Friday, March 05, 2010

'Aukad'

It is so important to have an imagination assistant when you are a village girl who has never seen a woman do anything other than to aim to get married and have children 
and look after the house.  
Photos of Medha Patkar , Indra Nooyi and the others are hung on the walls throughout this school. Yet it's always a case of 'unki baat alag hain'. 'Their case is different.'
 
Perhaps it will take generations. If a girl from here finishes class ten , hopefully her daughter will graduate from college . Social context is so important it can sound exaggerated to an outsider.
 
I just cannot imagine that an 8 year old girl has to wake up at 4 AM , finish her chores attend school adn return to the same routine in the evening in a dark one room house shared with five brothers, her mother and the usually absent migrant labourer father slaving away with his bare hands to build a mall in some distant city.
The entire village has no electricity . The animals live inside the houses of the families more often than not.
 
Within such a context, for her to be able to pronounce an English word takes so much courage , let alone intellectually questioning the deep rooted boundaries of caste, class, gender , and an 'aukaad' accumulated over generations of power games.
 
 
 

2 comments:

cwlq said...

Why do you say she needs "courage to pronounce and English word"? Is English somehow looked down upon in village life? Or are women not supposed to speak it for some reason? Or are you using hyperbole?

Y? said...

Oh. Just like how you lose your caste when you cross the seas- you lose your feminity when you speak English. Chris please learn to think beyond the IT citadel of Bangalore.