The birth of his first daughter, the family’s first child, made Rajeshwar Tiwari happy.
The birth of his second daughter made him indifferent.
The birth of his third daughter made him angry. “Why have you chosen to curse me?” he asked the gods bitterly.
The birth of his fourth daughter made him despair. He wept quietly, too despondent to talk to anyone.
Two more daughters, twins, died moments after birth.
Only after the passing of eight years and the birth of six daughters would the village sari salesman find reason to rejoice as his wife again bore a child. On that day, the one he considers the happiest of his life, his son was born.
The child was named Santosh, the Hindi word for satisfaction.
In this speck of a village, just 88 households in all, where the diversions from poverty’s sheer drudgery are few, the celebration that followed the child’s birth was elaborate.
A relative bought new clothes for the parents and baby, and sweets for the girls.
“I didn’t want so many children, but a family is not complete without sons,” sighed their soft-spoken mother, Shanti Tiwari, now in her late 20s. Married a year after entering puberty to a man only a few years older, she has been pregnant or nursing a baby all her adult life, just as generations of Indian women have done before her.
After being beaten by her husband and berated by her mother-in-law for producing only daughters those first years, Shanti Tiwari bore three sons. One boy died immediately after birth. Now there are six Tiwari children; four girls and two boys, the oldest 12, the youngest 2.
As her youngest child suckled her breast beneath the protective drape of her sari, she smiled with obvious pride. “Until you have a son,” she said, “you are not a complete woman.”
The reasons families here continue to have more children than they want are woven into the culture of India as intricately as rich silk winds through the brocades famous in this region near Varanasi, this country’s most sacred city.
Culture and religion, economics and education, limited access to safe amd reliable birth control, valid fears that disease will kill some offspring, skepticism toward missives of government and outside aid agencies–all help explain why in absolute numbers, India is growing faster than any nation on Earth.
Though generalizations seldom stand up to the striking diversity of India — where any visitor is cautioned that whatever one might say, the opposite is also true — a single desire binds virtually all its families, urban and rural, wealthy and poor, well-educated and ignorant, in the top and bottom castes: the quest for sons.
In what is also one of the world’s poorest countries, the cultural preference for males creates far more children of both sexes than most families can support. But girls pay the biggest price for the practice. Some Indian families kill female babies; most condemn them to something that resembles a living death.
Many boys are born to poverty, too, but the cultural premium placed on their sex elevates them to a revered status, even in the poorest families.
Powerful economic reasons persist that make a male heir desirable. A son provides what the Indian government does not: insurance in case of unemployment, sickness or injury, and an old-age pension. In this deeply religious country, a son is even the gatekeeper to the afterlife. Many devout Hindus believe they cannot get into heaven unless their son lights the funeral pyre. Most Indian couples want at least two sons, to ensure at least one will outlive them.
Indian customs disdain daughters. “Not wanting a girl to be born is an attitude that becomes a great leveler; neither education nor income has any effect on the attitude to the girl child’s birth,” India’s government concluded in a report for its Department of Women and Child Development.
Problems from dowry
The chief culprit is dowry, the money and gifts a bride’s parents present to the newly married couple and the groom’s family. The practice fashions daughters into economic burdens, sometimes causing families to go into debt for generations. Outlawing dowry has failed to eliminate or even diminish it. Instead, pressures are growing as India opens its economy to imported goods and Western-style consumerism. Dowry has become something of an extortion device that families use to acquire furniture, television sets, refrigerators, even cars.
The penalty for insufficient dowry can be a woman’s death. The practice is often referred to as bride burning because so many women are set afire in “kitchen accidents” that rarely are prosecuted. Over the past decade, dowry deaths in India grew by 170 percent. In 1994, 6,200 dowry deaths were reported, an average of one every hour and 24 minutes.
In the Hindu-dominated culture of India, women essentially must forsake their families upon marriage to live with their in-laws. As one researcher succinctly put it, “An Indian girl is but a sojourner in her own family.”
