The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (33 page)

Sexual violence, meanwhile, reinforced some families’ motives for rejecting daughters in the first place. The investment of family honor in girls’ sexual purity, and the terror of losing it, long played a role in northern India’s tradition of infanticide. As Amarjit Singh explained, “The Afghan plunderers on horseback used to come to Punjab to plunder and rob this area. They picked up beautiful women.” People thought it was “better to kill the girls before they are picked up, raped, and taken away.” In the twenty-first century there are no more invading hordes from the north and west, but the constant vigilance required to keep girls safe from violation is one reason people say they don’t want them in the first place.

Declining sex ratios curtail female freedom in additional ways as well. Guilmoto speculated that the increased demand for women to serve as wives and mothers will cut off other opportunities. “The reduced number of women in these areas would have an interesting corollary, in that women’s roles as wife, daughter-in-law or mother would become more essential to society,” he wrote. “The enhancement of this traditional family role will, however, come at the expense of other life trajectories, such as remaining single or a career-oriented strategy. Indeed, if new incentives towards early marriage and childbearing are offered to women, this could lead to their temporary or permanent withdrawal from the workforce.”
²⁹
Evidence from societies with highly uneven sex ratios bear him out; in such places women have lower levels of literacy and labor force participation, and higher rates of suicide, than in countries where the numbers of men and women are more even.
³⁰

I
t’s not just women whose futures are imperiled. Countries with millions of alienated, unmarriageable men are likely to be both more internally insecure and externally belligerent. In their book
Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population,
political scientists Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer show how historically, in areas where men have outnumbered women due to widespread female infanticide, superfluous single men have played a violently destabilizing role. To channel their aggression governments have sometimes embarked on campaigns of expansion, threatening nearby countries.

“The evidence suggests that high-sex-ratio societies, especially those with unequal resource distribution and generalized resource scarcity, breed chronic violence and persistent social disorder and corruption,” they concluded. “Indeed, bare branches in high-sex-ratio societies contribute to this disruption on a larger scale than might be possible in societies with lower sex ratios.”
³¹

Hudson and den Boer adopt the term “bare branches” from nineteenth-century China, where surplus bachelors formed criminal gangs that eventually coalesced into rebel militias. Like India, China has a long history of female infanticide, practiced for many of the same reasons. Women’s status, thought to be relatively high during the Shang and Zhou dynasties (1766-1122 B.C. and 1122-221 B.C.) fell during the Qin and Han eras (221-206 B.C. and 206 B.C.-A.D. 220) as arranged marriages, female seclusion, and the cult of chastity became institutionalized.
³²
As in India, dowries portended financial ruin for parents of daughters, and a mania for virginity made the killing of girls seem less shameful than the threat of premarital sex. Hudson and den Boer quote a scholar from the time of the Song dynasty (960-1279) who claimed, “[T]o starve to death is a very minor matter, but to lose one’s chastity is a major matter.”
³³

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Hudson and den Boer write, the Huai-pei region of northeast China had a series of natural disasters. The resulting poverty led to an increase in female infanticide and a sex ratio of around 129 men for every 100 women. Polygamy and concubinage, they write, further decreased the supply of wives. Thus, many poor men were unable to settle down and achieve the status of respectable adults; instead, they built a kind of antisocial subculture based on crime and martial arts. Eventually, the small bands of bandits started to organize on a larger scale to try to and overthrow the Qing dynasty in the Nien Rebellion.

“The Nien Rebellion,” write Hudson and den Boer, “is an example of how exaggerated offspring sex selection can threaten the stability of entire regions, and even great empires.”
³⁴

B
eyond questions of demographics and geopolitics, India’s epidemic of sex-selective abortion—and, more generally, its pathological mania for sons—victimizes individual women. It is way too simple to claim that all women who abort female fetuses are forced into it, but despite the experiences of Puneet Bedi and his elite patients, for some coercion is very real.

“In Gujarat, women do not decide whether they will have male children or female children,” said Ila Pathak, secretary of the Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group, a feminist organization based in Gajarat’s largest city. “To be frank, she is never consulted whether she will go to bed with the man. So there is no freedom of decision.”

