Educated but still behind the burqa in India
Chris Walter photo/Barakat
Children studied at a Barakat school in Uttar Pradesh, India.
Arti Pandey, of Cambridge, is the program director for Barakat Inc., a Cambridge-based nonprofit that works to strengthen education in South and Central Asia. She is conducting a needs assessment in India for a program that would provide a mobile library in remote areas.
UTTAR PRADESH, India -- India has conflicting currents of modernity and traditionalism, and even small towns in Uttar Pradesh feel the impact of these waves and are pulled back and forth by the opposing currents that surround them. Fortunately, in the process, education for girls and women is becoming more and more acceptable. How this education can and will be used is another question.
At the moment I am living with a conservative Muslim joint family in Bhadohi -- three separate households (led by two brothers and their nephew) on the top floor of the house. The floor below is used as a gudam (storage space and working area for finishing carpets) and office for the carpet business. Upon arrival, we were greeted with the news of recent additions: two new daughters-in-law and a little baby girl of 1 month, with another baby expected next month.
The daughters-in-law of the house stay upstairs and are never seen downstairs by any of the day-wage laborers who work here or by any other man who is not a blood relative. My Barakat colleague Chris Walter has been coming here for 18 years now, and until this year the women and older girls of the house maintained strict purdah (meaning “curtain”), even from him. There is, however, one old Nepali servant who is also the chowkidaar (gatekeeper) and has free access to the women’s households upstairs. He does odd jobs for them and is their channel of communication with the downstairs at times when all the younger children, the usual messengers, are gone to school or otherwise occupied.
While the daughters-in-law of the house are strictly confined to the upstairs and can only rarely come down if they are dressed in a burqa (which covers them from head to foot) to go shopping or visit their relatives, the daughters of the house are allowed much more freedom and are encouraged to further their education. Three girls from the family attend college in Uttar Pradesh, and an older daughter is working on her master’s degree. Only one daughter has been pulled out of college and remains at home.
As the boys are encouraged to study, so are the girls. The expectation is that the girls should be able to work if they marry into households in which their in-laws permit them to work outside the house.
But in this household, the standards of education and expectations for daughters and daughters-in-law are very different.
However, expectations of marriage and children are fairly similar for both girls and boys. One household has four children, another has seven, and the third has five -- fairly moderate statistics for an area that has the highest fertility rate among all the districts of Uttar Pradesh, which itself is the state with the second highest fertility rate, 3.9 births per woman, in the country.
The new daughters-in-law of the house had children within a year of their marriage; I am certain that the daughters of this house (once married) will be controlled by their husband and in-laws and may very well choose to have children in quick succession.
One woman in the house neither keeps the purdah, nor is restricted in her movements within or without the house — she even came down to take care of Chris when he was sick. Badi Ammi, the old matriarch of the house, is in her 80s and is as sharp and keen in her understanding as anyone less than half her age. Her wrinkles and her white hair, as well as respect, and she no longer needs to be covered from head to foot in public.
This is India, not Afghanistan, and yet if you were to take this household and place it among the Turkmen of Afghanistan, the only difference would be that in this household the daughters are encouraged to get an education whereas among the Turkmen daughters have to struggle for their right to education.
Conservative households in Bhadohi (which are the majority), be they Muslim or Hindu, function on pretty much the same lines with regard to women. Greater wealth and prosperity in the household does not translate into greater freedom for women -- on the contrary, women have less reason to leave the house and work outside when they are financially comfortable.
Many women do not resent this arrangement; their identity is tied up in the folds of their burqa. Their relatively inferior position in the house and society feels familiar and comfortable to the vast majority. As one of the women in the house told me, “I will be happy if my daughter wears the burqa. She will be keeping herself safe from the eyes of other men'' who may look at her lasciviously.
Even as this family transitions toward allowing its daughters to work, it will also hold them back by marrying them off into “respectable” households, where the girls may not be able to use their education in the workplace.
The struggle between the old ways and hopes of new possibilities is being played out in the day-to-day lives of the members of this family. The crucial factor that intervenes is education, and the great unanswered questions are: How will education affect women’s traditional role in the family and, consequently, what does that mean for the men who have been so long ensconced as the chief decision-makers and public face of the family?
For more information about Barakat’s work in Central and South Asia, go to www.barakatworld.org. To learn how you can blog for Passport, e-mail Lydia Rebac at lrebac@globe.com.
