May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (49 page)

When all the dais had arrived, we went outside to the veranda of a one-room schoolhouse for a laborious, time-consuming process that brought home to me once again how difficult it was to obtain basic information in India. The SEWA Rural staffers split the dais into
groups, and then one staffer sat down with each group and began asking questions. Slowly, the dais told the staffers the names of the pregnant women they knew, their ages, the extent of their education and the number and types of injections they had received. The staffers wrote everything down on little cards to be distributed later to the people accompanying the mobile dispensary. The questioning took two hours and left the SEWA staff members mentally exhausted. At eleven-thirty, everyone took a break, and all of the dais went out to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes by a log in the sun. Fifteen minutes later, the SEWA Rural staff members called the dais back, this time to ask about the couples in their villages who might be willing to accept sterilization operations, IUDs or birth-control pills. The dais were founts of local gossip and seemed to know everything. One told a SEWA Rural staffer that a woman with three daughters was pregnant with a fourth child, and that her husband was threatening to divorce her if she had another girl. Finally, by twelve-forty in the afternoon, after more than three hours, the meeting was over. The dais lined up for a payment of five rupees each, the equivalent of forty cents. They acknowledged the receipt of the money with their thumbprints, then headed back home on foot across the scorching plain.

Even with all of the training, Lata Desai estimated that as many as 20 percent of the dais in the area still pushed on a mother’s stomach from the beginning of labor—a practice that had caused the death of a woman while delivering twins a month before. I learned about the tragedy from a young doctor at SEWA Rural, Mukesh Dave, who was still haunted by it. As Dave explained it to me, SEWA Rural had known from the village health worker a month before the delivery that the woman was expecting twins, and also that it would be a breech birth. The woman had been asked to come to the hospital for the delivery, but she was frightened and refused. When her labor pains started, her mother-in-law called for a local dai, who pushed on the woman’s stomach. The woman began to bleed profusely and went into shock, and the family at last called a village doctor. By the time he arrived, the woman’s uterus had ruptured and she was dead of a postpartum hemorrhage. “We could have prevented it,” Mukesh Dave told me. “If I could have gone to see her four or five times, I could have motivated her to come to the hospital. This is a bad incident on our part.” The twins, though small, made it through the delivery. The SEWA Rural staff asked two mothers in the village who were already breast-feeding their own babies to take care of them, hoping that at
least the woman’s children would survive their mother’s death. But most villagers do not want to bring up children who are not their own flesh and blood, and the twins, to no one’s surprise, were not breast-fed at all and died.

My last morning at SEWA Rural was spent with a SEWA health worker, Ranjanben Atodariya, on her rounds. Gayatri Giri, Atodariya’s supervisor, came with us. Atodariya, a pretty, talkative mother of two, set a good example for her patients: She was twenty-seven and had had a sterilization operation after giving birth to one boy and one girl. Her job was exactly the same as Abigayal Patric Christian’s, although I noticed as Atodariya made the rounds of one of her villages that she took more time with each patient. Instead of simply handing out folic acid tablets, Atodariya took each expectant mother’s blood pressure, measured her growing stomach with a tape and listened to the baby’s heartbeat through a stethoscope. At the hut of an expectant mother who had had malaria during her pregnancy, Atodariya took a blood test and made notes for the hospital staff that there might be problems during the delivery. At another house, this one the prosperous home of landowners, Atodariya weighed a small girl—the seventh—who had just been born to a mother with no sons. As Atodariya went about her work, Gayatri Giri, the supervisor, gently brought up the subject of sterilization. This immediately sent the woman’s mother-in-law into a tirade. “The eighth will be a boy,” she said, then turned toward her daughter-in-law. “If you go for the operation,” she threatened, “I will leave this family. You take care of your own children.”

Giri dropped the subject but afterward admitted, as had Anil and Lata Desai, that even SEWA Rural was under pressure to achieve the targets set by Delhi. SEWA Rural had fallen short of its targets during its first year as a government agency and had learned that simply providing good health care was not enough to bring down the birth rate, at least in the short term. In subsequent years, the project easily met its targets, but the Desais admitted that they had to put pressure on their staff toward the end of each year to do so. Atodariya, for example, was well aware that she had to achieve thirty sterilization cases within the next four months. So far she had only sixteen. “Yes, she worries about her targets,” Giri said. “But there’s no scolding.”

THE COASTAL STATE OF KERALA IS A LUSH, TROPICAL STRIP OF RICE
paddies, coconut palms and white sand beaches, separated from the rest
of India by a string of mountains called the Western Ghats. Over the centuries, Kerala’s relative isolation allowed it to develop an indigenous culture in peace, while its 350 miles of coast along the Arabian Sea opened it up to the influences of European spice traders and Christian missionaries. With an unhurried and soothing way of life, Kerala in modern times seemed almost a nation unto itself. Historically, Kerala had always gone its own way. It had put one of the world’s first democratically elected Communist governments into power in 1957, and its land-distribution system was more equitable than those of most other states in India. Kerala had one of the largest concentrations of Roman Catholics in India; Christians accounted for one fifth of the population. Kerala’s people were poor, but because land was abundant, they did not surfer from the wretched poverty scarring so much of the north. Most important, Kerala was India’s most spectacular success story in population control.

