charukesi April 5th, 2006
Lack of women turns tables on suitable boys, says a rather optimistic report on yahoo news. [link through anthropology.net]
The report says that young men wanting to get married (and their parents) face a problem in finding girls - not surprising since the gender ratio in many districts is 922 girls for every 1,000 boys, and shockingly, in a few villages, less than 500 girls for every 1000 boys.
This apparently has led to a situation where parents of young girls have been spurning offers of marriage from men unless the potential groom’s family also has a marriageable daughter for their son…
The joint engagement pact, called “aata-saata,” or the “double-couple plan,” has emerged as young women find themselves much in demand in a state where the traditional preference, as in much of India, has been for sons.
Now the slightly incredible part - …dowry, where traditionally a bride’s father had to bestow riches on a groom to secure a marriage, has completely disappeared from many parts of the state. Rather the groom’s families are now offering to bear the cost of finding a suitable bride for their sons.
I doubt if the change is as drastic as all that. It is nice to think that people will wake up to the dangers of a skewed gender ratio, but that will happen only in the long run, if at all. I am skeptical - what do you think?
***
And this is why I am skeptical - Gaay aur Gori… The cow and the girl (gori also means fair-skinned, to look at another level of this). Better off than the donkey and the housewife, which again Harini points out in her post…
But, obviously for the guys who set the curriculum and write the text books in Rajasthan, the film has some sort of sacred symbolism. This from the ToI - “A donkey is like a housewife. It has to toil all day and, like her, may even have to give up food and water. In fact, the donkey is a shade better, for while the housewife may sometimes complain and walk off to her parents’ home, you’ll never catch the donkey being disloyal to his master”
This is my point - are people going to wake up to the fact that young men are finding it difficult to get married and therefore, hey, I need to keep my daughters and not kill them? I think it takes a lot more than a feeble threat of non-marriage in the distant future to achieve any progress in the gender bias and the female foeticide issue. And that is a fundamental shift in attitudes.
Harini also pointed out this piece to me from the Indian Express - Women versus girls - what about the right to abort?
What if aware, literate Indian women, who are not necessarily influenced by their families, consciously seek to give birth to male children by exercising their right to abortion? Here we confront one of the biggest conundrums in this debate: a woman’s right to abortion — a crucial right that has been the centerpiece of many a feminist struggle the world over — militates against the right of the girl child to exist, which is again a crucial social and feminist concern. How do we reconcile these two rights?
