Adventure Divas (17 page)
We arrive at our hotel, a former palace, to a frenzy of activity going on in the walled courtyard. Two dozen men are building platforms, draping yellow canopies, and stringing up twelve thousand bright orange carnations. Strands of lights and garlands of flowers are carefully arranged on an elaborate welcome gate. We have apparently stumbled on India’s wedding season, an annual festival called Akha Teej.
If the twelve pages of matrimonials in today’s
Times of India
are any indication, aside from caste, marriage seems to be life’s personal and institutional tour de force. There are 3,012 “Brides Wanted” ads, broken down by the caste of the groom-to-be.
ALLIANCE INVITED BY A BRAHMIN WELL SETTLED STATUS FAMILY
for their son 34 ys, 5´6ý.Professional handsome fair teetotaller well settled in business (software engineer in Motorola Chicago USA) seeking extremely beautiful, very fair, homely, slim, intelligent, convented girl from reputed family background not more than 24 years.
SEND BIODATA INFO AND HOROSCOPE WITH RECENT COLOR CLOSE-UP PHOTOGRAPH TO BOX NO BBV
000
R
.
An example of one of the 2,712 “Grooms Wanted” ads:
A reputed Pune based
WELL SETTLED CULTURED MAHARASHTRIAN
business family seeks alliance for their CONVENT EDUCATED TALL ATTRACTIVE DAUGHTER 23/5´6ý WT 60 MCM from a boy prof Maharashtrian height 5´9ý + well educated and smart.
SEND BIODATA PHOTO AND HOROSCOPE. WRITE: BOX
NO Y
000
Y
“Homely” and “convent educated” aren’t exactly plusses in the US of A, but the dating game is not
altogether
different than in the States, except that the priorities are a little different, the stakes are much higher, and the in-laws are notably more involved. For them, marriage comes first, and then love is generated as the bond grows. Indians think Americans are a wee bit unrealistic in our expectation that with marriage we get to have 1) the golden hue of falling in love, 2) a spouse with whom to conceive and raise children, 3) an intellectual match and companion, and 4) hot sex.
Yet, our (no doubt judgmental) queries about arranged marriage to the hotel concierge give even Julie and me pause. He asks us how many marriages in the United States are arranged, and how many are “for love.” Julie and I respond, almost in unison (and a bit too quickly), “All of them are love.”
“But,” he asks sincerely, “what if you don’t find love?”
Julie and I, both thirty-something and single (the Boyfriend in Seattle and I had gone our separate ways after I returned from Borneo), look at each other.
He nods slightly. “Yes.” He pauses awkwardly and smiles. “Well, the wedding begins at seven, if you want to film.”
Tonight’s wedding in the hotel courtyard might be arranged (purportedly around 90 percent of them are) or for love, or some combination thereof, but a lot of the marriages taking place during this year’s two-month-long marriage season are between children. Rajasthan, one of the most traditional states in India, has the highest incidence of child marriage—a practical hangover from times past that, though illegal, is still common in rural areas. A little girl might be married off at, say, age three—or ten, or twelve—although she won’t go live with the groom’s family until she is in her teens. Arranged marriage ensures that she will not become an economic liability to her family in later years. Dowry and child marriage, while concepts antithetical to modern Western sensibility, were born of pragmatism.
Rajasthan is also home to some of the country’s most progressive social activism. In recent years, a broad coalition of groups fighting for women’s and human rights have confronted the local political establishment on a range of social issues. These groups were initially spurred into action in 1987 when young Roop Kanwar, who lived in the village of Deorala, was burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre in an attempt to revive that tradition, called
suttee
or
sati
. Among the thousands of activists mobilized by this event, one of the most prominent is Alice Garg, the person we are on our way to meet at her home on the outskirts of Jaipur.
“We should shoot her seashell collection,” says Julie, who met Alice last week while scouting. “Shells in this dry, barren desert; an odd obsession, don’t you think?”
Alice is the founder of the Bal Rashmi Society (
bal rashmi
means “raise up” or “first rays of a new dawn”), which advocates on behalf of the most disenfranchised peoples of this region. Discouraging child marriage is just one item on her very long agenda.
