Of Women, Widows, and Child Brides

Yesterday I had a truly delightful time with the faculty and students of the Department of Educational Technology at SNDT, the first women’s university in India. For the record, I googled the acronym SNDT (Shrimati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey) Women's University and learned that the university was founded in 1816 by Dr. Dhondo Keshav Karve in response to a crying need to educate women—specifically Brahmin widows—as the only way of escape from the degrading realities of their lives, a reality which still lingers in modern Indian society.

Widows? Why widows? Why were widows, in particular, in need of an education? Well…

I’m lately learning about widows in India—more specifically about widows in Hindu India. I’m reading a book by Uma Chakravarti about the life and times of Pandita Ramabai, an eminent Indian Christian social reformer and activist, especially concerned with the plight of Indian women who survive their husbands. The rules for widowed women are relaxing now, but in 1816, and still today in some areas of the country, a woman widowed may not—may not—remarry. She belongs to her husband even after he has died.

Now there are plenty of widows, including my mom who’s been a widow since my dad died in 1965, who don’t want to remarry after their husband has died. But at least my mom, in England, had some choice in the matter. Women in Hindu India had no choice then, in 1816, and many widows even in present day India feel like they have no choice now.

It takes a long time for cultural prescriptions to die.

The fact is that widows in India have been treated disgracefully in the past. They were forced, by Brahminical law, to have their heads shaved and to labor in the household of their dead husband where, essentially, they lived as a slave for the rest of their lives. Rather than face this miserable future, many a widow preferred the option of suti—immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre.

Apart from the gross injustice of forcing anyone—literally or figuratively—to do something they don’t want to do, many a Hindu girl, in the old days, was widowed young. Brahminical law made this an inevitability.

In 1816, Hindu (i.e. Brahman) law required that girls be married off by the age of 10! The reasoning was that a girl married off by the age of 10 was unlikely to lose her virginity (read "purity") to anyone but her husband--a very important consideration when the goal was to maintain the "purity" of the caste system. But the outcome of this practice was that, inevitably, before medical science had advanced to the degree it has today, far too many women died in childbirth, including young women married to old men.

Indeed, it seems that it was not remarkable at all for a man to marry one, young, under-age-10 bride after another, until he died. Thus, when he did eventually die, he inexorably left behind a young widow.

In 1860, obliging British overlords, bent on legal compromise, fixed age 10 as the legal age for Indian girls to marry—not before! So I guess that’s progress. Did the British legislators condoning that 1860 decision have their tongue in cheek, or did they honestly think that this was OK?

We’ll never know.

By 1884, because of deaths of child brides as a result of too early sexual abuse at the hands of adult husbands, there began serious discussion to raise to 12 the youngest age at which girls were married off. Still today, as I read in The Hindu newspaper just last week, child brides are married off (sometimes to child grooms) in their early teens, though it is now, thankfully, the exception rather than the rule.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, men always married child brides, who were not older than 10. This is because there weren't any other women to marry. Every girl was married off by age 10. If a wife died, say, in childbirth, the man would marry again, and again it would be to a child bride. There were no other brides. All the girls were married by the time they were 10 because it was required by Hindu Brahmanic law.

Strange that widowers were allowed to remarry, but the same didn’t apply to widows. Oh, silly me. I forgot that men wrote the law!

It was not unusual for a man to marry several times before he died, which meant that his final marriage was at an advanced age. What was a girl to do when her aged husband died within a few years of the marriage, as was not uncommonly the case? The child bride became a child widow. She could not remarry; she was shunned by society; she was a slave in her dead husband’s home; she had to have her head permanently shaved as a kind of enforced castration.

What was a girl to do?

Suti, not surprisingly, was sometimes preferable to a fate worse than death. Thank goodness for men and women like Dr. Dhondo Keshav Karve, Dr. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, and Shrimati Pandita Ramabai, who railed against injustices such as this and did what they could to right these egregious wrongs.

We, too, today and every day, should do our part to work, slowly, but surely, for a society where everyone—-male, female, black, white, homosexual, heterosexual, disabled, non-disabled, red, pink, yellow, sallow, brown, light brown, bald, hairy, whatever—-has an equal opportunity to enjoy the good things of life on this beautiful earth of ours.

Hi, Auntie!

This is cute.

