May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (51 page)

Over the past year, I have discovered that writing this book has been almost as much of a journey for me as India was. Women were my window onto the country, but also a window into myself. It was only as I was writing, for example, that I understood the real anger I felt in the beginning of the journey, when I followed my husband to India and abandoned my job, my family and a comfortable life that had given me a sense of myself. Friends wondered why I was not delighted to have a husband with an interesting job that took me to the far corners of the world. Their reactions made it seem as if feminist rage were no longer an acceptable emotion, at least not in the large part of American society that believed the women’s movement was over because we had won most of our rights. Like Vina Mazumdar, the Indian feminist who once thought that “if we are not yet equal, it is
our failure,” I nursed the suspicion that if I was still angry, it was because I had somehow fallen short. India helped to teach me that this was not so, simply by allowing me to see that my reaction was a universal one that could not collectively be the fault of women. In India I learned that women from Aparna Sen, the accomplished director
of Paroma
, to Sheela, the uneducated wife of the Khajuron silversmith, were also angry, or at least well aware that life was at some level not fair. As Sheela had told me inside her mud house, with a reasoning that still echoes: “Men are not smarter. But they have been educated and go outside. Women stay in the house.” Anger, of course, is not always a productive emotion, and over the long term it is not good for a marriage. I realize now what I did with mine. Like Katherine Mayo, who confronted her own indignation about the sexual exploitation of women by writing, however badly, about distant places, I took my own conflicts—some of which I did not even know I had—and looked for the answers through the lives of others, and through the writing of this book.

I feel less anger now, and I am not sure why. Writing this book exorcised some of it, but I also think that India made me come to terms with being a woman. I realize now that as the eldest of four daughters I had been raised, in a way, as the son. I grew up knowing that a girl could achieve as much as, or more than, a boy, and in later years I was determined to ignore the difference between men and women. In my mid-twenties, I ran four 26.2-mile marathons, placing in about the middle of the pack, and I remember with what pleasure I used to pass by some of the men. This would still give me pleasure, but I also know that my experience in India finally forced me to acknowledge the differences between men and women, and hold them as special. As I write these words, I have just learned that I am pregnant with my first child. It is time—I am thirty-three—but I am sure that India moved me in that direction as well. I remember how I used to walk into Indian villages and be struck by the incredible power of fertility. Out of the dust, against every obstacle of poverty, there emerged babies—human babies, baby chicks, baby goats, calves, colts, puppies, kittens—all of them created, it seemed, by the most mystical force in life. By far my most moving experience in India was seeing the birth of the baby boy in Belukkurichi, the village where I found the couples who had killed their daughters. The mother had walked to the health center at eleven in the morning, and by noon she had delivered her child with ease, without painkillers or complaints. She walked home with her baby
that afternoon, leaving me in complete awe of her strength. I realized that there was a reason why Shakti, or female energy, was considered such a powerful force in the Hindu religion, and why goddesses like Durga were more feared than the gods. Indians knew that in the order of nature, it was the women who were powerful, who bled and did not die, who reproduced life itself. Later, when I read a speech the historian Barbara Tuchman once gave after accepting an award from Washington’s men-only Cosmos Club, I realized that it summed up my feelings.

“I have never felt that I belonged to an inferior sex,” she said. “On the contrary, I think that nature’s selection of us as the sex that procreates the species and nurtures it through infancy—men’s role being momentary and casual in comparison—is an obvious indication of superiority and privilege. I am glad to be female and I do not feel that my, or any woman’s, sense of her own worth would be enhanced by membership in hitherto male precincts. Men’s affairs, from what I can tell, are dominated by two primary components, aggression and alcohol. That is, fighting and drinking. Neither of which has any appeal for me still.… With regard to the Cosmos Club in particular, let me just say that if, as stated, the criterion of membership is ‘achievement,’ then the exclusion of women is the club’s loss, not ours.”

