WHERE HUSBANDS GO BY DEGREES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 386, 15 November 1946, Page 6

WHERE HUSBANDS GO BY DEGREES

The Status of Women in Modern India —

Written for "The Listener" by

ARUNA YESHWANT

GUPTE

|_AST week we published a BBC talk on education in India as applied to boys. Now we deal with the distaff side of the subject. The writer of this article for "The Listener" (left) is a New Zealander by birth and a graduate of Canterbury University College. Her maiden name was Aroha M. Hardcastle. In 1936 she went to India.and the following year married into a Deccani Hindu family, being formally given Hindu nationality and taking the name of Aruna Yeshwant Gupte. She has recently returned to New Zealand. Her husband, Yeshwantrao Gupte (right) is medical and pathglogical photographer in Grant Medical College, Bombay.

"What I know is not what is usually shown to Europeans who have business, Government, or teaching interests in Modern India," she says in a covering letter with this article, which is based on personal experience.

HAVE recently been told about a Northern Indian, long domiciled and married in New Zealand, who had refused to allow his daughter to be sent to school and college believing that he was thereby adhering to the custom’ of his community in India. He is, actually, so far out of date in this idea, that he would find it very difficult to get his uneducated daughter married off, if. he took her back to his native land. In modern India, education is demanded as a prerequisite in making marriages, and it may ‘ake the place of a dowry especially if accomplishments are added on. . Just before I left Bombay my husband’s sister’s son, Madhukar Karnik, was married to his cousin Shalini, my husband’s brother’s daughter. That is the ene form of cousin-marriage which is permitted among the C.K.P. community of the Deccan. This marriage was arranged because the Karnik family did not want a stranger to come in, and because Shalini’s family did not want to give a dowry. They have five other younger girls, and a son, yet to be educated. Therefore, strange as it may seem to you, Shalini had to be pushed somehow up and over the B.A. hurdle, before’ she could suitably be given to Madhukar, who is himself an M.Sc., now teaching in a Ratnagiri boys’ college, or high school. There is another young woman in $ same family group who has alreasy passed B.A. She is to marry a man in Baroda State service. Therefore she is being taught photography, drawing, and painting, and music. Her prospective bridegroom will not ask for a dowry. He wants an intelligent wife, with accomplishments. Last -year our man-servant left us. Most of the men could get better money

from the miiltary families,.or from working in the near-by military and motor transport camps. So we had to engage a woman from the local village of SionKolvada. Shanta’s eldest girl came in to oblige one day when her mother had fever. She was useless in the house, and I had to tell her to let it go. She was useless, because she was a school-going girl, studying to matriculate and better herself and her family by marrying a motor-truck driver. Housework was beneath her! Every young educated woman in India is married, or has refused good offers in the hope of getting something very good indeed. When I visited Travancore State some years ago, I met a number of girls of Thampi families. These are Nair Brahmin people, very near the throne by birth, Many of them had been abroad, either before marriage, or with their husbands. .For dignity’s sake they maintain a kind of purdah; many of them had

taken the M.A. or M.Sc. degree, usually studying science, mathematics, history, and similiar modern-style subjects. Languages, except English, are not very popular. There are almost too many women doctors, who are what my husband calls "glorified dais." A dai is an Indian midwife. The good thing about them is that they marry, often with’ men doctors, and have children of their own. So also those who take the B.T. examination (Bachelor of Teaching): usually marry teachers and get families themselves. Literacy is Not Education I do not think I have ever seen a really illiterate Indian woman. Those who do not know the English alphabet know the script in which their own mother tongue is written. After all, there is no record of a time in which there were no written languages in India: and it is not a sign of ignorance, but of a high degree of culture, when education is oral-as in the Vedic tradition.

