Women in this Telangana village stop reproducing only if it’s a boy

 

A recent story in Deccan Chronicle details a reporter’s visit to the Polyanayak hamlet in Nalgonda in Telangana. The women here continue to deliver till they give birth to a male child. For them a woman is complete only if she gives birth to a male child.

 

That’s odd, the so-called definition of “complete” woman in the patriarchal society is that a woman needs to give birth to a child (girl/boy) to earn that status. Apparently, if you don’t produce a baby, you have something missing. The story mentioned here also recounts how a woman, now 72, had given birth to 18 girls but her wish for a son was fulfilled only by her nineteenth delivery when she was around 48.  There are more like her, another woman in this village has given birth to 13 children in her desire for a son.

 

In this hamlet here, most families spare their girl child, some die themselves because of health-related issues, while the rest await a fate similar to their mothers. Their preference for the male child however, stems from the usual reasons. A girl will grow up and go to another family, only a male child will look after them in their old age and also if you have a son, you are respected in society and then the chief reason – dowry.

 

 

I am sure if we look into our respective family trees, we will find this example replicated there, under the guise of having a full and happy family.

 

What is the worrying factor is that urban civilisation is just two hours away from this place and yet, there exists such a village with such practices. Won’t these women be going to any doctor to get their deliveries done? Is there no one to make them understand how their rigid and faulty thinking is causing irreparable harm to the women’s bodies, the future of the hamlet and the huge gender inequality gap they are contributing to?

 

It’s hard to fault villagers for doing this, when women in the city also still do it. In August 2016, there was this incident where a Jaipur woman obsessed with having a son, allegedly stabbed her baby girl 17 times. She apparently had done a lot of pujas to have a boy but the gods had blessed her with a girl. Angered she took this tragic step.

 

 

What people don’t realise is that every time a male child is preferred over a girl, it sets off a chain reaction. When girls are killed in the womb, it creates a dearth of women in the population and as a result the available numbers are subject to forced marriages and remarriages as seen in villages in the North.  Repeated trafficking, rape and abuse are some of the other evils that are perpetrated as result of this.

 

Girl children who are allowed to live, in some cases, are no better off than dead, food, health and even safety becomes a problem for them. They are abused by own family members, treated as servants and then sometimes even sold off in case the family cannot afford a decent bridegroom. If the girl is an economic burden, some people convert that into profit by selling them. Child marriages happen, wherein people from villages in Rajasthan, Haryana and more come to places where the gender gap is not so high, why? Because there is no woman or girl in their villages to carry the generation on. They depend on borrowed girls.