I am so excited today - The Hindu, published a travel piece I’d written, on a visit to the beautiful limestone caves of Baratang, in the Andaman Islands.
Do read it here! (Though the web version is not very good…)
Some days ago, a young woman told me that my post on marriage symbols for women, helped her convey her feelings to her dad, since it was something she couldn’t articulate herself. This set me thinking on the gap that exists today as far as women’s roles and expectations are concerned, even with fairly liberal parents. Many urban parents today do not differentiate between girls and boys where education is concerned. Atleast in India, girls are not conditioned to fear maths and science, or think of them as un-girly. If anything, parents pressurise them equally to succeed in these fields! Many young women do get to choose their careers, and the new phenomenon of love-cum-arranged marriages means that young people can spend atleast some time together before choosing a life partner.
But, in some areas, there is such a wide gap between what parents expect and what young women would like to be and do. It is as if there is this boundary wall, that drops down from the skies all of a sudden, the moment you turn 24-25. When this happens, even the most supportive parents, who have pushed you towards a high-flying career, will suddenly realise that, “Oh my god, I have an unmarried daughter!” It is as though there is a clock ticking away that only they can hear. It doesn’t end there. Once you are married, after a “decent” interval, discreet (and sometimes, direct) enquiries begin : When is the grandchild arriving? At this stage, the career that you’ve worked so hard for, begins to seem like a trifle that can be re-arranged easily. If you voice your fears that you don’t think this is the right time in your career for you to take on the added responsibility of a child, parents pooh-pooh it - of course you can manage it, they say, doesn’t everybody?
Sometimes, I pity the liberal parents of today. Earlier, parents had no hope for their daughters except to see them married well - which meant, to a man who earned reasonably well and whose family didn’t outright ill treat their daughter. Parents today are pulled in many more directions. All their lives, they have told their daughters that they should work hard and look to a good career. In some cases, the mothers themselves are working women, though usually in low paying, ’second-income’ jobs that allow them to be home at a reasonable hour. They pride themselves on having raised successful daughters.
Now they are faced by daughters who have completely imbibed their teachings. They truly believe that they can do anything. That may mean working on a Ph.D and not getting hitched at the golden age of 25. That may mean choosing to delay having a child, or deciding not to have one at all. That may mean building a marriage on their own terms rather going along with traditional notions of how a married woman should behave. Suddenly, all this is rather dismaying for parents. “Is this what we taught you, have you forgotten your culture?”, they say. Somewhere there is an expectation that ‘thinking’ should be confined to your studies or your career, not to changing your way of life. What they don’t realise is that a liberal education is not something that can be confined to academics. People who have learnt to think for themselves, are bound to apply it to every area, including questioning handed-down ideas on religion, culture and roles.
How about our generation? Do we have our own sacred cows that our children will question? Readers who have slightly older children, can probably answer that.
This week, there is a lot of interesting material I have!
The Khaleej Times has a piece on Size Zero and its introduction to India. At least officially, most designers seem to be against it, which is encouraging to hear.
Unlike Western feminist blogs, I don’t discuss abortion here in any detail, since Indian laws allow it for all practical purposes. Deborah, at In a Strange Land, however brings up an issue of relevance to us here - how do you support the right to abortion while condemning sex-selective female foeticide?
Kay Abey at Noose Media, a media watch blog, talks about the dangerous phenomenon of the media passing judgement on ongoing cases.
If you’ve read Ambai in Tamizh or English, you would know that descriptions of food and eating are some very enjoyable bits of her stories. A one-pager by Lakshmi Holmstrom on Food in Ambai’s stories.
Finally, Tigtog at Feminism 101 has a post that should be a handy resource for all feminists - How to counter the argument of, “But, it’s her choice”?
We went to see a play staged at Chowdiah yesterday, ‘The Invisible River’. I knew that it was a play about the Ganga and I expected to see something revolving around the pollution of the river. In a sense, it did, but more than that, the play used the river as a motif to talk about faith and how there could be more than one way of seeing things.
The play is structured around three differing perspectives. Dr. Ajay, a government doctor in Allahabad is the rational environmentalist, seeing the river as a cesspool that needs cleaning up and trying to change the deeply entrenched belief that it is holy. His mother is a woman who has given up on life and turned to faith instead. The third view is that of Uma, a private sector scientist, out to investigate the work of bacteriophages in the river that seem to cleanse it inspite of the terrible stuff that is thrown into everyday (remains of cremated bodies, bodily wastes etc etc).
