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Magazine
Freedom in the cage
PUSHPA SURENDRA
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Women in many rural families seldom have rights to property. They live in a make-believe world with little freedom to speak for themselves, even if they are educated.
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Silence... the most appreciated quality in village women.
NAGARAJA dredged up the soil from the trench, while Puttamma emptied the baandlis of soil to form a bund around their fields on which they had recently sunk a bore-well. They had sold their plot of land with its mango trees, and their only son Mahesha's marriage a few months ago to someone considered not ``good looking'' had brought in a substantial dowry that helped the family to make the necessary investments on the land. A tractor had been employed in the initial stages to level the existing fields to make it fit for the cultivation of rice.
Along with hired labourers and using bullocks, Nagaraja worked for another month flattening the humps and filling the deep pits. During this period, Puttamma worked hard at providing two meals a day and several cups of tea to the men at work. The food and drink had to be carried to the fields from their home in the village. When money ran out, Puttamma and Nagaraja were the only ones working on their land not grudging their son's indulgence in the newfound joys of matrimony.
I watched with anxiety all the activity on my neighbour's farm, worried about the impact the new bore-well would have on our water table. One morning I heard sounds of crying and wailing from across my farm. Nagaraja, in a fit of temper, was beating up his wife because her brother had failed to pay back the Rs. 5,000 he had borrowed. Puttamma meekly subjected herself to the blows, but her tongue was at work with great energy and that succeeded in bringing several women grazing their cattle in the nearby fields to her. In anger, she cast aside her thali and was cursing her son for not coming to her defence. All the bitterness of long years of marriage poured out of her heart while the women listened to her sympathetically, advising her not to make a mountain of a molehill.
After several hours, the women succeeded in calming her down sufficiently to make her wear the thali again. I could hear her wailing the whole afternoon, but as dusk fell her embarrassed husband ordered her home. The next day she continued to work in the fields as if nothing happened. I admired the mild-mannered Puttamma's incredible lung power and strategy which succeeded in bringing the other women round her to rescue her from further blows from her husband.
With only a wall separating houses of one family from another it is hard to keep secrets from neighbours in villages. The onslaught of loud music and noise from television sets have come as a boon to wife beaters and quarrelsome in-laws. That was how in our village no one even heard the nightly cries of the panther that carried away dogs as prey.
Sumitra who used to work on our farm, until she came of age, was able to keep secret her love affair with a boy from a landed family. No one knew about it until she revealed the secret just a day before the boy, approved by elders, came to see her. Our women workers talked endlessly about the impossibility of marriage between two ``unequals''. As it turned out, it was actually the fear of her mother Kamalamma's sharp tongue that clinched the marriage.
The only weapon of village women, in many situations, where they fear being harassed, is their tongue. In contrast, women from rural middle class and rich families consider it coarse and vulgar to attract the attention of the public to their suffering. Silence and the ability to bear oppression are the most appreciated qualities in women. Suppression of facts and family secrets, considered shameful to the family, even at the cost of great personal humiliation to women, allows the male members to get away with the worst crime. Women in such families are seen as upholding tradition and preserving family honour and any attention from outside on them would be considered a matter of shame for the woman and the family.
Education does not automatically bring awareness of rights until women learn to consider themselves as equal and not inferior to men. In many wealthy rural families, education is given to women only to enhance family prestige and not to equip them intellectually or to enable them to stand up for their rights. This is especially true of plantation areas where girl children are educated in boarding schools and thereafter in colleges far away from home at great expense, only because it may enable her to get an educated husband. Such women, though from rich families, seldom have rights to property. Any assertion of her rights is seen as betrayal of time-honoured traditions and customs and she risks losing the goodwill of her family even though by law she is entitled to equal inheritance just as male members of the family. These women who live in a make-believe world of privilege have little freedom like the birds that are free to fly in cages. Poor women like Puttamma have no control over the dowries they bring and no ownership of the land they work on. As long as equal rights to land remains only on paper and women have no assets to their name, verbal and physical abuse of women will continue.
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