India Dishonoured: Behind a Nation's War on Women Read Online Free PDF

rise of polyandrous marriages. In Hindi slang, a woman with multiple husbands is sometimes referred to as Draupadi or Panchali . Both names have mythological connotations: Draupadi was a key figure in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata , as daughter of the king of Panchal (hence her other name), and married five brothers from the same family – the Pandavas.
    A news report in The Times of India in 2005 5 ‘Draupadis bloom in rural Punjab’ Times of India, 2005 pointed to extraordinary social developments. Across many villages in the Boha area of Punjab, north India, families of up to seven brothers had married one woman, the news report pointed out dryly. Such arrangements had become increasingly common because farmers do not have to divide up their land among different families or heirs if all the sons marry one woman. “Now the small landholdings and skewed sex ratio have abetted the problem,” Gurdial Singh, a Punjabi writer and professor told The Times of India.
    These ‘Draupadis’ are rarely interviewed and asked how they ended up in such a situation and whether they consented. Hidden away from public view and scrutiny the practical impact of India’s dangerous sex-imbalance is playing out in villages across the country. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) even published a briefing paper 6 Multiple Husbands, Multiple Woes: Draupadi, the New Slavery, 2007 calling the rise of the ‘Draupadi ’ a new form of slavery. It pointed out that usually the entire village was complicit in the practice, making it difficult for the police to find and rescue these women. Sometimes they don’t report their predicament because they fear the police won’t take them seriously, which is a legitimate concern in far-flung villages.
    Writer and journalist Meera Subramanian, who also runs an online magazine Killing the Buddha , says that sexual violence has always been there, “unspoken and unacknowledged,” but the rise of women in the public sphere, along with the growing gender disparity, is “exacerbating cases of violence against women.”
    To put more bluntly, men who don’t get married are more likely to be poor and desperate, and have more of an incentive to break the law and get to women by force. This is unfortunately the nature of India’s social crisis – the impact will be felt not just in the form of increased crime but the country’s broader social and economic development.
     
    1 Figures from the 2011 Census
    2 Harvard Asia Pacific Review, 2005 http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hapr/winter07_gov/hudson.pdf
    3 Sex-Selective Abortion in India (2006)
    4 ‘Many more Panchalis even now, as wife swapping is on the rise’ EnMalyalam.com, 2011
    5 ‘Draupadis bloom in rural Punjab’ Times of India, 2005
    6 Multiple Husbands, Multiple Woes: Draupadi, the New Slavery, 2007

6.
    At the age of 44, Sampat Pal Devi’s life took an unexpected turn. She lived in a small village with her husband in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. One day, she heard a man beating his wife relentlessly. No one dared to intervene so, unable to bear her cries, she went over and pleaded with him to stop. Rather than being shamed into stopping he verbally abused Devi too and told her to mind her own business.
    “That day, I left quietly, but stewed over it all night. The next day, along with five other women, I went back with a stout stick, and beat him black and blue until he begged for mercy!” she later told reporters, with pride. News of her actions spread around the village like wildfire and numerous women came to her asking for help or to be part of her work. “So many wanted to join us that I decided to give ourselves a name and a uniform.”
    In February 2006 the ‘Gulabi Gang’ was born, with a strict dress code that required women to wear rose-pink ( gulabi ) sarees and blouses. They claim to have grown to over 5,000-strong, spread out over several cities across Uttar Pradesh, driven by word-of-mouth, and more