Khushwant Singh's Book of Unforgettable Women

by Khushwant Singh

  Between the cities of India and its 550,000 villages, and between its elegant, educated ladies who grace the Lok Sabha and the vast majority of Indian women, yawns the gulf of many centuries. The lives of these women have not changed very much with the passage of time. Those whose mothers and grandmothers always enjoyed a certain degree of liberty still enjoy it today. Women of southern India, Kerala for example, are more advanced than women in other parts of India because regional matriarchal traditions remain prevalent. In general, women of the lower castes and income groups have greater freedom than higher-caste, middle-income women—as they have had in the past. And those whose female ancestors were cloistered in the zenana—women’s apartments—still remain cloistered in the zenana. Though the Constitution Act of 1949 guaranteed women legal equality, they are still subject to humiliating extra-legal restrictions.

  Yet the lot of Indian women has not always been hard and subservient. On the contrary, our early pre-Aryan female ancestors enjoyed a license that would shock the avant-garde of today. They wore nothing above the waist and the barest minimum below it. They drank strong liquor, danced till the early hours of the morning and were not inhibited in their sexual relations. It was more common for a woman to have four or five husbands than for a man to have a harem of women. They owned property because the society was matriarchal. Today in India, these poor, illiterate, jungle-dwelling Adivasis number about thirty-five million. Traces of their way of life can still be found among the aboriginal tribes in the hills and jungles stretching from Assam in the north-east to Cape Comorin in the south, as well as among the Dravidians in the south.

  Aryans, who started coming to India around 3,000 BC accepted this pattern of life at first. In their great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, a king unable to impregnate his queen persuades her to seek the services of other men as sanctioned by ancient tradition: ‘Women in olden days were not immured within their houses, nor were they dependent on their husbands and yet they were not considered sinful; for that was the sanctioned custom of the age.’

  In this state of affairs the notion of paternity was of little importance; bastardy carried no stigma. ‘Attending on an honoured guest’ was enjoined as a part of hospitality. This freedom continued up to the period of the Rig Veda (circa 1500 BC), which refers to women as equals of men, participating in debates, in the performance of religious rituals and in the pleasures of wine and the flesh.

  The change in female status came soon afterward. First, polyandrous intercourse was stopped. Pronounced the sage Uddalaka Swetaketu: ‘One woman can make love to one man only … If a woman is unfaithful to her husband, from today onward it will be a sin.’

  Then followed denigration of the woman to a mere producer of children—like a field producing crops. If she bore sons, she was partly redeemed; but if she had daughters, she could be legitimately cast aside and her female offspring destroyed as weeds. Woman became unclean (‘Below her navel a woman is always unclean,’ says the Atharva Veda) and an instrument of the devil to tempt good men to stray from the path of righteousness. According to the Maitreyani Samhita, ‘Woman is on a par with dice and drink, a major social evil, the spirit of untruth, the genius of darkness.’

  The chief apologist for lowering the status of women was the famous lawgiver Manu—also the father of the Hindu caste system—who lived around 200 BC. ‘Woman is as foul as falsehood itself,’ he wrote. ‘When creating them, the lord of creatures allotted to women a love of their beds, of their seat and ornaments; impure thoughts, wrath, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct.’ Manu emphasized woman’s secondary role in life. ‘From the cradle to the grave a woman is dependent on a male: in childhood on her father, in youth on her husband, in old age on her son.’ Manu prescribed early marriage—between the ages of eight and ten for girls—and pronounced a curse on parents in whose home an unmarried girl attained puberty. He also declared that a married woman could own no property. ‘Three persons—a wife, a son and a slave—are declared by law to have no wealth exclusively their own. Their wealth belongs to whom they belong.’

  Manu was also responsible for the deification of the husband. ‘Whether a drunkard, leper, sadist or wife-beater, a husband is to be worshipped as God,’ he wrote. The husband-God concept caught on. ‘Having offered adoration to the mind-born divinity, let the wife worship her husband with ornaments, flowers and raiment, thinking all the time, “This is the God of love”’, states a religious work.

