May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (19 page)

And yet, in this valley and another beyond it, I learned, families sometimes poisoned their newborn daughters. In August 1987, I met four couples, all poor farm laborers, who told me that the hardships in their lives and the astronomical expense of marrying off daughters had forced them to murder their infant girls. “I don’t feel sorry that I have done this,” Mariaye, one of the four mothers, told me quietly. “Actually, I think I have done the right thing. Why should a child suffer like me?”

The four couples described the practice as not uncommon in the area. No one knew for certain, however, how prevalent female infanticide really was. Certainly it was not the custom of the majority, and most of the people in the valleys around Belukkurichi considered it wrong. But the phenomenon was sufficiently widespread so that government-employed midwives who lived in the area told me they feared for a newborn’s life if it was so unfortunate as to be the third or fourth girl born into a poor family of farm laborers. Such a family could not possibly afford the price of another girl’s dowry, a custom which in Belukkurichi had spread to lower castes that had not observed it even a decade before. The birth of a daughter had become a devastating blow, one that a family believed could threaten its survival. At best, a family saw a daughter as an investment with little return. She would never earn as much in the fields as a son, and her small contribution from day labor would end when she left her family after marriage. To some villagers of the valley around Belukkurichi, “putting a child to sleep,” as they called it, seemed their only choice.

In some ways, female infanticide was the poor woman’s version of another phenomenon among India’s upper classes—the use of prenatal tests to determine the sex of a child. Statistics in India showed that after
such a test, if the fetus turned out to be female, most women decided to abort. Obviously, both sex-selective abortion and female infanticide represent a kind of extreme behavior, and my reaction to both was revulsion. I have decided to explore them here because I think they are revealing, if shocking, symptoms of the larger problem facing women in India.

I learned just how deep-rooted that problem was during my stay in Belukkurichi, when I witnessed the birth of a baby. I had been interviewing families in the area with Jaya Gokulamani, a community-development worker from the state capital of Madras. Although Jaya had lived in Belukkurichi on and off for a year and a half, she spoke an upper-caste Tamil, the language of Tamil Nadu. She had to remember to switch to the looser, less imperious local dialect when working among the villagers, for reasons that became apparent the day the baby was born. That morning we were near a government health center, a primitive building of concrete blocks squatting in the red dust. Mid-wives who worked in the health center told Jaya that a mother who had walked in an hour before was about to give birth, and they invited me, the foreign visitor, to watch in the delivery room. Never before had I seen a baby born, and when I saw the fat little eight-pound boy on the delivery table and then heard him cry out, I was moved to tears. For the first time in my life I understood something I had heard for so many years—that the birth of a child is both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary event in human experience. As I watched the midwives wash the blood off the baby, I marveled that such a healthy, perfectly formed creature had been produced by a poor village mother, a woman who had been deprived of proper nutrition and modern medical care. In this village especially, the birth of the baby seemed no less than a miracle.

A moment later, I was brought back to the realities of India. The health workers told the woman her baby was a boy, but when Jaya came in a few moments later, she smiled and congratulated the woman on her new pillai—the word in Jaya’s upper-caste Tamil for “boy.” But in the local dialect,
pillai
meant “girl.” The woman now thought she had given birth to a daughter and was shocked.

“You told me it’s a boy,” she said accusingly from the delivery table to the midwives, who were tying up the baby’s umbilical cord. “Are you lying to me?”

One of the midwives held up the baby for her to see. The mother
smiled, relieved. “No one is lying to you,” the midwife said, and then explained the different meanings of the word.

Afterward, the midwives told us that they knew for certain that the woman had murdered her second daughter. If the newborn had been a girl, they said, she would also have been killed.

