The most dangerous nation for women on Earth, one where a woman would consider herself lucky if she gets to see her 50th birthday. The second-most dangerous country to be a mother, one where about 10 per cent of them die in childbirth. A society where a woman bears six children in her short life-time, yet is considered worthless if at least one of them is not a boy. That’s Afghanistan for you.
However, these lifeless statistics don’t capture the plight of one half of Afghanistan’s population as well as the riveting poem given at the beginning of The Underground Girls of Kabul does. Titled “But not an Afghan woman” and intended as a prelude, the poem acts as the crie de coeur of the typical Afghan woman’s conscience.
An Afghan woman, it laments, is a voiceless creature, an example of weakness, one who has no rights. The sting lies in the tail of the poem: “I would love to be anything in nature but not a woman. Not an Afghan woman.”
This book is not just a cry from the heart, it is also a tale of resistance. One that explores the ways in which Afghan women guard their dignity in a regressively patriarchal society where their worth is determined by the number of sons they produce. It is an introduction to the Afghan practice of bacha posh — women choosing to bring up their daughters as boys, giving them, however ephemeral it may be, a semblance of individuality.
Jenny Nordberg, an award-winning Swedish investigative reporter, has written this book over a period of five years, between 2009 and 2014. In these five years, she met bacha poshs in different stages of their life. Some had reverted to being girls and subsequently women, the natural order for most of them. However, it is those whose minds rebel against being an Afghan woman on reaching child-bearing age that gives the book its title.
These are proud Pashtun warriors, defiant Tajik soldiers, fighting their own mini-battles. These rebels not just reverse gender roles, they subvert them, holding a mirror to the patriarchal ethos that dominate the Afghan social set-up.
Nordberg’s narrative revolves around Azita, an Afghan politician who has decided to bring up her six-year-old daughter as a boy, giving her the name Mehran. Azita wants to show her youngest child “what life is like on the other side,” one where she will be able to fly a kite, sit on the front seat of a car, laugh as much as she wants to and speak without fear.
However, the narrative is also about Zahra, a bacha posh in her teens who doesn’t want to part with her freedoms. And it is also about Nader — someone well past the ‘Afghan age of marriage’ — and other members of her coterie, women who have taken to the path of resistance to the Afghan way of womanhood.
What could be the reasons for the existence of bacha poshs? In the case of Azita, a public figure, it is about warding off ostracism that would come with not being an “ideal Afghan woman”. For others, it is about having insurance for their respective families in times of war. For many living below poverty, it is about having an extra set of hands to bring income. And for most, bacha poshs act as a goodluck charm — many families believe that dressing up their girls as boys will ensure that they have a male child soon. And qualified doctors like Dr. Fareiba attest to this belief.
Bacha posh is a practice that, Nordberg finds out, predates the arrival of Islam to the country. She realises that it is as old as patriarchy itself, going back to the era of the Sassanid empire that existed between 7th and 3rd centuries BC.
From Azita and Mehran, the author moves to girls in the next phase of their lives, a stage where they are required to get married and become mothers. But what if their subconscious rebels against it? Nordberg meets one such “boy” trapped in the body of a girl, Zahra. Though in her mid-teens, she is one who finds the idea of being an Afghan woman repugnant and hence decides to resist.
Nordberg introduces us to more of such underground rebels. Nader, a 35-year-old, university-educated, working woman, is one. Brought up as a bacha posh, she starts revelling in her new-found identity, defying the dictates of nature, and society.
She is economically independent, out of the “marriage market” and free from the shackles of conformism. She gives birth to a mini-movement by training the others of her ilk on the methods of organised resistance.
Her modus vivendi is simple — helping the young bacha poshs to stand up for their rights. She motivates them to convince their parents to get them educated rather than married.
Nordberg asserts that “bacha posh is both historical and present-day rejection of patriarchy by those who refuse to accept the ruling order for themselves and their daughters.” However, this rejection requires not just other women, but also educated men — supportive parents like those of Zahra and Nader.
Nordberg quotes Gerda Lerner, historian and author of The Creation of Patriarchy , as predicting that patriarchy is a “human-made idea” and hence likely to come to an end some day. However, in a country like Afghanistan which has abysmal development indicators, it would take centuries of struggle before the society’s consciousness is raised to those levels. For that, it needs more heretics like Nader, whose very sense of self lies in vehement rejection of the construct of gender in Afghan society.