Remember that the Maori people, who did not write, had schools and colleges in which their learning was imparted by word of mouth and very scrupulously memorised, We people of ‘the Western European civilisation have laid altogether too much stress on "literacy" and’ not nearly enough on memorisation, and consequent absorption, of great literature. We have made far too many books: there is an enormous quantity of chaff to what appears to be only the original quantity of good sound grain. In fact, we have confused literacy, the ability to read and write, with education, the Bringing out of the full mental powers of the pupil. We have tended to reckon a certificate or a diploma, showing proficiency in a set source of study, as an absolute proof of ability to think and to work in many varie fields of human activity..And perhaps we have overdone this examination business. Certainly it looks rather odd to sée the girls of India solemnly studying to obtain certificates and diplomas, in order to get nice husbands. Perhaps it is just as odd of us to set our young people studying seriously, in order to get nice jobs. Perhaps we have all forgotten that

education should be a training for life, not for job-getting. Perhaps life is much more important than business. And perhaps I am hypercritical. So let it go! Everything Depends on Economics Modern India is full of schools, colleges, and universities. Girls and women get the education which their families can afford. Economically it is not possible to pay for high education for all family members equally, since all schooling must be paid for. That is the reason why the men get most money spent on them. They have to bring in money, in return for the outlay. They have also to marry and to educate their children. The women have to be married as ad-' vantageously as possible, with the least outlay, because they will each take this education into another family: while linking the husband’s people economically with the father’s house. Everything nowadays is connected with economics, in all countries. It may be that the Indian communal system is, even in these years of distortion, more practical than our present individualism.

Recipe for a "Happy" Marriage You get some very odd sidelights on moder educated Indian women. One of our Brahmin friends in Bombay, having the diplomas of the J.J. School of. Art, wished to be quite modern-style. So he married the young widow of a certain university professor. Far from being a success, the marriage caused endless trouble. This fashionable lass had no respect, or affection for anybody. She bore her husband a son. But she openly preferred her first husband’s friends to her second husband’s family (perhaps with reason) and made everybody very uncomfortable. Another Decanni Brahmin Boy openly derided this marriage, and took an orthodox wife, a ‘teacher. When I asked him’ how he was getting along, he said, "Oh, we have a’son. She and I never ‘have a’ harsh: word." But my husband informed me, mockingly, that the wife lives in Poona, teaching. Her widowed aunt minds the child, and she graciously consents to keep her Bombay husband company, occasionally on a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) . week-end, or during 1 the holidays! Recipe for a happy marriage with an educated wife! Money rules nowadays.. The consequences are that the sons and daughters of the millowners and millionaire industrialists have crowded into the universities, since their parents can afford to pay the best private teachers. They are therefore usurping the places in the professions which the Brahmin-class families can attain to only’ by real ability plus very heavy sacrifices to scrape up the money needed for fees. Be pretty sure that a shabby dress, without ornaments, on a school-going girl, indicates a Brahmini,. whose family is eating less so that she may study more; she will become .a teacher or a doctor, and marry advantageously. And that will improve the chances of her younger brothers and sisters. Rich dress, and a social college life, followed by examination successes and further study abroad does not indicate outstanding ability in India. It only

indicates that you have family members who are prepared to pay any amount to give you a lucrative place in’ medicine, law, or the university. This is not unknown, of course, even in Europe. Story of a Film Star As to marriage, modern Indian girls have no objection to marrying men who have other wives and families, if there is anything to be gained by it. Since divorce is not in favour, plural marriages take place whenever the young man has money enough to be doubly attractive: So, plural marriages take place mainly in circles where Big Business, or the Cinema, keeps the wheels turning. I knew a sweet little girl, aged about 19, who was earning plenty of money as a cinema star. She has a very well-trained voice, is fair of complexion, with delicate features and diminutive stature. All she earned was spent on the education of her numerous older and younger brothers and sisters. So she decided, at 17, to

marry the son of a certain very wealthy Guzerati cinema producer. I believe she began by bearing him a baby girl. Then she went on, for two or three years, fighting every step of the way against both families. This year, just three months before I felt Bombay, Vasanti got her way, her marriage, and her man. She has a private fortune for herself and her three-year-old. A new baby will shortly appear. Her husband thinks she is a very beautiful woman. She knows she is independent — neither her own father nor his father can do anything about it. The fact that her husband has his first wife and family living in another large flat in the same street-this’ just does not trouble her at all. He is on good terms with the first, but he adores the second. All this is the reward: of patience and perseverance. And she looks like a delicate child! You may take it for granted that in many countries nowadays the female of: the species is still more deadly than the male.