Every day when I walk into class, I give my laptop bag and the projector case to my students and they set up my system for me while I chat with other students before the class begins. As it happens, I have a picture of my wife, Marilyn, on the computer desktop. When the machines fire up, there she is in all her glorious beauty smiling down on the class.

One day I overheard one of the students refer to her as “Auntie.” Only then did it occur to me that, just as they sometimes call me “uncle”—a term of respect for an older man in India—so “Auntie” would be the corresponding term of endearment for my wife.

And so it goes.

Now every morning, when Marilyn’s picture comes up on the screen, I tell everyone to say “Hi, Auntie!”

And they do; and I think it’s sweet; and I hope you do, too.

Lionized

Things here are heating up in more ways than one. Yes, daytime temperatures consistently soar to 100F; but things are heating up as regards my schedule of engagements, too.

Today is Saturday, and this week alone, aside from teaching my regular classes, I’ve been involved every day with one extra-curricular activity or another.

I’ve given presentations at my university, to the faculty of the Education Department (Monday) and the English Department (Tuesday).

On Wednesday (9:30 pm) and Thursday (12:30 am!!) I gave online presentations at the Teaching in the Community Colleges 2007 conference out of Hawaii, USA.

Thursday morning saw me at Akshaya Kshetra as the chairperson of a three hour workshop for elementary school children on “Integration.” 100 children from a Renigunta primary school spent time with the Akshaya’s disabled residents learning about the plight of people with a disability.

On Friday I was guest of honor at the Valedictory function for our graduating Masters of Education students. It was a beautiful ceremony where the students performed with recitals, songs and a short skit in between speeches by all and sundry. I was “felicitated” once again, garlanded and shawled, perfumed with sandalwood paste, my forehead daubed with a flash of red paint. I also was presented by my students with the most gorgeous gift of a beautifully carved figure of a Indian woman in tribal dress.

Today, Saturday, I’m not long back from the Sri Venkateswara private elementary and secondary school in Renigunta, from which the children came for Thursday’s Integration workshop at the Akshaya Kshetra.

I'm used to what I call "Indian time," where the starting time of anything is never--I mean never--at the appointed hour, and usually as much as half an hour late. But this morning was ridiculous even by Indian standards. The car to bring me to Renigunta was scheduled to pick me up at the guest house at 7:30 am. It eventually showed at 8:45 am!

To add insult to injury, the car was a truly clapped-out banger, a bone-shaker of a thing, which stalled every time the driver took his foot off the accelerator! No A/C, of course.

We eventually got to the school in Renigunta at around 9:30 am and I told the headmaster that I was on a very tight schedule. I absolutely had to leave by 10:30 so that I could be back at my university in time to teach my 11:30 class. I also said that I simply had to have a more reliable vehicle for the return trip--a motorbike, a scooter, a push bike, even a bullock cart!--anything rather than the jalopy they brought me in.

A deal was struck. I gave my speech, after which I posed for photos with the students and staff. Then I foolishly accepted one student's request to sign her notebook. Next thing I knew, I was absolutely mobbed by students thrusting notebooks and scraps of paper at me.

I scribbled a few more signatures, then I realized that I'd be there all day if I continued. So I threw up my hands, refused to sign another one, and pushed my way through the throng of clamoring boys and girls.

It was like swimming against an ocean tide. Everyone wanted to shake my hands on the way back to the headmaster's office, where I gratefully sought refuge and downed a thirst-quenching bottle of coffee-cream milk.

An air-conditioned jeep was commissioned to take me back to Tirupati. Now that's more like it! I made it back to the university with five minutes to spare.

Wedding Bells

Last Wednesday I attended a reception and dinner for Srikanth and Vineela on the eve of their wedding. Srikanth is the son of Dr. V. Kodandarami Reddy, a professor at Sri Venkateswara University. Vineela is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. N. Rosi Reddy, probably related, though not necessarily so. Reddy is a very common surname in these parts, like Smith or Jones in England.

The reception was held at R.K. Kalyanamandapam, a wedding center in Tiruchanoor, a suburb of Tirupati. A couple of hundred guests milled around in an open space in front of a stage where Srikanth and Vineela, after a formal ceremony of betrothal, were greeted by, and photographed with,a succession of guests, including eventually myself. This was not the wedding, just an opportunity for everyone to meet the bride and groom before they "tied the knot" the next day.

