HIMATNAGAR (India): Like many women in parts of India, Savita Chaudhry was a child bride, married at the age of 3 to a boy two years her senior, then sent home to grow up. In keeping with the customs of their agrarian caste, the two were expected to move in together after reaching adulthood.
No one anticipated that Chaudhry, 22, would decide to challenge the system. Last year, the willowy young woman with the flashing dark eyes refused the entreaties of her “husband” and his family to join them in their village, several hundred kilometres from this small city in western India where she runs the family grocery shop. She is paying a steep price.
Not only does Chaudhry accuse her would-be in-laws of demanding money in exchange for her freedom, but the leaders of her caste — a powerful informal council known as a caste panchayat — have also threatened Chaudhry and her family with the ultimate sanction of excommunication, or ejection from the caste. Such an outcome would rob the family of its social standing and damage the marriage prospects of Chaudhry’s 18-year-old brother, among other things. “If they can’t honour the commitment, society will ostracize them,” said Bhawar Lal, a member of the council, which claims jurisdiction in the case.
The young woman’s dilemma shows the enduring power of India’s caste system — the rigid social hierarchy that is integral to the Hindu faith — even in the face of modernizing forces such as globalization and rapid economic growth. In particular, it underscores the central role of the caste panchayats, which operate in much of rural India as a kind of parallel justice system, especially on family matters such as marriage and inheritance.
Typically composed of five men, these unelected councils have for centuries served as the main arbiters of life in villages across rural India. In the decades since independence from Britain in 1947, the central government has sought to replace them with a more representative system of elected village bodies called gram panchayats. The new system seeks to counter discrimination by reserving some seats for women and other vulnerable groups, such as the casteless Indians known as untouchables.
Combined with urbanization and improved education, such efforts have eroded the standing of traditional councils in some areas and help explain Savita Chaudhry’s willingness to challenge an edict that once would have been heeded without question. Still, breaking the stranglehold of the traditional councils on rural life is no easy task.
One of three children, Savita Chaudhry grew up in Himatnagar, a sleepy industrial city of about 100,000 people in the western state of Gujarat, about 460 kilometres southwest of New Delhi. She studied through the ninth grade, then joined her father in the family’s grocery shop, which occupies a front room of their small brick house on a dusty street choked with motor scooters and ambling livestock. She took over the business after her father’s death in March. The Chaudhrys belong to a farming caste from the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. Her parents were born in Rajasthan and moved here as a young couple.
Savita Chaudhry’s predicament dates to her early childhood, when one of her grandfathers in Rajasthan approached a neighbour and proposed, “‘Let’s get your grandson married to my granddaughter,”’ she said indignantly. Her grandfather then sealed the bargain by presenting the boy’s family with a coconut. Chaudhry and her parents then travelled to her father’s village in Rajasthan, where she was married to 5-year-old Pappu.
In symbolic consummation of the union, the bewildered 3-year-old spent the night at the groom’s house, then returned with her parents to Himatnagar. “I don’t consider myself married,” said Chaudhry, who has no memory of the ceremony. “I was 3 years old. It was more like a game than a marriage.” Nevertheless, the families remained in loose touch; two years ago, Chaudhry decided that she wanted to get to know the man to whom she had been pledged as a child. For the first time in eight years, she said, the couple got together at the home of her uncle in the southern city of Bangalore, where Pappu worked in a sari shop. But the reunion did not go well.
“These things are not good for the community,” explained Lal, 38, the member of the Himatnagar panchayat and a labour foreman. “They have to understand it’s not so easy to break off a relationship.” But Savita Chaudhry said she was determined to do just that. —Dawn/The Washington Post News Service
