A little under five years ago, I stood at New Delhi’s Jama Masjid, my hand firmly clasped by a cleric. The evening prayer was over and I was in a hurry to go home. The gentleman though wanted to talk.
“How many kids do you have,” he asked in a bid to prolong our meandering conversation. “I have just been blessed with twin girls,” I said. “Dono ladkiyan hain?” he cross-checked. “Yes, indeed,” I said. “Jo Allah ka hukum. It is all God’s will,” he added almost as a way of consolation. “Our prophet too had four daughters,” I countered. Flashing my four fingers touching each other and the thumb tucked behind, I added, “On the Day of Judgement, he who has even one daughter will be with the prophet like a finger is next to another.” “Yes,” he acknowledged feebly, now visibly keen to disappear.
A little before the cleric I met a friend who teaches Hindi in a reputed public school in Delhi. “Heard you have had twin daughters,” she mocked me.
“Yes, indeed.”
“But didn’t you have two daughters earlier,” she continued. “God’s will,” this time it was my turn to invoke God. “But you have doctors in your family,” she insisted. “So…?” I cut her short. “Didn’t they tell you,” she plodded on, greatly testing my patience. I moved on.
Cut to 2014. An engineer friend working with an automobile giant in NCR met me after many years. “So, how many kids do you have,” he asked me.
“I have four daughters,” I said.
“And sons?”
“No. Nil.”
“Oh!” His single word conveyed a sigh.
“What about you? How many kids do you have,” I asked.
“Two. I have two sons, one of them is still in school, the other has just completed college.”
“No daughters,” I almost whispered.
“I have a daughter,” he revealed.
“But you didn’t tell me when I asked you about your kids…,” it was my turn to nag.
“You asked about my children,” he said with an air of finality.
“I see,” I said, not seeing at all. Today, let me say it. It’s been painful but it bears telling. It is not easy being a father to girls in our society. From a maulana who deems it necessary to invoke divine will with the idea of softening the perceived blow for the father of the girl child to a lady teacher who believes that medical termination of pregnancy, even if illegal, is an option worth considering in case of female foetus to an engineer who counts only his sons as the children, it is not easy being the father of daughters in our country.
Just the other day, at an informal dinner with friends, I criticised somebody who had given a hefty dowry to her daughter. The next thing I heard was, “He only has daughters, so he would speak against dowry.” This was not in a downtown part of the city where uneducated men often consider girls to be a liability, but in the hallowed precincts of Lutyens’ Delhi where the who’s who of our society mingle over food and drinks.
Around the same time, there was a news report about four men who procured Muslim women from Bengal, gave them Hindu names to supply to men in Haryana, a State with the dubious sex ratio of 879: 1,000 and a literacy rate of almost 76 per cent! These figures are according to the Census 2011. In 2001 also, there were far fewer girls per thousand boys in the State.
All these incidents sent me in search of a book I last picked more than 10 years ago. I finally managed it right at the bottom of the pile inside a shelf I seldom open in my study. But honestly, Mini Phillip and Kathakali S. Bagchi’s book “The Endangered Half” which I received as a gift some 20 years ago, is still relevant. I liked the book for its detailing the first time round I read it. The repeat visit did nothing to change my opinion. In fact, in many ways, the words of the authors have proved prescient.
Back then, Phillip and Bagchi wrote, “The Indian society is, like most countries, a patriarchal one with the exception that preference for male offspring here has the sanction of religion and culture. However, selectively destroying female children and foetuses because of their sex is the most horrifying manifestation of this cultural pattern which has traditionally devalued girls. Over the last twenty-five years or so modern technology has developed many methods of determining the health of the foetus. …These tests began to be misused to determine the sex of the foetus at nominal rates between Rs.200 and 800 which even working class could afford.”
Interestingly, Phillip and Bagchi also gave a different twist to the long held practice of mother worship, linking it to a woman’s ability to procreate. “Mother worship and fertility rites are as old as the Indus Valley Civilization. A large number of the terracotta figures which were found here are considered to be a manifestation of the great Mother Goddess….Thus woman’s ability to bring forth life from her womb put her on the level of the Creator and she was respected and worshipped for this.”
Following the Aryan invasion, the position of women declined. Many centuries later, even Kautilya, otherwise hailed for his astuteness, stated, “The aim of taking a wife is to beget sons.” To reproduce Kautilya’s words through the two authors, “If a wife was barren for eight years or if she had borne only daughters over a twelve year period, the husband could take a second wife without paying compensation to the first.”
The first notes of discrimination against the female gender were probably struck with the first invasion. They were repeated periodically. With the Mauryas, Ghazni, Mughals and the Rajputs. Unfortunately, history seems to spill over to contemporary times. If on one side, we have Haryana with a sex ratio that should ring alarm bells, on the other we have a society, cutting across the divide of religion and caste, which at best, offers sympathy for the birth of the girl child. At worse, well, we know about all those MTPs. Don’t we?
Really it isn’t easy being a girl. It never was. It isn’t easy being a girl’s father either. Unwanted sympathy, unending homilies and sexist remarks are not what one deserves.