The next morning, bright and early, determined not to miss a thing, I took an autorickshaw back to the wedding hall for the wedding proper. Breakfast was served in a large hall, a very informal affair where everyone sat down where they pleased at long tables while waiters came by with tasty South Indian tiffin tidbits such as idli, sambar, rice, chapatti, curry and so forth. In South India light meals and finger food is always referred to as "tiffin," an Anglo-Indian word meaning 'snack'. I love this stuff!

Just after I finished breakfast and moved outside, the groom arrived at the mandapam (marriage center) and the musicians swung into action. Srikanth was dressed like a maharajah in a full cream and gold-lined coat and pants and matching turban. With mom and dad in tow and an entourage of attendants, led by the musicians he proceeded to the hall where the wedding was to take place.

The reverse of what is customary in America or England, the bride was already there awaiting the arrival of the groom. This is because the mandapam, in a city setting, represents the bride's home. The groom comes in procession to claim the woman who has been chosen to be his mate and the mother of his children.

In the foyer of the hall, the groom is prepared for the wedding. His feet are bathed. Garlands and gold chains are placed around his neck and gold bracelets on his wrists. Gold is everywhere. Everyone's dripping with it. Indians, especially the women, love gold; they can't get enough of it. It's passed down from generation to generation; it's an important slice of the dowry the bride's family has to pay for the pleasure of being absorbed into the family of the groom.

As you perhaps see from the pictures above, the bride is bedecked in a gorgeous red and gold sari. The gold thread is real gold, by the way. She's also covered in gold jewelry from head to toe. She's beautiful.

The wedding ceremony proper, being Hindu, is supervised by Vedic priests. They chant mantras and direct the groom while he "ties the knot"--Kappu, the holy thread--on the bride's wrist, which is meant to ward off evil spirits. The groom also ties the gold Mangala Sutra around the neck of the bride. She will wear this to her grave. Holding the bride’s hand, the bridegroom now walks seven steps with her. This is the most important part of the marriage ceremony, and only when they walk seven steps together (this is called Saptha Padhi) is the marriage legally complete. The belief is that when one walks seven steps with another, one becomes the other’s friend.

Finally, the guests file up onto the stage to congratulate the bride and groom, pouring rice on their heads to wish them prosperity and the blessing of children. Not too many children, though. "We two, ours two" is the guideline given by the Government of India to try to limit the number of offspring. India's population, over one billion and growing, is second only to China, and it's projected to become the world's most populous nation by 2030.

Fortunately, Indians have always, for thousands of years, had a yen for settling in different parts of the world. I don't know how many Indians live in diaspora, but there must be many millions of them by now. Srikanth and Vineela will be joining them when he takes his bride back with him to Lexington, Kentucky, where he's gainfully employed as a Firmware Engineer.

Let me live…. Or let me die

Those are the words of Ramachandra, the teacher at Akshaya, a school for children with disabilities in Renigunta, about 20 miles from Tirupati, which I visited yesterday afternoon. That’s Ramachandra and his wife in the picture above. Ramachandra, at the age of two, contracted polio and has been unable to use his legs ever since.

Ramachandra is a beautiful man.

I’ve known him for only a few hours, so how can I say such a thing? Simple. Because I choose to do so, and because I sense that this is so.

Life is constantly thrusting at us realities which we choose to either accept or deny. One day, about two months ago—every day seems like an age here in India where my experiences are so frequently fresh and new, like those of a new born baby—there was a knock at my door in the guest house. In walked Thasleema, with her friend Madhu.

That’s Thasleema, wearing the off-white sari third from the left in the front row of the group picture above.

I’d never met Thasleema before. I had met Madhu. We bumped into each other by chance at the Mother Teresa convent next to the Catholic church where I go every now and then for Sunday mass. On one side of the convent compound, the sisters and their aides take care of the elderly; on the other side, they take care of children with severe disabilities. I wrote about them in my blog in January.

Madhu was at the convent with some of his Hindu friends, distributing food to the old folks. Ours was a chance acquaintance, like ships that pass in the night. I never expected to meet him again. But we’d exchanged business cards, so anything was possible.

A few days later, along comes Thasleema, brought by Madhu to visit with me and ask for my advice. She’s about to defend her dissertation. Any day now she’ll be Dr. Thasleema. Her area of expertise is Special Education; it’s been her passion all the way through her undergraduate and graduate studies. She’s driven to help people with disabilities.

