a month of inequality in India.

Inequality seems to permeate Indian culture indelibly, which isn’t great news for women in a country where culture and tradition are valued so highly. It doesn’t seem to exist as a set of distinct issues that can be recognised as separate problems and challenged as necessary; more an inextricable fibre running through a terrifying amount of cultural norms for both sexes. Obviously India is enormous so it’s a sliding scale: if a woman is lucky and born into a liberal family in a modern city the issues she’ll face are far more easily navigable, but in more traditional villages inequality is so ingrained into everyday culture as for it to be customary for a woman to look at the ground whenever a man looks at her.

The importance of family and parental respect is pretty much the epicentre of Indian cultural values, and whilst itseems to pay richly in terms of personal happiness and security, from what I’ve experienced so far it’s also responsible for a lot of the oppression faced by the women I work with. With a culture so rich, diverse and ancient as India’s it’d be a massive oversight to say that’s the only issue, and I don’t want to risk being so narrow minded as to label it a ‘problem,’ but the majority of the most uncomfortable things I’ve heard relate to family. When I came to India I was expecting to encounter feminist issues coming from external sources such as the media, the government, and faceless social traditions; and of course I’ve noticed all of the above (most memorably an absolutely AWFUL bollywood film called Grand Masti: a parody of a terrible ladfilm made a thousant times worse by the almost entirely male audience cheering and whistling as women on-screen undressed.) However, I wasn’t prepared for the complication that for most women, the most prominent obstacles that stand in their way are often constructed by people whom they absolutely adore and couldn’t consider questioning.

Take 20 year old K for example. Studious, ambitious, outgoing, a great dancer and not much younger than me, it’s hard to separate her in my mind from most of my friends in the UK. Except that we’re allowed to go to the cinema without our parents and our marital freedom isn’t ticking down to the day that they decide it’s over. Talking to K about her wedding is one of the hardest conversations I’ve had in India. When I first met her she told me that she is happy to get married to a boy her parents have chosen because she knows they love her and she trusts them to choose the best for her. However, after getting to know her for a few weeks she was a bit more candid about her worries. She told me that she wants to be able to choose her own husband, but that her parents would never allow it. She can’t bear the thought of losing their approval though; so much so that she can’t even bring herself to suggest to them that she might like the chance to choose a husband herself. She said that family is absolutely everything to her, and that the knowledge that one day she will have to leave hers to live with her new husband’s family (as is traditional after marriage) is one of her biggest fears, and something she thinks about a lot.

What are you supposed to say to that. When I (very tentatively) asked K if she ever disagrees with her parents’ opinion (for example their insistence that she can’t go to the cinema alone with her friends, and their refusal to give a reason why) she said yes, but that she has to force herself to trust that they are right, even if she doesn’t understand how. She assured me that she is lucky that her parents are relatively forward-thinking, and so she won’t be expected to get married until her studies are completed and she is a bit further into her twenties  (although the legal age of marriage in India is 18 for a woman, a 2013 study reveals that 48% of women in India are already married by the time they reach 18) and that if her parents choose a boy she does not like, it is possible for her to refuse the match and ask for a different one. ‘I have no concerns about honour killings!’ she says unnervingly breezily.

If she was trying to comfort the white girl whose face had turned grey I can’t say she was successful. Arranged marriage in India ranges from forced child marriage in rural communities to being more like an autonomous dating process in more modern areas, and whilst the latter is quite practical (get to an age where you’re ready to get married, easily locate like-minded people at the same point in their life) it’s the degrees in between that make me really struggle with the idea on any level, particularly after coming face to face with women whose dreams it’s compromising. K wants to be a bank manager and travel the world (‘Singapore, London, Paris!’) but even if she manages to fight off inner-city competition (as a girl from a village an hour and a half away from even a relatively small town) for such a job in one of the bigger cities in Haryana the chances of her being able to balance such a high-commitment career with a husband and family look upsettingly low.

As tempting as it is, it’s not even really possible to blame K’s parents, as it’s likely that they themselves are acting under cultural constraints. Long-standing cultural traditions place a high value on marriage as a means of financial providence, and also the start of a new family. In a society where family is so important it is natural that parents will want their daughters to be able to carry on the tradition and create their own family unit, whilst for as long as high-earning jobs are male-dominated and women are generally expected to be caregivers rather than breadwinners, parents may naturally fear that an unmarried daughter is a daughter with reduced financial prospects and ultimately less security. Essentially their motives are likely to entirely well placed, even if from a western perspective they might look misguided.