Virtually all aspects of Indian life elevate boys and diminish girls. An Indian blessing says, “May you be the mother of a hundred sons!” Another typical saying is: “Bringing up a girl is like watering a tree in a neighbor’s garden.”
But the most telling evidence of low regard for women in this country is its increasingly skewed sex ratios. The female-male ratio has declined throughout this century to one of the world’s lowest levels.
In ancient India, unwanted daughters were poisoned, suffocated or drowned moments after birth. The same practices continue today. Some women kill their daughters believing that the act will bring them a son the next time. Pregnant women flock to clinics to determine the sex of their unborn child and to abort the females. In certain villages, daughters are practically non-existent.
Despite their gruesome drama, sex-selective abortion and infanticide account for only a small portion of India’s missing women. Daily routines of a macabre subtlety are a far more common fate for women born almost as a byproduct of the quest for sons.
Girls in many Indian families eat “last and least,” and are even breast fed for a shorter time than their brothers. Girls receive less medical care than boys, and they are likely to be sicker when they do see a doctor. Poor nutrition and health care continue into adulthood; 88 percent of women are anemic during pregnancy, a major reason for birth complications.
As an Indian government report conceded, “In a culture that idolizes sons and dreads the birth of a daughter, to be born female comes perilously close to being born less than human.”
Old attitudes, an old village
The village of Kashipur — the name means “place of divine light” in Sanskrit — amounts to little more than a cluster of huts. It stands amid vibrant green fields of rice and sugar cane dotted by broad banyan trees where parrots dwell.
The village’s age is a mystery to residents, few of whom know their own birthdays. In most respects, modern life long ago bypassed Kashipur. There is no electricity or running water. Residents ride bicycles or carts pulled by water buffalo into the nearest city. Within a dozen miles but more than an hour’s drive away is Varanasi, the ancient city on the banks of the River Ganges — the destination of holy pilgrimages for devout Hindus.
Notable civic improvements of recent years include surfacing the lone road into town with a yard-wide gravel strip, and the construction of brick outhouses that residents remain unaccustomed to using.
Residents depend on a combination of subsistence farming and odd jobs in the city. But on most days, men loll about the village, and listless children don’t bother to shoo away the occasional insects that crawl near their eyes.
The 24 members of the communal Tiwari family span three generations — four adult brothers, their parents, wives and 14 children. By the standards of rural India, where three-quarters of the populace live, they represent a certain elite.
Their home is among the few built of brick, not mud. They own a tiny rice plot. And they own a radio, a rarity in India, where access to information is quite limited. (For every 1,000 people, there are 78 radios and 7 television sets.) Each man wears a janeou, a white sacred thread draped over the left shoulder, one sign of his status as a Brahmin, India’s top caste.
The Tiwari women exemplify the fate of the unwanted. In a country where women have little autonomy, the Tiwaris pay for higher status with reduced independence. Though other village women move about the village freely, custom forbids the Tiwari wives from leaving home for even the smallest chore or errand unaccompanied by their husbands. Among the few times Shanti Tiwari has left her home were for the hourlong walk with family members to the holy River Ganges, where Hindus from throughout India bring the remains or ashes of their dead. Following ancient rites, the Tiwaris swaddled bodies of the babies who died in a cloth and then submerged them in the Ganges waters, believed to be the nectar of immortality.
Some lower-caste women in the village work the fields or bolster family income by stringing glass beads into necklaces. The Tiwaris cannot imagine such possibilities for their women, who spend their days washing clothes, hauling water, cooking and drying cow dung for use as cooking fuel. “They don’t have time to do anything else,” Rajeshwar Tiwari said.
Yet the Tiwaris’ status hasn’t spared them economic worries.
“I have two good sons. The other two are useless,” said Nagina Devi Tiwari, the family’s withered, almost skeletal matriarch.
The good sons earn steady wages in Varanasi, one as a nurse, the other as a museum security guard. Another is unemployed. As for Rajeshwar Tiwari, his sari business is unpredictable.