  Sati—the immolation of widows on the funeral pyre of the husband—was the next logical downward-step women were forced to take.

  Gautama Buddha, in the fifth century BC, disapproved of child marriage and sati but did little to ameliorate the sorry state of Indian womanhood. Buddhist emphasis on celibacy made woman appear as the seducer of good men. ‘Do not see womankind,’ enjoined the Buddha.

  ‘But if we see women, what are we to do?’ asked his chief disciple.

  ‘Abstain from speech.’

  ‘But if they speak to us, then what are we to do?’ persisted the disciple.

  ‘Keep wide awake,’ warned the Wise One.

  By the beginning of the Christian era, the practice of destroying female children at birth, infant marriage, polygamy, prostitution, mass burning of widows on defeat in war—all this had become common, with the sanction of Hindu religion.

  And worse was yet to come. Muslims began invading India about 1000 AD and ruled large parts of the country for the next 700 years. Although Islamic law entitled a woman to own property and to divorce her husband, most Hindus who were converted to Islam continued to observe their own customs: property and divorce remained the prerogative of the male. Muslims also introduced the institution of purdah, the veil, and seclusion of women in harems. Hindus of the upper classes imitated the Muslim rulers by incarcerating their women in the zenana.

  The poorer classes treated widows as an abomination. Their heads were shaved, they were not allowed to wear jewellery and could dress only in the plainest white. Even the sight of a widow was believed to bring bad luck. Many were forced into beggary or prostitution either in brothels or attached to temples as devadasis (servants of the Lord). To this day, the Hindustani word for a widow and a prostitute is the same: raand.

  Change for the better came with British rule. A small band of enlightened Indians supported the British reformers against orthodox Hindu reactionaries. In 1829, the viceroy, Lord William Bentinck, outlawed sati. His chief supporter was Rammohan Roy, who had seen his own brother’s widow forced onto her husband’s funeral pyre. Remarriage of widows was legalized in 1856. And it was as late as 1929 that a law was passed prohibiting the marriage of children.

  The big breakthrough came in the 1920s under the inspired leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Women by the thousands joined the passive resistance movement, including many women leaders of today—and one of them was, of course, Indira Gandhi. Education was given top priority. Two reformers, the Theosophist Annie Besant and Margaret Cousins, were responsible for founding many women’s organizations of which the most active today are the All India Women’s Conference and the Federation of University Women.

  Nehru carried the process of women’s emancipation to its current stage, against the wishes of the majority of Hindus. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the Constitution Act of 1949 which guarantees that ‘the state shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds of race, caste, sex, place of birth’. In 1955 polygamy was outlawed, and after 2,000 years, the right of divorce was restored to Hindu women. In 1956 Hindu women were given equal property rights.

  Nehru also pressed women into political life. By law, every village council must have a woman member. The Congress party and following its lead, the opposition parties, set up a quota of women candidates for election. In the last general election, forty per cent of the 100 million eligible women voters cast their ballots. Today there are fifty-nine women in the Indian Parliament (compared with twelve in the United States Congress) and 195 in the state legislatu
res.

  India has more women in important positions than any other country in the world. But it would be wrong to deduce that the women in India are more emancipated than women of other countries. Except in the top layers of society, the pattern has not changed very much and fewer than ten per cent of Indian women can read or write.

  Among minority communities, Parsi women are almost European in their way of life. Christians (twelve million) and Sikhs (eight million) have not inherited anti-feminist traditions; their women are more educated than Hindu women and are better represented, for example, in the nursing and teaching professions.

  It is different with India’s fifty million Muslims. The plight of the Muslim women is worse than their Hindu counterparts.

  Bhopal, in the heart of India, is a Muslim city in the midst of a predominantly Hindu state. And since many well-to-do Muslim families have migrated to Pakistan, those who remain are desperately poor and dejected.