“What do you recommend I do, now that I have my doctorate in Special Education?” she asked.

“Why don’t you start a school for children with disabilities,” was my reply. I expect she already had this option in mind, but maybe she needed to hear someone else say it to give her the courage to go ahead. Who knows?

Fact is, Akshaya, Thasleema's school for children with disabilities, has been open for two months.

Like the Don Benny school I visited a few days ago, Akshaya is a beautiful place, out in the countryside, surrounded by the sun-burned, fractured, gnarly hills of the Eastern Ghats, with lush green rice paddies nearby. The school grounds are blessed by a steady, cooling breeze that softens the air, especially at dusk, and sighs soothingly across the wide open plain.

Paradise.

But paradise with a purpose. These children need help. The challenge is well nigh overwhelming if one dwells on the huge scale of human suffering, of human disability. We all suffer, of course. Indeed, we all have disabilities of one sort or another. But there are so many whose suffering is extreme.

My friend Yvonne was born with severe cerebral palsy. Ramachandra has been without the use of his legs since the age of two. In the United States, with all our magnificent medical care and limitless supply of cash, there are 54 million people who are registered with a disability. That’s one person out of every five or six of the population.

If your family doesn’t have someone in it with a disability, count yourself lucky.

In India, the ratio must be at least equal to that of the United States. So I estimate there must be around 180 million people in India with a disability. From what I’ve seen, many, many more of those people than in the United States have a severe disability, like Ramachandra.

But people with a disability like Ramachandra don’t want our sympathy. They want our empathy; they want us to understand their plight. They don’t want us to feel for them; they want us to feel with them. Above all, they need our help.

Thasleema’s husband, Latif, who has supported her through school and who provided the seed funding for this venture of hers, was on hand for my visit. Latif and Thasleema are Muslim. Madhu is Hindu. I’m Christian.

Latif, Madhu and I joined hands and had our picture taken to capture the simple symbolism of our common brotherhood.

It’s not about religion. It’s about human compassion and human love. Those are the eternal values that make a difference in this world of ours.

Before he got involved with the Akshaya, Ramachandra wrote a story about his life and gave it the title: “Let me live… Or let me die.”

“Help me,” he pleaded. “I’m trying all I can to overcome my disability. I’ve put myself through school and qualified as a teacher. Someone, please give me a job. Let me use my skills. Let me do something useful, too—-or let me off this hellish merry-go-round we call life.”

People with a disability anywhere in the world, regardless of qualifications, have a notoriously hard time getting meaningful, gainful employment.

Ramachandra's article caught Thasleema’s eye when she read it in the newspaper. She remembered him when she came to start her school. She needed a teacher for her children with disabilities; Ramachandra needed a teaching job.

Perfect fit.

Thanks to Thasleema and Latif and the community they’ve gathered around them, Ramachandra and his wife of two months now have a lot to look forward to, as the beautiful smiles on their beautiful faces attest.

Sigh...

My butterflies are gone.

Do you remember them? They used to greet me every morning when I took this shortcut through the bush on my way to school.

My butterflies are gone, their habitat scorched to nothing by fire set to clear the bush. I understand the need to clear the undergrowth; it stimulates fresh growth, including amongst the trees that occupy the space. But it’s a shame my butterflies have had to flutter off to another place.

When I saw what had happened this morning, I couldn’t help but muse on what we humans do to the planet in our pursuit of personal well-being. Each one of us looks for space to plant our feet, space to live, space to support ourselves, space to support our families and friends.

How much space do we need?

Well, I guess that depends on how much we can afford. Rich people like to have lots of it; poor people are sometimes lucky to have the space they find themselves in at any point in time. Rich people surround themselves with luxurious spaces that poor people can only dream about.

What do we do when everyone has the wealth to buy themselves a sizeable piece of the planet’s pie? What do we do when billions of Chinese and Indians and South Americans and South East Asians can all afford houses and cars and shopping malls and six lane highways, just like the Americans and the Europeans and other rich folks?

What do we do when they all want the same space as us? How many people can the planet sustain when each person has the kind of impact on the planet that I do?