While the nation’s birth rate stagnated at 33 per 1,000, Kerala’s in the 1980s was 23 per 1,000 and was continuing to drop. Kerala had the distinction of being the only state in India where women outnumbered men: 1,032 females to 1,000 males. The mean age at which Kerala’s women married was almost twenty-two, the highest in India, compared with eighteen for the rest of the country. Kerala’s infant mortality rate was 33 per 1,000, the lowest in India, and less than a third of the nationwide rate of 105 per 1,000. These startling statistics were a subject of endless interest to everyone involved in population control, including Rajiv Gandhi, who often said that India had to figure out how Kerala had achieved its success and then duplicate its techniques. There were many theories, including one that the Communist government and the Catholic Church had influenced the state to spend generously on education, health and family welfare. But Kerala’s per capita expenditures in those areas were not, I learned, higher than those in most other states in India.

In the end, the most persuasive solution to the puzzle was that Kerala treated its women differently than did other regions in India. More than 70 percent of the state’s women were literate, for example, which was three times the national average. “In northern India, women just do the housework and have never learned to read and write,” said Vijay Lakshmi, Kerala’s director of public health services. “Here, women play more of a partnership role in the family. They have a higher stake in deciding how many children each family has. In Kerala, a male cannot just brush his wife aside and make her a child-rearing
machine.” Kerala also had more jobs for women, particularly in harvesting tea and coffee, weaving, making textiles from coconut fibers and processing fish. As K. Krishnamurthy, the state health secretary, said: “If women are the ones supporting a family, they recognize how pregnancy can interfere with their work.”

But applying the lessons of Kerala was not as easy as it seemed. The state was unique in India in that it traced its respect for women to the once-prevalent matrilineal society practiced among the warrior caste of Nayars, in which women inherited family property. Before I came to India, I had never heard of this matrilineal system, and once I got there, it was not easy to learn about it because so many of its practitioners were dead. But I felt it was important to understand the history behind Kerala’s population success. When a woman was married, for example, she remained in her parents’ home, and saw her husband only when he came to visit at night. The woman made no effort to claim her husband’s property because her parents gave her as many shares of family land as she had children. A son in a family received only one share of land for himself. The British outlawed these practices in the nineteenth century, and in recent years Kerala observed Hindu inheritance laws requiring all children to receive an equal share of family property. But the matrilineal tradition apparently continued to influence Kerala’s women. Kamala Das, one of India’s most well-known poets, once ran a quixotic race for Parliament on a platform of “gender justice,” calling for the government to build a house for every girl when she reached adulthood. “By being provided a house, a woman would get a sense of security, which I believe is every woman’s birthright,” she told me. “I think a woman feels insecure without a piece of land.”

Leela Damodara Menon was a more practical case in point. She had been a member of Kerala’s first legislative assembly and continued to run the women’s wing of the state’s Congress party. She had entered politics as the wife of a famous Indian freedom fighter, but it was undeniable that the matrilineal tradition of Kerala had also contributed to her drive and success. One warm February morning, when I went to see her about politics in general in Kerala, I wound up spending hours instead on a more fascinating subject—her own childhood.

Menon had not grown up in a matrilineal household, but her father had, as the only son among five daughters in a large landowning family in the northern part of the state. When Menon’s father married, he moved with his wife to a separate home, but his five sisters followed
the matrilineal tradition and lived with their husbands in their parents’ home. The sisters had their own rooms, where they slept on large platforms with their children and elderly aunts, sometimes a dozen women in all. As in most traditional Indian houses, all of the rooms opened onto a central courtyard. Meals were served in a dining room and were prepared by servants in an enormous kitchen. Menon came with her father for visits, which she recalled as the highlights of her childhood. “There would be food for everybody—some rice, some gravy curry, some dry vegetable,” she remembered. “Then there were all the mangoes, and jackfruit and pumpkins and gourds—everything! Season by season it would change. There were a dozen cows, which gave milk to all. And then each family unit might want their own little items, which they made—some little stew, or some little item for the children. You had a sense of freedom; you had so much land. There was so much to do. Even running around the house took so much time. So many people, so much talking. You could never be lonely. Psychologically, we had a sense of belonging.”

The husbands of the five sisters, however, were merely nocturnal visitors to the extended family. They kept separate rooms downstairs, where they received the sisters and performed their services as progenitors of the family line. Menon, for all her support of the matrilineal system, felt it would not have worked in modern-day Kerala. “Today, we want the husband to be living with us all the time,” she said. “We want to be part of his life, his feelings. But there, they had arranged only for progeny and not for companionship. The family provided for that. Not that there weren’t people terribly in love with each other—there were couples like that, and the family would make fun of them. Today, you want your husband to be the closest to you in your life. But that was not possible then.”

Menon told me that the family house was now 250 years old, and that it stood locked and empty, a symbol, I suppose, of a system that had slipped into disuse even though its influence still lingered. Menon had no intention of ever living in the old home. “When there are not enough people in a house, there are echoes, and you feel scared,” she said. “It had its place at that particular point in our history.” She felt that Kerala’s women had their own place in history, but that, too, was part of the past, and that there were signs that the equality of women was eroding. Although many women held jobs, their work was undervalued, and political power within the state remained in the hands of the men. “The status of even Kerala women is deteriorating,” Menon
said. “Society is willing to have a woman work, because she is augmenting the work of the family, but they are not willing to give her a place in society. We all joined the freedom movement, but after freedom, when it came to sharing power, the men were reluctant. Elections have become a very costly thing, and women cannot bear the cost on their own.”