  The streets of Bhopal are full of beggars. Lepers dig their stumps into your ribs, crying, ‘In the name of Allah!’ Women in dirty burkhas—head-to-toe costumes with holes cut for eyes—slide alongside like apparitions and whine, ‘In the name of Allah!’ Pimps with long hair and black antimony in their eyes (used both cosmetically and as medicine) insinuate in your ear, ‘Mister, looking for someone? I can get you a fifteen-year-old for fifteen rupees, yes?’

  I run the gauntlet of beggars, pimps and pansies and turn into a four-foot-wide gulley. I bang the latch of a door bearing a nameplate in English and Urdu: ‘Lutfunnissa Begam Dai, Midwife and Nurse.’

  A girl’s voice on the other side demands, ‘Who is it?’ She opens the door and slams it in my face. ‘Amma (mother) is saying her prayers … it’s a Sikh,’ she warns her mother.

  I wait five minutes before I am let into the little courtyard. It has nothing save a row of earthen pitchers on one side, a gunny-sack curtain to mark the latrine on the other, and a charpoy or cot in the centre on which the midwife is seated. She recognizes me. She delivered my cook’s wife of a son three months ago and I paid her ten rupees for the service.

  ‘Salam valaikum, Sardarji. How’s the little one?’ she asks.

  ‘He is well. And how is it with you and your daughter?’

  ‘Allah be thanked,’ she says and raises both her hands to the heavens. ‘Beti (daughter), get some betel leaf for the Sardarji.’ The daughter goes indoors and re-emerges looking like a miniature mobile tent, with holes in front of her eyes.

  Lutfunnissa is not poor by Indian standards. She earns almost Rs 120 a month. She has been twice divorced: by the first husband because after many miscarriages she produced only a daughter, and by the second because she produced no children and he married another woman who did. For some years she lived in the same menage with her co-wife. Then the younger woman persuaded the husband to throw Lutfunnissa out.

  All he had to do was to say ‘I divorce you,’ three times and the break was irrevocable. ‘The holy Prophet—peace be upon him—gave men the right to have four wives at a time and discard those they did not want,’ she says. ‘Who am I to question or complain? Besides, I got my dowry from both my husbands—Rs 750—and with it bought this roof to cover my head,’ she adds with a weary smile, baring her betel-stained teeth. ‘Now my only worry is my daughter. You know she is almost thirteen! Once I find her a husband, I can die peacefully.’

  ‘You have many happy years before you. You aren’t too old to find another husband for yourself.’

  ‘Toba, toba! Heaven forbid!’ she replies. ‘You are teasing me. Who will marry an old hag like me? Look at my white hair!’ She pulls a few strands across her eyes and is pleased to see that none have turned white.

  ‘Why haven’t you sent your daughter to school?’

  ‘What will she do with education? Was I educated? Did my mother or grandmother go to school? Education puts wrong notions in girls’ heads. They want to go to the pictures; they become fashionable and want to wear rouge and lipstick; they want to do gitpit (speak English) with strange men. No, Sardarji, we are contented with our lot. She can cook and sew. She can say her prayers from the holy Koran. What more does anyone need?’

  ‘How did you get to become a nurse?’

  ‘Oh, that! My aunt was a midwife and I often went with her. Then I had to do a few weeks at the hospital to learn these new things about using antiseptic and keeping your hands clean. I haven’t had many accidents. People come for me at all hours. Some pay Rs 7.50, some have nothing except a betel leaf. But Allah gives me enough to fill my belly.’

  That ends the argument about education. Jahanara, the daughter, comes in accompanied by a woman in a burkha. Addressing the midwife, the visitor says, ‘Amma is in labour. Bring your things along.’

  Lutfunnissa fetches her kit. It’s all in an Air India sling bag, decorated with the mustachioed Maharajah bowing obsequiously. She dons her burkha and beckons me to go ahead. We come out into the lane. She chains the door of the house and puts a big iron lock in the ring. ‘Beti, bolt it from the inside.’ I hear the bolt turn on the other side. ‘Sardarji, these are bad times we live in. You cannot trust anyone; neither strangers nor your own kith and kin.’

