I was bitterly surprised to read a quote by a famous Bollywood actor in the newspaper who claimed that the plethora of curvaceous female role models in the film industry is indicative of the improvement of women's status in Indian culture. Have they stepped out of their posh homes to see what the rest of India is like?
Thanks to my wandering through India this summer, I have. And women's status has indeed been improving in scattered areas as a result of the hard work of a few NGOs (I'm not going to get started on the ample corruption that clouds such efforts, just the ones that actually get something DONE for the target communities).
You don't have to travel three hours in a bumpy, overcrowded bus or tour destitute villages to get a taste of what it means to be a low-income female in this country. Just pick up the paper every day, and you'll soon find out.
Some of today's related news (I've been reading the paper for weeks now, this is typical):
-22-year old girl is harrassed for dowry and for bearing a female child, so she protests the mental and physical abuse she has suffered from her in-laws by walking around Gujarat in her underwear. Upon arriving at the police station, she tries to immolate herself as a demonstration but is restrained.
-2-day-old infant is found buried alive in Andhra Pradesh by her grandparents, because she is the seventh girl in the family.
-Due to unclear laws on the legal age of marriage for a girl in India, 15-year-old girls are being coerced into marriage. High Courts refuse to press rape charges, ruling that the 'age of discretion' has been reached at 15 years of age. No law fixing the uniform age for consensual sex exists.
-26-year-old girl working as a domestic help is brutally stabbed by her 22-year-old lover nine times with a pair of scissors, because she refused to continue the 'relationship' (the other day, a young, pregnant woman was bludgeoned to death by her lover as bystanders looked on, doing nothing. By the time someone finally put her into a rickshaw and sent her to the hospital, it was too late. She was killed for insisting that her lover marry her after discovering she was pregnant).
So no, famous Bollywood stars, things are not necessarily changing for the average poor woman in India, and they are certainly not changing because of how strong, sexy, rich and wholesome Bipasha Basu, Kareena Kapoor, Rani Mukherjee and Aishwarya Rai are.
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2 comments:
Wow they really are insulated in their bubble world aren't they? The decreasing hemline of women's skirts does not a liberation movement make!
In a way, do you think it is a good thing that these events still make the news? Do you think it reflects a more widespread intolerance to the oppression of women, for these things to be deemed newsworthy? I would imagine these reports/articles are written with an undertone of disdain, which will hopefully permeate the social consciousness . . . if only the illiterate could read these headlines . . .
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