Indian women shun tradition and embrace new freedoms

Indian women shun tradition and embrace new freedoms
Somini Sengupta: Bangalore, India	Published:Jan 11, 2009

Not long ago, an Indian woman, even a working Indian woman, would almost always have moved from her parents' house to her husband's.

Perhaps her only freedom would be during college, when she might live on campus or take a room for a year or two at what is known here as the working women's hostel.

That trajectory has begun to loosen, as a surging economy creates new jobs, prompts young professionals to leave home and live on their own and slowly, perhaps unwittingly, nudges a traditional society to accept new freedoms for women.

The new openings have hardly rubbed away old restrictions. As they wrestle with new uncertainties and new choices, many young Indian women are embracing the changes tentatively, tinkering for the time being with the customs of the past.

The changes are sharpest in the lives of women who have found a footing in the new economy and who are for the most part middle-class, college-educated professionals exploring jobs that simply did not exist a generation ago.

High-technology workers and fashion designers, aerobics instructors and radio DJs, these women in their 20s are living indepen- dently for the first time, far from their families. Many are deferring marriage for a year or two, maybe more, while they make money and live lives that most of their mothers could not have dreamed.

Bangalore, also known as Bengaluru, the capital of India's technology and back-office business, is the centre of these changes. Once a quiet, leafy city favored by retirees, more than half of its 4.3 million residents are under the age of 30, according to the 2001 census.

Posters advertise rooms for men and women living solo. Coffee bars are packed in the evenings. Vegetable vendors ply their wares late into the night.

So when Shubha Khaddar, 23, trudges home from work and stops to pick up something for dinner, she rarely finds herself alone.

"You'll find 10 other girls like you coming back with sabji (vegetables)," Khaddar said.

As she left one recent morning for the public relations firm where she works, her parting words to Pallavi Maddala, 23, her roommate and a software engineer, were to bring back some idlis, or steamed rice cakes, for dinner. She would be home late. Besides, idlis would be a low-fat option.

Khaddar had been on a diet, partly egged on by her mother, who is trying to improve her marriage prospects from across the country, in New Delhi. On the refrigerator, she had pasted a snarky yellow note to her- self: "Lose Weight, You Fat Pig".

In November, Khaddar gave notice at work, because she could no longer stand the job. She said she was stressed out at the prospect of finding nothing in Bangalore and having to return to life with her parents in New Delhi. "I don't think I'm prepared to go home," she said.

Both women were trying to stave off their mothers' intervention in the marriage department, though not entirely.

Khaddar had been seeing someone but had yet to tell her parents, and had not completely closed the door on her mother's plans.

Maddala, for her part, welcomed the pros- pect of having a husband chosen for her but not now, and not the overseas Indians for whom her mother has an affinity.

Not long ago, Maddala showed Khaddar a photograph of one such prospect, a young man in the United States. "The picture freak- ed me out," Khaddar recalled this morning, while getting herself ready for work.

"I said, 'Dude, you're not getting married to that.'"

Maddala laughed at the memory. She agreed that he was too big and tall for her tastes. A couple of months later, another marriage prospect fell through because the young man's family demanded a hefty dowry that gave Maddala pause.

More than anything, Maddala said, she wanted to savour her independence a bit longer.

In this deeply traditional society, accustomed to absorbing influences of all kinds over the centuries, change comes slowly, if at all. And so the new economy, and the new lifestyle it has engendered, has hardly wiped away the old values, particularly with res- pect to marriage.

Public opinion polls in recent years routinely have revealed that young people, men and women, still cling to ideas of virginity before marriage, and fairly large numbers say they prefer to marry within their own caste and community.

The great big Indian wedding is bigger than ever. Dowry — and deaths at the hands of in-laws who consider their dowries to be inadequate — prevails.

Yet, for women like these, freedom has brought new choices, new problems and, as Khaddar puts it, new guilt.

Should she stay here and enjoy her independence for as long as she can, she sometimes asks herself. Or should she return home to Delhi, find a job, and let her parents to fix a match with a young man from a Brahmin family like her own?

She is in transition, she said, between being "completely independent" and "a homely chick", meaning, in Indian English, a life of domesticity.

Khaddar knows what her parents know, and it makes her nervous: that finding a match will be difficult for a woman like her, a student of philosophy, who thinks for herself, lives apart from her parents and likes classic rock.

A bigger fear, she confesses, is not being married at all. "I'm torn about this whole independence thing," Khaddar said.

Indian women are marrying later, though still relatively young compared with the West. The mean age of marriage inched to 18.3 in 2001 from 17.7 years in 1991, according to the census, and as late as 22.6 years for the college-educated.

Nearly a third of the work force is female, with rural women employed mostly in agriculture and urban women in services. Although their ranks are minuscule at the top rungs of corporate India, it is common to see women in jobs that either did not exist a generation ago, or in jobs that would rarely be filled by women, whether gas station attendants or cafe baristas, magazine edi- tors or software programmers.

Every now and then, a high-profile crime against a woman prompts new hand-wringing and outcry over women working at night. But the young working woman living on her own is firmly part of the urban mainstream.

Source :
http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/News/Article.aspx?id=915520