India must reads: Open Magazine

India's Open magazine offers a couple must reads this week in a special edition devoted to women's issues.  

Check out the disturbing and moving story of women forced to marry their rapists to save their family's "honor" — and turn the moneylosing prospect of a steep dowry into a financial windfall.  

 “I was sleeping upstairs deep in the night, two years ago,” says Zareena, in a voice with flattened affect, “when he came in through the window of my room, caught hold of my mouth, stuffed it with cloth, and raped me. Then he ran away, and I came down and told my mother what happened.”

“We filed an FIR (police case) the next day,” says Zareena’s mother. That’s when the story took an unusual course. After Newton was taken into judicial custody, his parents approached Zareena’s and offered to get the two married. Sitting in on the meeting were two members of Bhalo Manush (literally, Good Men), a select group of worthy locals such as schoolteachers and government servants, who are charged with preserving the honour of Jhilli and the 17 surrounding villages. The Good Men, along with the two sets of parents and the girl’s lawyer, agreed that it would be in everybody’s interest to get the rapist married to his victim. Newton would be spared five to eight years of incarceration, the girl would get married despite no longer being a virgin and her father wouldn’t need to scrape together a dowry, even though the boy was from a better educated family and had well-off relatives, including a schoolmaster brother-in-law, and an uncle who was, Zareena says reverentially, “a doctor in Kolkata”.

Then read how the pill has destroyed the health of women in rural Kerala, because strict rules to isolate women during their period have prompted them to abuse birth control medication to stop their monthly cycle altogether.  

Muthuvans, indigenous to Idukkii, are considered among the most backward of tribals. They live deep in forest areas, dependent on forest produce and agriculture for sustenance. Their literacy rate is poor; their children rarely go to school, as this means a jungle walk of 15 km at least to reach the closest such. “They are generally very conservative, highly adherent to customs and traditions,” observes Seema Bhaskar, state director of Mahila Samakhya, who has extensively studied the impact of contraception pill intake among tribal women, “They firmly believe that women are ‘impure’ during menstruation, making it compulsory for women to stay apart during their periods. If they don’t, it is believed that they will suffer the curse of a goddess.”

….

“We surveyed 84 hamlets in Adimali and Devikulam blocks. Of the 3,008 women we interviewed, 42 per cent of them disclosed that they’d been using Mala-D every day to [put off] their menses, while 62 per cent were pretty aware of its side effects.” Levels of infertility were also found to be quite high; nearly a third of those surveyed had only one or two children, and not because they wanted no more. Around 100 women did not have any children at all. The finding that particularly bothered Bhaskar was “that 88 per cent of women strictly believed in observing traditions related to menstruation”.