NOTE FROM JONAH: This is the continuation of a photo series from India. If you’re just joining us, here’s what you’ve missed:
- I’m not alone here
- People ‘like’ my diarrhea
- Dancing In(dia) the Streets
- Indian trains: Contemptibly cozy, crammed and claustrophobic
- Feeding a City Part II: From Macro to Micro
- Confusing realities of child labor
- Enlightined in Bodh Gaya बोधगया
- Kathmandu — You’ve met your match: Varanasi वाराणसी
- Varanasi वाराणसी: Full Photographic Spectrum
- From sea to sand: Welcome to Rajasthan
- Holy cow!
- Gender inequality in a Blue City
From the roof of Beijing to hutong screening drama, the blog now rewinds a couple weeks where I spent some time in perhpas the bluest city I’ve ever seen. Found in India’s Thar Desert, Jodhpur is Rajasthan’s second largest city. And while from afar, it looks like its built of legos — this historic city is home to many forts, temples, ancient palaces — as well as nearly 1 million people.
Its not to hard to see why this place is called the Blue City, however, its also known as the Sun City — and usually has sunny days year round. A thick stone and mud wall surrounds the old blue city of Jodhpur. This gives the city a very medieval feeling.
The light blue tint which covers the city makes the old city environment a little more happy than other places I visited in India. However, whether the baby blue tint has an actual correlation to happiness is another question. And from what I learned in my time in Rajasthan — it certainly doesn’t seem like it.
While I worked on multiple stories in this city, what I heard over and over again concerned the general state of woman’s rights in Rajasthan. While this is a global issue, I have not seen the obvious inequality so blatant as I did in India. While in Jodhpur, I got to see and hear first hand the reality Rajasthani woman.
In many communities, woman are not allowed out of their houses, allowed to earn money or given the chance at education. When they do earn money, it is very common for them to have no power over where the income goes. In many ways, many woman living in both urban and rural environments seemed to have little or no control over their fate.
From arranged marriages and an evil dowry system combined with the caste system — problems for woman can be deadly. I spent time in some woman’s empowerment centers around Jodhpur and learned a lot about this sad reality.
A reader of this blog, shared with me the thoughts of an Indian colleague. He is a young IAS commissioner who is very concerned with the future of his country. He offers us these thoughts:
“India has the 2nd largest Muslim population in the world; it’s GDP is growing at 8-9% per year; that it faces 3 extreme issues that will keep it from leading the world in spite of amazing intellectual talent: corruption, lack of discipline and casteism.”
While this reader refers to some general problems – the state of gender inequality in Rajasthan, combined with the already messy reality of India certainly made me think quite hard in this desert state and about these desert people.
Let’s say you come from the lowest caste and you are female. From birth, you have very little rights and you have no ability to climb to any status in society based on your caste. You wouldn’t even be allowed to eat near someone from a higher caste. Then within your caste, you are subject to complete male domination — and not just from your husband or father, but from any male including siblings or strangers. From India Parenting.com:
Even modern, well-educated families start saving up money for their daughter’s dowry as soon as she is born, so what can one expect from the uneducated masses, whose only form of education is tradition? When demands for dowry are not met, the bride is subject to torture, and often even killed. The reason many parents don’t want to have daughters is because of the dowry they will have to shell out at her marriage, and the stress they go through due to never ending demands from her in-laws.
It is illegal to check the gender of a fetus in Rajasthan specifically because so many female babies were being aborted or worse fates came to the carrying mothers. Dowry’s are now so high, that many females become indebted to their daughter’s husband’s family. While my main purpose in India was to examen fair trade (still coming), while on the story I learned that 70% of fair trade workers were female. This landed me in several scenarios where the two stories intersected.
While I working on the fair trade story I conducted a series of interviews with woman in Rajasthan and at Woman’s Empowerment Centers about gender inequality and how they see their reality. After I finish up the fair trade video, I’m going to put together another small video on this subject. Interestingly enough — fair trade and woman’s rights actually have a lot to do with each other.
More on this, coming soon …
3 Responses to “Gender inequality in a Blue City”
Peter Carney says:
An interesting look at a beautiful place with dark secrets. Look forward to seeing the video. China and India are often compared and looked at as the next world powers and driving the world’s economies. People may not always agree with the Chinese govt and its policies but the party did a great deal to help woman’s rights and gender equality in the 50s. I hope that some progress can be made in India but with all things it takes time.
India is probably at the top of my list of places to visit and Jodhpur would be definitely be on the itinerary. Stunning buildings and a great set of images.
Jonah says:
Since coming back from India, its been really hard to not compare the two sub continents. Beyond being massive in physical size and population, the GDP rate sticks out. However, in China I feel like I can see the “trickle down effect.” Most people seem to have basic housing structures and are not starving. Basic amenities and infrastructure can be seen. This is simply not the case in India. For me, since both of these countries were in a far worse place 50 to 60 years ago, its hard not to compare the government structure and its effect.
I talked about this with a couple people – and the question was posed, if the Chinese government was in place in India, would India now be more like China? The answer most people seemed to agree upon was “No. Definitely not.” The long term effects of the caste system and British colonialism have made the population so different that regardless of the government type, people would be struggling.
But as you mention, the female population has come along way in China. I went to dinner one night in India with a woman who had been working in the NGO sector in India for 30 years. She had a theory (not sure if its true or not … but its very interesting) that a countries development factor and economic advancement has a direct correlation to the education level of woman. Her theory essentially was – if you look at patterns over time, if you educate the female population, democracy, peace, economic stabilization will occur quicker.
So, if we look at China’s example of empowering woman from the 50’s till now, these seems to be true. Compare that to India, where it didn’t happen, and look at the counter result (or lack there of). Very interesting …
Peter Carney says:
Very interesting. Not sure if you have read the book “Three Cups of Tea” but that looks at school being built for young girls in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan and makes some similar points about countries development and education of woman. its obviously very difficult to say accurately what if this had happened in India would things be different. I think the best look at China and India was done in the book Paper Tiger which was very cleverly written in the form of a letter to Wen Jiabao and told the story about rural India and the two countries problems. On the same point you recently had a senior female CCP official calling for women in the country to stay at home and look after the house and any children rather than getting a job. That igniting some pretty strong comments from netizens.