IT WAS THE BRITISH WHO FIRST DOCUMENTED THE PRACTICE OF FEMALE
infanticide in India in the late eighteenth century, chiefly among upper castes in the north. In some areas, officials reported discovering entire villages without even one female child. Lalita Panigrahi, in her book
British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India
, recounts the experience of James Thomason, a British official who in conversation with a group of landowners in eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1835 happened to refer to one of them as the son-in-law of another. “This mistake raised a sarcastic laugh among them,” Panigrahi continues, “and a bystander briefly explained that he could not be a son-in-law since there were no daughters in the village. Thomason was told that the birth of a daughter was considered a most serious calamity and she was seldom allowed to live. No violent measures were however resorted to, but she was left to die from neglect and want of food.” Panigrahi says that a chief reason for the murders was the exorbitant cost of dowries among the upper castes. Many families also faced enormous difficulties in finding their daughters good husbands from a limited supply of suitable bridegrooms. Not marrying off a daughter was unthinkable and brought disgrace on a family.

The British outlawed infanticide in 1870, and a century later, educated Indians believed that the practice, like sati, had all but died out. That assumption was shattered in June 1986, when
India Today
published an explosive cover story, “Born to Die,” which estimated that six thousand female babies had been poisoned to death during the preceding decade in the district surrounding the town of Madurai in Tamil Nadu. Although it was impossible to know how accurate this estimate was, the magazine reported that the practice of female infanticide was prevalent there among the two hundred thousand members of a poor subcaste called Kallars, who fed their infant daughters the lethal oleander berries growing in their fields. “There is hardly a poor Kallar family in which a female baby has not been murdered sometime or the other during the last ten years,” an agricultural worker named Muniamma told
India Today
.

People were stunned by the
India Today
story, although perhaps they should not have been. After all, neglect of girl babies was commonplace. Studies have consistently shown that girl babies in India are denied the same food and medical care that boy babies receive. They also suffer more from severe malnutrition. Girl babies die more often than boy babies, even though medical research has long found that girls are generally biologically stronger as newborns than boys. The birth of a boy is a time for celebration, but the birth of a girl is often viewed as a crisis. “The women of the family spread the news rather like a family illness or calamity,” the social worker and women’s activist Tara Ali Baig wrote in her book
India’s Woman Power
. In India, she observed, the belief was that boy babies “should want for nothing. They should be fed when they howl, be dandled and coddled by everyone in sight and when ill be surrounded by acute feminine anxiety.” This pattern of discrimination continues through a woman’s life, making India one of the few nations in the world where men outnumber women, and where the ratio of women to men has declined since the turn of the century. In 1901, the Indian census reported that there were 972 women for every 1,000 men; by 1981, the figure had fallen to 933 women for every 1,000 men.

After the
India Today
story appeared I decided I would try to investigate the subject myself. Female infanticide, however, was clearly so sensitive an issue that I knew I was undertaking an ambitious and probably unrealistic task. When I called
India Today
, staff members confirmed as much and told me there had been such an outcry from the Kallar community in Madurai after the “Born to Die” story appeared that the magazine had been burned in the streets. They believed that no one would talk to me if I went there, and they suggested that I go to another area in Tamil Nadu where female infanticide was suspected, taking along a person who was known and trusted by the local people. (Female infanticide was not unique to Tamil Nadu. In October 1988, just a few months after I left India,
India Today
reported that in a cluster of a dozen villages in a remote western corner of Rajasthan, an estimated 150 newborn daughters were put to death each year; among the area’s 10,000 people, there were said to be only 50 young girls.)

The
India Today
correspondent in Tamil Nadu gave me the name of Jaya Gokulamani, the rural-development worker, who he thought might be able to help me. I looked her up at her apartment in Madras and found a forty-four-year-old widow, a Brahmin, tall, commanding
and softhearted. When I met her, she was working two afternoons a week as an announcer at the local racetrack. Her knowledge of the villagers in Belukkurichi, about an eight-hour drive from Madras, came from her role as a consultant to a Danish government health project in Salem District, of which Belukkurichi was a part. For a year and a half, Jaya had lived off and on in a two-room house in Belukkurichi, where her job had been to assess the work and the living conditions of the Indian government health workers in the area, and also to help the villagers administer a newly created “community welfare fund” that would pay for such things as roads and public latrines. It was not the sort of life she ever would have imagined for herself, but in a sense it was a modern interpretation of the widow’s lot in India. Jaya would never remarry—it was not part of her culture, she said—but instead would devote herself, if not to charity, then at least to useful work. I also think the Brahmin in her—and there was a lot of it—enjoyed the power she had to change the villagers’ lives.