Prosperous Gujarat, birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru and cradle of India’s independence struggle, is famous in more recent years for right-wing Hindu pogroms against Muslims. While Punjab has agriculture, Gujarat has trade and industry; the Gujarati businessman is a national stereotype. Like elsewhere in India, its wealth is inverse to its tolerance for girls. The state’s sex ratio is 883 girls for every 1,000 boys. In Ahmedabad, it is 836. Pathak, a white-haired, soft-spoken, retired English professor, has studied violence against women in Gujarat extensively, spending several years combing through police records to produce a systematic analysis of domestic violence cases and of the circumstances surrounding women’s deaths. “In Gujarat, so many women die or commit suicide because they give birth to daughters,” she said. “Husbands torturing wives because of the birth of a daughter is not unique.”

A
t around 8:00 p.m. one evening in May 2007, two confused, terrified women, Sunita Rajput and her cowife, Kajal, appeared with their daughters at the Kasturba Gandhi Memorial Trust, a shelter for abused women on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. They could barely walk and had to be helped from the gate. Both were covered with welts from beatings with a belt. Sunita needed a blood transfusion. They had just escaped from their husband, Rajesh Rajput, seller of ayurvedic remedies, a sadist who had forced the women to have eight abortions between them because they hadn’t produced a boy.

When I met Sunita a year later she was in her late twenties. Her huge obsidian eyes, perfect almonds fringed by thick lashes, were still shadowed and often blank, and she often broke into tears as she spoke. She found it too painful to recount much of her past in detail, so Pratima Pandya, the shelter’s director, told her story instead.

Sunita, who has a seventh-grade education, had married Rajesh ten years earlier, and after a year her first daughter, Anjali, was born. A year and a half later there was another girl, Kashish. It is the sperm that determines whether a baby will be male or female, but Rajesh blamed his wife, and, furious at his failure to have a son, he would beat Sunita terribly. His mother blamed Sunita as well, and after the first two daughters, she and Rajesh arranged for ultrasound tests followed by abortions for each of Sunita’s next four pregnancies.

Each time she went, Sunita recalled with an angry little laugh, there was a sign outside announcing, as per the law, that the clinics did not perform sex-determination tests. “They should be stopped, they should not exist,” she said. It should have been obvious to the doctors, she said, that she was there under duress: “Of course no mother wants to kill her baby. Of course Rajesh took me there forcibly.”

The next two times Sunita was pregnant, Rajesh, assuming she was incapable of having sons, didn’t even take her for ultrasound—he just brought her for abortions. Meanwhile, flouting Hindu law, he married another woman, Kajal, hoping that she could give him a son. At first he installed Kajal in his brother’s house, not bringing her home until she was seven months pregnant. He treated her decently until she too gave birth to a girl. Rajesh didn’t go to the hospital to see the newborn, and when Kajal brought her home, he held her up by one leg and started hitting her. Together, the two women rushed at him, fighting to save the girl’s life. From then on he would torture the two of them together—beating them daily, driving nails into their fingers and ears, even forcing them to drink his urine. They weren’t allowed any contact with the outside world. Kajal would eventually have two abortions as well. As Rajesh’s persecution increased, Sunita stopped eating. They started to go mad.

The torments Sunita and Kajal faced, said Pandya, exceed anything she’s seen in her many years at the shelter. It is not unusual, though, for abuse to escalate following the birth of a girl. “Almost for twenty years I have been working in this field,” she said. “If a boy is born, [a woman’s] position in the family becomes consolidated. If a girl is born, she has to face the usual torture.”

Finally, when Sunita was pregnant for the ninth time, the two women made their escape together. Neither had any idea where to go—Kajal was an orphan and Sunita’s family was too poor to help her. Fleeing their village, they got in a rickshaw and asked to go to the nearest town. They were sobbing, and the rickshaw driver asked what was wrong. They told him their story. Fortunately, he’d heard of the Kasturba Gandhi Trust, and he brought them there.