A few years before leaving for India, I had interviewed Gloria Steinem, six months shy of her fiftieth birthday. She told me something then which I have never forgotten: that women may be the one group that grows more radical with age. “As students,” she said, “women are probably treated with more equality than we ever will be again. The school is only too glad to get the tuitions we pay.” But later, she said, come the important “radicalizing” stages in a woman’s life. The first is when she enters the labor force and discovers that men, by and large, still control the workplace. The second is when she marries and learns that marriage is not yet a completely equal partnership. The third is when she has children and finds out who is the principal child-rearer. And the fourth is when she ages, which still involves greater penalties for women than for men.

By this measure, I am right on schedule, although I do not think it is only because I have reached certain stages in my life. I am less angry in my personal life, but I think I have also grown more radical—which is to say more acutely aware of the basic injustice that exists in the lives of most women—because I have spent the past four years interviewing and thinking about other women who have gone
through these radicalizing stages themselves. I have learned that to write about women in India is to write about their problems of work, marriage, children, poverty and aging—problems that are not unique to India but are rooted in any society’s definition of womanhood. The women I interviewed were part of a foreign culture but nonetheless members of the same world to which we all belong. Their reactions to their problems were human reactions, ones that all of us can understand. Infanticide may have been the most heinous of crimes, but I saw it not as the act of monsters in a barbarian society but as the last resort of impoverished, uneducated women driven to do what they thought was best for themselves and their families. As alien as their lives were to the lives in the world from which I had come, it was these women—and women like the poet Nabaneeta Dev Sen, and the policewoman Kiran Bedi, and Mrs. Rana, the New Delhi housewife—who convinced me that when life is pared down to its essence, there is a universality to each woman’s experience. In the end, I did not feel so very different from them. As the Indian journalist Anees Jung wrote in
Unveiling India
, her lyrical book about her own travels among the women of India: “In the macrocosm of a vast land I find the microcosm of my own experience repeated and reaffirmed.”

As I traveled throughout India, I often thought about another part of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s essay “Myself in India,” in which she wondered whether it was morally right for foreigners like herself to live so well amid such desperate poverty without lending a hand to help. This thought plagued me the most in Calcutta, where in asking Veena Bhargava how she rationalized painting the homeless rather than working among them, I had sought a justification for why I was interviewing interesting artists instead of helping out myself. But I realize now I was searching for a larger answer, for one that would have helped me define my whole purpose in India. I have come to the conclusion that if I did not work among the poor, I have at least told their stories and unveiled a part of their lives. This book was my mission—to inform, to enlighten, and to prove that the women of India are more like us than they are not.

This does not change the fact that the majority of women in India continue to live deplorable lives and are still held back by the overpowering forces of poverty, history, tradition, religion and caste. The country has not solved its most basic problem, overpopulation, which burdens women most heavily and makes all of the other problems worse. Men still control the power structure, and modernity has been
a mixed blessing. Women have been displaced from traditional labor, and medical advances have ensured that discrimination against them can now begin before birth. And yet, in the four decades since India’s independence, there has been a marked improvement in some women’s lives. In the past decade, the women’s movement has made some of the most dramatic gains of any group in India and has made the political leadership aware that there is a desperate need for reform. The work of people like Ela Bhatt among the poor women of Ahmedabad is a cause for optimism. I know I will not see major change in the lives of Indian women in my lifetime, but I am convinced that there will be progress.

Of India itself I am less sure. The statistics, particularly those predicting the horrific growth of the population into the next century, are not encouraging. To look at India compared with Japan, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan or Singapore is to realize how much it has fallen behind these newly prosperous nations of Asia. But India has had to face the obstacle of massive poverty, and while struggling with that problem it has at least managed to feed itself without deteriorating into a totalitarian government or a military dictatorship.

In the end, the country’s three biggest challenges—maintaining democracy, secularism and national unity—cannot be accomplished without justice, including justice for women. In a sense, the country is a proving ground for whether humanity can tame itself, and whether we can eventually evolve into a world civilization. One reason to believe there is hope lies in India’s resilience and spirit, but most of all in the strength of its women.