “untouchable” caste that had been singled out by the Indian government for special opportunities, in an effort to raise people’s levels of education, economic status, and political participation). We learned she was a practicing Hindu who made daily offerings to Kali, her favorite goddess – little wonder! – and that she was 20 years old, and “alone,” by which she meant “single.” But she meant “alone,” too, and when we invited her to a restaurant next door for chai and pastry, Ambika told us her story.
Orphaned at age seven when her parents were killed in a bus accident, Ambika and her four sisters and two brothers were taken in by an aunt and uncle.
“How good of them to take in seven kids!” I commented.
“Yes, with five girls – that’s five dowries they have to raise – what a burden! But don’t worry for them. My aunt put us to work. She beat us a lot.”
I had already come to understand the bane that daughters represented in traditional India. In order to marry them off, the parents had to come up with sizeable sums of money or – in the case of poor villagers – cattle or promised harvests. Sometimes the husband’s family continued demanding dowry payments long after the wedding. Hence, girls were usually not educated but instead forced to work to begin earning their dowry. In fact, in order to have chai with us, Ambika had left her shop in the care of an 11-year-old girl, her eager helper.
Ambika recounted how when her aunt and uncle arranged the marriage of her 20-year-old sister, they also arranged Ambika’s. Since weddings were elaborate, expensive events, they figured a two-for-one was a good deal. Ambika was only 16.
“Did you meet the groom – the husband – beforehand?” James asked.
She nodded. “I met him once. He was 26. I don’t know, maybe he was a good boy, but he seemed stupid to me. I did not want him.”
Traveling in India with so many of our modern Western values intact, James and I were continually surprised at how many people we met who submitted to arranged marriages. Even in Delhi, we went out with some of Shashi’s office staff – modern, educated young people – who recounted their brief meetings with prospective spouses, the elaborate background checks (family lineage, astrological charts, education), negotiation of the dowry, and their early difficulties in married life. When questioning how they could marry someone they did not love, we repeatedly got the same answer, “First marriage, then love.” And it seemed, often enough, that these young couples really did learn to love one another. As we were told, “When divorce is not an option, you understand you must work it out.” It was also frequently pointed out to us, “You know, in America, you have a 50% divorce rate,” which was stated as proof that a “love match” could easily fail. Although divorce was legal in India, it was largely considered a social evil, repudiation of a holy institution, or selfish personal failing. India’s divorce rate, one of the lowest in the world, was just over 1%.154
We would sometimes ask about their sex lives, and the most common answer seemed to be a variation of the first one: “First marriage, then sex, then love.”
James and I often argued for the power of love at the outset and the right to free choice, which were countered by an insistence that the parents knew best. Young people understood that they had little or no experience dating, were too young to make a decision with lifelong consequences, and that the background investigation would help their parents choose the most compatible mate. Whereas in villages, marriages were often arranged before the children had even learned to write their own names, in cities, parents allowed the teenagers to meet their fiancé before the wedding, and to decide if the marriage prospect was to their liking. For Ambika, the selected groom was most definitely not to her liking.
“So my aunt told me if I don’t get married with that boy, then my sister could not get married either! My sister was so upset, because she really, really wanted to get married – she was already 20!”
“What did you do?” James asked.
Sadness clouded her face as she absentmindedly twisted strands of her black hair. “I had no choice. I got married,” she sighed.
“You were just 16,” I said. “How did you feel?”
Emotion widened her dark eyes. “It was so scary! So scary!” she groaned. “I cry and cry! He wanted to have sex with me!” Her small mouth twisted with disgust. “I couldn’t do it! I refuse! After three days, I was supposed to move in with his family, and then what maybe happen to me there? Maybe I never get out! I refuse. My aunt beat me, everybody so mad at me, but I refuse!”
“Then what happened?” James asked.
“Everybody was yelling at me, kicking me, so I told them, ‘Then I kill myself!’ and I drank a bottle of insecticide there – right there in front of them!”
I gently put my hand on Ambika’s arm, “You tried to commit suicide...”
“Yes! Every day I pray to Kali, ‘Forgive me for the wrong things I have done,’ but what kind of life is there for woman? I rather die than suffer like a woman!”
