Policing Village Moral Codes as Women Stream to India’s Cities
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
CITY LIFE
Meena, a student in Rohtak, warns young women that moving to a city does
not keep people back in the village from scrutinizing their actions. “I
tell them, we have to be careful,” she said.
By ELLEN BARRY
Published: October 19, 2013
ROHTAK, India — Meena, 20, was a village girl herself, so she can
recognize the changes that come when girls from the village arrive in
this city as students and take their first gulps of freedom.
Multimedia
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
NEW FREEDOMS Female and male students mingle on campus in Rohtak.
Blue jeans, forbidden at home, are crammed into a corner of the backpack
for a midday costume change. A cellphone is acquired and kept on
silent.
She always tells them: You never know who might be watching. If word
gets back to the village that a young woman has stepped across the
village’s moral boundaries — it could be something as simple as being
spotted chatting with a group of male students after class — her life
could be upended in a day.
“I tell them, we have to be careful,” Meena said. “Maybe they are not
aware that someone can watch them and go and report back.”
As young Indian women leave rural homes to finish their education in
cities, often the first women in their families to do so, they act like
college students everywhere, feeling out the limits of their
independence. But here in the farming region of Haryana State, where
medieval moral codes are policed by a network of male neighbors and
relatives, the experience is a little different. There is always the
danger that someone is quietly gathering information.
The old and new are continually rushing at each other in India, most
starkly in places like Haryana, a largely rural, conservative state
abutting New Delhi whose residents can commute 20 miles to work in
nightclubs and office buildings. But their home villages are sleepy
places, whose main streets are patrolled by glossy, lumbering black
water buffalo.
The villages are ruled by khap panchayats, unelected all-male councils
that wield strong control over social life, including women’s behavior.
That job becomes much harder once the women have left for the city. When
one khap leader listed city shops that were allowing young women to
store mobile phones and change into Western clothes, another suggested
posting informers outside the shops with cameras to capture photographic
evidence as women came and went.
Om Prakash Dhankar, a khap leader who voiced his support for this
approach, said measures like these would protect young women from much
worse dangers that might follow if they freely cultivated friendships
with men.
“The mobile plays a main role,” he said in an interview. “You will be
surprised how this happens. A girl sits on a bus, she calls a male
friend, asks him to put money on her mobile. Is he going to put money on
her mobile for free? No. He will meet her at a certain place, with five
of his friends, and they will call it rape.”
A generation ago, women here lived in complete seclusion from men, and
could appear in public only wearing a lightweight cloth that completely
covered their head and face. Though that tradition is fading, many women
are still not allowed to leave the house without permission from a
father or husband.
Haryana’s khaps focus much of their energy on defending a single ancient
prohibition: Men and women are not allowed to marry anyone from the
same village. The local interpretation of ancient Hindu texts holds
villagers to be brothers and sisters, rendering their unions incestuous.
Young people defy the ban very rarely, but those who do are sometimes
murdered by a gang of male relatives. As much as the khaps condemn these
“honor killings,” they are just as adamant about preventing these
romances, a quest that involves tight control over women.
Meena, who left her village several years ago to escape an arranged
marriage, said young women there were terrified of the elders in the
khap, who scrutinized their behavior and issued a steady stream of
criticism. The criticism, in turn, terrified her parents, who feared
being ostracized.
“They would say, ‘Why is your daughter going around in the village with
her head naked?’ ” she said. “If you were walking with your head
straight, the khap guys would say, ‘Look down at the ground, don’t make
eye contact. Don’t have irrelevant conversations.’ ”
Whether their influence extends to college women in Rohtak, one of Haryana’s largest cities, is another matter.
As young women poured out of the gates of Maharishi Dayanand University
recently, walking down the road in the golden light of afternoon, they
described the alchemy that takes place when young women from the village
mix with classmates from big cities. Some begin illicit romances,
something strictly forbidden at home. But for many, the changes are
modest ones.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Om Prakash Dhankar, a member of a village council,
urges tighter controls, like surveillance, to avoid trouble.
Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Women typically cover themselves in traditional Indian villages like Dhakla, in Haryana State.
“In the cities, the girls have phones, because parents provide them, but
in the village we are not given phones,” said Sunita Meham, 23. “She
comes to college and sees that other people are using phones, so she
also wants to use one. If her parents agree, and if her friends call her
on that phone, they say, ‘Why do you have so many friends?’ To save
herself all these questions, she has a secret phone.”
Satish, who runs a photocopy shop next to the college,
said the khaps are simply too far away to monitor students’ behavior.
Phones are often exchanged as gifts and kept secret from the family, he
said. “Generally,” he said, “everyone around here has two mobiles at
least.”
Sonal Dangi, 20, shrugged off the talk of tighter controls. Social
change had taken hold in Haryana, she said, and it could not be halted.
“Everything has its positive and negative sides,” she said. “But they can’t stop it.”
But others were far more wary. The moral arbiters from the village have
informers everywhere, Meena said. Police officers often work with the
khap, many said. A young man from the same village might report back to a
woman’s family if he spotted her walking with a man, others said. So
could the rickshaw driver who drove her to the city.
All the young women interviewed in Rohtak could reel off stories of
classmates who simply disappeared, withdrew from school and were swiftly
married to men of their parents’ choosing after word of a moral
infraction reached their village.
The possibility of violence ran like a thin blade through their chatter:
Just last month, a young man and woman studying in Rohtak were killed
in public by the woman’s relatives after they were discovered violating
the ban on same-village romance. The man was beheaded.
“You know,” said Puja, a 19-year-old student, “the first time the
parents hear that the girl is roaming around, either they take her home
and get her married or else they kill them.”
Even within the khap panchayats, there seemed to be little consensus on
how, or whether, to keep an eye on young women away from home. In
interviews, numerous local khap leaders scoffed at Mr. Dhankar’s notion
of placing surveillance units at places where young women change out of
their traditional, billowing clothes.
But Mr. Dhankar was undaunted, saying the photographs could be shown to
the girls’ parents, or to friendly police officers, who could threaten
to press trumped-up criminal charges unless the behavior stopped. Great
dangers await, Mr. Dhankar said, when a young woman keeps secrets from
her family.
“It starts with a small lie,” he said. “Then they get into borrowing
money and other bad things. The end result is that she will commit
suicide or someone else will kill her.”
As he was explaining this, his daughter, a high school science teacher
in her early 40s, chimed in with a robustly dissenting view, and Mr.
Dhankar admitted cheerfully that the women in his house generally ignore
what he says.
Growing serious, he added that it was misguided to see any collision of
interests between young women and the traditionalists in the village.
They are, he said, on the same team.
“As long as the girl lives within moral codes, she can have as much
freedom as she wants,” he said. “If they are going after love affairs or
extra freedom, then they are killed.”
Letter
Honor Killings in India
Published: October 23, 2013
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page
editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
In “Policing Village Moral Codes as Women Stream to India’s Cities”
(news article, Oct. 20), you confirm that Hindus — not just Muslims —
also perpetrate honor killings. However, the honor-killing motives among
village Hindus are not confined to a taboo against marrying someone
from one’s own village (seen as a form of “incest”), but are mainly
caste-related. Falling in love or marrying someone from an “inferior”
caste is still viewed as a capital crime.
In addition, unlike Muslims, Hindus murder men along with women 40 percent of the time, according to a 2012 study
published in Middle East Quarterly, of which I was a lead author.
Indian Hindu immigrants to the West do not tend to bring this custom
with them, whereas some Muslims do. As women everywhere of all religions
and cultures seek freedom, they are endangered by ancient tribal
misogyny.
PHYLLIS CHESLER
New York, Oct. 21, 2013
New York, Oct. 21, 2013
The writer, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is the author of 15 books.
...and I am Sid Harth
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