Kadod, I'm sorry to say, is a working model of much of what's terribly wrong with the situation that most Indian women are subject to. Daily, I meet and work alongside women who are nightly beaten by their husbands. Even though I was born and raised in a society that vehemently disdains domestic violence against women, I am crushed less by moral disgust than by my sheer powerlessness to help these women help themselves. There are no women's shelters here. In fact, so far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any kind of support network in place for abused women living outside the city. Here, even a battered woman's place is in her home, so friends are hardly in a position to offer her a safe place lest they imperil themselves or their families. This is to say nothing of law enforcement agencies (dominated, incidentally, by men) who tend to shrug off domestic abuse as a fact of nature.
I don't want to mislead you. I've met plenty of men and women here who don't appear to be living in physically violent or otherwise hostile domestic situations. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for a large majority of people I've met here. But the prevailing attitude here in the village is that what goes on in other people's homes is other people's business. When good people do nothing in the face of injustice, silence becomes consent.
Grim as the situation painted above must seem, it's hardly aberrant. From what I can gather, it's much the same in any of India's rural villages (which house more than 80% of her 1.2 billion people). According to present projections from the United Nations, 2 in 3 married Indian women are abused by their husbands. That means that there are roughly 100 million more battered wives in India than there are people in the United States. It ought to go without mentioning, but especially for a country widely presumed to lead the world's power politics over the course of the next century, that's a jarring -- and shameful -- figure.
Recently, Slate magazine ran an interesting piece about the Gulabi movement: a gang of female vigilantes out to avenge women who are beaten by their husbands. I think their story raises some fascinating issues concerning the roles of state and society in India; invokes larger dilemmas of means versus ends; and ultimately, points to the the challenge of figuring out how we can eliminate the worst injustices suffered by some of the most disenfranchised human beings on the planet. I invite you to read that article by following the link below. I'm going to get to work putting together some of my own thoughts about the Gulabis for my next post. In the meantime, I'd welcome any and all of your comments and ideas.
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