Of Mothers and Daughters: Debjani Banerjee

It was one of the rare sunny afternoons in August and we were celebrating my niece’s tenth birthday with a barbeque party. Watching her play around with her friends I was reminded of the day she was born. When the telephone call had come on a Saturday evening, I rushed over to my parent’s house to celebrate. My mother organized a puja to thank the Lord in her way and invited everybody over. We still had not stopped smiling when a well meaning neighbour came over to commiserate with my mother. ‘Don’t worry, may be next time.’ A neighbour who had just had a grandson echoed the same sentiments. I tried to picture my sister’s face and imagined people pitying her for delivering a beautiful, healthy baby girl. I was livid but my mother, having borne 3 daughters and 0 sons, was used to this sympathy and took it in her stride, just as she had remained calm for so many years in the face of much whispered rantings of ‘Who is going to look after them? They have only daughters.’ She had remained calm and confident as we had gone through our lives studying to be professionals (like other male children) getting jobs (like other male children) taking responsibility for our households (unlike other male children) and parents (like some male children). She remains equally calm now when the same commentators enviously say, (looking at us I hope) ‘It’s easier to bring up girls rather than boys.’ All’s well that ends well.

I was prodded out of my almost pleasant reverie by a news item on NDTV, ‘Bombay High Court upholds sex test ban.’ The petition was filed by a couple, Vijay and Kirti Sharma, residents of Lokhandwala complex in Andheri; they wanted to use sex determination to have a male child as they already have two daughters.

In their petition they said that in a ''less advanced society'' like India where a ''patriarchal mindset exists'' and where a ''girl child is not socially accepted,'' it is better that such children are not born. It was followed by a short and quick interview with Kirti Sharma, who said that, the ban on sex determination tests does not take into account the trauma a mother goes through when she finds out that the second child is of the same gender as the first!!
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Others milling around the television found the incident funny. Someone suggested, ‘If I send my two hyper active two year old to them for a day, they’ll change their minds about wanting a son.’ But I could not join in their light hearted banter. It’s not an unknown fact that in many, perhaps the majority of the Indian households, the male child is looked upon as the ultimate blessing. The Sharmas perhaps even deserve a pat on their backs for trying to legalize something others are doing anyway. It is no secret that ever since prenatal sex determination tests have been banned in India people have explored many loopholes. For the right fee, doctors find ways around the law by revealing gender through gestures and codes. Advertisements saying, ‘Pay 500 now to avoid paying 5 lakhs later,’ are clear evidence of the existence of such practices.

But the issue that kept troubling me is that the Sharmas had two daughters and wanted a male heir; not only that they wished that the girl children were not even born? What message was Kirti Sharma sending to her daughters? That they were second best? That they were associated with stigma? Ten years down the line I could see the Sharmas struggling to put together a huge dowry to buy a son in law instead of turning right around and teaching their daughters to believe in themselves and be independent in social and economic terms. I cannot accept that my ten year old niece and five year old daughter, who are beautiful, intelligent, loving children, could be so easily dismissed as second-best. In fact, as a parent, is it not my responsibility to fight discrimination in any form? I thanked my parents for allowing us to live and blossom in an environment in the 70s and 80s where such inequalities were far away fictions. Looking around me now, I realize that it must have been a hard task and I congratulate them for that.

It is ten long years since my mother was consoled for having a granddaughter after three daughters. So much seems to have changed and yet so little! While women, in urban India at least, have made huge progress in every field imaginable, the Sharmas and perhaps many others seem to think that the girl child is not accepted in India. The Sharmas who live in an upmarket area in Bombay have argued that affluent couples who have the financial and social means should be allowed to choose the sex of the child as opposed to couples who use such tests to have only male children.
But isn’t that convoluted logic? Is it not one and the same thing? Is it not even more problematic to have daughters and sons and treat them as unequal?

There are two relevant issues to ponder upon and they may be linked. Firstly, there does not seem to be a way for the woman’s movement or individual women achievers to get through to this particular section of women – the affluent, upper middle class (if you like gradations) woman for whom modern India seems to have afforded a life of convenience and even moderate luxury. Women like Mrs Sharma are not able to identify with the fruits of the women’s movement, they have never had the conviction that women can be empowered in society or at least till they are, they can struggle for it.

Secondly, it seems to me that the Sharmas seem to be locked in the wrong battle. They are clearly vocal people who can speak up for their rights but perhaps their cause is a little misplaced? Why not use the same resources to challenge the “patriarchal mindset” that according to them, does not socially accept the girl child? Now, that could be a battle worth pursuing and it would make their daughters’ life easier. Why not fight dowry and other injustices that may contribute to the girl child being discriminated against? Wouldn’t that be a more concrete battle, improving the lives of their daughters instead of trying to add numbers to a population that is bursting at the seams?

The one silver lining in the whole issue is perhaps the stance of Justice Ranjana Desai who is among the few women judges in the Bombay High court. She has written that ''Sex selection is not only against the spirit of the Indian Constitution, it also insults and humiliates womanhood. It violates a woman's right to life.” It is not always easy to be so vocal about women’s rights even when and perhaps specially when one is in a position to do so. But she has come out and condemned the Sharmas’ arguments as shocking and upheld the ban in no uncertain terms.

