INDIA’S WOMEN, INDIA’S MEN

MILLIONS WERE MISSING. BIRTH RECORDS, CENSUS DATA, AND child sex ratios and other data analysis revealed who the victims were. In parts of the north of India, in 2015, 120 male babies were being born for every 100 female ones—not at all what nature intended. Heavy societal preference for boys, combined with new technology such as ultrasound scanners, together explained why millions of girl fetuses were being aborted. By one estimate, 12 million girl fetuses had been discarded—because they were girls—in the three decades before 2010. Fatal discrimination continued after birth. An analysis of seven- to fifteen-year-olds, counted in the 2011 census, suggested that another 11 million girls were lost, in addition to those aborted. They had died from neglect, or worse. An expert in the field added a grim detail, explaining how some mothers in Bengal rubbed salt on their breasts to kill newborn daughters, in effect poisoning babies as they tried to feed.

Such statistics and details were appalling, but they did not explain why ill-treatment happened. South Asia was arguably the worst place anywhere to be born female, by the 2010s, at least if you were born poor. Statistics showed that malnutrition, stunting, and other public health–related problems—especially in north India—were especially dire for young women and girls. India had fallen behind almost everywhere on this score. For decades China had done a much better job than India of keeping women alive as they gave birth, for example. For politicians eager to improve well-being, this should have been an obvious area for public spending: devoting an extra billion dollars a year to improving maternal health clinics would have been a far better choice than subsidizing losses at Air India. Getting women better educated and fed, economically stronger, healthier and more powerful: these were obvious paths to raising human capital in India. After all, the well-being of future generations, literally, depended on it.

If India were to enter into its political prime, it needed to achieve dramatic gains by focusing on its women. Women were well represented at the very top of politics, as leaders of some of the largest parties, as a president of the country, and were active in sport, television, art, dance, culture, journalism, academia, and business. The first female voters (though they, like men, had to own land) were enfranchised in Madras, as early as 1921, and universal suffrage came shortly after independence. But by 2014 only 12 percent of national MPs were female, and in regional assemblies the average fell to just 9 percent. Nor did politicians, male or female, make the prospects for Indian women much of a priority.

Schools need to be improved for girls. The first decade or so of this century saw almost all girls get to classes at the primary level for the first time, which counted as welcome progress. Manmohan Singh’s government had rolled out free midday meals and enshrined theoretical rights and minimum national standards in schools. But it did too little to get teachers to turn up and give quality instruction. Modi’s government did even less. Basic shortages, such as schools that had no toilets, discouraged older girls from sticking with formal education. Corruption, whereby teachers took bribes and let students cheat, meant that many millions of students dropped out or learned little. Girls were especially vulnerable if their parents chose to pay bribes on behalf of sons, who were expected to go to work, rather than for their daughters. A huge number of families, including poor ones, paid for private education, as at least 40 percent of Indian households made some use of private instruction. But because many families favored boys over girls, spending on education for boys was bound to be higher than for girls.

A root problem was that many families simply valued girls less than boys, or women lower than men. Indian society (and many others) over the centuries had a way of measuring this: dowry payments. These became illegal in 1961, but continued anyway in much of Indian society, sometimes disguised as extravagant wedding presents from a bride’s family to the parents of the groom. Dowry amounted, in effect, to paying another family to relieve you of the burden of having a daughter. It seems likely that having to pay a dowry was also one reason why some parents much preferred male babies. As in many other countries, sons were favored because they conferred higher social status; brought a higher income, because men were more likely to get jobs beyond the home (plus a dowry); and, by tradition, were supposed to care for parents in old age. By contrast, tradition deemed that a daughter would leave for another household.

Some brides were ill-treated when they arrived in a new family. In 2013 India’s Supreme Court lamented “emotional numbness in society,” saying that daughters-in-law were sometimes kept as near slaves or attacked over dowry. The judges said “life sparks are extinguished by torture, both physical and mental, because of demand of dowry and insatiable greed.” At the time, nearly seventy thousand trials were pending over dowry violence—brides who had been attacked, even killed, because payments were late or low.

