RAKSHA KUMAR
I entered a 24-year-old woman's house in Kacholia village of Rajasthan’s Tonk one warm morning earlier this year. Upon opening the door, she immediately pulled the corner of her pallu on her head and invited me in with a wide smile. She was excited to see me and eager to share her story. She offered me a chair and promptly sat on the floor close to my feet. No amount of protests would change the seating arrangement.
"I cannot sit on the same level as you," she said.
"Why?"
"For one, you are older. And then, you also seem to be from oonchi jaati," she said, meaning an upper caste. And then, as if to confirm, she asked, "Hai na?" (Are you not?)
I soon learnt that she was not to sit on a chair in the presence of a man or someone from an upper caste. She never thought to question the practice.
Over the past decade, as I reported from over 100 districts across the country, I observed that Indian women were becoming increasingly confident in their skin. Even in remote corners of the country, women were reclaiming their agency, asserting their desires, and becoming aware of their rights. Each one pushed the boundaries bit by bit, as much as they could—as much as they thought they could.
When I looked at the appalling figures on child marriage in India, I thought it was just the story that would capture this churning.
India has the largest number of child brides in the world.
Child marriages are arranged by families either because of poverty, patriarchal notions such as a fear of the girl choosing her partner or for access to cheap household labour.
In case minor women were married off by force, the law gives them the option to annul their marriages. And yet, the complex patriarchal societal structures keep them from exercising that right. Often, no amount of education, employment or assertion of their agency helps.
The woman I met in Tonk was preparing to join the state’s police force. When I visited her, she had chosen her life partner at 16 and lived with him. They would marry as soon as she got a divorce from the man her parents had married her off to when she was four years old.
It is a radical step for a woman to choose her life partner. Living with him is even more radical, especially in her ancestral village, where everyone knows her family. She was training to be a policewoman. And yet, she insisted that I sit on the chair because of what she presumed my caste to be. After a few minutes, her live-in partner entered the room, dragged out another chair, and plopped himself on it while offering me tea, which the woman had made.
Her story does not appear in my feature on why most child marriages are not annulled in India because her partner has POCSO cases against him filed by her family. However, my investigation includes many other examples of young women fighting for their rightful place in society today as they see fit. Each woman draws her boundary and pushes it when she needs to.
Read Raksha Kumar’s full story here.
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