May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (14 page)

Three months after Roop Kanwar’s death, the Indian Parliament passed a tougher law banning sati, which some feminists argued was not really needed; an adequate law existed, and both murder and
suicide were already illegal. But the government had to do something. The fact remained that in the India of 1987, hundreds, if not thousands, of people had stood and watched a young woman die. Why did not one person try to help? Roop Kanwar’s in-laws claimed that they tried to dissuade her. How was it not possible for several of the grown men in the family to physically keep an eighteen-year-old woman away from a funeral pyre?

As in the case of Surinder Kaur, I will always wonder what really happened. But if I were forced to decide, I would theorize that Roop Kanwar was pushed. Certainly she was worth much more to Deorala dead than alive. Again, my decision is based on instinct, not evidence. All I know for certain is that I thought one thing in the beginning, as I did with Surinder Kaur, but came to a quite different conjecture in the end. India seemed to have a way of making me do that.

The larger tragedy for both women, of course, was their profound powerlessness to control any aspect of their lives. So many words were spent debating whether or not Roop Kanwar died voluntarily, and yet in an important way they were meaningless words. What freedom did an Indian woman have to decide anything in her life?

As
Manushi
asked: “If a woman does not have the right to decide whether she wants to marry, and when, and whom, how far she wants to study, whether she wants to take a particular job or not, how is it that she suddenly gets the right to take such a major decision as whether she wants to die?”

THE VILLAGE OF KHAJURON LIES DEEP IN A POCKET OF THE FERTILE GANGES
River plain, part of the “Hindi heartland” of northern India where some ways of life have not changed in thousands of years. Most of Khajuron’s farming families still live in mud huts, segregated, like their ancestors, into neighborhoods by caste. They draw their water from wells, cook their meals over fires made from cow-dung cakes and go to the village sorcerer for magic spells when their cattle fall ill.

Over the course of a year, I lived in Khajuron during a half dozen visits, and sometimes at sunset, when I walked through the smoky, hazy light along the dirt road leading out of the village, I saw men crossing the fields, carrying their wooden plows home on their shoulders. I felt as if I had been dropped into a distant century. On one religious holiday, I watched as the head of a family, my host, put turmeric paste on a goat’s forehead and a hibiscus blossom on its head. He then slit a bit of the goat’s ear and threw the blood into a sacred fire as an offering. In the evenings, jackals howled in the surrounding
fields. Later at night they stopped, but then I was kept awake by the snorts of the water buffalo tethered near my bed.

Khajuron is the village where I stayed with Bhabhiji, an upper-caste farmer’s wife who lived in purdah. My purpose in Khajuron, which should not be confused with Khajuraho, the site of the erotic temple sculptures in central India, was to interview women of all castes in one village over the period of one year so that I could write about how they managed their lives. But I also wanted simply to live in Khajuron, to sleep, eat and work there, so that I could experience, to the extent that a foreigner could, a little bit of how most Indians live. Three fourths of the world’s population live in villages; one seventh of the world’s population live in the 560,000 villages in India. Khajuron lies almost in the dead center of the enormous Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of more than 120 million. As a separate entity, U.P., as the Indians call it, would rank as the eighth largest country in the world. The ways of the 1,000 people of Khajuron are the ways of most of humanity.

One of the most important events that I saw that year, an event that in its own way revealed the true condition of the women of Khajuron, was the election of the village chief, who is called a pradhan. The campaign was in its final days when the summer monsoon arrived, forcing the six candidates on the last weekend before the Tuesday election to canvass through rain and the powerful kind of mud that sucked sandals off your feet and squished up cold and clammy between your toes. The battleground areas of the campaign were the outlying village hamlets, clusters of mud huts poking up from the flat fields, and the voters who lived in them had been subjected to the noisy candidates’ processions all weekend. On Sunday at seven in the morning, Arvind Kumar Awasthi, a thirty-four-year-old Brahmin, was the first candidate through the hamlet of Ranjit Khera, leading his band of supporters in a chant of “Vote for the chair!” A few hours later, the dirt footpaths of Ranjit Khera were filled once again, this time with the supporters of Rameshwar Prasad, a sixty-year-old leader of Khajuron’s Harijan community, who shouted “Vote for the tractor!” The tractor was his campaign symbol, and the chair was Awasthi’s. The incumbent was represented by a camel. The symbols, which had been assigned to the candidates by the local election authorities, appeared on the ballot and enabled illiterate people to vote.

The night before, I sat under the neem tree outside Bhabhiji’s house and talked to the village elders about campaign developments. A few
of the candidates had turned up to lobby for support and be interviewed by the press, which was me. I asked them about their qualifications, their platform and the issues, such as they were. Arvind Kumar Awasthi, the Brahmin candidate, said he was running against the incumbent, a middle-caste farmer named Shri Ram Choudhary, “because he harbors feelings of hatred toward Brahmins.” He complained that when electricity was brought to the village, “persons of influence” had determined the site of the poles carrying the wires, and thus the Brahmin section of the village had no light. Shri Ram Choudhary, the incumbent, chose to ignore such allegations and merely said he was running on his record, which he considered impressive. “Whatever I have done in the past,” he said, “I will do again.” Rameshwar Prasad, the Harijan leader, told me the next day that he was running as a champion of the oppressed. “Always there is a fight between the rich people and the poor people in this village,” he said. “I am the symbol of the poor people.”

