Vrindavan: City of Widows Symbolizes Shameful Treatment of South Asian Women

Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy has earned two Oscars by bringing world's attention to women's abuse in Pakistan. She has shamed Pakistani politicians and society at large into a series of actions to put an end to violence against women. Alas, there appears to be little attention paid to women's abuse in Pakistan's neighbor India.

Widows of Vrindavan

Indian women's suffering begins at birth and continues through their entire lives. Girls are highly undervalued, there are 35 million fewer females than males, presumed dead, killed by midwife or parent or starved to death. Unltrasound technology is used mainly to find and destroy female fetuses. Ultrasound and abortion are available even in the smallest villages with no electricity or clean water.

The girls lucky enough not to be aborted face inequality and cruelty at every turn because of low social status of Indian women, according to SuperFreakonomics, a book by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner that documents status of women in India.

Vrindavan, also called the city of widows, is the most shameful symbol of women's suffering.  Satti, the immolation of surviving widows on a husband's funeral pyre,  may have been banned in India, but life for many widows in India is still tragic as they are shunned by their communities and abandoned by their families, even their own children, according to a recent Aljazeera  report.

The widows often live in severe poverty and are ostracized by society due to various superstitions - even the shadow of a widow can wreak havoc and bring bad luck, many Indians believe. Lack of education and any source of income forces them to beg on streets and many turn to prostitution for survival, according to the report.

The last time the issue of abandoned and ostracized widows got much attention in India was in 2005 when a Deepa Mehta film "Water" was released.  The film Water features Chuyia , a 7-year-old child bride, who 40-year-old husband dies. Chuyia's head s shaved and dressed in a coarse white sari. She is then taken to a Hindu temple to spend the rest of her life there.  The film shows that several young widows are prostituted to clients to raise funds for the temple.

The irony is that the film Water's only acclaim came from audiences thousands of miles from India.  Deepa Mehta was forced to finish making the film abroad after receiving death threats for "insulting" Hindu culture. It was nominated for an Academy award but it did not win. It, however, did win several other prestigious international awards.

More recently, Naatak, a  Silicon Valley based theater company,  did "Vrindavan" as a musical production.  It takes a closer look at the politics and social ills behind the city of Vrindavan. It's directed by a Silicon Valley engineer Sujit Saraf who heads the theater company.

While all of South Asia needs to change the way women are treated, it's only Pakistan that appears to be willing to confront the issues of gender bias. Similar courage is needed in all of South Asia, particularly India, to do more to alleviate the suffering of women.

Related Links:

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Comment by Riaz Haq on March 9, 2016 at 7:32am

#Pakistan’s prime minister #NawazSharif is defying the clerics. #WomensDay2016 #AGirlInTheRiver #MumtazQadri #Sharia http://wpo.st/JdGK1 

..Sharif, 66, and his PML-N lawmakers are now challenging Pakistan’s religious community, charting a new path for their party while unsettling a constituency that includes hundreds of thousands of Islamic clerics.


During a speech to international business leaders here in late November, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif shocked the country’s powerful religious community by calling for a new, more “liberal” Pakistan.

Amid an outcry, within hours, Sharif’s staff was downplaying the speech, saying he didn’t really mean to imply Pakistan should become more like the West.

But so far this year, Sharif and his party have defied Islamic scholars by unblocking access to YouTube, pushing to end child marriage, enacting a landmark domestic violence bill, and overseeing the execution of a man who had become a symbol of the hatred that religion can spawn here.

The shift in tone can be traced to Sharif’s ambitious economic agenda, the influence his 42-year-old daughter has over him, and his awareness that Pakistan remains the butt of jokes, according to his friends, senior government officials and analysts.

“He knows the international community needs a progressive Pakistan,” said one senior Pakistani government official close to the prime minister who asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly about his boss. “So if he thinks a moderate, progressive or liberal agenda can help with his economic agenda, he goes for it.”

With strong support from rural voters and the religious community, Sharif returned as prime minister in 2013 after his party, Pakistan Muslim League-N, won a decisive majority in parliamentary elections.


