by Sudhir Kakar
To a child listening to the tale, the message on the nature of the untouchable is clear. The (untouchable) crow is black, and has a beak that forages in symbolic equivalents of faeces, refuse and garbage. (A crow is also inauspicious in the sense that in the popular mind it is a bird associated with death14—to dream of a crow is a sign of approaching death—and this may well be included in some versions of the story.) Naturally, then, for its presumption of going to dine on the upper-caste sparrow, the crow is fittingly punished.
These are some of the essentials of untouchability that enter into the cultural part of the growing child’s mind as an underlying ‘truth’ of the social world in which he will live and die.
Caste, or rather what has been called ‘the evil of the caste system’, has been under persistent attack by Hindu reformers—chief among them, Mahatma Gandhi—for more than a century. In fact, what is now considered news is not that someone attacks the institution of caste but that someone dares to publicly defend it. The reformist attack on the religious and moral foundations of caste and the onslaught of the state on its legal pretensions has certainly weakened the hold of certain aspects of caste on the mind at least of middle-class urban Indians. The well-known sociologist André Béteille attests to this change when he writes: ‘The doctor in his office, the lawyer in his chambers, the civil servant or even the clerk in his office is no longer bound by the moral authority of his caste or sub-caste in the way in which the brahmin, the rajput, the nai (barber) or the dhobi (washerman) was in the traditional village. The emancipation of the individual from the demands of the caste and sub-caste has been a complex and long-drawn process that is by no means complete yet...What is clear, however, is that increasing numbers of professionals, civil servants, managers and others feel free to repudiate such moral claims as may be made on them in the name of the caste to which they happen to belong...it is in this sense that the middle-class Indian’s orientations to caste and to his family are quite different. He cannot repudiate his obligations to his family even when he finds them irksome; nothing is easier for him than to repudiate the demands of his caste if he finds them inconvenient.’15
Yet, even for the urban middle-class Indian there are some demands of his caste identity that lie under the surface of consciousness and thus are less susceptible to conscious examination and eventual repudiation. The occupation prescribed for his caste is the most easily rejected; what middle-class parents are most passionate about is their children’s admission to those schools, colleges and professional institutions that are perceived as gateways to successful careers in the modern economy. Caste also now plays a decreasing role in middle-class friendships, and inter-caste marriages, though still rare, have begun to register on the Indian mental screen. But the hierarchical thinking associated with caste continues to remain influential in the middle-class psyche. As does the specific fantasy that associates the untouchable with the dark consumer of dirty foods.
Indian Women:
Traditional and Modern
India was and continues to be a patriarchal society, with the general subordination of women and their disempowerment that patriarchy normally entails. To view Indian women solely through the lens of patriarchy, therefore, is to see the resemblance—in fact only superficial—to women in other patriarchal societies. But the image in such a case is always fuzzy and indistinct. Once we use the zoom lens of Indic culture (and its contemporary ferment), however, the picture becomes more focussed and nuanced as unexpected details emerge. The similarities to women in other patriarchal societies do not disappear but become balanced, and, in parts of the picture, overwhelmed by the differences. Thus, for example, in India, caste almost always trumps gender in the sense that a brahmin woman will have higher status than a low-caste man.1 Or, to take another example, the powerful role played by mother-goddesses in the Indian cultural imagination—and by mothers in the inner worlds of their sons—imbues male dominance with the emotional colours of fear, awe, longing, surrender, and so on.
The interplay of universal patriarchal values, Indic culture and historical change in the wake of India’s encounter with the West is most clearly seen in the case of the modern, urban Indian woman. The emergence of a sizeable middle class in the last few decades, pan-Indian in character, though overwhelmingly urban, is widely regarded—with optimism by the ‘modernizers’ and disdain by the ‘traditionalists’—as the most important development in the ongoing transformation of Indian society. Not that this middle class is exactly the same all over the country, especially in the context of women. In the South, for instance, wives participate more in their husband’s lives than in the North. But overall, the similarities between middle-class men and women across the country are greater than the differences based on caste, language or region. And within this expanding middle class, it is the woman who is at the centre of changes taking place in contemporary Indian society.
Caught in the cross-fire of ideologies that seek to defend the traditional vision of Indian womanhood and those that seek to free her from the inequities of religiously sanctioned patriarchies, the modern Indian woman is engaged in a struggle between two opposing forces in her psyche as she seeks to reconcile traditional ideals with modern aspirations. To her strident critics from either the far left or right of the political spectrum she may well answer with these lines by the German poet Goethe:
Your spirit only seeks a single quest
So never learns to know its brother
Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast
And one would gladly sunder from the other.
A DAUGHTER IS BORN
To appreciate the magnitude of change that has taken place in the psyche of the educated, middle-class Indian woman, let us consider the culture’s marked preference for a son, a preference which has scarred the psyche of generations of women.
