Despite outlawing of the prenatal sex-selection tests and voiceferous campaigns by the liberal and the enlightened, the son fetish among the Indian families dies hard. This is a part of the mindset consciously propagated through usual utterances within families (and sometimes publicly) as a piece of conventional (therefore automatically valid) wisdom, and sometimes more insidiously inculcated via suggestions, idioms, mythological stories, legends culled from family, village, ethnic wellspring during childhood and even later, from mothers to children, especially, daughters. The confounding thing (for the social scientists and probably for everybody else who have to deal with the fall out of this home brewed poison) is that despite the wave of modernization, liberalization and even globalization sweeping India this preference is not on the way out. The growing skewed female-to-male ratio in most of the major Indian states is a grim indicator of this trend.
The pervasive son fetish of the Indian families does two things at one stroke. Firstly, discrimination against the girl child is almost hardwired into the family’s evolutionary gene, perpetuating an institutionalized differentiation between the son and the daughter; the practical steps deciding allocation on food, nutrition, medical attention and education then follow. Even in more well off urban and modern families where such brutal daily discrimination is not evident it exists in subtle forms. This also includes the discrimination about norms of good behaviour – girl-like for some or as befitting a boy for others.
Secondly, the girl child, whenever present on the scene, being neither in the scheme of things temporal like property ownership (this has now been somewhat rectified legally) or maintaining family line, nor eligible to perform exit rites for the parents’ other wordly peregrination, becomes like a temporary deposit (the exact synonym for the Hindi word ‘Amanat’ which is how she is conceived in the family and described in common parlance) only to be handed over in marriage to the son and heir to another suitable family in future, sooner rather than later. Till that time the girl has to be raised in due tradition, taught the patriarchal values, often symbolically deified and most importantly, her honour (narrowly conceived as her sexual virginity) is to be protected from being sullied.
Interestingly the burden of protectionism with all its trappings falls to the lot of the girl. There are edicts, explicit and implicit in every Indian family with obvious social sanction, as to what would be the appropriate dress for her, where all she can go, whom she could move with, how she should conduct herself and speak in public, etc. The geometrical space the traverse of so many ‘laksman rekha’s would create, one would imagine, leave very little room for breathing let alone freedom for the ‘precious’ girl child guaranteed by the Indian constitution to everybody including the boys from the same family who suffer little impediment In the end this prescription of gender-appropriate behaviour seems like a big charade whereby even the family and the society (and that includes policemen, everybody knows which society they come from, can one blame them ?) are surreptitiously passing the responsibility of security and protection of the girl to herself, making it conditional to her abiding by the arbitrary and unfair barriers to the exercise of her freedom.
Since the wind of liberalization and attempted globalization of Indian economy started blowing a couple of decades ago the mindset in respect of girls have come under a challenge because of the obvious mobility of both boys and girls from traditional families from villages, semi-rural areas, small towns to metropolitan cities in response to the inescapable urge for economic benefits and aspiration to make it big in the cities. It is becoming practically difficult to manage to keep the girls, who are also earning good incomes and often standing the families in good stead as much as or sometimes better than the boys, within those rekhas in urban centers, offices, public spaces, streets swarming with other fortune seekers and predators imbibing the ‘animal spirit’ of a nation obsessed with economic growth.
A ghastly rape of such a role model of a girl of new India in a metro city has made the bulwarks of patriarchy, heads of cultural and religious organizations, god-men (whatever that may mean) and last but not the least the politicians cringe more about this loss of control, about becoming irrelevant and prompted them to make such openly ridiculous statements that even many of their followers and supporters feel ashamed about.
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