The life of a sari salesman
“Come and buy my saris!” he hollers as he arrives in a village, a bundle of the women’s traditional garments packed onto his bicycle. “I have everything for you!”
On his sporadic days of success, Tiwari sells half a dozen saris. If he managed to do that each day, he would earn enough to bring the family’s per capita income to about $150, many times more than other villagers but less than half the average per capita income in India.
A thin but sturdy man, Tiwari displays a bitter demeanor. “A man who doesn’t know about his present, about whether he can provide food for his family, how can he think of the future?” he asked. “My future is in darkness.”
The Tiwaris insist they treat their sons and daughters equally. Yet only the oldest daughter and two sons have been immunized against diseases. Moon-shaped charms, talismans believed to ward off evil, hang from black cord necklaces worn by the boys, not the girls. Only the boys drink milk, because Rajeshwar Tiwari says he doesn’t earn enough to be able to feed all the children what they need. At one breakfast, the females ate rice with vegetable broth, while the vegetables were reserved for the males.
“There are so many children and no money to feed them properly,” said their mother, who has been hospitalized for anemia and has been told by doctors to eat more nutritious food. “If I’d had my way, I would have wanted two sons and one daughter.”
All six children are sick often, but only the boys have been treated by a doctor. The oldest daughter, named Nisha, “night” in Hindi, lay on a macrame cot one morning, writhing in pain while adults ignored her. “Headache, fever, cold, stomach upset . . . she is sick all the time,” her father said, dismissing the latest ailment.
Still, the three oldest Tiwari daughters have one vast advantage over the majority of Indian girls: They go to school.
Each morning they walk across rice fields to a private school where boys and girls sit on backless benches placed on opposite sides of the classroom. High female literacy is closely linked with smaller family size. But nearly two-thirds of India’s women are illiterate — almost double the comparable rate for men.
At the Tiwaris’ school, boys outnumber girls by proportions that gradually increase, reaching a 4-1 ratio in the higher grades. To many parents, especially in rural India, educating a girl seems pointless because they expect her to spend her life doing domestic chores and rearing children, tasks few believe require schooling. As a girl nears puberty, the pressure to keep her chaste leads many parents to keep her at home.
Moreover, literacy can be a liability when it comes to marriage. Under India’s strict social codes, an educated girl generally must marry a more educated boy. She becomes more expensive to marry off because dowry tends to grow with the groom’s education level.
Yet the Tiwaris believe schooling will improve their daughters’ marriage prospects. “It may help them make a better match,” their father said.
The family pays $1 a month for the girls’ tuition. Though a free public school is available, it is farther away, and the longer walk would leave the girls little time for household chores.
The girls don’t have much time for studies, their father admits. Because he dropped out of school at a young age and his wife received only enough schooling to learn to write her name, they can offer the girls no help with school homework.
Nonetheless, Nisha’s teacher describes her as a good student who struggles with math and stays home for a few days if she is scolded in class.
Rail thin and painfully shy, Nisha only rarely displays her pentup anger. Asked what she would like to do when she grows up, the 12-year-old said, “How can I think of what I’d like to do when I have to do everything?”
In two or three years, her parents will arrange her marriage according to the same ancient customs that were followed when they were wed. Shanti and Rejeshwar Tiwari did not meet until their wedding ceremony, and even then, her face remained covered by a veil.
Shanti Tiwari’s dowry amounted to little more than a few cooking utensils, clothing and a watch. But she and her husband believe they will need much more, perhaps as much as several years’ income, for each daughter to arrange a marriage that will not shame the family. So far they say they have not managed to save anything.
The minute a daughter is born, Indian families begin worrying about such matters. Thrusting her youngest granddaughter, still an infant, into the arms of a visitor, the family matriarch, Nagina Devi Tiwari, said darkly, “You feed her, educate her, pay for her dowry.”
Some families with many daughters try to limit dowry by arranging a marriage in a group to the sons from another family. Others succumb to economic pressures by selling their children into prostitution or child labor markets.
Though such grim prospects seem unlikely for her daughters, Shanti Tiwari cannot imagine what lies ahead for them. “They are born in a place where there are no dreams,” she said.