David Quammen, a sociobiologist graduate of Yale and Oxford universities, said this in his beautiful book “The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions”:

"Let's start indoors. Let's start by imagining a fine Persian carpet and a hunting knife. The carpet is twelve feet by eighteen, say. That gives us 216 square feet of continuous woven material. Is the knife razor sharp? If not, we hone it. We set about cutting the carpet into thirty-six equal pieces, total them up--and find that, lo, there's still nearly 216 square feet of recognizably carpet like stuff. But what does it amount to? Have we got thirty-six nice Persian throw rugs? No. All we're left with is three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come apart."

What a frightening analogy for what humans are doing to the planet earth! We're inexorably dividing it up into smaller and smaller sections, smaller and smaller habitats, squeezing out the larger species other than ourselves because they need a larger space to survive and we're taking it away from them.

We're getting to the point where the larger species can survive only in zoos.

There seems to be no way of stopping it, no end to the steady depletion and destruction of this our earthly domain.

I sometimes think that we humans are a kind of cancer. We invade our own place, our own space, slowly overwhelming it, till it’s incapable of going on--till it dies.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Maybe the best thing that could happen to the planet is that we just go ahead and render it uninhabitable, like a bush fire that destroys most everything in its path--except for the life that survives to live another day.

I hope my butterflies are still there after we're all dead and gone.

An amazing place

Yesterday afternoon, at around 3:30 pm, I was picked up at the university guest house by Mrs. Ivy Katherine and taken to the Don Benny Public School. It’s a couple of miles outside of Tirupati in what is still a rural area. The school—actually a private school—is the dream-child of Ivy Katherine and her husband, Ramesh, who bought the land on which it stands 12 years ago. Over the ensuing time, they have developed it into the awesome, ashram-like place it is today.

It is a school for children from kindergarten through age 14-15. All classes are taught in English. Class sizes are small (max 25 students) compared to most other schools in India, where class size is normally anywhere from 40 to 50 students. But the best thing about this school is its location, in the middle of nowhere, yet close enough to the town of Tirupati to have a ready catchment of students.

From the moment I arrived I was captivated by the serenity of the place. The 200 or so students, along with the faculty, were all assembled in an open area under the trees, where they were sitting quietly while Ivy Katherine and Ramesh took me on a tour of the establishment. Fortunately, there was a cameraman on hand to take pictures, so I gave him my camera and told him to shoot away whenever he pleased. The photos above give you some idea of the beauty of the school, set, as it is, amongst the surrounding hills.

Mrs. Ivy Katherine, soon to be Dr. Ivy Katherine, is the principal of the school. Her husband, Ramesh, is a Phys Ed teacher at a college about 50 miles away, but the Don Benny School is as much a realization of his dream as it is of Ivy Katherine’s. He manages the plant and supervises all the construction, which has been ongoing over the past 12 years. He also coaches the sports teams and I watched him later in the evening playing soccer with some of the boys. For a 49 year old, he’s remarkably fit, agile, and full of energy in a very quiet, unassuming, really beautiful sort of a way.

Together, Ivy Katherine and Ramesh have created what I consider to be a model school where the children are able to grow up as part of a close-knit family in an environment where homespun, simple, unalloyed values can be nurtured and acquired. To see all the children sitting around me, from the little kindergarten kiddywinks to the soon-to-graduate 15 year olds, I couldn’t help but feel that I was in a kind of time warp, like I was stepping back 50 years or more to a time and place when innocence had not yet been shattered by modern mass communications.

I was introduced to the students by Ivy Katherine and one after another they came up and presented me with garlands and bouquets to welcome me to the school. Then I gave a little speech. As you can see from the pictures, I had a lot of fun, and the children seemed to enjoy it, too.

Afterwards we had a photo shoot with the teachers and with the different age groups of students. The students were then dismissed for the day. I sat down with Ivy Katherine and her daughter and we chatted for about an hour while watching Ramesh and some of the students playing soccer. After that we went indoors (Ivy Katherine and the family live in a house on the school grounds), and watched a movie while dinner was prepared. Dinner was delicious, as usual. I love South Indian cuisine and Ivy Katherine seemed to know all of my favorite dishes.

Around 9:00 pm I said my farewells and, with a wistful sigh of inner contentment, settled onto the back of Ramesh’s motorbike for the ride home.

What an amazing country this India is. I'm falling in love with it more and more with each passing day.