At the end of each interview, I tried asking each candidate a question he had never before heard in his political career: “What are you going to do for the women of the village?” This was clearly a misguided inquiry, and most of the candidates dismissed it. “The women of this village are not educated,” said Choudhary, the incumbent. “Therefore whatever you tell them goes in one ear and out the other.” As he answered, Choudhary pointed to his ears with great exasperation. His audience laughed appreciatively. Two to three years ago, Choudhary continued, adult education was offered for the women, and yet they weren’t interested. “They were ashamed that they were so old and they couldn’t read,” he said.

PARTLY, I HAD BEEN MOTIVATED TO LIVE IN AN INDIAN VILLAGE BY
reading the accounts of a few other Western women who had done the same thing. Sarah Lloyd, a British landscape architect, had lived in villages in Punjab and written
An Indian Attachment
about her experiences there. It was a curious book, derided by Delhi’s intellectuals, who found her account of her relationship with an uneducated opium-addicted Sikh both bizarre and condescending; I thought the story of “Jungli,” the Sikh, was weird, too, but was impressed with Lloyd’s unsentimental descriptions of village families in Punjab. “There was a superficial contentedness about the restful rhythms of their daily tasks and the constant chattering between neighbors which
belied the bitterness and resignation often smouldering underneath,” she wrote. “And somehow the conversation within families—and not just Jungli’s family—seemed to lack the real friendship and understanding that is not uncommon in the supposedly arid family life in the West. Not once did I witness positive abandoned joy: it was as if there were wires straining at their hearts.” Another English woman, Sarah Hobson, had written
Family Web
, a compelling account of the life of one Indian family in the southern state of Karnataka. Hobson, like Lloyd, discovered the tensions underneath the façade of simplicity.

But my real inspiration was Victor Zorza, an expert on Soviet politics and a former Washington columnist who had left his old life as a celebrated Kremlinologist to live in a remote Indian village high in the Himalayas. Zorza’s five years there had been the basis for newspaper columns in
The Washington Post, The Guardian
and
The Times
(London). I interviewed Zorza in India in 1986 for a profile about him for the
Post
, and it was he who taught me the importance of living in a village rather than dropping by for the day. Villagers may be uneducated but they are extremely clever, he said, and very good at telling an outsider what they think she wants to hear. The truth about a village, Zorza believed, could come out only slowly, with time—time for trust to build between the villagers and the outsider, and time for the outsider to peel away all the layers to get at the truth. “Some of the things I’m writing now are the very opposite of what I used to say before,” Zorza told me. “The people who in the past I regarded as good I’ve found are baddies, and vice versa.” Zorza, who had undertaken his columns as a mission to explain the despair of the world’s have-nots to the haves, was determined to involve his readers on an emotional level, to prove that the illiterate poor are rich when it comes to the complexities of emotion.

That said, I did not have five years. But I was able to spend as much as six days at a time in Khajuron, and during the course of a year I lived there for a total of three weeks. I was there for the blistering heat of May, the cold days at the end of December, the spring harvest festival and the July election for headman. When it was hot, I slept outside under mosquito netting on a charpoy, or string cot. When it was cold, I slept inside a brick-and-mud shed. I brought in my own water but ate Bhabhiji’s chicken curries and rice sitting on a mat on the mud floor; not once did I have the stomach problems I frequently suffered after eating at restaurants and hotels. I took baths in a dark little room off the central courtyard, dipping a small urn into a cold
bucket of well water and pouring it over myself. In the winter, the air inside the little room was so chilly I could see my breath. In the summer, it was so humid that the bath made no difference. I used the family latrine, a mud hut with a straw roof over a hole in the ground, built a few hundred feet away from the main house. At night, bats flew around in the hole or flapped overhead. And yet Bhabhiji and her husband were fortunate. Most families had no room for a latrine and had to make a long trip into the fields.

I spent my working hours in long interviews, sometimes two hours at a time, with what eventually amounted to twenty-five women from the highest to the lowest castes. By the end of the year, I came to two unqualified conclusions: First, both men and women struggled in the village, but the women, because of their gender, struggled and suffered twice as much as the men. Second, the women of Khajuron had one of two lots in life, defined entirely by caste. If a woman belonged to one of the upper or middle castes, she was virtually a hostage, confined within the walls of her home to isolation and demanding housework, which her husband did not consider work. Many men said their wives did “nothing” all day, even though most women never stopped working at physically exhausting household chores. If a woman belonged to the lower castes, she was free to leave her house, usually to work at seasonal labor in the fields for less than fifty cents a day. She was of course expected to handle all the housework and child care as well. It may be too strident to say that a woman in Khajuron was either a prisoner or a slave, but whatever one wants to call her, she could never hope to escape from her fate nor determine it herself.