Stepping Out , livre ebook

Mrinal Pande

STEPPING OUT
Life and Sexuality in Rural India
Contents
About the Author
Praise for Mrinal Pande
Preface
Introduction
1. Sex, Lies and Red Tape
2. Whispered Asides
3. A Womb of One s Own
4. Of Patriarchy Born
5. In the Shadow of Death
6. Unsung Heroes
7. Urban Snapshots
Footnotes
Introduction
1. Sex, Lies and Red Tape
2. Whispered Asides
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
STEPPING OUT
Mrinal Pande is the group editor of the Hindi publications of the Hindustan Times house: the daily Hindustan , a monthly digest Kadambini and a magazine for children, Nandan . She has also been the editor of Vama and Saptahik Hindustan , executive editor of Hindustan Dainik , senior editorial adviser to NDTV and has anchored the Hindi news for Doordarshan. The first Indian woman to be the editor-in-chief of a multi-edition national daily newspaper, she is the founder president of the Indian Women s Press Corps. Mrinal has written extensively in Hindi and English, including novels, short stories and essays, and has written a column for the Hindu . She has previously published Daughter s Daughter and Devi: Tales of the Goddess in Our Time , and a novel, My Own Witness .
Praise for Mrinal Pande
[ Devi ] celebrates women as the prime movers in the lives of men through the ages. - Telegraph
A book by Mrinal Pande . . . [is] different . . . [She] has no qualms about confessing to being a feminist but there are no pretensions in her make-up. - The Hindu
It is always a pleasure to read Pande s fluent use of the language. - Sunday
There is a fluidity about the narration that enables [her] to blend stories, vignettes, thoughts, reflections, memories and much else in a seemingly effortless manner. - Financial Express
Preface
Half a century after the makers of India s constitution opted for a socialist welfare state and limited laissez-faire economics at the national level, a new globalized system is emerging. It decrees that in the twenty-first century volatile market forces shall be the locomotive of growth. And elected governments and the people must learn to live with invisible hands. It is not difficult to see how this model relies a lot on both the state and the markets behaving rationally in the pursuit of their legitimate interests. But what happens if behaviour is not always rational? What about sociocultural practices that time and again get in the way when calculating the utility of children and the need for population control?
It would be deterministic to say that all Indians or some states in India are programmed for population proliferation. Also, it is not at all clear that the two great priorities of our democratic capitalism-economic integration and political self-determination-will complement each other in the twenty-first century, as they have not in the last decade of the twentieth century. Historic evidence shows that the desire to procreate is deeply embedded in human nature, and matrimony and childbirth have always been treated as holy and ennobling experiences by all communities and castes in India. If the state refuses to accept and endorse this view and opts for blind coercion, individually or culturally sanctioned procreative activity may start giving subtle encouragement to people to ignore all appeals for planned families. As the scientists tell us, under certain circumstances, even inanimate objects such as molecules may reveal a capacity for self-organization.
The new economy India has opted for is distributing wealth in an unprecedentedly unequal manner today. Everywhere you travel in India, you see two kinds of life, two kinds of growth. On the one hand, there are gigantic shopping malls, from Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Guwahati and Kottayam to Amritsar and Chennai. One is struck by the richness and variety of goods displayed there, as also by the number of rich urban and rural customers they attract through the year. At the same time, the numbers of our poor and their miserable unauthorized colonies are also growing. Theirs is a lean and disempowered weld, furnished with objects of the most elementary kind, overflowing with hoards of malnourished children. Life here has come to be entirely sustained by symbolic values and meanings that the poor will impart to the most mundane things in the face of total neglect by the state. Here a pubescent girl being fed with rotis from five homes becomes a symbol of nascent and holy fertility that creates life. A smudge of black kohl or honey on a child s tongue shall become a shield that will protect him from all illnesses. A smear of red on a new mother s forehead shall anoint her as Laxmi, the fertile creator of wealth and life, in the midst of poverty and death.
There is nothing here. No money, no nutrition or sterilized water, not even medicines of the most basic kind. Only a few coins, a small dish with vermilion, jaggery and wild flowers, a coconut shell with a few teaspoons of oil, and a gourd with rice liquor. And yet those who are gathered around the objects look wildly excited and proud. The young woman, by giving birth, has attained a great honour, and her new baby is deemed an honoured addition to the community.
CEHAT, one of the Mumbai-based groups that I interacted with during the course of my travels for this book, had in 2001 filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court of India alleging that, laws notwithstanding, large-scale illegal sex determination and subsequent aborting of female foetuses were still going on in no less than eleven states of India. These are ironically some of the richer states that according to the latest census reports have registered a worrisome decline in their girl child population in the 0-6 age group. Piqued by the refusal of several state governments to curb private clinics that use ultrasonic techniques and amniocentesis to check out the gender of the unborn foetus, and help abort the unwanted female, the Supreme Court of India summoned their health secretaries. The court severely indicted the state governments for not complying with its earlier orders for registration of all ultrasound clinics and prosecution of those who resorted to illegal sex determination of the unborn foetus. And it also ruled that it would be desirable for the Government of India to frame appropriate rules with regard to sale of such (ultrasound) machines to unregistered clinics.
India s supreme court may or may not favour privatization of medical and health services, but its recent ruling reveals that it definitely expects them to be monitored and supervised strictly by a national (read governmental) authority. It is notable too that privately run hospitals and clinics may be critical of the state-run health care system, but they also look to the state for the order within which legal contracts can be enforced and commerce can flourish. (There is no rush these days, for example, to open branches of leading private hospital chains in militancy-infested areas, where the rule of law is shaky.)
But what is it like for a woman living below the poverty line in the India of today to be a client of the governmental and non-governmental health care systems? Can the comfortingly simple categories of good and evil, guilty and innocent that we take for granted be applied to those who live in extreme deprivation? How should we view a woman s silence? While she quietly accepts what is given, is there a whole angry debate running inside her head? If yes, how does this anger manifest itself? Does it taint her relationship with her own children, especially her daughters? These are some of the questions that have haunted my mind whenever I have travelled as a journalist gathering stories about women s lives and their state and status at the workplace, which exposes them to tremendous health hazards.
The door to finding satisfactory answers to these questions was first opened for me in 1998 by Carmen Barroso, Director, Population and Reproductive Health Area, and Poonam Muthreja, Country Coordinator, India, of the John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation. They suggested that I put together the not-inconsiderable information available on the subject of Indian women s reproductive health and update and strengthen it with travels to various parts of India. They inspired me further by providing lists of NGOs working in remote areas in the field of health care, and helped me contact them and prepare a travel itinerary. In 1999, Vasudha Dhagamwar, Director and founder of Multiple Action Research Group (MARG), hired me to pursue the project. The support and patience I have received from these three extraordinary women has been the mainstay of this book.
The social and health workers and women from urban slums and rural communities that I met and interviewed during the course of my travels all agreed that if India s population policies are to succeed, it is necessary that women have real control over both their productive and reproductive lives. It is senseless to pour an inordinate amount of energy and resources into controlling female fertility, while neglecting a genuine socio-political agenda towards restoring the basic dignity and human rights for all women. Our population problem can and must be tackled in the overall context of democracy, not demography.
Under the circumstances, the NGOs template for better reproductive and child health care with its sensible and sensitive support for local customs and culture, and their tendency to consult with those for whom the family welfare programmes are meant, seems a much better model than the one created by our policy makers who seem to nurse an arrogant, unilateral disdain for the human rights of the poor. One wonders, however, if the old-timers on the national government s huge population policy team will be willing to humbly learn from the non-governmental sector. Will the financial advisers to various governments at the Centre be