Of course, most Indian women did not suffer in this way, and the problems were not unique to India. It is also true that, for many women, India was an enabling place, especially in more educated, urban, and well-off communities. Yet in some instances even the better-off suffered. One way to get a glimpse into many families was through the eyes of Ajit Singh, who had launched a private detective agency in the 1990s and specialized in the flourishing business of premarital investigations. That gave him an unusual vantage point from which he could trace the changing position of women in society. Investigation of brides (and grooms) was “increasing like anything,” he explained. “Now everyone relies on matrimonial portals, websites” to find partners, he said, twitching his moustache a little in disapproval. “Twenty years ago it was only the higher-income group that would hire us. Now people from the weaker section also do,” he said. “In the past the poor had their own relatives and sources, now people send each other their resumes and don’t tell the truth,” he said. “And if you are not telling the truth in relationships, it is much more serious than in business. You are cheating two families.”

Extended families of several generations in a single household were growing less common than before, but remained more widespread than in most other countries. A census in 2011 found that 18 percent of homes in India had more than one married couple; barely 1 percent of households in Britain fell into this category. The wider family remained intensely important, and it did much to define what opportunities—social, economic—were possible for women, especially when a bride went to live in her new husband’s household. Marriages arranged by parents for their offspring remained the most usual, but even with “love marriages,” where the couple already knew each other, the parents of the bride or groom might hire a detective to check out the other family. A simple investigation, for about 20,000 rupees (roughly $300 in 2016), provided basic information about reputation and “general character,” plus details from the workplace. Some clients spent as much as 300,000 rupees, said Singh. “Then we will follow the subject. We put more energy into checking the financial status. We offer detailed financial analysis, detailed information into the extended family, monthly income, circles of friends, behavior and habits—for example, whether they are into drinking and partying, what is their weekend style, do they like going to pubs, do they take beer all the night? We talk to maids, drivers, gardeners, nearby persons, neighbors.”

Parents of a bride wanted most information about the groom’s mother, the future mother-in-law, said Singh. “They ask about the nature of the lady. Is she God-fearing, quarrelsome, friendly with the neighbors? How does she deal with the maid, is she going to temple, does she spend all day in the markets, at kitties [parties], and at the parties is there any drinking? Because the girl who is going to marry [into] that house, she is going to spend a lot of time with that lady. Every day she is going to face the mother-in-law,” said Singh. The parents of the groom, however, were most likely to judge the bride, said Singh. The investigator was asked to lay bare the bride’s previous “behavior and character, their upbringing. If she is living a lavish life, will there be a difficulty to adjust to the house? What is their temperament? The majority of the girls have a very high expectation of marriage—and it doesn’t meet reality. They ask what expectations she has. What friends? Her upbringing, standard of living, the kind of car she has, the brands she wears. If someone is in a Mercedes, shops in malls, buys big brands, will it be a problem when she comes to the in-laws?” Most important was whether she is gharelu—literally, “homely,” but meaning subservient, timid, hard-working. It all sounded intimidating—families studying each other’s women, paying Singh to help them to assess whether the union would raise or diminish social status.

Singh’s clients were urban, from Delhi especially, though his agency was spreading nationally. If a woman kept working for a salary after marriage, as became more usual, she would probably be expected to “deposit her salary into the house, to share her income with the husband,” said Singh. Double standards were obvious in judging sexual history. “Previous affairs is a big subject,” said Singh, because a young woman’s past “matters to mothers. We check at the office, we ask about affairs at college, or in the neighborhood, or school even.” Lying was common. Around a third of Singh’s pre-marriage cases “trend negative,” meaning he found that somebody had been dishonest about something serious, perhaps a previous marriage or a falsehood about one’s income. It was surprisingly common to be hired by parents of a bride who doubted the sexuality of the groom, he said.

After marriage, the often difficult relationship of brides and their mothers-in-law was a bumper source of extra business. Singh described a woman who had recently asked him to investigate her husband’s mother. The client was from Mumbai—“girls from there are very fast. It’s a reality. We here, in Delhi, we cannot keep up with them. Life is fast.” The woman had moved in with the groom’s family in Delhi and things soon went awry. She continued working, but broke convention by sending money to her own parents. Relations soured until she left and each side launched a legal case, accusing the other of deception, abuse, even sorcery. “The daughter-in-law wrote in her FIR [a police charge] that the family were doing tantric worshipping, wrong pujas, against her,” he said.

Changing relations between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law—the saas-bahu relationship—were a subject of intense interest because the domestic household was a rare domain in which women dominated. “It is the toughest relationship across the families. In a very rare case the mother-in-law treats the daughter-in-law as her daughter. In the majority of cases the mother-in-law is wrong,” suggested Singh, talking of his clients. He saw young women growing more assertive. More were educated, employed, and financially independent than before. “Now they don’t tolerate the bullshit,” he said. Walking away from an abusive relationship had become possible, something hard to imagine in the past. Books about mothers-in-law offered blunt advice, such as: “Run, she is trying to kill you.” Online discussion threads let women share horror stories under titles such as, “I’ve got a mother-in-law from hell.”