Despite the prevalence of arranged marriage, marriage for love can and does happen. An English teacher at the college told me that she met her husband at school and that they were happy together for seven years before getting married. However she found that after marriage she had to leave her job in corporate IT because her in-laws told her there was ‘no point’ having such a job after becoming a wife, (and questioning your parents or in-laws is not something most women would consider.) Now pregnant with her first child she is clearly ecstatic to become a mother, but is also very honest about missing her old job. ‘I used to be a team leader of twelve people, here are my team members’ she says, showing me photos on a smartphone that in itself seems like a throwback to a fairly different world from the one she now inhabits in the relatively small and traditional town where the college lies. The irony that she is teaching at a college founded with female empowerment in mind rather than doing the job that she originally loved is symptomatic of how complex the issue of empowerment is in India.

More complicated still is the case of P. She has been happy in her arranged marriage for ten years now, and although she told me she was scared on her wedding day, she says she was happy with the match from the moment she met her husband. Like a lot of the women at the college she completed a degree before getting married (not always possible in cases where women are expected to marry young) and furthermore she is able to balance a happy family with a vocational course in beauty culture at the college because her husband looks after the children for the two or three hours per day she is in class. However she told me that she is too scared to go anywhere further afield than the town she lives in without her husband, and that she feels unsafe without him. She is completely unfazed by this though, laughing as she calls him her ‘bodyguard’ and saying that she is free to go wherever she likes as long as she takes him with her. When I asked if she ever wishes if she could feel safe alone she simply says she is ‘not a bold girl’ and that her children need her too much for her to go very far away from home anyway. Pretty uncomfortable to hear as someone who treasures freedom and independence so highly, but perhaps not such a terrible situation for a happy woman who has no desire to go very far away from home without her family?

All in all it’s a pretty tangled web, and the longer I stay here the more I struggle to separate things that are just culturally alien from things that I objectively disagree with. So far all I can say for certain being in college (even a women’s college specifically founded for empowerment) isn’t the sort of leveller you’d imagine, and that being in a position to go to college doesn’t necessarily translate into empowerment. I’m interested to find out way that the Indian women I know who run empowerment projects here (the college principal and the Indian contact for the British organisation I came here with) view inequality within a culture that’s familiar to them.  When it comes to seeing if it’s possible for me to offer a bit more than English grammar teaching skills and general pastoral care I think the next step is to ask them a few questions and see if their perspective can broaden and inform mine. 

a week of inequality in India.

So far trying to combat inequality in India feels a bit like the death throes of an arcade game – blindly manoeuvring every which way at high speed in a frantic attempt to stave off game over. Poverty and tradition are the bad guys working together like some kind of inequality supervillain that lurks round every corner, and it feels like there’s only so far even the most aggressive optimism and determined will can get you (i.e. not very far.)

Due to some transport issues (if you’ve ever been to India there’s a little in-joke for ya) I ended up helping out at a slum school on my first day instead of the women’s college I’m supposed to be working at. Turns out there’s nothing quite like walking through a slum to make you feel totally helpless. I was coaching a select group of all male children for entry exams at a local private school (chosen from a class containing only three girls out of around twenty five children in total) but in the slum gender inequality didn't exactly feel like the most pressing issue at hand. I wouldn’t blame anyone who has a pile of rubble for a bed for not giving a fuck about anything else other than how to swerve cholera, never mind the ideas of another silly white alien invading their home. Needless to say, shoulder-deep in economic desolation I didn’t really feel I could launch into questions about the archaic views re: women and education typically held by less privileged groups in India who are removed from progression in every way. 

Challenging these views and getting more girls into school is obviously really important but if you want some motivational insights into how we can all work together to fight the problem whilst Beyoncé songs play jubilantly in the background  I’m afraid I got nuthin (and if I can’t find a way to utilise Beyoncé rest assured it’s a lost cause.) Or at least I’ve got nothing so far. Poverty may be an overarching problem that seems to swallow gender inequality in its FUCKING MASSIVE jaws but I’ve got five weeks left and I’m not ready to completely abandon hope and leave it at that just yet.

Working at the college is far more reassuring. The women were really shy and barely said a single word on my first day, but after a few days of hanging around the college they started relaxing into my presence, and the more I get to know them the more I’m absolutely convinced that being here is totally worth my while. When I’m standing in front of a class they pretty much radiate ambition; there’s a tangible sense of purpose in the classrooms and it’d be impossible for anyone not to get really excited about being part of it, never mind someone who genuinely loses her mind over a tree-ripened mango.* When I’m sitting across from one or two women practising speaking skills I’ve never seen such concentrated and urgent determination on anyone’s face than one of them being absolutely set on understanding what they’ve just heard.