So three cheers to her and to the spirit of our legal system! Read more!

Tagoreana: Sublimity encased in simplicity

As a Bengali who grew up in Bengal, Tagore’s songs or Rabindra Sangeet is something that I consider an intrinsic part of my life. Of course I know friends who probably outgrew Tagore’s songs or others who can’t relate to what they consider Tagorean upper class sensibilities. My sister too finds Tagore’s music somewhat contextually confined and has developed more cosmopolitan taste in music (except some renditions by Late Kanika Bandopadhyay the unparalleled exponent of Tagore songs). For me, however, it’s the sheer simplicity of Tagore that I can always relate to. I find most of Tagore’s songs a package of sublime thoughts wrapped in melodious tunes. They have almost all been touched with the magic wand of Tagore’s master craftsmanship when it comes to the poetry and for the musical scores he dips into traditions as diverse as Scottish highland songs to Indian classical and Bengal folk.
My grandmother, who was a grand-niece of Rabindranath had often related to us stories of how he would compose songs within a few minutes – sometimes as gifts for his loved ones on their special days. He had, in fact, written a humourous poem on one of my grandparents’ wedding anniversaries that he had spent with them. Tagore had composed various dance-dramas too – for performances by students of Vishwa Bharati University. He himself supervised these shows which were vibrant musical festivals in Santiniketan with Rabindranath himself as the focal point. But even though Tagore wrote some of his music and his poetry to commemorate day to day events, it’s the universal spirit in his work that has made it immortal. The simplicity of his sublime thoughts often bring solace to those who understand Bengali, even when they are far away from home or suffering from unhappiness and pain.

To end I’ll try a very rough translation of one of my favourite Tagore’s songs:

Diye genu basantero ei gaan khani…

I’m leaving behind this gift of a song of spring for you…
When the year ends, I know you will forget….
…But when another season comes and your eyes moisten over the nostalgia of this song, I consider that reason enough to compose it…
….And then Spring will come again and bring new people into your life and new melodies of life…
Probably when Tagore was talking about new melodies of a new spring, he was crystalball gazing into the present time when the copyrights on his songs have expired and people are free to do what they like with them – creative or otherwise. Who knows, it could be Rabindrik Rock perhaps!
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The 'Come September' feelin'

It's that time of the year again - the only time when I feel the potency of the season in my veins. I can't really explain why this happens. But even as August turns to September, I start dreaming of blue skies with billowy white clouds. And no, I'm not in Kolkata or its neighbourhood - but I still feel the ambience of "Durga pujas" all around me. I'm sure I can't explain this feeling to anyone but other Bengalis, who've lived in Bengal and felt the monsoonal season slowly change to a mellow autumn. "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;...that's Keats' Autumn - and mine too in many ways.
I remember lazy September afternoons on campus at Jadavpur University which slowly turned into light, hazy (Kolkata isn't misty, it's smoggy instead) evenings. It was puja vacations and most of my friends at the JU women's hostel had gone home - I would too in a few days. My father and mother - who were in Durgapur - had sent me a generous allowance to buy myself new clothes for the pujas. And I had treated myself to a shopping spree at Dakshinapan - Kolkata's only 'shopping mall' in those days. Actually it is a shopping complex with various government emporia under one roof - but for us in those days, it was the ultimate retail experience. And Dakshinapan has an outlet of the Gujarat emporium - Gurjari - which provided us with all our needs of ethnic chic apparel. I had just bought my new festival clothes but couldn't wait till the Pujas to start preening in them. I still remember my long red kurta - with elaborate embroidery and mirror work that I was wearing as I strolled around the huge JU lawns and the football field, waiting for at least one of my friends who lived nearby to turn up. Our on-campus 'subaltern' cafes, which were actually dingy tea-stalls were all shut for the vacations. There was a sense of desolation all around which perhaps was symbolic of the end of our heady campus life in a few months from then.

Going back to Durga Puja - it's that time of the year when the farmlands outside Bengal's city limits are overflowing with the yearly rice crop - ready for harvesting. So when you take a train ride from say Kolkata to Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan - your eyes can feast on the green fields and the blue skies, truly an artist's palatte. At many places the landscape is carpeted with the almost symbolic 'Kash Phul' - silky white blossoms on tall green stems growing amidst the grass which have been immmortalized by Satyajit Ray visually in his Panther Panchali, the first of the Apu Trilogy. Besides Tagore's own poetry that captures the beauty of the season, a novel called Nilkantha Pakhir Khonje in Bengali- set in Bangladesh before the partition of India also epitomises for me the understated and nostalgic beauty of Autumn in Bengal.
This is a season that doesn't have the exuberance of spring and the underlying tone is one of sadness and the onset of winter. Most Bengalis are part of revelries for the week-long Durga Puja celebrations - but Goddess Durga whose advent we are celebrating will soon be going back to the home of her husband leaving her parents behind in tears - that's the significance that the Pujas have mythologically. The season captures that feeling of loss and also brings with it a coolness all around with occasional light winds and showers - one can sense that winter is on the way, just waiting around the few coming weeks. But where I am now in Delhi, there's no such cooling down, it's still very warm, muggy and uncomfortable. But yet my senses tell me that things are about to change soon.
My birthday is usually close to the celebrations for Goddess Durga and my aunt, parents and grand-parents named me after her - so perhaps it's a kind of bond that I have with the Mother Goddess. My father, too, was born in September and so this year, the intensity of my memories is almost all engulfing. I have always felt that I looked like my dad and did quite a lot of things like him because we shared the month of our birth. Now I feel the pain of separation and a bond with him that runs far deeper than my life and his death... Read more!

