Title: Curtained lives
and stifled voices
Author: Pamela Philipose
Publication: The Indian
Express
Date: April 18, 2000
The purdah works both
ways. It locks lives in, it locks lives out. Muslimwomen are truly the
twice-forgotten, the minority within the minority. Whilestereotypes often
based on prejudice proliferate, there is very littleaccurate knowledge
about a community of women that number some 60 million.What are the specific
problems they face? How do they cope with them? Whatare the safeguards
provided by the law with regard to these women? Howeffectively are these
laws being implemented?
It is to seek answers
to these questions that the National Commission forWomen held special hearings
with Muslim women from all over the country. Incities like Tezpur and Thiruvanathapuram,
Chennai and Aligarh 13 venues inall meeting were held over a period of
two and a half years. A reportbased on these hearings, `Voice of the Voiceless',
was released a few daysago. While it is by no means a definitive account
on the status of Muslimwomen in the country, it provides valuable clues
to the reality of theselives.
The first aspect that
came through was the overwhelming poverty that thesewomen had to contend
with. The great majority of women who participated inthese hearings lived
in crowded mohallas and fetid bastis. This is nosurprise, seeing that income
levels among Muslims, as a community, was farlower than those in other
religious communities. According to the IndiaHuman Development Report 1999,
quoted in this document, the per capitaincome of Muslims in rural India
was around Rs 3,678 as compared to Rs 4,514for Hindus.
What was also equally
apparent in most human development surveys is therelatively lower participation
of Muslim women in the workforce (around 16per cent as compared to 31 per
cent for Hindu women). Literacy remainselusive for the great majority of
Muslim girl children, whose lives continueto be dominated, not by the 3
`R's but by the 3 `C's: choola, chaadar andchaardeewari (the stove, the
purdah and the four walls).
These already fragile
lives were made even more insecure by the regularoutbreaks of communal
violence. Women in Chennai and Ahmedabad narrated howthey were often the
targets of communal frenzy victimised by both therioters and the police.
Often, in their experience, police personnel bargedinto homes and took
away male members of the family without bothering toeven produce an arrest
warrant. And when the men were taken away, sources ofincome for the family
also quickly dried up.
Ultimately, it is the
women who bear the backlash of communal disturbances.For instance, women
in the Hyderabad slum of Hafiz Baba Nagar complained howthe observance
of purdah have become much stricter after the fall of BabriMasjid. Sociologists
have pointed out that women especially women ofminority communities were
invariably the symbolic repository of groupidentities. Therefore in moments
when group identities came under threat, itwas the women who were required
to live even more strictly according to thenorms laid down by the community
at large.
Then there was the persecution
from within the family. Listen to the voiceof Lateefa, speaking in Chennai
last December: ``I live in a kabristan(graveyard). My husband has left.
My children work.I received no mehr, nomaintenance. He has remarried.''
Or to that of Imdaad Bibi speaking at theAhmedabad hearing two months ago:
``It is difficult to have the courage totalk. But our men have led us to
a point when we must break the silence. Iam from Bareilly. I was given
talaq after three years of my marriage...''Interestingly, although dowry
was never a cultural practice in thecommunity, it has now become common
enough.
The `Voice of the Voiceless'
Report notes: ``Postal talaq and triple verbaltalaq was widespread...Dowry
is a growing menace; one of its saddest fallouts was the growing incidence
of teenage girls being married to old menfrom the Gulf in exchange for
lumpsum payment to their destitute families.''(Tomorrow: Does the future
hold change?)