  Thirteen-year-old Jahanara locked from within and without, is symbolic of the state of emancipation Muslim women have achieved. It will be quite some time before their world changes.

  Among Hindus, the pattern of relationship between men and women varies enormously in different regions and social classes. In the north, dominated by Muslims for many centuries, Hindu women draw a dupatta (head scarf) across their faces if they meet any of their husband’s older male relatives. A wife will walk a few yards behind her husband, never alongside him. She will not sit on the same charpoy but on the floor; she will not eat with her husband, but only after he has finished eating.

  Some Hindu communities preserve strange customs. The men among the Bishnois, a small group inhabiting a desert tract west of Delhi, choose the fittest young man in the community and make him Gama shah ka saand—the stud bull of Gama Shah, their legendary hero. The stud bull’s main function is to impregnate wives of impotent or sterile Bishnois. When the men are at work in the fields, the stud visits homes of the needy. His ornate pair of slippers left conspicuously on the threshold indicates that the housewife is busy.

  The hill people of the north-west have their own mores. They do not look upon their daughters as burdens since they do not have to provide dowries as large as those of people in the plains. On the contrary, in many cases the intending husband has to pay a bride price to the parents of the girl. Bride price is common among the poorer and lower castes such as the Kabirpanthi untouchables.

  I acquired a Kabirpanthi family along with a house my wife inherited fourteen years ago in the small town of Kasauli in the Himalayas. At that time, Chajju Ram, the caretaker of the house, and his wife Kamala were in their twenties and had only one child. But every spring when we went up to Kasauli we found Kamala pregnant. Chajju Ram shamefacedly admitted to me: ‘It is bitterly cold in the winter and we have only one quilt to cover ourselves.’

  I provided them with another quilt but it did not affect Kamala’s pregnancies.

  They now have seven children living—five girls and two boys. Even Kamala does not remember the miscarriages and the number of children who died at birth. When questioned by my wife, she only wrung her hands and explained: ‘What else have I to give him? It is a wife’s duty. If I said no he might go to some other woman.’

  When the two elder girls were four and two years old, they were betrothed to two brothers. Chajju Ram got Rs 225 for each of his daughters and invested the money in buying a buffalo.

  Among the Kabirpanthis of Himachal, and many other Hindu tribes, muklawa, the consummation of marriage, takes place after the bride and groom have attained puberty. But neither of Chajju Ram’s daughters had their muklawa with the boys originally chosen for them; their husbands, it turned out, were dwarfs. The marriages were annulled by amicable a
greement between the parents. Chajju Ram returned the bride price. (In the meantime, the buffalo had borne many more buffaloes and brought him upto Rs 150 a month in milk.)

  Both girls were married off a second time; one to an older man who had returned his barren wife to her parents, and the other to a young attendant employed in an office. Nothing was ever put down in writing. No ritual was performed either at the marriages or at the divorces. All that was necessary was to have the approval of the Kabirpanthi panchayat (council) and feed the bridegroom’s relatives and friends.

  Two years ago Chajju Ram developed a rasping cough and had to be admitted to a sanitorium. He responded to treatment and will be discharged from the sanitorium very soon. Now only one worry clouds Kamala’s mind. ‘Bibiji (mistress),’ she confided to my wife, ‘I do not want any more children. I won’t be able to have them in another few years. Then I won’t mind what he does. Why don’t you tell the doctor to tell him that it is bad for his health?’

  ‘If you study history,’ Indira Gandhi once said, ‘you will find that where women have risen, that country attained a high position, and wherever they remained dormant, that country slipped back.’

  Two days after Mrs Gandhi was elected prime minister, I went to a group of villages along the Jamuna between Delhi and Agra.

  Most of the land belonged to Brahmin agriculturists but there was a fair sprinkling of other castes—Jats, Gujjars, Harijans, Muslims, Meos and Sikhs. I joined a mixed group waiting for the ferry.