Veena Venugopal, a journalist who turned a sharp eye on Indian society, wrote a study of brides and mothers-in-law.¹ She found educated, prosperous, English-speaking women—with just about the best opportunity of any in India—whose lives were made miserable by their mothers-in-law. “I hadn’t expected how bad the stories were going to be,” she said, blaming the “unhealthy” joint Indian family “as the source of both the greatest closeness and stress.” She described a fabulously wealthy family of nine in Mumbai, whose matriarch wore “diamonds the size of bird’s eggs”—a family that feuded for years ostensibly over who controlled the kitchen servants. The daughter-in-law fled when the conflict turned abusive. Venugopal generally blamed the elder women, saying they mistreated the younger ones, and described what she said were elder women’s near “obsessive” control of “sex and shame” as a way of keeping a grip on the household. Mothers-in-law “don’t trust her to be faithful, so they try to desexualize the daughter-in-law,” locking her up, fattening her up, phoning her several times a day. Women competed for attention from the shared man in their lives: the mother’s son, the wife’s husband. My assistant, Indrani, from Kolkata, explained how in Bengali wedding ceremonies much of this was made explicit. A groom on his wedding day repeated to his mother, three times, “I will bring you a servant.” Meanwhile, the burdensome daughter, leaving home to join the new household, would take a handful of rice and tell her own mother, “Your debt is cleared.” The message was pretty blunt: a new bride was considered little better than a skivvy, or servant.

But for all the gloomy stories about women in India, there was some progress being made. At least their prospects were being debated intensively in the press, on television, in magazines, on social media, and beyond. For India to tackle the various threats to girls and women, these threats first had to be talked about: a broad cultural change could follow. Some signs pointed to improvements. Divorce rates appeared to be rising (though they remained low by international standards), from almost nonexistent to about 13 dissolutions per 1,000 marriages. Family courts in larger cities, especially, reported a big increase in applications for divorce. That suggested more women were able to leave unhappy or abusive marriages, resulting in increased independence for at least a portion of the female population.

Progress on these scores can be seen in relation to the decline of older, unappealing, practices. One place to hear of old practices that were becoming rarer was in Vrindavan, a pretty town near Agra, a favorite for devotees of Lord Krishna as well as backpackers seeking joints and spiritual highs. The town was famed for its many elderly homeless women who lived out their final years there while begging for alms. At a soup kitchen for the elderly I met Renubala Dasi, a Bengali who had a bent back, a grey smear of mud on her forehead, and oval spectacles. She told a story of years of neglect and toil. It was typical of those told by several elderly women who attended the kitchen. Married at the age of twelve, Dasi had moved to her husband’s farming family in Tripura, in northeast India, initially sharing a bed with his widowed mother. She recalled being “very scared of my mother-in-law” and respectfully calling her ma-goshai, or “God mother,” and “worshipping her as a goddess.” She rose at 4 a.m., prepared a hookah for her shashuri (the Bengali term for mother-in-law) to smoke, fetched water, and cleaned. “After she had taken her bath, I would wash her clothes, massage her head and body, tie her hair. Whenever she came in[to] sight I would bend and touch her feet to show respect,” she said. Submission brought order and Dasi could at least hope that if she produced a son, she would graduate as a mother-in-law herself, and get similar care.

Years later, when it came to arranging a wife for her own son, she said much had changed. She complained that her own daughter-in-law was a “tigress,” a woman already thirty years old who had ideas of her own. The younger woman never called her a “God mother”: “She calls me nothing, just orders me to sit or stand.” The younger woman grew hostile, “denied me food, stopped me speaking to my son,” and eventually her son drove her 870 miles to Vrindavan and abandoned her. Resigned to it, she took up singing devotional songs and reciting the 108 names of Krishna. Her son won’t light her funeral pyre when she is cremated, she said sadly. Did she think her story reflected a change in the family, and in the place of women in Indian society? She saw only her own sorrow. “We are living in the time of Kali Yuga,” the end of civilization, when humans live only for lust, greed, broken vows, and violence, she said. Another widow spoke tearfully of her broken leg, and lamented that “brides arrive in the house prepared, they can’t be abused, they do the abuse.” A third complained about the influence of soap operas, like Smriti Irani’s one, saying: “I blame TV for daughters-in-law being like this. From the age of five they watch TV and learn about money and families.”