But Sharif, 66, and his PML-N lawmakers are now challenging Pakistan’s religious community, charting a new path for their party while unsettling a constituency that includes hundreds of thousands of Islamic clerics.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 9, 2016 at 11:49am

Why #India’s Chief Economic Adviser Has #Beef With Talking About #BeefBan? Losing his job!! #Modi http://on.wsj.com/1M614Ip via @WSJIndia

India’s chief economic adviser, Arvind Subramanian, on Tuesday declined to answer a question about how bans on cow slaughter affect the country’s rural economy, choosing to avoid an issue that has become a flashpoint for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s conservative government.

“You know that if I answer this question, I will lose my job,” Mr. Subramanian said at an event in Mumbai, according to a Press Trust of India report.

The western state of Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai, recently expanded a ban on killing cows, which are revered in Hindu culture. Many other states restrict the practice to varying degrees. Last year’s mob murder of a Muslim man accused of killing a cow has kindled concerns that religious intolerance is on the rise in India.


But what might Mr. Subramanian have said on the subject had he chosen to be a little less discreet?

Beef is big business in India. The most recent Livestock Census counted 191 million heads of live cattle and 109 million heads of buffalo in the country in 2012. Not all of those animals were destined for the abattoir: In the 2014 fiscal year, 3.2 million cattle were slaughtered, yielding 333,000 metric tons of meat, and 9.7 million buffalo met the same fate, yielding 1.2 million tons of meat.

Lots of that meat, in turn, got exported: India shipped abroad $4.2 billion worth of frozen bovine meat in the 2014 financial year, more in dollar terms than the country’s exports of T-shirts, motorcycles and car parts that year, and making India one of the world’s biggest beef exporters.

Livestock in aggregate—not just cows but goats, chickens and pigs, and not just meat but eggs, hides, dung and even honey—added 3.2 trillion rupees ($48 billion) to India’s gross domestic product in the year that ended March 31, 2012. That represented nearly a quarter of agriculture’s 18% total contribution to GDP that year.

As for how much bovines contribute to (human) employment, a government survey in 2013 found that 1.75% of rural households, or around 2.7 million of them, derived their primary income in the preceding year from rearing livestock. But that doesn’t capture the extent to which people in the hinterland raise animals to supplement their earnings from cultivation, manual labor or other activities. The same survey found that 682 households out of 1,000 in the countryside owned cattle, and 415 out of 1,000 owned buffalo.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 26, 2016 at 5:08pm

#India: #widow leaves children behind to live with another man for money, an ancient custom of "nata" @AJENews

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/09/india-children-...

Dungarpur, Rajasthan, India - Five-year-old Pinki is hiding behind her grandmother, Kanku Roat. The 53-year-old has been her world since her mother left. They live in a small mud house that they share with two goats, a cow and a calf - their only assets. 

Pinki doesn't remember her mother. She left after Pinki's father died. The young widow went off to participate in the centuries-old custom of Nata Pratha. Pinki was only a year old. 

Prevalent in the Bhil tribal community from which Pinki's family come, Nata Pratha allows a man to pay money to live with a woman to whom he is not married.

The price can range from 25,000 to 50,000 Indian rupees (around $375 to $750) and is usually negotiated by members of the community, or middlemen, who may receive a cut for doing so. Traditionally, both the man and woman were supposed to be married or widowed, as in the case of Pinki's mother, but the custom is evolving to include single people as well. 

The woman typically goes to live with the man, often leaving any children she already has behind. 

"After the death of my son, my daughter-in-law became a part of this custom and discarded her daughter to live with a married man," says Kanku. "She could have stayed back and taken care of her daughter, but this is the custom of our community that has been followed for centuries."

She says she doesn't know where her daughter-in-law is now and Pinki has not seen her mother since she left. 

"Women who enter Nata mostly leave their children with ... relatives," explains Neema Pant, the assistant manager of the child sensitivity social protection programme at Save the Children in Rajasthan. Some, she says, "suffer discrimination and abuse by their ... relatives. They miss their school and their nutrition is also compromised". 

Sometimes, she says, they are made to work in the house and on the fields, although Save the Children is working to provide support to children abandoned as a result of Nata Pratha so that they can attend school and experience a more "conducive environment in the family". 

Rama Kallasua is the head teacher at a government school in South Rajasthan and a member of the Bhil community. She says: "In our community there is no concept of remarriage. Nata is the alternative of remarriage and this is a socially sanctioned and approved custom by our community."

