Rehmat Bibi is a forty year
old lady who recently presented with symptoms of depression. She has been
married for over twenty years and her husband now plans to get remarried.
Her fault: she has borne him three daughters and no son. He, now, desperately
wants a son and believes, and his parents believe too, that a second wife
will most certainly produce one for him. A relationship of twenty years
with all the emotional investment that Rehmat Bibi has made in it
over the years is soon going to end. Her daughters, who are now grown up,
can sense the tension at home. When they see their mother crying they hold
themselves responsible for her misery. Is it a crime to be a daughter?
Fazilat is another lady showing
symptoms of anxiety. She was married at the age of twelve to a man no less
then forty years her senior in age. This was because her father died when
she was still a child and the mother faced with the burden of other children
could not afford her upbringing. She ultimately found a solution by marrying
her daughter to a man old enough to be her grandfather.
The above are true case stories. Only
the names have been changed. There are numerous other tragic experiences
that patients relate every day, point towards the misery that women suffer
in our society. Most suffer silently accepting it as a part of their destiny,
others unable to cope, break down after a period resulting in physical
and psychiatric symptoms which are too frequently misinterpreted by the
family as being the result of possession by the evil spirits. They are
then taken to various quacks and faith healers who further confirm this
belief. The type of unimaginable tortures that the poor souls are then
subjected to in the name of ‘treatment’ is altogether another sad story.
We all rejoice at the birth of a son
whereas the birth of a daughter, especially the second one and almost always
the third one, is considered an unbearable tragedy. The family mourns the
loss of the expected son that did not arrive and if that was not sad enough
they also mourn the arrival of an unwanted daughter who places heavy burdens
on them. She happens to be, sadly, a useless ‘investment’ in our society.
We must admit that we parents are basically very insecure and selfish.
We welcome the birth of a son because in our later years we can make use
of him as a crutch to provide us support and security. We happily invest
in his education and upbringing because we can count on him to provide
for us in our old age and look after us when we are sick. This, of course,
does not apply to a daughter in our culture. She is sooner or later, going
to be married leaving her parents to become part of another family. Right
from early life she is constantly brainwashed about being in a ‘parayah
ghar’ and a burden on the family. On the day of marriage, she is repeatedly
reminded and warned in different ways that under all circumstances she
has to put up with her in-laws and that it is only her dead body that should
ever leave their house for good. In this manner, the honour of the family
is considered upheld.
The rules whereby marriages are arranged
and conducted in our society are, to say the least, preposterous. We witness
these everyday, and have done so for decades, but somehow seem little perturbed
by them. What would we opine about a marriage custom in a society where
the groom’s family and friends, running into hundreds, arrive at the bride’s
place on the wedding day, have a sumptuous feast at the expense of the
bride’s family and later return taking with them almost everything; the
bride, a lavish dowry and of course the groom. The girls’ family is left
with little more than prayers. Yet this is precisely what we observe and
practice in our society and despite all our education and ‘enlightenment’
fail to perceive the irrationality involved in the whole affair.
For many daughters, moving in to live
with their in-laws is the start of a never-ending nightmare. The issue
is not who is more at fault, the girl or the in-laws. The problem lies
with the setup. The newly wed girl, who till recently, was doted on by
her parents, is suddenly, overnight, thrown at the deep end. She is now
instantaneously expected to assume roles and responsibilities, which she
has never experienced before. Not only that she is also expected to perform
impeccably with no room to make mistakes. She is under a constant psychological
surveillance by the in laws who would leave no stone unturned to detect
even the slightest fault and make a mount Everest of it. Jealousy, unrealistic
expectations, intolerance, rigidity, and many other factors ultimately
lead to a constant power struggle. In most cases, the girl realizing that
she has little choice is forced to give in. The choice is not hard to make.
Being financially and socially dependent on her husband’s family, (almost
abandoned by her own) and regrettably having little personal identity to
permit survival in this cultural, she settles down to a life of perpetual
suffering. She then pins all her hopes on her children, particularly the
sons. She eagerly awaits the day when they’ll get married, as if magically,
this would bring and end to all the misery that she has been going through
from the day of her own marriage. The new daughter-in-law however becomes
another scapegoat; a fresh arrival to face the wrath arising from the mother-in-law’s
own unfulfilled emotional needs and in this way the whole cycle starts
again.
Can this pathetic system change? I
believe it can, but not by any act of parliament. We have enough of these
already but with little results.
The first step and I feel the most
important one is to bring about a change in the way we think and believe.
To give one example, let us try to look for security in other support systems
apart from desperately searching for it in the birth of a son. Everywhere
we hear so much talk about faith, and trust in God but deep down, especially
when getting in touch with our real selves, we discover that we have more
faith in our male offspring than God Almighty. In other words, we need
to confront our own internal insecurities. Once we succeed in changing
our collective thinking, the social system we live in will slowly start
changing as well. We must stop blaming the ‘system’ or ‘society’ for all
the ills that face us including the way we treat our daughters. This ‘system’
has not descended upon us from the heavens. It is a product of our faulty
attitudes and patterns of distorted thinking. The tragedy is that we have
allowed ourselves to become psychological slaves to something that we have
created ourselves.
Another thing that requires urgent
attention involves laws relating to women. A lot has been said and written
about this. I sometimes wonder if the resistance to change may be attributed
to the fact that the majority of our representatives dealing with the process
are males. When it comes to laws involving the rights of women they do
so with the image of a wife in their minds and therefore have a strong
tendency towards not being too generous in granting them much liberty and
freedom. If men when dealing with laws pertaining to women could visualize
their own daughters, sisters and mothers being affected by it, I am sure
the outcome would be very different, particularly in the area of marriage
and divorce.
We also need to review the traditional
interpretation of our religious commandments. Any one who cares to study
the Qur’an in a rational and objective approach would soon discover
that there is a wide gap between the kind of true Islam as conveyed by
the Qur’an and the ‘traditional’ Islam handed down to us from the
pulpit. The latter is unfortunately the ‘second hand religion’ fully contaminated
by prejudices, narrow thinking and the limited knowledge of those who have
been left to interpret it for us. Most of them originate from the underprivileged
and deprived section of society where a woman especially a daughter or
a wife enjoys little respect and status. The socio-cultural background
very much influences the way they evaluate and interpret the status and
rights of women in our religion. Sadly, such biased and corrupted views
are thrust rather totally blind, in religious matters to confront such
views. It is ultimately the victims, our daughters, who suffer, being left
at the mercy of fate or ‘kismet’ or ‘Nasib’. I know of so
many mothers who ever since their first daughter’s birth, spent their lives
praying and hoping for the unrelenting ‘nasibs’ to be favourable.
Ours is a sick society. The cure has
to come from within. We are all, in one way or another, at one level or
another, responsible for this. Particularly the so-called ‘decent majority’
who ‘prefer’ to remain silent are contributing in a major way in perpetuating
this sickness. Our apathy and our tendency to blame others for all the
ills that face us shift control. In this way, we succeed in obtaining psychological
relief as the burden and responsibility of bringing about a change has
been conveniently shifted elsewhere.
It is better to light one small
candle than to curse the darkness. We need to realize that until we
stop ceaselessly blaming others and instead take on the responsibility
to bringing about the required social change upon our own selves, the birth
of a daughter will continue to strike as a calamity in many homes, some
parents may reluctantly accept it, the others may not, but the pain will
be there all the same.
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