The inner experience of being a girl, to sense that perhaps with your birth you have brought less joy to those you love, to feel that sinking of the heart when adult eyes glow at the sight of your baby brother while they dim as they regard you, can easily become a fundamental crisis at the beginning of a little girl’s identity development. The crisis, generally silent, is given rare eloquent voice in the fictionalized reminiscences of the Hindi writer Mrinal Pande who describes the reactions of her fictional counterpart, the seven-year-old Tinu, at the birth of a brother after three daughters have been born to the parents.
An aunt comes in with a gleaming bowl of special broth for Mother that smells of fennel and coriander and ghee. Little slivers of chopped almonds and pistachios swim on the surface like tiny sail-boats. Mother smiles and says she doesn’t feel like drinking the heavy stuff. ‘Drink it up, drink it all up,’ says Grandmother coming into the room and bending to pick up my younger sister. ‘You will be breastfeeding a son this time.’ Mother elevates herself on one elbow. I nudge against her so some of the vile liquid spills. I expect to be yelled at, to have my shoulder firmly grabbed and be propelled out of the room for bad behaviour. But nothing of that sort happens. People can’t stop smiling with pleasure today.
‘This is my Laxmi [goddess of good luck] daughter,’ says Grandmother, squeezing my baby sister against her ample breasts. ‘She has brought a brother on her back.’ Everyone smiles some more...
‘You too have a brother now,’ everyone tells us happily. ‘He’ll protect you and carry on your father’s name.’
Dinu [her sister] and I giggle at the thought of the little bundle protecting us. The elders’ joy is infectious...
‘I’m glad it’s all over now,’ mother tells her mother. ‘No more ordeals like this for me,’ she says, and lies down, content as a cat.
‘Shoo now,’ Grandmother says to us, not unkindly, ‘let your mother rest.’
We are almost at the door when mother asks us anxiously if we have eaten. Her eyes are brown and deep and they are saying, Never mind. I’ll love you all the same. Dinu and I smile and speak together: ‘Yes we have.’
Though t
he truth is, we have not.2
The preference for sons is as old as Indian society itself. Vedic verses pray that sons will be followed by still more male offspring, never by females. A prayer in the Atharva Veda even adds a touch of malice: ‘The birth of a girl, grant it elsewhere, here grant a son.’ As the Indologist A.A. MacDonnel observes, ‘Indeed daughters are conspicuous in the Rig Veda by their absence. We meet in hymns with prayers for sons and grandsons, male offspring, male descendants and male issue and occasionally for wives but never daughters. Even forgiveness is asked for ourselves and grandsons, but no blessing is ever prayed for a daughter.’3
At the birth of a son drums are beaten in some parts of the country, conch-shells blown in others and the midwife paid lavishly, while no such spontaneous rejoicing accompanies the birth of a daughter. Women’s folk songs reveal the painful awareness of this discrepancy, at birth, between the celebration of sons and the mere tolerance of daughters. Thus, in a North Indian song the women complain:
Listen O Sukhma, what a tradition has started!
Drums are played upon the birth of a boy,
But at my birth only a brass plate was beaten.
And in Maharashtra, the girl, comparing herself to a white sweet-scented jasmine (jai) and the boy to a big, strong-smelling thorny leaf (kevada) plaintively asks: ‘Did anyone notice the sweet fragrance of a jai? The hefty kevada however has filled the whole street with its strong scent.’ A contemporary proverb from Bengal at the opposite end of the country expresses the culturally sanctioned preference more bluntly: ‘Even the piss of a son brings money; let the daughter go to hell.’
Of course, the preference for the birth of a son although widespread is not uniform. But the exceptions generally only prove the rule: in some families, the first-born girl, though not as welcome as a son, may still be regarded by parents as a harbinger of good luck, or the birth of a girl after a succession of sons in a daughterless family will almost certainly be celebrated (the birth of a second or third daughter, however, tends to be an unhappy event for the family). Only in parts of the country—the North East and the south-western states—which have a history of matrilineal systems of female inheritance and post-marriage residence in the woman’s house is the birth of a girl a consistently welcome event. But even these patterns are rapidly changing in the direction of the ones prevailing in the rest of the country.
Besides the universal patriarchal preoccupation with the family name being carried forward through the male line, there are ritual and economic reasons for the strong preference for male offspring. The presence of a son is necessary for the proper performance of many sacraments among the Hindus, especially those carried out following the death of parents for the well-being of their souls. Economically, a daughter is looked upon as an unmitigated expense, someone who will never contribute to the family income and who, upon marriage, will take away a considerable part of her family’s fortune as her dowry. In case of a poor family, the parents may be pushed deep into debt in order to provide for a daughter’s marriage. The Aitareya Brahmana (like other ancient texts) probably refers as much as anything else to the economic facts of life when it states flatly that a daughter is a source of misery while a son is the saviour of the family.