"In marriages, there are a lot of expenses and our community is very poor, so to save costs our ancestors created the Nata custom," she explains.

The custom has also found support among tribal leaders such as Bansilal Kharadi, who is a member of a panchayat, or village council, in a Bhil community and believes that the tradition can be empowering for women, allowing them to choose to leave husbands they are unhappy with in order to live with another man.

"There is nothing wrong in Nata Pratha," he says. "It's a custom that gives power to women to choose. If a woman's husband is an alcoholic, then she can just leave him and start living with a man of her choice. Our ancestors created this custom and it cannot be wrong. Our community will always follow this."

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 3, 2017 at 10:19pm

BBC News - #India textbook lists bride's 'ugliness' as cause for #dowry. #misogyny

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-38852290

A textbook in the western Indian state of Maharashtra has caused outrage after it listed "ugliness" as a reason for the increased demand for dowry.
The textbook said: "If a girl is ugly and handicapped then it becomes difficult for her to get married. To marry such girls [the] bridegroom and his family demand more dowry."
A minister told local media that the offending passage would be removed.
Pictures of the text were widely circulated on social media.
Many pointed out that such texts did little to remove existing prejudices in Indian society.
Paying and accepting dowry is a centuries-old South Asian tradition where the bride's parents gift cash, clothes and jewellery to the groom's family.
Why are India's housewives killing themselves?
Five bizarre 'lessons' in Indian textbooks
The practice has been illegal in India since 1961, but it continues to thrive and campaigners say it leaves women vulnerable to domestic violence and even death.
Disputes can arise over how much money should be paid and over what timescale. In some cases when grooms and their families do not receive their desired amount, brides can be subject to terrible abuse.
In 2015, the Women and Child Development Ministry told parliament that more than 8,0000 dowry deaths had been reported for each of the previous three years.

This is not the first time Indian text books have been in the spotlight for the wrong reasons.
A teacher in the central Indian state of Chhatisgarh last year complained about a textbook for 15-year-olds in the state, which said that unemployment levels had risen post-independence because women had begun working in various sectors.
And in 2006, it was discovered that a textbook for 14-year-olds in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan compared housewives to donkeys.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 26, 2021 at 9:44pm

The #Indian girl killed for wearing #jeans . Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes. #Hindutva #misogyny - BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57968350

Women and girls in small town and rural India live under severe restrictions with village heads or family patriarchs often dictating what they wear, where they go or who they talk to, and any perceived misstep is considered a provocation and must be punished.

No wonder then that the alleged assault of Neha for her choice of clothing is just one among a number of brutal attacks reported on girls and young women by their family members that have recently shocked India.

Last month, a gut-wrenching video that emerged from Alirajpur district in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh showed a 20-year-old tribal woman being beaten by her father and three male cousins.

Following outrage, police lodged a complaint against the men and said she was being "punished" for running away from her "abusive" marital home.

A week before the incident, reports said two girls were mercilessly beaten up by their family members for talking on the phone with a male cousin in the neighbouring district of Dhar.

--------------


Reports of girls and young women being brutally assaulted by family members have recently made headlines in India. The incidents have also put the spotlight on how unsafe girls and women are within their own homes.

Last week, 17-year-old Neha Paswan was allegedly beaten to death by members of her extended family in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh because they didn't like her wearing jeans.

Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes at their home in Savreji Kharg village in Deoria district, one of the least developed regions in the state.

"She had kept a day-long religious fast. In the evening, she put on a pair of jeans and a top and performed her rituals. When her grandparents objected to her attire, Neha retorted that jeans were made to be worn and that she would wear it," her mother said.

The argument escalated, resulting in the violence, she claims.

Shakuntala Devi said as her daughter lay unconscious, her in-laws called an autorickshaw and said they were taking her to hospital.

"They wouldn't let me accompany them so I alerted my relatives who went to the district hospital looking for her but couldn't find her."

The next morning, Shakuntala Devi said, they heard that the body of a girl was hanging from the bridge over the Gandak river that flows through the region. When they went to investigate, they discovered it was Neha's.

Police have lodged a case of murder and destruction of evidence against 10 people, including Neha's grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and the auto driver. The accused have yet to make any public statement.

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