Alice and the Bal Rashmi Society have been frequently under fire for their work to bring attention to—and end—atrocities against those in the lowest castes. Alice was involved in a campaign to bring to justice a group of gang-rapists, one of whom was the deputy superintendent of police. Alice quickly became a target. Before we arrived she e-mailed us about this experience: “I do not know if you are aware of the politically motivated attack we had to face. Nine cases—rape, murder, attempt to murder and rape, exploitation, fraud, misuse of funds, etc.—were registered against us.” The Bal Rashmi office was raided; Alice and her associates were taken into police custody and tortured, and one died in custody. Since then, the ruling government lost assembly elections and was replaced by a new party. The case against Alice was reopened and dismissed. In the end, she and her colleagues were fully exonerated by a human rights commission.
“As a result of this, all our programmes have suffered greatly,” Alice wrote. “However, there is plenty going on once again,” she concluded her e-mail, encouraging us to come.
Alice Garg opens the front door and greets us with a subtle head cock and a warm smile. I notice that one eye wanders ever so slightly. She wears her salt-and-pepper hair in a tightly wound bun at the nape of her neck, and a chunky red
bindi
centers her forehead. She is wearing a white sari with red trim as, I later found out, she always does. Seventeen years ago Alice made a decision. “I am not against fashion or anything, but I feel that we women waste a lot of our time in selection of our dresses. Also, white matches everything.”
She also intimates that she could spend the money she might have used on clothes on acquiring seashells, or on a trip to the seaside to pick them up herself. Her seashell collection is housed in a glass case, and she shows us this almost immediately after tea. “These are from all over,” she says rhapsodically, taking small pinkish shell after small pinkish shell out of clear plastic bags and displaying them to us.
After an hour of filming the shells and watching Alice peddle on her exercise bike in her sari (and consuming a total of sixteen cups of tea and four primary-colored sugary treats each), we are all bumping along a dirt road through a scrubby desert landscape in a jeep, on our way to the village of Soan ka Baas, to follow Alice for a typical day of fieldwork. Once in a while a weak-looking tree asserts itself onto this seemingly inhospitable environment. As we drive, Alice tells us about her life.
At eighteen she married the wrong boy next door (as in wrong caste, wrong religion), which led to being disowned by her family. Her activism took shape shortly thereafter, and in 1972 she left her job as a high school teacher to start the Bal Rashmi Society with four thousand rupees (about ninety dollars). “I have seen poverty, extreme poverty, I’ve seen people suffering, you know, without any complaint. That motivated me,” says Alice. In the early years, when Bal Rashmi was still fledgling, she took “untouchable” orphans into her home and cooked and cared for them. At least one out of six Indians are Dalits, or untouchables.
Dalit
means “crushed” or “stepped on,” but Gandhi called them
Harijans,
or “Children of God.”
These Children of God are often brutally persecuted and are victimized by violence including murder and assault, and they are often banned from worshipping at temples. Untouchables are thought of as too polluted to count as human beings, untouched by even the supreme Hindu deity. They are so low on the Brahmanical order that they are not really even on it; they are a caste predestined to deal with human waste and dead bodies.
Alice’s latest project is the construction of an enormous water-retention site for the drought-ridden village of Soan ka Baas. “This is the third continuous year that we are facing drought,” Alice explains. “We are trying to create a big facility in order to catch the runoff water from the rains. We do not want the water to go to waste.”
We drive over a berm in this dry, butterscotch-colored wasteland and stop when we see at least fifty women, from teenagers to the elderly, dressed in stunning, bright saris that stand out like gems against the parched landscape and the hazy, pale blue sky. The women have carved out a vast depression in the dry earth and are busily picking and digging and hauling buckets of soil to the surface. A line of women emerges from the hole, each balancing a heavy, round, metal, saucerlike bucket—heaped with earth—on her head while holding a veil over her face and negotiating the steep grade. They pass by one another, often trading smiles, in the hundred-degree heat as they make their way from the bottom to the top, where each transfers her bucket to another woman. The curves and poise and sharp fuchsia and lime-green and bright aqua moving over a dead landscape make for a most graceful and extraordinary chain gang. I am loath to glamorize this back-breaking work in this sweltering environment, but there is something uncannily serene about the women’s movement, and indeed, the entire scene. The run-off well that they are creating will radically change their lives.