`All we do is give birth’
The Tiwaris are among the 139 million residents of Uttar Pradesh, literally “North State” in Hindi, a place so densely populated that it is the equivalent of cramming a little more than half of the U.S. population into Arizona.
A few figures reveal the poor regard for women here. For every 1,000 males there are 879 females, a ratio that is believed to be the world’s most distorted. The fertility rate, 5.1 children per woman, is India’s highest. Women’s life expectancy falls two years short of men’s. Only one fourth of women can read, compared to 56 percent of men.
“All we do is give birth, one child after the other,” remarked one Kashipur woman. “I would love to have been born a man.”
A comparison with the state of Kerala, at India’s southern tip, shows India’s extreme disparities. For every 1,000 men there are 1,036 women. The fertility rate, 1.8 children per woman, is below replacement level. Women’s life expectancy exceeds men’s by six years. And, 86 percent of women can read, compared with 94 percent of men.
With its matriarchal culture and distinct history, Kerala presents a success story India has not been able to replicate.
The government has long sponsored a public information campaign to convince its people that small families are better than large ones and that daughters are as good as sons. But only the literate people can read the signs and posters. And only those with television see the family-planning serials that run on government-owned channels.
Awareness of birth control isn’t enough. Almost all of India’s married women, 96 percent, know about modern contraceptive methods, but only 42 percent of married couples use them. Some studies show that condom sales and the percentage of women using birth control have fallen in recent years.
Moreover, contraceptive supplies in India’s vast remote regions are undependable, and the vast majority of health services are concentrated in the cities. Women doctors are in particularly short supply in rural areas, and many women will not submit to examinations by male doctors.
In 1951, India became the world’s first country to announce an official family planning program, and it remains the target of myriad international aid projects to stem population growth. Yet ancient cultural practices hold far more sway over the nation’s illiterate masses, for whom birth control has come to mean little more than the prospect of a sterilization operation they fear, advocated by those they mistrust–outsiders or their own government.
The experiences in Kashipur suggest why even some of the most ambitious and costly family planning efforts have not yet succeeded.
For several years, a health worker visited Kashipur regularly to talk about contraceptives and the benefits of a small family. “No one took her seriously,” one elderly village woman scoffed. A few years ago, the health worker stopped coming.
Another village woman says she doesn’t see a need for birth control. “If a woman doesn’t give birth to children, what does she do?” she asked.
Laws are unlikely to produce change in this nation where dowry, tests to determine the sex of a fetus and marriage before age 18 are both illegal and commonplace. (Conversely, abortion is legal, but 90 percent of abortions are “unofficial.”)
Officials are debating a law that would allow no one with more than two children to be elected to office — a change that at least in theory could rule out Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, the father of three sons and five daughters, who is said to have quipped, “This entitles me to advocate family planning.”
One reason Indians mistrust their government on family planning can be traced to a program of forced sterilization for men during the mid-1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. Though Kashipur is largely isolated from mass media, the stories of men being rounded up for surgery elsewhere found their way here. To this day it remains a sensitive issue politicians try to avoid. Only a small fraction of the nation’s men are sterilized, and the ministry that handles such matters now goes by the more benign name of “family welfare.”
Female sterilization
Female sterilization has become the mainstay of family planning. Throughout rural India, women submit to assembly-line laparoscopic surgery in barbaric sterilization camps.
This procedure is used by two-thirds of all Indians who use birth control. Many women who agree to the surgery have already reached the end of their childbearing years. But government workers under pressure to meet sterilization targets offer them money, housing or land in exchange– a system the Indian government is only slowly relinquishing in selected test sites.
Urmila Kushwas, the midwife in a government health clinic near Kashipur, pays women who undergo sterilization 145 rupees or less than $5–but nearly a week’s salary in some households. This way, Kushwas persuades 20 women a year to have the surgery — 16 fewer than the annual goal the government set for her.
“I have never met my target,” she conceded.
