Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991 TAG: 9103120036
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by BONNIE NEWLON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In 1988, one in six of all the world's people were Indian. Every year the Indian population continues to grow by about 15 million, the equivalent of Australia.
One way to understand the quality of life on the subcontinent is to focus on its women. "Herstory" is not unique to the Third World, but provides a vivid portrayal of the social transition ongoing amidst the Westernization of many ancient agricultural cultures. Data and sources on the 400 million female Indians are left to other studies; this book is more a good magazine read, with an intimate telling of several lives based on interview.
The title is a Hindu blessing and, in many ways, a depiction of the Indian female d'etre. India's male population, while depending on female economic and social contributions, has defined and controlled the lives of the feminine gender. While law has evolved to give Indian women the right to own property, vote and have their own savings accounts, society still views them as secondary. Some analysts have called India's women, its "single largest group of backward citizens," suffering double discrimination because they are both female and poor.
About 75 percent of the women in India live in villages, coming from small peasant families that either own less than an acre of land or are landless and work for large farmers.
The typical Indian woman cannot read or write, though she would like to, and has rarely traveled more than 20 miles from her birthplace. She doesn't own land, even jointly with her husband. She believes she catches colds and fevers from evil spirits that lurk in trees.
Her occupation is field work, for which she receives less than 50 cents a day - usually half the wages of a man doing similar work. She combines her field work with child rearing and home duties; her husband does not help with these. If he is displeased with her, he feels it is his right to beat her. Invariably she considers her husband a god and says she loves him.
There is a growing Indian middle class that believes in education of its women. Many of these are in the professions or are entering the world of commerce, and marking trails for others to follow.
The richness of their stories are found alongside those of the poorest of the poor. Infanticide, arranged marriage, sexual mores, (wife-burning on the husband's funeral pyre), the lives of artists and intellectuals, the feminists, the upwardly mobile, a police chief, sights and smells in small villages, open countryside and enormously ancient cities all unfold to heighten our awareness of this land of the far pavilions as it exists today.
Author Elisabeth Bumiller professes to have exorcised some of her feminist anger through the telling of this book. To write about women in India was to write about problems that were not unique to India but rooted in society's definition of womanhood. The failures she saw in herself became no longer personal, but part of the universality of the female experience.
by CNB