Holding a lacy number up to the light, Rennu Marwah recalls when her grandmother took her to buy her first bra.
“She made me wear one of those T-shirt style bras that compress whatever is growing,” she said, flicking through the racks of provocative English, French and American lingerie on sale in a new shop in Bombay.
“That still happens, but Indian women are becoming more comfortable with themselves and they want to exhibit what nature has given them,” she said. “Seeing spaghetti straps is so common now.”
Mrs Marwah, a 50-year-old fashion house exporter from Madras, is not the only one to notice a new sense of self-confidence among the Indian female urban elite in a country that, as a rule, still regards girls as social and economic liabilities. Dalbir Bains gave up a six-figure salary working for Philip Green, the British entrepreneur, as a buying director for Bhs in London to set up her own business in the country her parents left in the 1960s.
She has Indian roots but a Western upbringing and little in common with her potential customers. However, she spotted a market. Boudoir London, her shop in Juhu, the Bombay beach suburb beloved of Bollywood stars, is a radical departure from the retail norm of women fishing around in big bins in marts and department stores for vaguely fitting underwear.
“This is a massive eye-opener if they have never owned a bra that doesn’t make them look fat or have droopy boobs,” Ms Bains, 37, said. “Ninety-nine per cent of the women who come in don’t even know their own size. Now I have people coming back for the suspenders, the corsets, the lot.” The fact that she has struck a chord offers an intriguing insight into modern India at a time when the position of women appears to be at its most confused.
The contradictions are everywhere to be seen. The most powerful politician in the country is a woman: Sonia Gandhi is adored by the masses despite not even being Indian, yet a piece of legislation reserving a third of the seats in parliament and other legislatures for women has yet to be tabled after a decade of debate — by men.
The number of women in the Indian lower house was 8.3 per cent in 2004, compared with 20.3 per cent in China, 21.3 per cent in Pakistan and 14.8 per cent in Bangladesh, according to a report published last week by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). Hindi actresses gain fervent male followings by revealing more and more on screen yet are still expected to give up the job when they marry because audiences will not tolerate a taken woman in the heroine’s role.
Advertising campaigns, such as the one for a skin-lightening cream that depicts a male suitor seeking approval from the parents of a career woman, scream about the empowerment of the fairer sex, yet forced marriages are still common and the outlawed practices of dowry abuse and female foeticide are on the increase.
Where once in ancient India women were celebrated, even elevated, they have been reduced to secondary status. Giving birth to a girl is still a huge disappointment. Sons bring social pride, carrying on the family name and inheriting businesses and property. Girls are an economic drain, first on their parents, then on their in-laws. Nearly 50 years after the dowry was made illegal, the practice of “gift giving” by the bride’s family to the groom’s family is widespread.
When the value of the gifts is not considered sufficient, incidences of abuse arise. In the most extreme cases, the result is “bride burning”. In Delhi a woman is burnt to death nearly every 12 hours, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, and a dowry death is reported every 77 minutes.
Even in richer families, where the financial burden of a girl can be borne more easily, the desire to avoid having daughters is strong. With access to the latest ultrasound equipment, it is in the educated, urban areas where some of the greatest sex ratio disparities are being reported.
Unicef estimates that up to 50 million girls and women have gone missing in India as a result of systematic gender discrimination. Seven thousand fewer girls are born every day in India than the global average. The 2001 census showed that there were 927 women for every 1,000 men in the Indian population compared with an average male-female birth ratio in most countries of 1,050:1,000.
The worst-affected region was Punjab, with 798 girls per 1,000 boys, meaning that the state had lost about a fifth of its natural female population. Women’s rights groups fear that the knock-on effect will be hardest felt in the poorer neighbouring states of Assam and West Bengal, from where women are being trafficked as brides to make up the deficit.
