by Sudhir Kakar
From anthropological accounts and other sources, we know of the affection and often compassionate attention bestowed by mothers on their daughters throughout their lives.8 ‘I turn the stone flour mill with the swiftness of a running deer; that is because my arms are strong with the mother’s milk I drank.’ This and other similar couplets sung by women all over India bear witness to the daughter’s memory of her mother’s affection for her and to the self-esteem and strength of will this has generated in turn.
In addition to her mother’s empathic connection with her, as an Indian girl grows up, her relationships with others within the extended family contain the possibility of diluting the resentment she may harbour against her brothers. Among the many adults who comprise the joint family there is usually one adult who gives a little girl the kind of admiration and the sense of being singled out as special that a male child more often receives. And of course when a girl is the only daughter, such chances are increased immeasurably. Thus in folk tales, however many sons a couple may have, there is often one daughter in their midst who is the parents’ favourite.
In Tinu’s case, besides the gift of a rich inner life and the resources of a poetic imagination, it is her emotional access to her father that enables her to deal with the discrimination in a creative way without becoming embittered.
If no one is going to pay attention to me, then I want to be able to float free, grubby and uncombed in the large, lonely and bare rooms where I can dance with shadows after Dinu and Mother have taken off for Grandmother’s crowded and noisy house...
I love being left behind.
Once they have turned the corner, I rush in, knowing that now the house will be all mine. Now I can sing, I can laugh, I can pull faces in the mirror, and dig for worms in the garden. I can also have Father all to myself when he comes home for lunch. I can spin tales to entertain him while he is eating, and he will nod good-naturedly, overlooking the spills I cause in my excitement.
But it is not easy to be left behind...9
In traditional India, every female is born into a well-defined community of women within her particular family. Although by no means does it resound with solidarity and goodwill, the existence of this exclusive sphere of femininity and domesticity gives a woman a tangible opportunity to be productive and lively. Getting along with other women in this sphere, learning the mandatory skills of householding, cooking and childcare, establishing her place in this primary world—these relationships and tasks constitute the dailiness of traditional girlhood in India. Moreover, when necessary, other women in the family—her mother, aunts, sisters, sisters-in-law—are not only an Indian girl’s teachers and models but her allies against the discriminations and inequities of the patriarchal values of the outside world. Often enough, in the ‘underground’ of female culture, as reflected in ballads, wedding songs and jokes, women do indeed react against the discrimination of their wider culture by portraying men as vain, faithless and infantile.10 ‘Do not call a snake “helpless”, or a husband “mine”,’ lament the women in Maharashtra; ‘A husband so long as he is in bed, Yama [god of death] when he gets up,’ say Telugu wives; and women in Karnataka mock, ‘Peacock before marriage, a lion at the time of engagement and a sheep after marriage.’
And finally, the young girl has before her the examples of older women, mothers all, who are respected and powerful in family affairs. The much-maligned Hindu law giver Manu is only a qualified misogynist. His infamous pronouncements against women are limited to younger women: ‘The teacher is ten times more venerable than the sub-teacher, the father a hundred times more than the teacher, but the mother is a thousand times more than the father.’11
All these factors help to mitigate the damage done to a girl’s self-esteem when she discovers that in the eyes of her culture and society she is considered inferior to a boy.
Leaving aside the objective facts of discrimination against daughters in middle-class families, which are almost certainly less than in traditional India, subjectively many of these girls are convinced that their parents consider them as equal to their brothers. In fact, standing the gender discrimination paradigm on its head is a study of one hundred and thirty school boys and ninety school girls from the city of Pune which reports that girls perceive themselves to be more accepted by both parents than do boys.12 And what does one make of another study that tells us that educated middle-class Indian women report both parents as more ‘caring’, that is, affectionate, empathic and close, than do comparable women in the United States?13 In short, as a middle-class girl grows up, her experience of gender-based discrimination in her family is substantially less than the developmental fate of her traditional counterpart.
The difference between the urban middle-class girl and the traditional rural girl is most pronounced in the area of education. For although the idea of some school education for girls has gained wide acceptance all over the country, middle-class parents even welcome higher education for their daughters which, they believe, is necessary for the girl so that she can achieve a measure of autonomy. University education will enable the daughter to contribute to the family income after marriage and also make her capable of standing on her own feet if, unfortunately, the marriage breaks up, a possibility that has recently dawned on the middle-class horizon.14 The daughter is thus encouraged to work hard at her studies, her academic achievements greeted with parental pride and pleasure, while her involvement in domestic chores, although still more than that of her brother, is often minor as compared to the lot of her rural sister.
ENTERING PUBERTY
Late childhood marks the beginning of an Indian girl’s deliberate training in how to be a good woman, and hence the conscious inculcation of culturally designated feminine roles. This is true of all girls, although in the new middle class the break between early and late childhood is not so sharp and traditional feminine values are leavened with modern imports.