 I’ve only worked there for four days but I’ve already heard so many obscenely positive things. One girl took me to one side to earnestly tell me about the importance of education and what it means to her, another one chased me down to ask ‘please could you give me some tips on being self-sufficient?’and I’ve heard girls making jokes about their biggest ambition being to become housewives and then watched them kill themselves laughing together at the thought. Basically it couldn’t be more obvious that not only do the women at the college have an acute and detailed understanding of the problems facing their gender in their country, but that they’re also dead set on overcoming them. Furthermore they seem to be able to appropriate a genuine love for their country and value for so many of its traditions into their attitude that puts their attempts into a really interesting context.

One the one hand it’s pretty uplifting to learn that certain oppressive elements of a culture aren’t capable of marring an entire heritage or national identity for the women within it, but it does make ‘empowerment’ a lot more complicated. When a young woman who’s fiercely devoted to learning English and becoming a bank manager tells me that she’s excited to get married to someone of her parents choice because of a cultural tie I could never relate to I don’t really feel like I’m in a position to challenge her. When I hear a woman who is driven, motivated and clearly very intelligent say things like ‘I love my parents and I know they’d choose well because they want the best for me’ and ‘it worked for my parents and my grandparents and I want to be part of that tradition’ it feels like the whole issue is far more complex than I could have imagined before I came here. I can’t bring myself to romanticise a tradition that played such a huge role in the deaths of 8,233 women in India last year alone but it’s going to take a bit of time to decide how much I can blame the tradition itself rather than the individuals who abuse it. Tradition 1 – 0 Millar.

Despite the problems I’ve described in all the above, I feel like I’ve only really encountered one thing that I was truly completely unprepared for, and that’s the attachments I’m already forming after only one week. For some reason I was under the impression that I could work in a women’s college for six weeks and then draw a line under it as a defined project and comfortably move on having made a finite contribution to an ongoing issue. I think that might be the most short-sighted conclusion I’ve ever made, and I once tried to repair a leaking milk carton with a plaster. (I misleadingly use the phrase ‘I once’ like it didn’t happen at some point in the last year.) I’m not looking forward to having to leave the women or the project but it’s pretty early to be worrying about that so for now I’m just going to make the most of it whilst I’m here.

Which has been pretty easy to do so far, India is amazing.

Until next time. x

*in my defence their skins are yellow and their flesh tastes like how happiness feels when you're five.

why.

Feminism is pretty important to me. It’s a loaded word and a lot of people don’t like it, but for as long as gender inequality reflects a female disadvantage it’s one I won’t mind using.  Thanks to a history of awful stereotypes and a fair bit of bullshit contemporary discourse (because being a feminist never saved anyone from being an idiot) it’s not necessarily the easiest movement to align yourself with, but once you get past a few misguided preconceptions I can’t say I understand why being a feminist has to come with such a stigma. It’s a principle not a character trait: being a feminist doesn't say anything about me at all other than that I believe in equality.

And that’s basically why I'm in India.  Proper, full, ‘let's-all-get-paid-the-same-maybe-get-a-few-more-women-in-power-eradicate-slutshaming-and-wouldn’t-it-be-lovely-if-noone-ever-felt-they-could-make-any-assumptions-or-take-any-liberties-just-because-I’m-female’ equality is still pretty far off in the UK,  but on the global sliding scale of severity it’s pretty hard to deny that you’re infinitely better off as a British woman. Obviously that’s not a good enough reason to ignore gender issues in the UK, but as someone who finds the whole thing pretty pressing in its entirety I’d like to get a first-hand experience of the bigger picture.

It’s also about knowing how lucky you are but not quite being able to appreciate it. Independence, freedom, and access to education and the arts are vital to my happiness and I really struggle with the idea that women across the globe are being denied all of the above in varying degrees, a lot of the time purely because they’re female. Obviously there’s fuck all I can do about world injustice and to be honest I think I’ll probably come home in eight weeks with more questions than answers, but by the looks of things it largely seems I’m idealistic enough to think it’s at least worth trying to make a difference.

Also I’m 23 and the world is massive and I want to go mad on seeing it.

As much as I love the comic image of accidentally kickstarting a global revolution by bumbling my way around Asia just trying not to set fire to something, I really don’t have any kind of grand ideas as to what my contribution to a women’s empowerment project in Delhi can realistically achieve. If I can make any tiny kind of positive change in the lives of a handful of women as individuals I’ll be absolutely ecstatic. If all I can do is learn a lot more about an important issue and gain a different perspective to take back home with me then I’ll settle for that too. 

If all else fails the guava juice here is INCREDIBLE and I have eight weeks to drench myself in it. Link to a b-plan guava juice review blog tbc. x