Dogs, Migrants, and Daughters-in-Law
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 11 Oct 2010
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service
Of course it is plain wrong to make sweeping statements about a country, people or culture. But personal experience also counts for something, or used to till political correctness prohibited the errant voice. Anyway, here goes: In my experience of seventy years, daughters-in-law in India get a shabby deal. Suffering, misunderstanding, lack of trust and affection are all everyday features in their lives. Many get badly abused for not bringing in enough dowry, or are constantly threatened for being not well read, or too well read, for being backward or being modern, for being ugly or for being too pretty – the list is endless. Physical torture is also added to routine mental torture. Too many are killed so that their husbands can marry richer women, or just because everyone in the in-laws’ house is tired of them. This degradation of women has existed at least since colonial times. The Indian nationalist movement in the 19th century started by focusing on social reform, particularly of the status of women. Katherine Mayo trenchantly criticized the treatment of Indian women a hundred years ago, and though Mahatma Gandhi called her book ‘a gutter inspector’s report,’ he was in the forefront of the movement for women’s emancipation. It is because much cruelty is so common against women that India has produced in the last few decades a home-grown, strong and practical women’s movement.
It is not that Indian men are especially cruel. Most are very kind to their own daughters. Several explanations can be attempted why such contradictions exist in a society which is still among the most tolerant in the world. It is tiresome and baffling to dive into political-economy or theology in search of answers. What I have personally noticed is that there is an evident distrust of the bride, this stranger who has walked into a houseful of established relationships, where everyone knows a lot about everyone else, their good points and bad, and over time have mutually agreed to adjust to everyone else. But an unknown young woman who has suddenly come into their midst is unsettling, they all begin by expecting this young woman to be a paragon of all virtues, find disappointment too quickly, are harsh to the stranger, and get defiance, or rejection, or withdrawal in some way or other, and soon relationships degenerate into coldness, and if the psycho-social condition permits, all this can quickly lead to studied ill-treatment, or worse.
These brides are young women, many little more than girls, they do not get married and come to their in-laws house with an attitude. They are hoping to please, to find a new home, love, happiness, a position in life of acceptance, reward, respect. Then why do things go wrong? The householders subject the brides to an inquisitorial social examination which the girls cannot pass, and with every little failure, the examinations get tougher, repeated failures become certain, with increasing mutual distrust and dislike culminating in unlived life, even if the tragedy is no more than unremarkable cold distanced life.
The personal is political, private dramas are but miniatures of larger public tragedies. President Sarkozy seeks a final solution of the Roma problem. Hitler did include them within his larger project of ethnic cleansing, and did manage to gain a wider degree of support than the French president has secured today. But the key question is, why do such projects get any public support at all? Why are immigrants suspected, treated with intolerance, and then ejected or annihilated without mercy? The migrants whenever they went to a new land, whether they were Jews in Christendom, or the Roma in Europe, or Armenians in Turkey, or Mexicans in the USA, or Bangladeshis in present-day India, did not undertake hazardous wrenching journeys with an attitude. They did not go to a new land to give trouble – they migrated because of poverty at home, human rights abuses, climate change, for whatever reason they left home, they went into a new land, their promised land, full of hope, wishing to please, to be accepted, and later perhaps even to be honoured, or if nothing else to be given a little place at someone else’s hearth. Of course they were different from their new hosts, they carried with them their own knowledge of things, their history, their culture, as precious gifts, for they had little else to give. And was all this human knowledge as nothing compared to what their hosts had? Could human culture from another part of the world ever be treated as dangerous? Should their human carriers then be segregated into ghettoes, given low wages, and then be coldly tolerated under threat of expulsion or worse? It seems astonishing that all this has been the common lot of immigrants anywhere, and at any time.
And now Germans are discovering after a very long time that the Muslim gastarbeiter has not assimilated into German society. Is this a failure of multiculturism? As this lazy concept is practiced today it means no more than letting low-paid workers remain in poor neighbourhoods, while permitting them to hang onto remnants of their heritage, religious or cultural. They did not travel to a new land to remain the same; they traveled so that they could lead a different life, not just as consumers of commodities, but as socially integrated persons. Immigrants crave for affectionate creative engagement with host communities at the beginning, till bitter experience turns them into lonely communities. Anyone who travels knows how lonely it feels even for the few days one is there, if there can be no warm contact with the locals – a frequent criticism of people who visited soviet countries some decades ago. In the few years I spent in Switzerland, I was very lonely because I couldn’t get to know the Swiss, but even then I really did not blame them for I was identified with the idle international freebooters who were there only for the money.
Many families keep dogs as pets. For several thousand years we have managed to tear apart the social life of canines, and bring every new-born puppy into the fold of a human family. Theological societies did not credit dogs with souls. After the Enlightenment, scientific societies have denied that they have minds. Most dogs are trained to obey their masters implicitly, and some dogs are put down for failing to do so. And yet, as any animal whisperer knows, a little puppy only wants to please, to belong, to love and be loved. That little life at a man’s feet wants companionship, wants the man to share its own joy at chasing a ball.
The relationship between life and life is very simple. Pets, brides, migrants break into the dull routine of our lives, routines that are the harbinger of death, and the newcomers bring promise of spring after winter, a new beginning, unsettling to old ways, but with all the bursting glory of a better future. And for all the promise they bring, they require us to spend time with them, teaching a puppy and learning about nature from it, showing migrants our ways, and learning better from them, welcoming the bride, and becoming young again with her.
To be cold to the new is plain wrong. To be socially not inclusive is a crime. To not return love when offered love is a crime against God. It is not the EU which should act against the French government for the expulsion of the Roma, but it is the Church which should threaten excommunication.
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Vithal Rajan, Ph.D.[L.S.E.], worked as a mediator for the church in Belfast; as faculty at The School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as Executive Director, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. He has founded several Indian NGOs. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 11 Oct 2010.
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