|
India´s Caste system is the cruelest, ugliest and most rigid form of discrimination. Briefly, it is a societal pecking order that separates the masses into four categories or Castes: intellectual, warrior, worker, servant. Despised and excluded from this ancient hierarchy, however is another group of people called Untouchables. Untouchable women are the lowest of the low, poorest of the poor. Being outcasts means they perform the worst jobs: cleaning latrines, sweeping streets, scavenging, burning corpses, and gathering up dead animals. Research is scant, but according to a recently published book entitled, "From Role to IdentityDalit Christian Women in Transition,"* Untouchable women have no existence of their own. When interviewers questioned them about their lives as women they responded with the following litany about daily life; "We have no power, no authority, no status, no money, no respect, no dignity, no will of our own, no use, no purpose, no importance, no credit for any achievement . . . we are godforsaken. We would be better off if we hadn´t been born." What attitudes foster such heartbreaking desperation? One possibility is the temporary impurity associated with menstruation and childbirth that has provided an important basis for the belief that women are inherently inferior to men. A father says, a boy is as good as gold. A mother says, a girl´s is a worthless life. Restrictions increase with the onset of puberty when she is made aware that femaleness and uncleanness are inseparable ("We are filthy"). |
|
Marriage for most women regardless of cultural mores is the most significant transition in an adult woman´s life. For Indian women, however, it is a time of uprooting and rerooting. To the peasant woman, "When time for marriage comes, and we leave our mother´s home for that of our mother-in-law, we have the feeling we´re being sold. We then realize our lives are devoid of any significance." The father says, My daughter is a kid-goat I have raised. I´m going to the marketplace to sell you.
All the women in this study claimed to have been beaten by their husbands but found the repressive authority of their mothers-in-law even worse. "One must bear everything silently," they said. The classical expression of this conviction is that in childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead, to her son; a woman must never be independent.
*by John C.B. Webster, Deborah Premraj, Ida Swamidoss, Rashilda Udayakumar, Chandra Yesuratnam
