Most women are searching for freedom within families, not freedom from families.
They want to find the 'I' within the 'We' as they navigate the world inside and outside their homes, says Deepa Narayan.
Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com
- Part 1: 'Marriage is a gamble'
Ahimsa, 25, who works at the State Bank of India, says, 'Only family can give you a sense of belonging and identity. Only family members can guide you best as to what is wrong and what is right.'
When we asked women about their biggest fear, it is invariably about loss of family and safety of family members, it is hardly ever about the self.
This too makes sense.
Most women are searching for freedom within families, not freedom from families.
They want to find the 'I' within the 'We' as they navigate the world inside and outside their homes.
Freedom is the hotbed of choice, decision-making and desire.
A young woman making a decision is therefore engaging in a dangerous political act.
That is why khap panchayats, local-level, all-male decision-making bodies in Haryana punish girls over noodles, jeans or telephones -- it doesn't matter what it is, it is the fact that a girl has made an independent decision that is dangerous.
It signals moving away from the 'We', the family and community, to the 'I'.
A woman's 'self ' is the sacrifice to the family, polity, economy and society.
Since we have not seen or acknowledged this cultural sacrifice clearly, women blame themselves.
They become the only self-blaming and self-hating species. This too keeps women in their place.
There are some shifts.
Women are delaying getting married.
When women are supposed to exist only in relationships, there is no single force more threatening than the single woman who delays marriage, is financially independent, lives on her own and has high earning power.
She is part of the 71 million single women, altogether 21 per cent of India's 353 million adult women, that includes large numbers of widows, and abandoned and divorced women.
This statistic was noticed first by marketers, who sell cars, life insurance and travel.
But despite their numbers, the world has not adjusted and single women remain an awkward social phenomenon who are not desirable role models in the imagination of young girls or other women.
They cause nervousness.
Their mere presence shatters the fundamental cultural assumption that 'There is no such thing as a woman outside of mother, wife, daughter relations'.
Single women are dangerous by definition.
If a single woman is a threat to society, a single mother successfully raising a child outside a marriage shatters completely the story of women not existing outside relationships with men.
A few women are forging new paths to an independent self and defining their own mix of duty and desire.
But it isn't easy.
In the quest for family and freedom a few young women are negotiating new forms of joint-ness.
Kindly note that the photographs have been published only for representational purposes.
Excerpted from Chup, Breaking the Silence About India's Women, by Deepa Narayan, Juggernaut, with the publisher's kind permission.