“If the water is there, then there is some relief at least; it is the women who bring water for the whole family. They are always the one,” Alice says, wheezing just a bit from the dust-filled air.
The men and boys, in white cotton pants and shirts with blue and green turbans, are looking
particularly
serene, as they are lounging on a ledge that forms the perimeter of the construction site where the women work. Alice yells at a group of idle men and explains that since they never have to carry the water, they don’t care how close it is.
Alice surveys the sweltering, dusty work site, which covers a few acres. She scuttles quickly over tough terrain, unself-consciously hiking up her sari when necessary; we scramble to keep up. This is no tour for us; this is a typical work day in which Alice might cover two hundred kilometers and oversee several projects. Alice constantly barks directions, in a piercing, gravely voice, at those who are not working, and sometimes at those who are.
Her brashness is forgiven because it is a part of “Didi” (a moniker of trust and intimacy used by those who are digging the well), a woman who has won respect by years of working to empower the disempowered and to improve communities.
“What’s the status of women in this region?” I ask, when we finally get Alice to stop moving for a minute.
“She is considered to be nothing. Nobody knows the women’s names in the villages. They live anonymous lives. Day and night, unpaid servants,” she says, gesturing to the chain gang, and her brusque managerial style softens.
“The caste system seems to create a double whammy—both caste and gender oppression,” I say. Although caste discrimination is officially illegal, Alice confirms that it is still the most operative force in people’s lives.
“Yes, [caste] plays a very major role. Oh, it exists very much, you can see it, you can feel it,” Alice says, with that strange little wheezy cough that has been with her all day. She goes on to talk about how it takes a long time for cultural reality to match laws.
“We have a law, for example, against child marriage, but it continues. We have a law against female infanticide—you cannot just go kill the girl in the mother’s womb. But it continues.
“Women in Asia are not even living in the Third World; we are living in the Fourth World. You don’t have a right to be born. You don’t have a right to live; you don’t have a right to your future. The women are tortured and treated badly by the family and other people because they think that she will not open her mouth.”
Alice goes on to explain the ways that oppression is institutionalized in contemporary India.
“I call the family an institution, because we in India, women especially, we’re born in the family and we die in the family, we don’t have any separate identity. So, the institution—like family, police, administration, religion—women are not safe anywhere in these institutions. Anywhere—including the family.”
“Not safe from what?” I ask.
“Unsafe means their development is not considered; and unsafe in other ways, too. She can be killed for dowry in the family itself. We have seen rape cases in our police stations, by those who are supposed to protect women.” Alice’s voice cracks, and she pauses to compose herself. Working with everyday atrocities has clearly not hardened her.
“But now, women have started raising their voice against it,” she continues.
Alice explains that laws will not change the adverse affects of deeply rooted mores and caste oppression. Change must come through people and through the social order.
“Why do you do what you do?” I ask, wanting to better understand her personal motivation. But she responds with the mission of her organization.
“We are working so that women can understand their situation and start making their own decisions. So she will be able to have her own identity as a woman, not as somebody’s daughter or mother or sister, but through her own work, identity, through her education. We always tell them to raise voice against them. They should not feel ashamed. It is the women who need to change the social values now, in their favor.
“The mothers say, ‘We have seen what our lives are like, and we don’t want our daughters to face the same thing.’ ”
First water, then school. We leave the site of the well and drive to one of the twenty-nine rural villages where Bal Rashmi has set up schools. Alice and I walk through the tiny village, followed like Pied Pipers by a small parade of children. We settle in next to one of the caramel-colored mud huts to talk. Alice sits cross-legged on a bench and the villagers gather around to watch. Little girls, maybe six or seven years old, in pigtails with carefully tied, tattered ribbons, skip along the dirt road in front of us with buckets of water on their heads. They are in navy blue skirts and blouses, school uniforms—the only clothes they have. They are the first generation of girls from this community to go to school.