Ambika clearly identified the black hole that might have awaited her at her i
n-laws’ house, where young wives become the house servant and endure beating, torture (throwing acid on their faces or setting them on fire being common punishments for not anteing up more dowry), and death. Since they consider “marital disputes” to be a private affair, police rarely get involved. Statistics are hard to come by, but according to a 1997 Amnesty International document, “In India there are close to 15,000 dowry deaths estimated per year. Mostly they are kitchen fires designed to look like accidents.”155
After drinking poison, Ambika was rushed to the hospital, where she lay in a bed for three months recovering. During the ensuing investigation, she did not report to the authorities the reasons for her desperation, because she did not want to get her relatives in trouble. Child marriage is illegal in India, but 45% of girls are still married off before they reach the legal age of 18.156
Back in her home village, Ambika had brought shame to her family. Like a mosquito that would not stop annoying them, however, she was working to have her marriage dissolved, but so far, the village judges had not given their approval.
“They tell me to go home to my husband, and I tell them I will never go to his house. They said to me, ‘You’re awfully small to speak like you do.’”
“Small?” I queried. “You mean, young?”
Ambika nodded. “So I say to them: Well, then I must be too young to have married that boy!”
James and I both laughed, imagining how the village judges must have been scandalized that such a “petulant” woman did not know “her place.” It impressed us that she defied her family and the social order for her own freedom... if you consider being a shopkeeper, still living with her aunt and uncle, free. Worst of all, she was now considered “damaged goods.”
“Married once,” she explained, “It’s like a government stamp on your forehead. Everybody knows. An alone woman in India, they give a lot of bad names to. I pray to Kali she forgives me.”
“What do you wish for, Ambika?” I asked her. “What are your dreams?”
A smile lit up her brown face. “I make some money in this shop, and I help my younger brothers and sisters go to school. My older sister is happy with her husband, and they have one child. When my younger brothers and sisters are OK, then I want to go abroad, where women have freedom. But now, I must work.”
“You can make it, Ambika,” I told her. “Keep practicing your English and using your mind. You are very intelligent. You are a strong woman, and no one can kill your spirit.”
Yes, I am a strong woman,” she sighed, “and I am alone. I feel so alone.”
Because of her Kali-like vehemence and an internal power pack that made her tough enough to slog through a patriarchal edifice of oppression, Ambika’s story was a hopeful one. During our time together, James and I encouraged her. Still, wherever we went in India, we kept smacking up against that edifice.
As we traveled, naturally we saw children playing in the streets, soccer fields, and parks. I noticed that it was mostly boys that I saw, and my mind unconsciously made up excuses – the little girls are at home helping their mothers, girls are not allowed out, or some other unformed idea. When I began hearing about female infanticide, my mind rebelled again, refusing to entertain the background stories... How do you kill the baby? Bury her alive? Leave her outside for wild animals to devour? Throw her down a well? That newspaper article snapped my mind to attention. Sons were so over-valued that families were willing to kill their own children! Was the burden of the dowry so great, then? No, it had to be more than that. It had to indicate the reduction of Female to mere property, like a machine you bought to produce sons for you. When its job was done, you discarded it. In point of fact, the abandonment of widows was a real problem in India.
In the book, Sex and Power, Rita Banerji, in a section entitled “Women as Sex Objects for the Patriarchy,” states the following:
Undeniably, particularly in the case of India, the worst outcome of this severe social objectification of women is that it makes them as disposable as any other object. Indeed, the routine elimination of women from the population is perhaps one of the most depraved secrets that India conceals in its folds of democracy and traditionalism. Reports based on census studies estimate that at least 50 million females have been removed from India’s population. There are villages in north India where the gender ratio has been reported to be as low as 31 women to 100 men. Government records also show that there are villages in Rajasthan where there have been no reports of the birth of girls for decades. The methods of elimination include female feticide, female infanticide, dowry murders and the death of pre-adolescent girls through willful neglect of nutrition and medical care. 157
This phenomenon of the objectification of women fits perfectly in a Dominator System. Gods at the top, then priests, then householders (men), then sons to carry on the family name. Women, girls, servants, and Untouchables at the bottom. Here was the Vedic Creation story! The body parts of purusha (First Man) made the sun, sky (male elements), and Brahmins from the upper body (the “pure realm”), whereas the women, slaves, and female elements – like the Earth – were formed from his feet (below the waist being the “impure realm”). How could this simple myth, thousands of years old, still affect how people viewed their world? How could it lead them to murder their own daughters and wives, without some internal alarm going off to tell them it was wrong? How did Shakti, the Great Mother Goddess – and her many manifestations as Sarasvati, Lakshmi, Kali, Durga, and a thousand others – not instill an appreciation of the Feminine?
