Almost a century ago, my great grandmother was married to a boy of her family’s choosing. This would be totally unremarkable (not to mention irrelevant to the post I’m commencing) except she was a seven-year old bride. When she was eighteen and suitably “womanly” (read: able to reproduce), she went to live with her husband of more than a decade; though he is now gone, she still loves him very much. I remember being very disturbed by this story the first few times I heard it. My mother would always soothe me and say that it all occurred during another time, that the practice of marrying off children wasnt a part of modern India*.
*When I was a bit older, she explained the asterisk which was visible only in the guarded look her face took on whenever she said the phrase, Modern India; that fleeting change in her eyes represented the inevitable and unfortunate truth that bad things might still occur, but “only in rural, backwards places” which were still living in the shade of ignorance.
I was reading yesterdays WaPo when I thought of all of this. The article I knew Id write up for SM was about Savita Chaudhry, a striking 22-year old who at age 3 was arranged to marry a five-year old. Her matchmaking grandfather sealed the deal with a coconut and perplexed toddler-Savita spent the night with her new in-laws, to consummate the marriage symbolically before returning home with her parents. Everyone expected that Savita would willingly stand by her man once she was an adult, like my great-grandmother did.
I wonder if there were signs, when she was a wee three, that two decades later she’d grow up to be someone fierce.
Last year, the willowy young woman with the flashing dark eyes refused the entreaties of her “husband” and his family to join them in their village, several hundred miles from this small city in western India where she runs the family grocery shop. She is paying a steep price.
Not only does Chaudhry accuse her would-be in-laws of demanding money in exchange for her freedom, but the leaders of her caste — a powerful informal council known as a caste panchayat — have also threatened Chaudhry and her family with the ultimate sanction of excommunication, or ejection from the caste. Such an outcome would rob the family of its social standing and damage the marriage prospects of Chaudhry’s 18-year-old brother, among other things.
Ah, the dreaded “P”-word. Whenever “Panchayat” shows up on SM, it’s trouble, I tell you. Trouble for the woman whose fate is at stake, trouble for other women:
“She has to understand that she hasn’t even lived with him for one day, and she’s complaining about him. It’s definitely set a bad example.”
Which of the acronyms in the comment thread of my last post are applicable here? Let’s make up a new one: Righteous-has-a-backbone-girl, RHABG for short. Inelegant, but totally apposite.
Panchayats and caste, two of the things that contrast sharply to the India we quite understandably love to talk about on this blog. The former especially vexes me. India doesn’t need a parallel justice system, damn it, not when it’s going to punish innocents who are vulnerable second-class citizens. It always blows my mind that the same country where sex-selective abortions, dowry deaths and female infanticide occur once had a female head of state.
Perhaps change is in the air?
In the decades since independence from Britain in 1947, the central government has sought to replace (Panchayats) with a more representative system of elected village bodies called gram panchayats . The new system seeks to counter discrimination by reserving some seats for women and other vulnerable groups, such as the casteless Indians known as untouchables. Combined with urbanization and improved education, such efforts have eroded the standing of traditional councils in some areas and help explain Savita Chaudhry’s willingness to challenge an edict that once would have been heeded without question…
“Everything to do with household and family, all the intra-family disputes, is still very much controlled by the caste panchayats,” said Ranjana Kumari, the head of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi, who asserts that women are usually the victims in such cases. “This very undemocratic, very patriarchal and extremely hierarchical system should be abolished.”
Preach on, sister. I’m sick of reading articles in the NYT and the “good” Post about some powerless woman getting raped or otherwise punished because a few unnecessarily important assho1es with Y-chromosomes deem it necessary.
By the way, it’s not like Savita wrote her groom off automatically:
“I don’t consider myself married,” said Chaudhry, who has no memory of the ceremony. “I was 3 years old. It was more like a game than a marriage.”
Nevertheless, the families remained in loose touch; two years ago, Chaudhry decided that she wanted to get to know the man to whom she had been pledged as a child. For the first time in eight years, she said, the couple got together at the home of her uncle in the southern city of Bangalore, where Pappu worked in a sari shop. But the reunion did not go well.
Pappu sounds like a real champion— he asked his lovely bride to hit her father up for over $1,800 AND told her that he disapproved of her bold, unladylike behavior. You see, she had the NERVE to approach him without her hair covered.
“It made a very bad impression on me,” Chaudhry said. “He was okay-looking, to be honest, but his conversation made no sense.”
Savita Chaudhry has one of the advantages I think is key when it comes to challenging the system; her family supports her.
Soon afterward, Chaudhry tore up Pappu’s photograph and told her parents she would not go to live with him, a decision they supported. But he and his family insisted that she honor her commitment and move to their village in Rajasthan, members of both families recalled.
Savita’s parents visited her would-be in-laws at the end of last year and offered them more than $2,000 to call the whole thing off, which is apparently a perfectly legitimate compromise within their caste. Pappu’s family, to the surprise of no one, demanded several times that amount. Of course, when WaPo called up Pappu’s mom for the story, she denied everything except pressuring her daughter-in-law to move in with them. What, asking a bride’s family for more money?? Unheard of!
The panchayat in Rajasthan sided with Pappu’s family and referred the matter to the caste council in Himatnagar, which last month summoned the young woman’s mother to its meeting place at a Hindu temple and threatened her with excommunication.
“These things are not good for the community,” explained Lal, 38, the member of the Himatnagar panchayat and a labor foreman. “They have to understand it’s not so easy to break off a relationship.”
But Savita Chaudhry said she was determined to do just that, having fallen in love with another man. “It’s very unfair,” she said of the council’s threats. “I’m not some cow or goat.”
I’m wishing with all my heart that Savita’s story gets a happy ending, like Nisha Sharma’s did. I don’t want her to be a hapless victim who gets tortured, strung up or otherwise “made an example of”. I hope she gets to marry the man she actually loves. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