Jaya told me she was convinced that female infanticide occurred regularly in the area around Belukkurichi, and that she would be happy to take me there and work as my go-between and interpreter. (Tamil, one of the fifteen official languages of India, has no resemblance to Hindi.) It would be difficult but relatively well-paying work for her, but I think the real reason for her enthusiasm was that she saw the potential for the exposure of a social evil in whatever I might write. A month before in Belukkurichi she had seen a ten-day-old baby girl die, and she was haunted by the knowledge that she had been unable to prevent it. “I want people to know about this,” she said firmly. The mother of the baby had herself died during childbirth, and the relatives had brought the healthy newborn to Jaya. She took care of the child for six days, but on the seventh day the mother’s sister asked for the baby back. Jaya had been in the area long enough to fear the worst, so she told the woman she had some friends who could bring up the child. The woman said no, the baby belonged to her family. Jaya, with great misgivings, handed the child over. Three days later, she saw the baby again—but this time the infant was blue and suffocating on the examination table of a local doctor. The child’s two grandmothers had brought the baby in, saying the girl refused milk and was having difficulty breathing. The baby died as the doctor examined her. “The child had been so beautiful,” Jaya said. “She looked like a doll. If she had been a son, it wouldn’t have happened like that.”

To reach Belukkurichi, Jaya and I drove southwest from Madras into the interior of Tamil Nadu, past soft green rice paddies and a roadside temple where Jaya stopped to offer a prayer to the south Indian goddess inside, Adhiparasakthi. The south has its own deities, languages, foods and customs. I am not the first to observe this, but the entire region really always seemed to me a different country from the north. Not only was the south cleaner, tropical and more luscious, but the people themselves seemed to reflect the gentleness of the landscape. Close up they appeared physically smoother and somehow sweeter than the villagers struggling with a harsh existence in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. Historically, the south never had to defend itself from the waves of invaders like those who crossed the mountains from Central Asia into northern India. South Indians believe this has made them less aggressive and kept their culture “pure.”

At the end of the day, Jaya and I reached the town of Salem. We checked into a hotel and the next morning made the one-hour drive to Belukkurichi, where we spent our days for the following week. We returned to the hotel in Salem every night, but we had lunch every day at the home of one of Java’s friends in Belukkurichi, a housewife whose husband was a local official. The meal was usually stewed beetroot, rice and yogurt, which we ate with our hands, and afterward we all stretched out on mats on the floor and fell asleep in the afternoon heat. Jaya had a whole network of contacts among families and health workers in the area, and through them we were tipped off to couples who had put their daughters “to sleep.” Belukkurichi was about one hundred miles from the area in Tamil Nadu that
India Today
had investigated for the “Born to Die” story. Officials at child welfare agencies in Madras told me they had heard rumors of infanticide in the area around Belukkurichi, but they did not expect anyone to admit to it. But by the end of the week, after combing the large valleys around the village, Jaya and I eventually met the four couples who told us, after long conversations about the problems in their lives, that they had murdered their baby girls. In the interest of telling the most complete story, I asked them if I could use their names, and they agreed. I am still not sure why. I told them I wanted to publish the information in a book I was writing, and perhaps the prospect of appearing in print in a land as vague and distant as America did not worry them. Maybe the couples thought I was going to help them; my questions had been sympathetic, and Jaya, whom they all knew and
liked, was a reassuring presence. She was horrified by what these parents had done, but she too saw the deaths as symptoms of much larger problems beyond the parents’ control. She knew that the couples, despite their guilt, felt that their actions had been justified. Whatever the reasons for their admissions, I will protect the parents—on the remote chance that they might be prosecuted—by not naming the areas of the large valleys around Belukkurichi in which they lived.