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It's a man's world in India
Melbourne Age - November 14, 2009
Graham Reilly – Suresh's grin was as wide as the Kerala sky. "People are too much happy today, sir," he said, tilting his head almost imperceptibly from side to side as if it was being tickled by the breeze.
Suresh was a young taxi driver I had hired in Kovalam Beach to take me to a small village inland, to watch a religious festival in which the magnificent local elephants would be a highlight.
As we bounced through the brilliantly green countryside, Suresh confided that he was soon to be married. He said his parents had found a bride for him and that her name was Naveena. "Yes, sir. It is an Indian marriage. An orangeade marriage."
I had visions of an arcane local wedding ceremony involving vast amounts of soft drink and incense. "Orangeade?" I ventured, confused. Suresh beamed. "Yes. My parents, they are meeting with Naveena's parents and they are orangeading it together."
When I realised that Suresh's impending nuptials had been "arranged" by his mum and dad, I offered my sincerest congratulations.
The trip to the backblocks of Kerala was just one of many extraordinary journeys that I took during the two years that I lived in India. As a tourist destination, the country justifiably markets itself as Incredible India, and in many ways it is absolutely that – incredibly beautiful, incredibly mystical, incredibly inspiring.
But there is another India, an incredibly troubling India, an India that doesn't appear in the tourist ads, an India that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is never likely to see on official visits to the capital to meet his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh. It was certainly an India that left me confounded, shocked and struggling to understand the country's many complexities and inconvenient truths.
What disturbed me about India was the many forms of discrimination that exist there, and which despite some political intervention, remain entrenched. Each day, I devoured several of the main quality newspapers. Without fail, there was a report that left me reeling.
I recall a 2006 story about the discovery of hundreds of female foetuses unearthed near a medical clinic in the state of Punjab. Such is the desire and cultural preference for male children in the Punjab that about 20 per cent of the girl child population is missing.
The 2001 Indian census put the country's gender ratio at 933 girls to every 1000 boys and in 2006 the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet reported that in the National Capital Region the ratio was 762 girls for every 1000 boys. Tragically, this skewed gender ratio doesn't appear to be improving, despite the banning of sex-selective ultrasound technology.
The then minister of state for women and child development, Renuka Chowdhury, pointed out the obvious: that if this trend continued the country would not have enough girls. This has proven to be the case, and some Indian men are forced to find wives from other parts of the country – mostly the north-east – where the gender imbalance is not so great.
But women and girls from the culturally different north-eastern states are also vulnerable to being sold into a forced marriage or trafficked into servitude or prostitution. Indeed, the Hindustan Times ran a story in February 2007 about a 40-year-old truck driver from Rajasthan who bought a much younger woman from Jharkhand for 12,000 rupees (about $A280), which, the story pointed out, was cheaper than a buffalo.
What much of the current research also shows is that in areas where there are corrupted sex ratios there is also a higher incidence of violence against women, a horrifying example of which is dowry deaths, otherwise known as bride burning.
According to a report published in The Lancet in April, women between the ages of 15 and 34 accounted for nearly two-thirds of 163,000 fire-related deaths in India in 2001. Local experts attributed this extraordinary gender bias mostly to dowry disputes and other forms of domestic violence. Put simply, if a wife cannot meet the demands for more dowry from her husband or her husband's family, she will be doused with kerosene and set alight. Demanding dowry might be illegal but recent figures from the National Crime Records Bureau show a steady increase in the number of dowry harassment cases.
Every other day I was confronted by headlines referring to yet another episode of violence against Dalits (formerly known as Untouchables). The Indian constitution may well ban caste-based discrimination, but the Hindu caste system still flourishes, systematically excluding a significant part of the population from basic human, civil and economic rights and subjecting them to what US academic and author Smita Narula has described as "the endemic abuse meted out at the hands of higher caste populations, often with the complicity of local and state governments".
I was also fascinated by the matrimonial classifieds that feature in most major newspapers. Perusing these vast sections every weekend, where men and women advertise for spouses, I was struck by how the men invariably sought a woman with light skin, what was euphemistically referred to as a "wheatish complexion". For their part, women boasted of being "fair" or "very fair" or "very very fair".
Such notions are strongly promoted by Bollywood, where the heroes are fair skinned and the villains are dark. Indeed, megastar Shahrukh Khan has appeared on Indian television hawking one of the many brands of skin whiteners to darker skinned young men who can't find girlfriends.
Of course, promoting what Indian academic and writer Sarojini Sahoo described as this "fair-skinned consciousness" has more sinister consequences for those with darker complexions.
"We Indians are living with a strange dilemma and we seem to use different terminologies for the same 'racism'," she wrote recently. "On one side, we oppose racism, particularly Western racism. On the other side, we don't want to recognise unexpressed internal hatred or discrimination of each other (e.g. between North Indians and South Indians) based on race.
"When our children are attacked either in Britain or Canada or in Australia, we shout against racial discrimination in these countries. We seem to see clearer when the subject is far away and seem less in focus when it is closer."
Suresh's orangeade marriage will have been celebrated by now. Thinking back, when he dropped me off at my hotel he complimented me on the colour of my shirt. "It is matching your eyeballs, sir," he said, chugging happily away up the road.
[Graham Reilly is an Age senior writer.]
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