By: Husna Rizwan

Women are not born, but made. What better than India to exemplify this statement by Simone De Beauvoir. With the whole world celebrating International Women’s Day with great pomp & show, it would be only apt to analyse the position & the space Indian women occupy today, and comparing it to the time 6 decades ago when the country had just gained independence. With women participating in nationalist movements, to being pushed into the domestic household space, to their resurgence as super women today, women in our country have seen it all.

There have been innumerable debates about gender in India over the years. Much of it includes women’s positing in society, their education, health, economic position, gender equality etc. What one can conclude from such discussions is that women have always held a certain paradoxical position in our developing country.

• 

While on one hand, India has seen an increased percentage of literacy among women, and women are now entering professional fields, the practices of female infanticide, poor health conditions & lack of education still persisting! Even the patriarchal ideology of home being a woman’s ‘real domain’ & marriage being her ultimate destiny hasn’t changed much. The matrimonial advertisements, demanding girls of the same caste, with fair skin & slim figure, or the much criticised fair & lovely ads, are indicators of slow changing social mores. If one looks at the status of women then & now, one has to look at 2 sides of the same coin; one side which is promising & one side which is bleak.

When our country got its independence, the participation of women nationalists was widely acknowledged. When Indian Constitution was formulated, it granted equal rights to women, considering them legal citizens of the country & as an equal to men in terms of freedom & opportunity. The sex ratio of women at this time was slightly better than what it is today, standing at 945 females per 1000 males. Yet the condition of women screamed a different reality.

They were relegated to household chores & made to submit to male-dominated patriarchal society, as has always been prevalent in our country. Indian women, who fought as equals with men in nationalist struggle, were not given that free public space anymore. They became homemakers & were mainly meant to build a strong home to support their men who were to build the newly independent country. Women were reduced to being 2^nd class citizens. The national female literacy rate was alarmingly low (8.6%). The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) for girls was 24.8% at primary level & 4.6% at upper primary level (in the 11-14 years age group). There existed insoluble social & cultural barriers to education of women & access to organised schooling.

A very few were allowed into the public space, which she was expected to manage on her own, while maintaining her domestic role as a homemaker. In spite of Sharda Act which was passed in 1950’s to raise the marital age limit for girls, child marriage particularly in North India was quite prevalent though average age at marriage for females was increased to 18. Sprawling inequalities persisted in their access to education, health care, physical & financial resources & opportunities in political, social & cultural spheres. It was almost unthinkable for women to have a choice or a say in matters of marriage, career or life. Rather she had no voice at all. The practice of dowry was as common as ever.

And since men were better educated than girls, their demands were even more. The Dowry Prohibition Act was finally passed in 1961, to protect women & promising severe punishment, but the conviction rate of crime against women was & still is very low in India. Because of such inhuman practices which were normalised by our society, the birth of the girl child was considered inauspicious. In villages as well as cities, the girl child was killed either before birth or after it. Even till date, the practice continues. The United Nations Children’s Fund, estimated that up to 50 million girls &  women are “missing” from India’s population because of termination of the female foetus or high mortality of  girl child due to lack of proper care.

Though a number of constitutional amendments were made for women’s social, economic & political benefits, yet they were never effective to bring in a radical change in situation. Women had only the role of a “good wife” to play & if a woman ventured out to work, she was seen as a bad woman, going against societal norms. Women were expected to cook food & eat only after the men, with whatever meagre amount of food is left. This led to rampant malnutrition among women & an extremely poor health status. Around 500 women were reported to die every day due to pregnancy related problems due to malnutrition & getting married before 18. It was only by 1960’s that a few educated women began to see themselves increasingly change from a mere guardian of home to a legitimate participant in discourse of life. The country saw the 1^stundercurrent of female discontent with the system.

With time, a lot has changed since those dark ages of 1950’s for women. Though at some levels like dowry, crimes like rape, sexual harassment at office or public places & molestation, eve-teasing, even after over 60 years of independence women are still exploited, which is the shameful side of our country. Yet one can’t deny that the situation has improved since the earlier times. Women, who now represent 48.2% of the population, are getting access to education & then employment. From 5.4 million girls enrolled at the primary level in 1950-1951 to 61.1 million girls in 2004-2005. At the upper primary level, the enrolment increased from 0.5 million girls to 22.7 million girls.

Dropout rates for girls have fallen by 16.5% between the year 2000 & 2005. Programs like “Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan” & “Saakshar Bharat Mission for Female Literacy” has helped increase literacy rates from less than 10% to more than 50% today. The result of this is that India has world’s largest number of professionally qualified women. In fact India has largest population of working women in the world & has more number of doctors, surgeons, scientists, professors than United States.

Women in India slowly started recognising her true potential. She has started questioning rules laid down for her by society. As a result, she has started breaking barriers & earned a respectable position in the world.

Today Indian women have excelled in each & every field from social work to visiting space station. There is no arena, which remains unconquered by Indian women. Whether it is politics, sports, entertainment, literature, technology everywhere, its women power all along.

Today names like Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Shobhaa De, Jhumpa Lahiri can put any other writer to shame. In the field of cinema, women like Rekha, Smita Patil, Shabana Aazmi, Vidya Balan &  Konkona Sen are such names who don’t play feminised roles, but have asserted themselves over this male-dominated realm. In the field of Politics, from Indira Gandhi to Shiela Dixit, Uma Bharti, Jayalalithaa, Vasundhra Raje & Mamata Banerjee today, women are making their presence felt.Today, modern woman is so deft & self-sufficient that she can be easily called a superwoman, juggling many fronts single-handedly. Women are now fiercely ambitious and are proving their metal not only on home front, but also in their respective professions. Women in Indian are coming up in all spheres of life. They are joining the universities & colleges in large numbers. They are entering into all kinds of professions like engineering, medicine, politics, teaching, etc. A nation’s progress & prosperity can be judged by the way it treats its women folk. There is a slow & steady awareness regarding giving women their dues & not mistreating them, seeing them as objects of possession. Despite progress, the very fact that women, along with being achievers, are also expected to fulfil their roles as wives or mothers, prioritising home against anything else.

This point of view hasn’t changed much. There is still a large section of women who are uneducated & married off before the age of 18. Families are required to supply a chaste daughter to family of her future husband. Also very few women are actually employed in good-paying jobs & hence parents don’t see the point of spending money on girls’ education. Statistics say that close to 245 million Indian women lack the basic capability to read & write, which is a large number. Only 13.9% women are employed in urban sector & 29% in domestic & agriculture sector, where too a majority of women are exploited by men. The sex ratio of India shows that Indian society is still prejudiced against female, and a lot is yet to be achieved in this context.

The path towards total gender empowerment is full of potholes. Over the years, women have made great strides in many areas with notable progress in reducing some gender gaps. Yet realities such as 11,332 women & girls getting trafficked every year & increased practice of dowry, rape & sexual harassment hit hard against all development that has taken place. Thus, if on one hand women are climbing the ladder of success, on the other hand she is mutely suffering violence afflicted on her by her own family members. As compared to the past, women in modern times have achieved a lot but in reality they have to still travel a long way. Women may have left secured domains of their home, but a harsh, cruel, exploitative world awaits them, where women have to prove their talent against the world who see women as merely vassals of producing children. The Indian woman has to make her way through all the socialised prejudices against her, and the men have have to allow & accept the women to be equal participants in the country’s way forward.