As James and I struggled with such questions, we continually posed them to people we met, such as Baba Ram Puri. Sitting at the feet of the Naga Baba, we heard him speak reverently of how the Mother Goddess had created the Universe through her uttering of matrikas, “creation syllables” that wove the motherly matrix of manifest reality. Every village had its patron goddesses, he told us, as he aimed to deconstruct our tendencies toward pop spirituality or over-generalization.
“Everyone prays to the Goddess, yes,” I agreed, “but what about how they treat women in general? What about dowry killing?”
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he sighed, his bare chest modestly adorned with japa mala beads. Eyeing my frustration with a mixture of consternation and benevolence, Baba Ram Puri stroked his beard. “Listen, if you’re going to judge this culture, ask two questions: Who holds the keys? Who holds the money?” After a moment’s pause, he answered them himself, “It’s the woman.”
Robert E. Svoboda, an Ayurvedic and Tantric author, in his essay, “Family Vows,” remarks that in the Indian family, the wife/mother not only manages the household, but maintains the altar, also, thereby tending to the material as well as spiritual well-being of the family. “Women are in India as elsewhere the principal architects and conservators of the family.”158
Additionally, India was one of the first countries in the world to give women the right to vote, its progressive constitution guaranteed equal rights for men and women, and Indira Gandhi was one of the world’s few female prime ministers back in the 1960’s. Albeit that women’s rights were definitely advancing in certain sectors of society, India was a vast country, and we found it to be as Mahatma Gandhi had said: “India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her 700,000 villages.” And the truth be told: traditional village values were alive in the cities, too.
In summary: women in India were the lynchpin holding families together. The Feminine was exalted as the Great Goddess, to whom Hindus prayed. And 50 million females had gone missing from the population.
What in the blue blazes had happened to Shakti in India?!?
Let Goa
That question followed us everywhere we went, up the Karnataka coast, and into Goa. By the time we reached Goa, we were travel-weary and just wanted to sit still and watch the sunset dissolve into the Arabian Sea... for at least several months. So that is what we did. While my mind coached
us to live where we could experience traditional India, my body exuberantly cast off my salwar kameez and dupatta. For here was a place I could wear a bikini or the scandalous “noodle strap top” without men glaring at my breasts, and a skirt instead of trousers and three layers of silk in heat that could wilt a candlestick.
Long stretches of sandy beaches (which were not used as toilets!), palm groves, rounded hills brown with the dry season... Goa felt like home immediately, and we were intrigued by its hybrid culture. Politically Goa was not a part of India until 1961, when 400 years of being a Portuguese colony ended. Hence, there were Christian churches (and Christians who might think and dress Western-style), older people speaking Portuguese, and restaurants with a European flavor. We found the Goan people to be culturally open-minded and extremely friendly – and for India, where we had been so warmly welcomed, that was saying something!
Between the easy-going culture and the relaxing beaches, it was inevitable this should become a refuge for hashish-smoking freaks, free-spirited artists, and other homeless global citizens, who stumbled into Goan fishing villages in the 1960’s. Trance dance and raves rocked Goa in the 1980’s and 1990’s, making it a Mecca for people who loved to dance. The line-up of beach shacks seemed to have invested more in sound systems than in kitchen equipment, creating quite the soundscape! Thank the gods and goddesses that global trance was one of our favorite kinds of music, so we could groove with it.
In addition to the international freaks (Britishers, Germans, Italians, Russians, and Israelis primarily), Indians also sought refuge in Goa as a tourist destination where they could let their hair down. We enjoyed meeting the musicians, artists, and other freethinkers who told their stories of getting liberated (even if only for a week’s holiday!) in a conservative culture.
Upon renting a small house, we set up housekeeping and straightaway carved out a writing space for me. Our months on the road had me bursting with ideas to get down on paper. Placing my studio at the back of the house – putting distance between my thinking space and the noisy road and busy cow path – I arranged a computer desk, and single mattress with pillows, and then erected a simple altar to the Goddess of Writing and the Arts.
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