Like her traditional counterpart, the middle-class Indian girl entering puberty learns that the ‘virtues’ of womanhood which will take her through life are submission and docility in the home of her husband, and that the primary goal of her life is to please her future husband and parents-in-law. This learning, however, is now being subverted by a middle-class modernity that is pushing the girl toward educational achievement, equality and relative independence. The message from her parents is mixed. Obedience and conformity, selflessness and self-denial are still the ideals of womanhood and a good woman does not ‘create waves’ or ‘rock the boat’. Middle-class parents, however, also encourage and take pride in the academic success of their daughter. Their aspirations for an occupational career for her, though more ambiguous than for a son, are not completely absent. The parents’ cherished goal for the daughter, however, remains a ‘good’ marriage; her education should help the girl to find a well-educated, economically well-off man from a respectable family. Which is not to say that this is always the case. But if a girl pursues education solely and determinedly for a career, it is usually when a strong and self-reliant adult member of her immediate family has empowered her through approval or encouragement. Clinical experience and group discussions with middle-class women suggest that in families where mothers are not career women, a daughter looks up to and identifies with the father as the representative of the modern, external world. His is the decisive voice in influencing her career choice and legitimizing her intellectual aspirations.
The faltering in self-esteem of Indian girls during the years of early puberty is intimately related to the fact that at precisely this developmental moment, a time of hormonal changes and emotional volatility, her training in service and self-denial in preparation for her imminent roles of daughter-in-law and wife is stepped up. In order to maintain her family’s love and approval—the narcissistic supplies necessary for firm self-esteem—the girl tends to conform, and even over-conform, to the prescriptions and expectations of those around her.
Puberty is also the period when the differen
tial treatment of girls cannot be masked. Besides the training to be a good wife and daughter-in-law, a major difference in the bringing up of sons and daughters is in the restrictions placed on the girl’s freedom of movement. Whether strictly enforced or relatively lenient, the restrictions transcend rural-urban, traditional-modern and other demographic differences. In traditional India, girls are not allowed to play with boys and are confined to the company of their own sex. There are many prohibitions with regard to the kind of clothes they may wear. A girl is permitted fewer recreational activities which involve going out of the house such as visiting friends, going to the market or to the cinema, and which may bring her in contact with a member of the opposite sex.
Puberty rites in many parts of the country emphasize the fact of the girl’s body ‘flowering’ or ‘ripening’ into womanhood and thus being ready to fulfil what the culture regards as the chief tasks of a woman’s life cycle—procreation and motherhood. The girl’s sexual maturity is welcomed as a vital step on the road to becoming a woman whose fertility would be a credit to the family. Yet, the same puberty is also feared because of the inherent danger of wantonness and sexual abandon which can deeply dishonour and shame her family and the community. The girl has to be protected—from herself as much from men—in the highly vulnerable period between puberty and marriage, a period to be kept as short as possible. This protection mainly translates itself into the culture’s efforts at moulding the ways the girl carries herself and in placing restrictions on her encounters with men. For instance, it is expected from the girl that she never take long ‘masculine’ strides but short, soft, barely audible steps, which are also forced upon her by the sari or the half sari she now has to wear. Traditionally, all actions that could even hint at sexual abandon—personified by the prostitute, the dancing-girl or the courtesan—such as the bold gaze or the loud laugh, the chewing of betel leaf (paan) which tints the mouth red, leaning against a pillar or wall or standing in the doorway meet with undisguised family disapproval.15
This applies more now to rural and small-town communities in India. The restrictions placed on the way an urban middle-class girl comports herself are more relaxed. But they are by no means absent. The average college girl in Delhi, for instance, dressed in jeans or even short skirts, will perhaps smile at the antics of a boy playing the clown to attract her attention but will hesitate to break into loud laughter. At some level, she is still aware of traditional folk ‘wisdom’ pertaining to male-female interactions in this period of her life which she has absorbed from the family and community in the process of growing up and which, for instance, holds that boys believe ‘Jo hansi, woh phansi’ (‘If a girl laughs, she is already in the net’).
The restrictions, enforced by the women of the family, by mothers and grandmothers, are not presented to the girl as punitive measures but as the reality of the world in which she will live. The curbs on her freedom are the way things ‘naturally’ are, and to which the girl, any ‘good girl’, must comply for her own protection and the good name of the family. The message transmitted to the girl is that it is she who is responsible for maintaining a distance from boys and men, thereby protecting her ‘purity’ which is also the honour (izzat) of the whole family. She is made to understand, undermining a sense of female agency, that young women are weak and vulnerable, unable to resist determined male advances or the promptings of their own sexual nature.
Even middle-class girls are not overly rebellious or critical of the restrictions on their free association with boys. Although overwhelmingly in favour of co-education, the majority of college girls, at least in small towns and cities, would like their interaction with boys to be limited to educational activities and not extend to a more personal association, and certainly not to ‘dating’ in the Western sense.
