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.