Women's Rights & Issues

niyad

(113,055 posts) Thu Jan 10, 2013, 12:12 AM Jan 2013

being female in india-a hate story

Being Female in India: A Hate Story

Her epitaph should read, simply, without any personal reference: India hates women. For I can think of no greater way to do her honor, the 23-year-old victim of a particularly grisly gang rape who died, after a battle for life that lasted nearly two weeks, in a Singapore hospital in the early hours of December 29. Jyoti Singh Pandey was attacked with her male companion while traveling on a public bus in India’s capital, New Delhi. Both were savagely beaten, the woman raped and then, together with her companion, thrown from the moving vehicle. Her intestines had been ruptured by an iron rod that her attackers inserted into her vagina; her brain and internal organs had suffered massive damage. I can only honor the supreme horror that she faced in the dead of her night by speaking the supreme truth in the light of our day, by laying it, a funeral wreath, at her feet and the feet of millions of her sisters raped in India. Like the teenager allegedly raped and set on fire by her attackers to ensure her lasting silence, like the 10-year-old raped and her body thrown in a garbage dump, like the woman raped in one city and dumped in another.

India hates women. That is the ugly, unvarnished truth.

It is also what Indians lie about the most, except perhaps our other self-told fairy tale–rather similar to the lies Euro-American society tells itself about “post-racial” America–that caste discrimination is a thing of the past. I can think of no brace of lies more ubiquitously told by Indians to ourselves, and they are often connected, as when the rape of this urban young woman galvanizes national and even international attention, but the rape of a tribal woman, Soni Sori, whose attackers’ tender attentions included the thrusting of stones into her vagina and rectum, is almost totally obliterated from public scrutiny because of Sori’s disadvantaged status as a tribal woman and the fact that her rape occurred in police custody. But both rapes speak to a pervasive, deeply entrenched misogyny whose roots run bedrock-deep in our society and are directly proportional to the extent of our denial of this very misogyny.

. . . . .
The hatred of women starts in the womb, when we abort hundreds of millions of female fetuses each year. For Indians, girls are a burden; the desire for male progeny is as natural to us as breathing. Even before conception, we utter prayers, make vows, observe fasts, bow before this or that divinity, all so we might not remain childless or burdened with the debit side of the account–the girl child. For burden she is; practically every Indian, barring a few communities where matrilineal systems still exist, must be familiar with the idea that a girl is “paraya dhan,” the treasure of another’s home. The word “treasure” should not fool us. We are commodities, chattel, goods. Why else would we have to pay the groom’s family a dowry for the favor of taking the girl-child off our sinful hands?

. . . . .

Some feminists in India have clearly had enough. Witness the young women out on the streets protesting peacefully against the climate of hatred for women of which this rape and murder, and millions of other assaults, are the inevitable and bloody fruit. It is also heartening to see so many young men with them, who reportedly rushed forward to take upon their own bodies the blows rained on their sisters by baton-wielding police. But the real battle against misogyny in India has to be fought in our homes and hearths, our hearts and minds. It has to be fought in our own families, with our fathers and mothers, our uncles and aunts, our cousins, friends, colleagues. Misogyny–the idea that makes it OK to pray for male children, to save for a daughter’s dowry, to make sexist jokes and pass them off as “humor,” to watch avidly innumerable television sitcoms and movies where courting is essentially coercion and where women are routinely portrayed as “lesser”–is always with us. It sits across the breakfast table from us in the morning. It works alongside our desk in the office. It meets us after work for drinks, goes shopping, clubbing and to the movies with us. Misogyny stares out at us from the mirror. India hates women. We need to face this fact in order to change it.
It is the highest tribute we can pay to the young woman who died a few days ago today. Admitting we have a problem is the first step towards change, towards healing, towards hope.

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2013/01/07/being-female-in-india-a-hate-story/