ABSTRACT
A number of years ago a friend and family acquaintance in Britain, who is actively engaged in cultural activism and Punjabi literary circles in Britain and in Punjab, had a baby girl. As is routinely done, I sent a congratulations card to him and his wife for the new arrival. At that point, having one daughter myself (my second daughter had not yet been born), I felt inspired to offer more than the usual generic card of congratulations. Without knowing anything about their feelings, sensibilities or circumstances, I made a card with a small personalized poem inside it about how fortunate they were to have been blessed with a little girl who would bring them security, good fortune and joy, despite what society around them might be saying. I suppose I was subconsciously trying to subvert what I saw as a mundane practice of ready-made cards with generic messages sent so commonly upon practically every lifecycle moment, which, I believe, fail to capture the complex meanings and specific dynamics of those moments. In sending the card I was also, of course, conveying my solidarity as a woman, daughter and a mother to the newborn daughter and my friend's wife, but significantly routed through him, a man who I thought would welcome such a message of connection and social consciousness. A few days later, I received a telephone call from this friend, who said that the card had made him cry and feel shame at his own feelings of disappointment that he had been feeling about having a daughter instead of a son. His expression of thanks for my words during this time when he had received many contradictory messages from family and friends gave me two distinct feelings. One was that I felt I could, in my own small way, present a negation or objection to the magnitude of anti-daughter thoughts and expressions which had over the years infuriated me though also encouraged me to develop an inquisitive path. The second feeling I had was that small acts can be significant contributors to creating ripples of larger waves of change. There are thousands, if not more, small acts which occur each day in framing and reframing the son-preference question. I have witnessed many small acts and have reflected on some of these in this book, not least in the reflections of the girls' and women's voices in Chapter 6. The recognition of small acts, whether spoken, unspoken or even appearing silent or absent, is a move toward acknowledging different voices in the vast field of gender and son preference. It is not merely a matter of understanding the causes and consequences of son-preferential attitudes and outcomes, but of conceptualizing the modes of resistance and change that circulate. This book, in its own way, could be considered to be a small act of expressing my voice on a stage of many other voices and acts.
