Zahra Gordon

Dancers from a New Delhi troupe. Credit: Zahra Gordon, 2010

In 2010, I was lucky enough to be selected to be a part of the Oxfam International Youth Partnerships conference – a forum for young people dedicated to social change. It was a great opportunity, but in hindsight, I’m learning that there are two Indias and I only saw one.

Participants came from all corners of the world gathering in New Delhi for over a week of discussion, community outreach, networking and cultural exchange. There were, of course, participants from India as well. I remember a conversation I had with one of the Indian participants in particular.

We were talking about movies and I mentioned that I was fond of the film Water by Deepa Mehta. Water was the final installment in Mehta’s trilogy Fire, Earth and Water which looked critically at the lives of women in India in different time periods. Water is set in the 1930s and focuses on misogyny and ostracism against widows. At the very mention of the film and Deepa Mehta’s name my Indian colleague threw his hands in air. “This woman. God. She’s portraying India in a bad light. She’s stuck in the past. Nothing like that happens anymore,” he said. I asked if he was sure and noted that the film was historical. Still, he didn’t want to hear about Deepa Mehta. And he did not agree with me that women in India, like women almost everywhere, had long strides to make on the road to equality. Honestly, in India it seems like most women have a long way to go before they’re even acknowledged as human beings.

Now, I’ll tell you something, the young man I’m speaking of is not your average Indian. I say this because he spent a considerable amount of time during introductions detailing his family’s military legacy – he was of the Warrior Caste and India’s ancient caste system this caste has now become associated with the middle or upper class. In passing conversation he also mentioned that he had planned to go to Italy for Christmas and was just about to buy ticket when he found out his visa had been denied. His manner of dress was an also indicator of some access to money. To support  his statement about widows no longer being ostracized in Indian culture he shared with me that his elder sister was divorced and wasn’t ostracized or abandoned by her family. 

Yet, it seems to me that if you have access to money in India then, yes, “nothing like that happens anymore.” But if you are poor, then the narrative is completely different. International headlines were flooded last week with reports of 12 women dying at a sterilization camp in Chhattissgarh following botched tubectomy surgeries. Scores more women were left critically ill and this week, it was revealed that the antibiotics given to the patients were tainted with rat poison. Sterilization camps are part of the Indian government’s population control campaign. Indian’s population is estimated to reach nearly 2 billion in the next 30 years. While the international community seemed to be shocked once again about an instance of injustice in India, this is, unfortunately, not an exceptional event according to activist Arundhati Roy.

This is everyday life for women in India: forced sterilization in poor conditions, gang rape, shame for giving birth to daughters. Population control has been made into a poor women’s problem when it should be a national issue. Why is it that  automatically women are the ones who have to undergo sterilization when it takes both men and women to make children? Why are the sterilization campaigns only targeting poor women through monetary incentives rather educating all women, rich and poor, about contraceptive use?

The India I experienced gave me  only an inkling into these issues and while I was there I too believed that something like gang rape was rare. Although I was exposed to people living in extreme poverty and others being discriminated against because of their caste or sexual orientation, I never really got the true sense of brutality perpetrated against women on a daily basis. I had experienced my colleague’s India – the India of conferences, wedding crashing at the hotel, tourist attractions and “nothing like that happens anymore.” It just makes me wonder how my colleague could’ve been so adamant that these issues no longer exist. I also wonder what he would have to say today.