JOIN USThis is a westernized city that’s built on a backward and patriarchal foundation, thereby marginalizing women, observes Anuradha Dutt.
In Gurgaon, feudal mindsets and aggressively patriarchal attitudes coexist uneasily in a westernised ambience. Beneath the modern veneer, lurk feudal mores and misogynist attitudes. Sinsi Sebastian, moved to Gurgaon from Kerala in 2011, to work as a software designer in a private firm. She shared a flat with two girls in an upscale colony adjoining Nathupur village. Nearby were Udyog Vihar and Cyber Greens, hubs of numerous corporate offices and IT companies. Young educated professionals flocked there for work.
Their evenings were spent pub-hopping, catching a film or simply spending time with friends. An only child, Sebastian was found murdered in her flat while her apartment mates were away in January 2012. The police eventually arrested the company driver, who used to pick and drop her. He admitted to killing her in a fit of rage when she spurned his advances.
Sharp contrast
Women socialising and working with male colleagues, sharing apartments with them, smoking, all these trigger a culture shock and predatory instincts, with unfortunate consequences at times. Gurgaon’s rural pockets are deeply entrenched, rich and powerful, carrying the social baggage of centuries. Several pockets of villages have presided over a meteoric urban expansion, even while attitudes remain unchanged. This is most evident in gender relations and caste prejudices.
The rustic gentry are now wealthy, having sold their farmland to developers and taking to the booming real estate business. Rural women, however, are conspicuous by their absence here. Instead migrant women – mainly from Bengal – act as domestic help, while a floating population of different ethnic groups seek work in factories and offices. Among the local populace, rustic elite females lead sheltered lives, whether in residences in the new colonies into which their families have shifted, or in their ancestral village homes, renovated lavishly after the sudden influx of money.
Sad state
Well-off rural women, veiled in the presence of their elders, men and outside the home, do not travel unaccompanied by male kin. They have access to the accoutrements of modern life, but they lack freedom, and have limited school education and have not been taught how to operate these sophisticated IT gadgets.
Early marriage is the norm for girls here, with their predominant role remaining unchanged over the centuries – as child-bearers who help to perpetuate the family line and as domestic care-givers. A few college graduates may work as teachers to supplement family income, but that is as far as it will go. Any deviation from the norm invites punishment that could be fatal. Dowries, if found to be inadequate, could also provoke retribution from in-laws in a milieu fiercely yoked to material gains.
Damned by ‘honour’
Thus the mobility of women – trapped as they are by convention and hemmed in by clan feuds – is severely curbed. They are left with little option but to meekly follow what custom has ordained for them. Errant conduct – a love affair, an inter-caste or inter-faith involvement or marital dispute – often culminates in honour killings. The infamous khap panchayat – an arbitration council representing a cluster of villages – presides over matters related to social prestige, family/village honour and social disputes. They are reported to pass brutal verdicts on matters that defy convention. Errant couples, for instance, are often killed or forcibly separated. The subservient status of women commonly ensures denial of inheritance rights in the marital and natal homes, with property accruing to sons or, in their absence, to the larger family pool.
Roots of bias
In such a scenario, women really are left with no choices – not even the option to stay single and self sustaining. Even adopting the life of a renunciate too is almost impossible. A few village families, poor and lower in the hierarchy, do allow their womenfolk to work in the colonies as domestic help or as gardeners in parks. And those like Sinsi, educated and ambitious, who move into this city for better prospects, may collide against the lethal, deep-rooted biases against single women that mark Gurgaon’s feudal milieu.