Independence = Freedom & Happiness.Enjoy!

I spent Independence Day with my cousins, uncle, aunts, nephews and neices at a beach resort near Mahaballipuram.It was a great break which I spent soaking in the sun and sand, swimming in the pool, tucking into Sri Lankan cuisine, negotiating the waves, getting myself a tan and most importantly enjoying the company of family.

The reason for writing this however, is to describe a tricolour ceremony at the Ideal Resort which was graced by Indians, Global Indians and non-Indians. The theme was of India changing and finding the true meaning of freedom. There were no arguments - though many felt that the last 20 years were far more meaningful chapters for Independent India than ever before.

We had senior citizens in our midst who were born before 1947 and a Britisher whose speech on the occasion was interrupted by a falling coconut "upstaged by a coconut" he observed with typical British dry humour and then carried on with what India and our I-Day meant to him.

The flag was hoisted by a lady from Chennai who's married to an African-American in Washington DC after which we the Indians and Global Indians in the group sang Jana Gana Mana... The couple with their two cute kids come back to Chennai to enjoy a seaside vacation every year. My brother-in-law, an IT professional in London - spoke about the economic resurgence in India while a retired school teacher said that for her freedom had meant grooming her young students to face life.

Later we enjoyed a cake with tricolour icing and listened to popular south Indian patriotic songs before everyone went back to the serious vacation buisness of relaxing on the beach. Of course, later in the afternoon, my nephew rigged up the kite he had specially stitched for the occasion and flew it on the beach taking advantage of the windy day, as the rest of us took lessons from him. Read more!

Beyond argument: Nearly eighty percent of Indians live on half a dollar a day

From the Times of India

" NEW DELHI: The number of people below the poverty line may have come down, but 79% of unorganised workers, 88% of SC/STs, 80% of the OBC population and 84% of Muslims belong to the "poor and vulnerable group"... "That includes 6.4% who live on less than Rs 9 per day or three-fourths the poverty line level, another 15.4% who are between this layer and the poverty line, 19% who earn at best 1.25 times the poverty line and 36% who earn between 1.25 and two times the official cut-off for poverty. It, therefore, cautions that while large numbers may have technically ceased to be included in the official poor, they remain vulnerable"

This according to a report by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS). The report (says Reuters) shows that about 836 million people - 77 percent of Indians live on below 20 rupees (50 U.S. cents) per day.

As expected, there is lament all around as to how growth has not benefited most Indians. A real surprise, isn't it? Was it supposed be another way? A few days ago we had a post from RV Bhawani regarding the agrarian crisis. Reporting on the same issue P. Sainath has now won the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay award. Then there was the issue about malnutirition amongst India's children. Much ink was spilt by great economists such as Surjit Bhalla to suggest that poverty did not exist anymore in India. Then there was the debate about exactly how much poverty had fallen by. All along, we have had (fairly predictable) evidence as to what was happening to most of India.

Of course, fiscal redistribution is an immediate need, although its limits are well-known. I think there is little evidence in history which suggests that a nation can keep growing at 8,9,10 per cent with 77 percent of its populace in such condition. And, ironically, there is much evidence that redistributive growth has multiplier effects. But beyond that, there is the need to go beyond the game of fiscal redistribution; band-aids only go thus far and no further. Living off the crumbs of the back-office of the world cannot be a permanent solution for the 77 percent; in fact it is not even clear that it can serve too long as a solution for the 5-10-15% who are now gaining from it.
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Reducing India

"Twenty years ago the rest of the world saw India as a pauper. Now it is just as famous for its software engineers, Bollywood movie stars, literary giants and steel magnates."
Time Magazine

Pauper, really? and in my opinion, none of these four categories of people represent the people of India. Its amazing how the media is so apt at reducing India to one, two, three or four things ... or just one city (B'lore) or just one issue (foeticide) and so on...

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India@60: Sixty arguments at Arguing India

Let us start with a few.... please add, comment, argue as you wish..

1. India is taking over the world

2. Indian democracy is reaching new levels of maturity

3. Inequality is increasing

4. The situation of India's women reflect deep and irresoluble contradictions

5. Life in India for Indians is much better than life abroad...

6. Indians are religious but India is secular (what is secularism is itself a matter of great debate everywhere and certainly in India. One meaning that I find useful is the one in India's constitution: freedom to practice any religion of one's choice; non-discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity, caste, creed etc.; and separation of state and religion).
Read more!