ABSTRACT
‘Beta ho to taliyan, beti ho to galiyan’ 1 : This is the most common saying describing the difference between the sex of offspring encountered by a mother in Bundelkhand region in central India. A daughter is ‘parayo dhan’ (others’ property) or ‘ukkaro dhan’ (garbage wealth, in Rajasthan; it is … wealth and not waste, ironically called wealth). She is an inferior kind of wealth or an indirect form of wealth which is deployed to generate wealth; ukkaro is literally the heap of garbage which is collected in the cowshed. Though it has no use in the house, it is valuable when it is spread in the fields as biomanure for the crops. The garbage heap has a special value for the fertility of the household’s agricultural fields as is a daughter’s fertility for some family other than the natal one. These adjectives for a daughter imply that like a rubbish heap she grows up fairly quickly and has to be married off. Marriage and dowry frequently crop up in the conversation right after and subsequently following a daughter’s birth, but never upon the birth of a son, though marriage of sons is no less obligatory. A son lives in the family, while a daughter leaves the family upon marriage; in that sense she is viewed also as an avoidable burden raised for another family. People commonly view a daughter as a complex bundle comprising emotions, a responsibility to be cared for as someone else’s property, protected sexually and handed over in marriage to chosen ones for reproductive and fruitful family regeneration and establishment of affinal ties with other families. In this light, her birth signifies her future role of a wife and mother along with that of her parental family’s role as her custodians. The juxtaposition between her birth and her marriage is cryptically communicated in several ways. For instance, a mother after she delivers a daughter is often told that she may not wear the best dresses, the implication being she has to begin collecting items for the daughter’s trousseau rather than splurging on her own clothes. A newborn daughter’s wedding is foregrounded at once upon her birth, i.e., she is perceived as a daughter (and a female). Marriage in Indian society is one of the most important life-cycle rituals, and is of critical importance across all castes. It is the fountainhead of the family, a preponderant social institution of Indian society that enables it to replenish the human capital from generation to generation. In the Indian context, while replenishment of the human capital across generations takes place through the family-household, the onus of the marriage of children rests with the family elders, especially the parents. The most important and often reiterated social and religious duty of parents, especially that of a father, is to give away his virgin daughter as a gift in marriage to a suitable groom (‘kanya daan’). The word gift is a poor substitute for the word daan in the Indian context, as we shall see shortly. Finding a suitable groom for one’s daughter is a major preoccupation and is the subject of popular discourse not only in the family circle but also among a wider circle of relatives as well as acquaintances, with varying intensity, right from birth until a girl’s much relieving betrothal. It is strikingly different in the case of a son whose marriage is also the ‘father’s responsibility’ despite the fact that a son’s marriage is critical for the continuity of the lineage. A father, and by implication also the family’s seniors is described as having had a heavy burden removed from his shoulders, shortly after his daughter’s wedding is over.
