In search of freedom

It was as unlikely a place for a discussion on the girl child’s rights as could be imagined — a beach along the meandering course ...

It was as unlikely a place for a discussion on the girl child’s rights as could be imagined — a beach along the meandering course of the Trisuli river in Nepal. Lying under an upturned raft propped up with paddles to dry, bottles of Carlsberg in hand after a day of running some decent rapids, the three of us were chatting about our cultural backgrounds. My companions were a woman from Scandinavia and a Chinese girl whose family lived in England.

It began with Leslie, whose father was from Hong Kong and mother from the Chinese mainland, and who had grown up in Oxford, saying: ‘‘In the East, unlike the West, girls are not equal to boys. There was always a difference between my brother and me. He and I were just not equal. It didn’t matter that we were living in England, we might just as well have been living in Hong Kong or China.’’

I listened to Leslie with dismay. She’d hit the nail on the head about the East-West cultural divide regarding sons and daughters. True, there are families in Hong Kong and China who treat sons and daughters equally but they are in a minority and it was sad that her parents had carried their ‘Oriental’ prejudice all the way to the cultured university town in Britain where they had chosen to settle.

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In much the same way, there are Indian families who do not discriminate between boys and girls but they are in a minority. For the most part, our towns and cities are populated with urbanised families who refuse to let go traditional prejudices and perceptions about girls and their pre-ordained roles that have migrated with them from the villages of their forefathers.

One such perception is that a daughter is not one’s own, she is ‘parayee’. Her fulfilment is supposed to be as a daughter-in-law, wife and mother. A woman’s duty is to help her husband in sundry tasks, among them looking after his parents in their old age. The care of her own parents is the duty of her brother.

These perceptions are passed from generation to generation. There are too many urban girls, even those with ironed hair, bare mid-riffs and lycra clothes, who do not question them. The inculcation of these ideas begins early and their seed is in the great dictum that is drilled into the core of the vast majority of Indian children: do not question your elders.

There is no room for individual freedom in such perceptions. But then the individual does not seem to matter, or even exist, in India. India is ruled by samaj and the vast majority of urban Indian women — even if they are working and financially independent — go through life complying with the dictates of samaj. If this is the state in our cities in the 21st century, what hope can there be for villages?