In fact, though the widows’ stories were sad, they reflected a more hopeful turn in society: that many younger women no longer accepted being exploited, shaking off habits that were more common among previous generations. They were less weak than those of an earlier age. Bitter fighting between generations was a welcome sign of power shifting. As women got more paid work, earning income outside of the household, they could dare to assert themselves, leave bad marriages, and defy repressive traditions. Old attitudes—captured in the Hindi saying that “once you go to your in-laws’ house, only your dead body should come out”—were fading. The head of a “mother-in-law protection forum” grumbled once to me that “the main problem is that today’s women are educated, but not in the proper way. Parents are incapable of teaching the daughter how to stay in her in-laws’ house.” But the sooner regressive views like hers declined, the better for India.

By 2016 or so, there was mounting evidence that more women were standing up for themselves. Many rejected the old practice of sindoor, wearing vermillion at the hair parting to signify devotion to one’s husband, for example. Debates also arose over another traditional practice, Karva Chauth, in which women are supposed to fast for a day, each year, to bring their husbands long life and safety. Women were marrying later: at twenty-one or older, on average—up from fifteen years of age in the mid-twentieth century. Later marriages, in turn, gave more women a chance to get educated and to control when the first birth would follow. The more educated expected paid jobs, to work after they wed. Women also had more of a chance of knowing whom they were marrying. Before 1960, fewer than 20 percent of women had any communication or interaction with their future husbands before marriage. By the 1990s that figure had risen to 60 percent of urban women (and about half of rural ones). No doubt, by 2016, it was higher yet.

Change had to come on several more fronts. Only when girls and women were better fed, for example, would fewer underweight babies be born. And only then would India start to be rid of its dreadful record on malnutrition. Surveys showed that bad nourishment persisted even among some wealthy families, suggesting neglect of girls. The grim tendency, especially in north India, to abort female fetuses remained roughly as prevalent in towns as in villages. Modi spoke well, a couple of times, on the subject of horribly skewed child sex ratios in India, but his government did little to change behavior and opinions.

As one consequence of this, northern states including Haryana, which is relatively wealthy and close to Delhi, began to experience a shortage of women (as happened in parts of China). This led to the trafficking of brides from other parts of the country, some tricked or forced against their will. Evidence of this was easy to find. Not far beyond the glass towers of Gurgaon, Delhi’s business-satellite suburb, were villages set among wheat fields of Haryana. Dung cakes on the roadside were artfully stacked into house-like structures, drying for use in cooking fires. On one dung stack stood a satellite dish, for receiving cricket games, soap operas, and TV news. Here were mud-built homes and paths thick with people walking from school or leaving fields in chattering groups, a reminder that rural does not always mean lightly populated. In one village, Kotla, in the courtyard of a home where children clambered over walls, Sakina, a mother in her thirties, explained how she had been tricked into marriage while still barely a girl, in the 1990s. She had been brought more than 800 miles to the village by a middleman who trafficked young women as brides. Her husband’s family had mistreated her. Sakina explained that “it was when I started having children that I realized I had no time to be upset.” She produced nine offspring, eight of them boys—and by producing so many male children, she was elevated in status within the village.

In the dying years of Manmohan Singh’s government the mistreatment of women became an issue of national, even international, debate. The spark was the gang rape and murder, on a bus, of a young physiotherapy student, in December 2012. The victim, in Delhi, came to represent an emerging, aspirational group of Indians. Huge protests erupted, helped by intense television and press coverage. Seething crowds appeared, some chanting that they would torture and lynch the attackers. At times, police resorted to tear gas and curfews to restore order. The rape and murder of poorer women never got such attention, but there was a widespread push for more debate over the ill-treatment of women in general. Official rape statistics did not prove that India had a worse problem with sexual violence than other countries, but such statistics were not widely trusted and opinion polls suggested that 90 percent of Indians thought rape was a “very big” concern, and most said it was getting worse.