Everywhere Indian women are being told that they have more choices. Better education, access to jobs and opportunities for promotion in a globalised economy. The stuffy old Calcutta Club, a relic of the Raj, is even considering allowing women members for the first time in its hundred-year history. The gap in the average level of education completed by girls and boys has consistently decreased. The female literacy rate at the last census in 2001 was 53.7 per cent, compared with 75.3 per cent for men. In 1981 the figures were 56.4 per cent and 29.8 per cent respectively.
It is increasingly common for married women to continue their careers. When Pepsico chose Indian-born Indra Nooyi this year as its first woman chief executive, she was lauded as an example of what all educated Indian women could achieve, not criticised as someone who had neglected her domestic duties.
While many are happy to enjoy the trappings of being a modern woman, there is a sense that it is little more than a distraction from their inevitable destiny. “We have tried to ape Western concepts of liberalisation without understanding them. Earning the pay cheque doesn’t necessarily mean you are empowered,” Nimisha Sadhu, 25, a corporate strategist, said.
“You are conditioned in India to believe what makes a good daughter, a good wife, a good woman that you overcompensate for it. No one says you should give up your career but you feel compelled to come home for ‘the nice boys’ your parents want you to meet.”
On the lower rungs of the Indian caste system, the process of emancipation is slow but arguably has the potential to be a more potent force in society because they have more to gain than the affluent classes.
For women in the poor, remote rural areas, life without an education means marriage and children at the onset of puberty. Anita Kumari, a beekeeper from a small village in the backward state of Bihar, was forced into a marriage at the age of 15. Unlike her peers, she refused to give up her studies or her employment in what was considered locally to be a man’s job.
Now aged 17, she owns more than a hundred hives, manufactures her own honey under the brand Anita, attends college, rides a motorcycle and tutors her mother at night. “It was easy to work with the bees and continue my studies because, unlike other professions, bee keeping doesn’t require much of my time,” she said.
Alongside Suryamani, an environmentalist from Jharkhand, and Krishna, a teacher from Madhya Pradesh, she was presented last week to a room of impressionable female Delhi students as a “girl star” representative of the changing face of India.
The statistics, however, point to their being the exceptions. Nearly half the women in India are still being forced into marriage before the age of 18 in violation of the law. In states such as Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Chattisgarh, a woman gives birth for the first time on average before she reaches her 19th birthday.
“The situation of our womenfolk in the rural parts of India has improved slightly but the ground-level conditions remain the same,” said Sharmila Tagore, a celebrated 1960s Bollywood actress who married Mansoor Ali Khan, Nawab of Pataudi and a former Indian cricket captain, and is now a Unicef ambassador.
“The average Indian man gets married only for the sake of having a woman in the house who can tend to his ailing parents. Bringing about gender empowerment will be a daunting task if we are not able to change the mindset and education is the key. I still believe that the change we see around is quite a cosmetic change.”
In instances where women have been empowered, such as the 1993 law that reserved a third of the seats in panchayats (district assemblies) for women candidates, the results are tangible.
Villages in West Bengal where women play a leading role in local politics have had twice the investment in drinking water, increased visits by government health workers and a decrease in the gap between boys and girls attending school, according to Unicef.
A survey of 100 villages in Rajasthan found that a woman pradhan equalled more immunised children, a higher participation of girls in schools and better health facilities for women. “Study after study has taught us that there is no tool for development more effective than gender equality,” Kul Gautum, the deputy executive director of Unicef, said.
Deepa Jain Singh, the Indian Women and Child Development Secretary, takes heart from the experiences of rural government and dismisses the idea that the changes of recent years are superficial. “There is nothing cosmetic about it,” she said. “More and more women are making their choices. Indian women have come of age.” Even if the changes are skin deep, they are a start. Ms Bains has seen enough to know that she may be on the cusp of a new awakening.
To make the point, she turns to a sheer, fur-cuffed, red Sexy Santa outfit on a mannequin near the window. “Two weeks ago, I had 12 of those. That’s the last one left,” she said.
A woman's lot
Life expectancy is 65.6 years for women and 63.9 for men Sources: National Election Study 2004, CIA World Factbook, The Lancet, International Herald Tribune
