I wake up at 3 am to venture off to the field, it’s almost
impossible to sleep with such bumpy roads filled with potholes and if you do
sleep you’re most likely rudely awoken by hitting your head against a window
multiple times throughout your journey. So instead I stay awake and look out
the window expecting a very boring ride with no one on the roads. Instead I am
intrigued to see women in colorful saris lining the streets, getting ready for
the day. I soon find out that women in India wake up at extremely early hours
to bath themselves and take care of any other matters because it is the only
time of the day in which they will have some privacy.
The life of a woman in India is so interesting, it makes me
realize how easy it is to be a woman in America, we can wear almost anything we
want, we have the freedom to choose who we want to spend the rest of our lives
with, we can be out at night without any question, and most importantly every
woman in the U.S. has the privacy to bath and pee! It’s an unforgettable experience
when you stop at a field site and ask for a restroom (called a socharlie here)
and soon find out that the restroom consists of a large open field with no
shelter of any kind. Of course being the Colorado girl I am that wouldn’t
generally be a problem except for the 6 or so children and mothers trying to
get a peek of me peeing in their field, most awkward pee moment of my life!
Of course not every place in India is like this, but being
in one of the poorest counties in India just goes to show how little freedom
Indian women have. Every once in a while I will have an elder woman come up to
me asking where my red mark is (the Indian signature of a married woman) when I
say I am not married they often look at me with a puzzled expression. I’ve
already made it past my prime for marriage in India, most Indian women are to
be wed somewhere around 18-22 years, if I was living here I would probably be
married with a child or two cooking every night for my family. Although I toy
with the idea of being a stay at home mom sometimes it seems so overwhelming in
India, it’s as if the women here stop moving all together and only take care of
their families, no work, and no outings to the gym, no anything.
The weirdest thing to see as an American is the marriage
system. The idea of marrying a complete stranger is interesting in its own way,
but the fact that some families will tell their daughter merely ten days in
advance of their wedding that she will even be getting married seems surreal to
me. Apparently this helps to decrease the amount of time in which a bride to be
will be upset over the marriage.
Woman all over India have started standing up for their
freedom and I think it should be interesting to see what will happen over the
next couple of years in the country. Things are slowly progressing, for example
woman who are educated often have a little bit more say in when they would like
to get married and are often allowed to wait until after their education has
been completed. One of the larger issues surrounding the freedom of women is
rape. Recently a law was passed allowing for consequences to be placed against
anyone who may rape a woman. This has been a large issue over the last couple
months arising from a brutal gang rape of an Indian woman on a bus last year.
However there are so many politics involved that the crime is still going
unpunished, almost every day I read about the rape of a girl in India, a lot of
them occur with only children, it is such an awful problem that has yet to be
fixed.
Although the woman here don’t have the freedom that they do
in America it is also interesting to see the way in which they live around
these obstacles. A new bride will accompany her groom to his family’s house
after their wedding, my initial thought was what a nightmare you just got
married to a complete stranger and now you have to try to impress your
mother-in-law for the next couple of months. But that idea isn’t carried as
much over here, from the sounds of it most mother-in-laws take their new
daughter-in-laws in as if it is their own daughter. I guess going through the
same passage in the past has created a bond between mother-in-law and
daughter-in-law. Because families live together (grandparents, parents, aunts
and uncles, sons, their wives and children) the women of the household seem to
create miniature networks. You often see them in the courtyards all working together
and talking amongst themselves, probably gossiping about the day’s news. While
the men go out into the field and work.
If anything, I think one of the most eye opening experiences
here has been the realization of how easy it is to be a woman in America. I
often think that women in America take this for granted and don’t realize how
difficult and limited the freedom of a women is in other countries. I hope that
freedom is granted to women across the country but with the mindset and
corruption of the country I don’t foresee it happening anytime soon.