People in authority mishandled their responses. Some blamed the girls and women who were assaulted for wearing supposedly immodest clothes or for daring to go out after dark. Mulayam Singh Yadav, a leading politician in Uttar Pradesh, said that rapists were treated too harshly—that “boys make mistakes”—and vowed to “revoke the anti-rape laws.” A policeman in the same state was seen on television in effect telling villagers to murder a fourteen-year-old girl who had been abducted by older men, saying that if his sister had “eloped” he would have killed her or killed himself in shame. A Bengali politician, the son of Pranab Mukherjee (who became president), scoffed at women protesting against sexual violence, calling them “highly dented-painted.” The police chief in Mumbai, where a female photojournalist had been gang-raped, blamed youthful “promiscuous culture.”

Thankfully, others promoted women’s safety. Ranjana Kumari ran an organization to help women on the edge of a slum in Delhi, for example. “I deal with rape cases on a daily basis.” she said. “It is very difficult to believe anything will improve because there is a lack of political will.” But at least, as with corruption, democratic India was beginning to confront this enormous, complicated problem. The rise of cities was one reason to be optimistic, because police there were more likely to respond to complaints of sexual assault than those in villages. Kumari dismissed Hindu nationalist commentators who claimed that “Bharat,” implying rural India, never saw attacks on women. It was just that such attacks were far less likely to be recorded or publicized than those in town. In cities a new sort of debate was also becoming possible. A decade or two earlier it was almost taboo to utter the Hindi word for rape (balatkar), let alone address the problem of how men behaved. But more people in modern India said they refused to be treated as victims.

The photojournalist who was gang-raped in Mumbai said she would keep working, and refused to be shamed by the attack. What needed to change, argued Kumari, was that men and boys should start to have a “fear of law, or at least the semblance of the rule of law.” Police have to take the attacks more seriously. It would help, too, if more youngsters got to talk frankly about sex, she said, complaining about “fundamentalists who won’t allow sex education in school, and teachers who won’t utter the word sex.”

A judicial commission set up after the Delhi rape and murder received thousands of public suggestions for tackling violence against women. It proposed sensible laws—such as tougher punishment for those who disfigure women by throwing acid at them—which parliament enacted quickly. At least the perpetrators of the Delhi gang rape, men from a nearby slum, were arrested and jailed (though one died in prison) after a swift but fair trial that involved 130 hearings and nearly 200 witnesses. Extra courts—a plan called for 1,800 eventually—helped to speed other prosecutions for rape, to clear a backlog of 23,000 cases. The democracy showed it could function when pressed. The media also got better at discussing sexual violence, dropping euphemistic terms such as Eve-teasing, a reference to men’s taunting, abuse, or groping of women in public. And although rape statistics in Delhi worsened, that was paradoxically encouraging, suggesting that women there were more willing than before to report attacks and the police were readier to record them.

Growing public anger about the issue at least encouraged those who campaigned to change attitudes. Activists tried to shift opinions. In south Delhi, off a narrow alley, was Maitri, an outfit for battered women. The organizer, Winnie Singh, sporting round tortoise-shell glasses and cropped grey hair, said “our laws are among the strongest in the world,” but police and judges failed to implement them. She spoke of being attacked during her first marriage and got only unsympathetic reactions from police. She created her group, one of many, to help battered women lodge legal cases against attackers, though that often proved difficult.

Prospects should improve for women, especially if politicians do more to speed up gains. India spends far too little on public health—1.4 percent of its national wealth, compared with over 3 percent in China. The burden of that is felt hardest by women and girls. Putting more resources there would lift their prospects in general. As of 2014, combined private and public spending on health, per year, averaged $75 per person in India. Even in Delhi, one of the wealthiest corners of India, only one in five women have a midwife or other skilled person present when giving birth, and barely half of the children get a measles jab.

Modi as prime minister, to his credit, did talk about Indians’ preferences for sons over daughters as a “psychological illness of the entire country,” saying that “we don’t have a right to kill our daughters” and “in our neighbourhood, girls are commonly killed in their mothers’ wombs and we don’t feel the pain.”² It was welcome to hear him address the difficult subject. But wider efforts are needed, across both political and economic realms. Only if more women are paid for the work they do, for example, will their clout rise. Labor done by women is said to account for only 17 percent of the output of the formal economy, whereas in China it accounts for over 40 percent.³ Nearly two-thirds of women in China are in the formal workforce (even if many do drudge jobs), vastly more than in India. If manufacturing were to boom in India, even to the level achieved in Bangladesh, with big textile and other factories, then more women would surely start earning salaries. That could have widespread social effects. According to McKinsey Global Institute, India could have an economy 60 percent larger if women were in the paid workforce and more productive—meaning better educated, better fed, and healthier. That is a tremendously hopeful goal for Indians to aim to achieve.