Eventually the play seemed to suggest that Uma’s research could indeed be true. Of course that leads to a terrible sort of conclusion - why bother to keep the river clean, why bother to stop throwing stuff into it - if it is indeed self-cleansing? In a weird sort of way, science seems to lead back to the conclusion that the river is holy and indestructible. The play stopped short of this stating this though, and the overriding message was that nothing is as simple as it seems. A politician who would like to use Uma’s research as part of her campaign further rubs this in - that what seems good and reasonable can be subverted. It can even be seen as useless, depending on the context - after all, her ‘phage’ therapy may never reach Allahabad, where Dr. Ajay despairs over children dying of cholera after drinking the polluted water. Â
The acting was credible - the best part of the play was the characterization. The conflict between a seemingly illogical, devout mother and a rationalist son - the tension - was played really well. What jarred a little was the script itself - shouldn’t plays set in India have an Indian English feel to them? Even if we know that in reality, a lot of the action would have happened in Hindi, Indian English could have been a close substitute. The script, at many places however lapsed into strangely American sounding English. The accents of the cast too, sounded a little unreal, especially the little street kid who spoke with a city school accent. It seemed as though the director believed that only policitians and pujaris would speak in an exaggerated cowbelt accent.
Playwright: Gautam Raja; More info here.
Is hiring out your housework a feminist thing to do? Over at ‘An Open Letter By a Feminist’ two interesting posts on this issue, 1 and 2Â with a lot of useful discussion in the comments space.
I find the Western perspective on this quite different from our situation though. First of all, with a whole lot less dirt and much more labor saving devices, I don’t think the definition of housework is quite the same. It is perhaps possible then for full-time working people there to do all their own stuff.
Here, if we count the basic chores that any house needs on a daily basis - sweeping, swabbing, utensils, clothes wash (if there is no machine) plus the heavier weekend dusting and cleaning, it adds up to quite a bit of time. I would estimate about 1.5-Â 2 hours per day. This is apart from the cooking, since most Indian families (meaning, women) still do from-scratch cooking for most meals. When kids enter the picture, the requirements get even heavier.
To my mind, therefore, having house help allows women to go out and work. Here of course, we are referring to middle or upper class women, which is where the question emerges - Are you using your privilege and hiring someone else to do your ‘dirty work’? In a sense, this is a consequence of viewing traditional women’s work as low value, easy to do, requiring no particular skill. Housework was traditionally done by the lady of the house - it has low economic value, since there is no external customer paying for it. It is therefore hired out to what is seen as ‘unskilled labour’. It is also a function of a large available labour base, which will take any work it can get.
On the other hand, I know from talking to maids that many of them do view this as safer work than what they find in factories. Plus, the (usually) part-time nature of work allows them to care for their own families as well. So, on the whole, I don’t believe it is any more wrong to hire out housework than it is to call in a plumber or electrician. Those jobs are of course seen as much more skilled, and skilled jobs are usually done by men. There is definitely an issue with ‘how’ we view housework and therefore how maids are treated. The issue is therefore with how ‘we’ perceive and allot an economic value to it, not with housework itself.
With families in metros gaining from double incomes, some of it is percolating down to hired help - and we do see the wages of maids going up. This may still not be in proportion to the inflation that is happening.  One solution would be to get more women to go in for vocational training that allows them to go in for skilled, better-paying jobs. Most of the ‘glass ceiling’ break throughs have been in white collar jobs. Most other occupations such as skilled construction jobs, electrical work, plumbing, painting, even gardening - remain the preserve of men. A start has been made in the retail area, where women have started managing floors and counters in large numbers. As more such options increase, women from lower socio-economic classes have many more choices that don’t necessarily call for a degree, but still pay reasonably well. Currently, many of them are not trained for any other options - the conservatism of families also prevents them from getting trained.
Eventually, demand and supply has a big role to play. As education levels rise, good house help is harder to get, people will be willing to pay them more, and will have to treat them better. Eventually, will it also be seen as a job with its own requirements and therefore deserving respect?
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