Within this atmosphere of general avoidance of close contact with men, there is one poignant fact: the little time a daughter spends with her father. In traditional India, less than half the families (almost two-thirds in Bihar, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh) eat together at meal time, almost the only time a girl may have with her father. Although the contact between father and daughter is greater in urban, middle-class families, it is still generally limited. The absent father, without a share in the activities of his daughter, indeed ‘reflects one of the great tragedies of Indian family life.’16
We do not mean to over-emphasize the bleakness of puberty in the life cycle of a traditional Indian girl. One compensation of this period is an increase in culturally sanctioned maternal indulgence, paradoxically at the same time when the mother is also the chief agent in the family’s efforts in moulding the girl according to the dictates of tradition. Considered as a guest in her ‘natal’ family, the girl is often treated with the solicitous concern accorded to a welcome outsider who, all too soon, will marry and leave her mother for good. Mindful of her daughter’s fate, the mother re-experiences the emotional conflicts her own separation once aroused, and this in turn tends to increase her indulgence and solicitude toward her daughter. As we have noted above, daughterhood in India is not without its rewards precisely because the conditions of young womanhood are normally so forbidding. Little wonder that for an Indian girl rebellion against the constraints of impinging womanhood, with all its circumscription of identity, becomes near impossible. She internalizes the specific ideals of womanhood and monitors her behaviour carefully in order to guarantee her mother’s love and approval, upon which she is more than ever dependent as she makes ready to leave home. The irony of an Indian girl’s coming of age is that to be a good woman and a felicitous bride she must be more than ever the perfect daughter.
MARRIAGE: IS LOVE NECESSARY?
In traditional India, the marriage of a daughter is a trying time for the whole family and often overwhelming for the young girl. Consider this: in northern India, given the rules that a marriage should be within the same caste or a group of sub-castes but exclude partners from the extended kinship group (which practically eliminates all eligible males of the village), it is likely that a girl will marry a stranger from a place far away from the one in which she has spent her childhood. More important, she may have little say in the choice of her partner, and this is a pan-Indian phenomenon.
As we shall see later, modern Indian girls also prefer arranged marriages, though their sense of their own agency in the arranging of the marriage is greater. Whereas considerations of caste and family status, followed by the earning power of the boy are dominant in the arrangement of traditional marriages, education and the ‘personality’ of the groom—apart, of course, from the social and monetary status of the groom’s family—are now the more important considerations for the new middle class. And it is in this class that the girl’s opinion is not only sought but actively solicited. Often enough, she has a de facto power of veto on any marriage alliance proposed on her behalf. Paradoxically, because of the spread of the global consumer culture in which the Indian middle class is an enthusiastic participant, the amount of cash and material goods expected as dowry by the groom are today far greater than the more modest expectation of giving and taking in traditional Hindu marriages.
In spite of her inner ideals and conscious resolutions to be a good wife and an exemplary daughter-in-law, a bride comes into her husband’s family with heightened anxiety and feelings of loss. There is a wariness bordering on antagonism toward her mother-in-law who has usurped the place of her own sorely missed and needed mother. There is a mixture of shy anticipation and resentment towards her husband’s sisters and young female relatives who are presuming to replace the sisters and cousins and friends at home. And then there are the ambivalent feelings of hope and fear towards the usually unknown man who is now her husband and claims her intimacy.
Further, in the social hierarchy of her new family, the bride normally occupies a low rank. Obedience and compliance with the wishes of the mother-in-law are expected as a matter of course. Any mistakes or omissions on her part are liable to incur sarcastic r
eferences to her abilities, her looks or her upbringing in her mother’s home. The bride’s situation is not quite so bad in middle-class marriages. Marrying late, typically in her early twenties, the middle-class woman no longer enters her husband’s family as a submissive daughter-in-law. Because of her education and maturity, she begins to play a significant role in her husband’s family affairs from the very outset. The middle-class woman’s potential for individual self-assertion in her marriage and the new family has, however, clearly defined limits which come from her traditional ‘markings’, etched deep into her mind during the process of growing up. She, too, believes that getting along in her husband’s family and earning the good opinion of his family members, including the traditionally reviled and feared mother-in-law, are important obligations—even when these entail a measure of self-sacrifice and self-denial.
Here, it helps that an Indian girl is prepared or at least sufficiently warned about what to expect before she actually departs for her husband’s home. Guidance by the mother and other female relatives on what awaits her in her new home—stories, proverbs, songs, information gleaned from newly married friends who come back home on visits—have more or less prepared her for the harshness of the transition. If married very young, the bride’s initiation into her new life is gradual, interspersed by visits to her parents’ home where much of her accumulated loneliness and resentment can be relieved by the indulgent love showered on her. Even in the husband’s home, the young wife’s isolation is relieved by relationships of informal familiarity that she might form with certain younger members of the new family, and especially with other fellow-sufferers—the daughters-in-law of the house.
We need to add that although the clichéd relationship between an overweening mother-in-law and a silently suffering daughter-in-law is a bitter reality for many young women, the changes that are taking place in the power structure of the educated middle class have made many a mother-in-law view herself as a loser across the board. She feels bitter and shortchanged that although she suffered under the whims and moods of older family members when she was a young bride, now, when it is her turn to reap the fruits of being the family matriarch, she can neither take the respect of her better educated daughter-in-law or the loyalty of her son for granted.