Though sterilizations are the midwife’s focus, a few women also come to the clinic for birth control pills or intrauterine devices. Many of them return with complications, including pregnancy.
The Tiwari women are afraid to undergo an operation. An aunt in the family died from complications following the surgery.
Though many Indians have heard little of other birth control methods, the Tiwaris have been informed about them by an in-home authority. Rajendra Tiwari, the adult brother who is a nurse, completed a 15-day course on family planning, and he has told the family all he learned.
Condoms are dangerous, he said. “They’re like a balloon,” he explained. “They could burst.”
As for birth control pills, the women in the family are uneducated and too undisciplined to take them, he has decided.
“The best approach is your own self-discipline,” he said.
Once, he approached a village woman in another family about birth control. She listened closely as he told her about how unsanitary her living conditions were with 10 children in a one-room hut and little food to go around.
“Why don’t you go in for family planning?” he asked.
“I have no problems getting an operation done,” the woman replied. “But my husband has said if I have the operation he will kill himself.”
Yogendra Tiwari, the adult brother who works as a museum guard, said he considered a sterilization operation for his wife after the births of two children, one son and a daughter. But other family members talked him out of it, saying, “You need two sons.”
One humid morning years later, he said ruefully, “In search of the second son, I have two more daughters.”
KILLING GIRLS–ONE VILLAGE’S UGLY SECRET
MODHA, India The Indian babies murdered just moments after birth bear one fatal flaw: They are female.
They are killed out of mercy by mothers who don’t want another generation of women to suffer a miserable existence. They are killed to avoid the high cost of dowry, the wedding gifts a bride’s parents are expected to bestow upon her groom and in-laws. And they are killed to avoid bringing shame on the family that would result if a daughter married beneath her station in defiance of India’s strict social codes.
Though no one knows how prevalent the practice is, it has become tradition in some pockets of India.
The girls have practically disappeared from Modha, a remote village set beside the golden, rippled dunes of the Thar desert. Among some 1,100 residents, no more than 25 girls can be found.
What happened to the village daughters?
“There’s magic in the water,” insists one old woman, her face crinkled as a raisin, smiling at her joke.
A 12-year-old among the throng of village boys answers the question with a gesture, pressing a thumb to his throat. When older boys scold him for revealing the local secret, he asks in return, “What is there to hide? This is the fact.”
A thumb to the windpipe. A sandbag over the mouth. These are the ways Modha disposes of its unwanted newborn girls. In the twisted morality of this village, murdering a daughter carries far less shame than being unable to arrange a good marriage for her.
The families are Bhatis, members of an elite group within the Rajput caste. Centuries ago, Bhati men killed their wives and sisters to save them from being raped or tortured by their enemies. Now they kill their females as soon as they are born, to save them from disgrace in marriage. Under the mores that govern life here, a Bhati daughter, already at the top of her caste, must find a groom of higher status — a nearly impossible task.
At the same time, the Bhatis save themselves the expense of dowry.
“We should have killed her instead of facing this humiliating situation,” said Sammad Kanwar, her 16-year-old daughter at her side.
The family needs gold and silver to find a suitable groom. “We don’t have the money,” Kanwar complained. “The gods should give us a lot of prosperity so we can marry the daughters well. Otherwise, it is better to kill them.”
In Modha, women from lower castes are given a few coins and clothing in return for smothering the infant and burying her in an unmarked spot in the desert.
In India’s cities and nearby villages, families pay doctors to see that unwanted daughters never arrive.
In Pilana, an agricultural village some 25 miles from Delhi, every woman knows where to find a doctor willing to conduct an ultrasound test that will determine whether the pregnant woman gives birth to a boy or aborts a girl.
“Everybody goes for it, but nobody admits it,” said Shanti Tyagi. A few months ago her daughter-in-law underwent the test. Any day now, she is due to deliver a boy.
“If this would have been a daughter, we would have opted for abortion,” said Tyagi, herself the youngest in a family of one son and seven daughters. “If the test had been there at that time,” she observed, “I would not be here.”