In addition to medical treatment, Pandya called the police and got the women legal representation. Rajesh was arrested and jailed, and two clinics where Sunita had undergone ultrasounds had their registrations suspended. Meanwhile, the story hit the local media. A young woman named Usha, who had been raped and branded with hot metal by cousins of the mentally retarded man she’d been married to, read about it in
Chitralekha,
a popular magazine. It inspired her to run away, too; today she shares a room with Sunita and her children at the shelter. At least one other woman also fled to Kasturba Gandhi after seeing Sunita’s story.

Usha may have been moved by Sunita’s strength, but Sunita feels anything but powerful. Several months after arriving at the shelter she gave birth, in a cosmic irony, to a boy, whom she named Dharmik. In jail Rajesh read about Dharmik in the paper and began sending letters to the shelter, demanding that Sunita and his son be returned to him and promising that he would no longer torture her now that she’s succeeded in producing a male heir.

To Sunita’s horror, Rajesh was released from jail pending the outcome of the trial, which, given India’s glacial legal system, could take years. Hoping to pressure her, he beat up her father and brother. “Bring back Sunita to me,” he told them. “I want my son back.” As long as he’s free she lives in terror that he will try to take Dharmik. Compounding her shock, Kajal, restless at the shelter, returned to Rajesh, assuming the more legitimate role of his only wife. (According to Pandya, a momentarily solicitous Rajesh, hoping to stop Kajal from testifying against him, promised to put the house, now partly in Sunita’s name, in Kajal’s instead.) “They are in that home,” said Sunita, “and I am in an orphanage.”

Sunita never leaves Kasturba Gandhi except for medical and legal appointments. She’s learning handicrafts—embroidery and beading—but can’t imagine how she’ll ever support herself independently. The day we met she was sitting in one of the shelter’s airy cement common rooms, which is half open to the leafy compound outside. Other residents were sifting wheat for chapatis. Eyes downcast, she rocked Dharmik in a rustic cradle; her lovely daughters, saucer-eyed and solemn, were perched protectively beside her.

She had only one wish: She wanted Rajesh back in jail. Please, she implored, wasn’t there something I could do? “I don’t want anything but that Rajesh should be punished.” She started crying. “I don’t have an identity!” she said, repeating it over and over, “I don’t have an identity!” Her only hope was in the sleeping six-month-old. “When Dharmik grows up,” she said, “I will have someone to cling to.”

I
n the end, as long as women lack an identity without a husband or a son, sex-selective abortion will continue to deform India’s—and Asia’s—demographics. That’s why what is happening in India is more complicated than modernization gone awry. Rather, social modernization has proven unable to catch up with technological progress. Indian society is reforming, slowly and incrementally. The very fact that Sunita escaped her hellish home, said Pandya, is evidence of a small shift. Twenty years ago, “she would have committed suicide,” Pandya said. “That Sunita came here, it is a sign of seeking freedom.” Gradually, she insisted, women are moving beyond utter dependence on men. Due to increased education, she said, “twenty, twenty-five percent of women who have faced such torture are trying their best to get out, the way Sunita or Usha did.”

If you look hard you can see such faintly hopeful signs everywhere. Dutt, the editor of the
Sunday Indian
, comes from a family with an infanticidal history. Of her grandfather’s sisters just one survived; an elderly female member of her great-grandfather’s family put the others to sleep with overdoses of opium. Just two generations later she chose to remain single and to adopt a baby girl.

Some believe only a boy can light his parents’ funeral pyres; indeed, that’s said to be one of the many reasons Hindus are so desperate for sons. “Now girls are doing it,” said Dutt. “I lit my mother’s funeral pyre.” Dutt, a large woman with a sweet smile, was wearing a royal blue
salwar kameez
; as she spoke, her teenage daughter, wearing jeans, did homework at the kitchen table. They seem more a remarkable exception than the edge of an emerging trend, but they are there nonetheless, in one of the most hostile parts of the country. There has been “slow change,” said Dutt. “There has been a lot of change from the late nineteenth century until now. When I was born my mother distributed sweets. She was bored of having sons—I had six brothers. I opted to adopt a girl child. So there are exceptions like that, and slow change, but it is very, very rare.”