As the wildly skewed sex-ratios in Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, hinting at widespread female foeticide, show, economic prosperity and the rise of a sizeable middle class in these North Indian states have failed to dent the traditional preference for a son. What is encouraging, though, are signs that whatever their initial disappointment after the birth of a daughter, parents in middle-class families may have begun to take equal pleasure in their male and female offspring, at least as long as they are infants.4 In their interactions with the baby, they do not show a preference for boys over girls, irrespective of whether they are engaging with the baby through caregiving activities or through play. The discrimination, when it takes place, begins later.
DISCRIMINATION AND THE MAIDEN
As she grows up, the girl child sees the preference for a son translated into a differential treatment received by girls in the family. In Mrinal Pande’s fictionalized reminiscences, on a visit to her maternal grandmother who lives with her son’s family, the four-year-old Tinu is immediately aware of the difference between her and her male cousin Anu who is of the same age. Whether it is in the making of coloured paper buntings for a wedding where Anu takes the best twigs, leaving rotten, damp ones for Tinu and her sister, or the small peacock made of gold thread which the sisters discover but are forced to cede to their cousin under intense pressure from the adults, including their own mother, it is evident to little Tinu that as the son’s son Anu cannot imagine anyone refusing him anything for long.
On a visit to the parental home of her mami (mother’s brother’s wife), Tinu listens to her mami’s father muttering, ‘Too many girls! Too many girls in all the nice houses!’ as he feeds a slice of mango or a toffee to one of his grandsons. Back in Tinu’s own family, if there are any complaints from the tutor about the girls’ lack of concentration, the older women smile and say something about girls eventually needing skills only to roll chapattis and boil dal and rice. The grandmother’s old female servant, while locking up the family’s pet bitch for the night, says this is how she wants all girls to be: behind closed gates and asleep after dark. Even Tinu’s mother is not completely immune from the traditional ideology in relation to the girl child: ‘When Dinu and I laugh too much, Mother gets angry and says we will now weep. Girls should not laugh too much, she says grumpily. Dinu and I giggle inside our quilts, and then we put pretend-tears on our cheeks with our spit to ward off bad luck.’5
The traditional discrimination against the girl child is reflected in various statistics of which the worst is her absence, by the millions, in the latest census figures. Together with untouchability, the selective abortion of the female foetus and female infanticide, often by the midwife, who is paid by the family to snuff out the life of a baby girl at birth, are perhaps the greatest blots of shame on Indian society. Statistics tell us that there is a higher rate of female infant mortality; girl infants are breast-fed less frequently, for shorter durations and over shorter periods than boys; they are given lower quality food, made to work longer hours than boys and have lesser access to schooling and health care.6
These, then, are the objective facts of discrimination against daughters in traditional India. But what is the subjective reality? How is a factual discrimination viewed by the girls themselves? We know that what is psychologically significant is not what has happened to us but what we believe occurred. The fictions we tell ourselves about our past and our lives are indispensable to keep at bay the truth that may shock us out of our ever-precarious sense of well-being and self-worth. A comprehensive study of the girl child, resulting from a survey conducted among girls between the ages of seven and eighteen in six hundred rural and urban households in eight Indian states, reminds us of the gulf that often exists between objective facts and their subjective perception.7 If the question is raised whether an Indian girl feels discriminated against and treated unfairly in relation to her brother, then the answer is not as clear-cut as in little Tinu’s account, or as the statistics would have us believe. In the conscious perception of Indian girls, cutting across income, educational and regional divides, the answer to the question of gender-based discrimination is in fact more no than yes. In the study, the girls do not report differences between girls and boys with respect to health care or food (even if girls often eat last, with their mothers). Girls do not discern differences in rewards and punishments meted out to boys and girls. And as far as education is concerned, over seventy per cent of the girls—with the percentage becoming much higher in the states of Kerala and Maharashtra—believe the acquisition of literacy equally important for both boys and girls.
The main reason for the subjective perception of girls diverging from objective realities is that the cultural preference for sons and the discrimination against d
aughters captured in statistics (or in a creative writer’s easier access to buried childhood memories) does not directly impinge upon the psyche of an Indian girl. The patriarchal stance towards the girl child is mediated and strained through the filter of the family. In other words, for the wider culture’s devaluation of women to be translated into a pervasive sense of worthlessness or bitterness in individual women, the behaviour and attitudes of parents and close older relatives towards the infant girls in their midst—the actualities of family life, that is—must be fully consistent with this female depreciation. In the childhood memoirs of many women there is often one or more caretaker—an older relative—whose attitude towards and interactions with the little girl run contrary to the dictates of patriarchy.
Also, the internalization of low self-esteem presupposes that girls and women in Indian households have no sphere of their own. That they have no independent livelihood and activity, no area of family and community responsibility and control. That they have no living space, apart from that of men, within which to manifest those aspects of feminine identity that derive from intimacy and collaboration with other women. The fact, however, is that all these circumstances do exist in traditional India, mitigating the discriminations and inequities of patriarchal attitudes and institutions.
