Table Of ContentLOVED AND UNLOVED
The Girl Child in the Family
ch^ri^cj
— tJjuRdl
(And even the girl child should be nurtured
and educated with care)
Manusamhita
—
LOVED AND UNLOVED
The Girl Child in the Family
Jasodhara Bagchi, JabaGuha
and Piyali Sengupta
School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University
A
a
Loved and Unloved: The Girl Child in the Family
was first published in September 1997 by
Stree, 16 Southern Avenue, Calcutta 700 026
© 1997 by Stree
ISBN 81-85604-20-7
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any means without prior
permission from the publisher
Distributed by
Bhatkal Books International
Mumbai, Calcutta, Delhi, Pune
Typesetting and design by
LOGS, 6 Ram Hari Mistri Lane, Calcutta 700 013
and printed by Webimpressions (India) Pvt Ltd,
34/2 Beadon Street, Calcutta 700 006
Published by Mandira Sen for STREE, an imprint of
Bhatkal and Sen, 16 Southern Avenue, Calcutta 700 026
To thè girl child of thè future
CONTENTS
Preface vii
1. The Girl Child and the Family in Bengal:
The Historical Setting 3
2. The Endangered Sex: A Selected Survey
of Literature 22
3. The Sample 43
4. The Family Environment 58
5. The Girl Child: Some Statistics 87
6. The Girl Child: Profiles 122
7. Action Programmes 194
Conclusion 203
Survey Team 208
Index 209
PREFACE
Our purpose is to focus on the precarious existence of the girl
child in the family. She remains a drudge, is kept illiterate, fed
inadequately and married off early in order to maintain the
family’s status as well as to provide for its future. Fifty years of
independence have not been enough to guarantee the natural
claim to childhood for most of our girl children. The girl child is
caught in a complex social process which, in a sense, ‘naturalizes’
her deprivation. The book attempts to study her situation within
her family and is published with the hope that she will cease to
be the endangered sex and that her future will become secure.
Traditionally, the family has been viewed as a supportive and
protective institution, especially for girls. We have critically exam
ined such a deeply entrenched but grievously mistaken view.
Questions of gender-based discrimination within the family have
been addressed, and possible areas requiring intervention have
been discussed, revealing the retrogressive forces that operate,
within and outside the family, in restricting the opportunities and
choices available to the girl child (and hence to the woman). We
find that very little is known about these matters.
The first time the girl child received a special focus was the
decision by the SAARC countries to declare 1990 as the Year of
the Girl Child, thus drawing attention to the particular problems
she faced in this part of the world. In response to this declaration,
the Department of Women and Child Development, Ministry of
Human Resource Development, Government of India, sponsored
a national project on the Girl Child and the Family. The study was
carried out simultaneously by twenty-two of the UGC sponsored
centres of women’s studies located in different regions of India. It
was co-ordinated by a central co-ordination committee. The aim
was to make it possible to observe not only the special charac
teristics of the situation and problems of the girl child in each
separate area, but also to bring to our notice the common features
that emerged from the study, so as to provide an overall picture
of the condition of the girl child in our country. It was a survey-
based, collaborative, research-cum-action project which aimed at
generating comparative data on a set of parameters relevant to
the condition of the girl child. At the same time, each individual
centre remained free to investigate additional problems specific to
the region concerned. We have used the data from the survey to
illustrate our arguments in the book. It is interesting to note that
because of the gravity of the crisis the girl child faced, the SAARC
countries have extended the time-frame, declaring the period up
to 2000 to be the Decade of the Girl Child.
vili Preface
The study of the girl child in her family environment was
expected to help to reduce the gaps in our understanding of the
situation, and hence improve our planning and execution of
related programmes. Since the problems call out for intervention,
academic research and action programmes must necessarily go
hand-in-hand if the exercise was to be at all meaningful. This was
the rationale and background of the national project titled The
Girl Child and the Family’.
In West Bengal, the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur
University, was entrusted with this work. A primary survey of 600
sample households was carried out in selected areas of the state.
The target group consisted of girls in the age group of 7-18 years.
The sampling methodology and questionnaire were formulated by
the Central Co-ordination Committee and used by all the twenty-
two centres involved in the project. Information was collected not
only about the girl herself, but also about the household she lived
in, her family background and the perceptions of her mother.
Jasodhara Bagchi has written the short survey of relevant
literature as well as a historical analysis of the evolution of the
problematic of the girl child in Bengal (Chapters 1 and 2). Chapter
l.The Bengali Girl Child’, places her in the historical setting,
tracing the social construction of the girl child through the
processes of social change that characterized the colonial period
in Bengal. Working our way through the maze of debates, discus
sions and representations that feature the girl child in this
historical phase, we see the anxieties of the newly emerging elite
class (popularly known as the bhadralok). The social deprivation
of the girl child was articulated mostly along the lines of her legal
and marital status, negotiating several religious orthodoxies to
make room for a school-going, game-playing girl child. So much
has the dominant class taken the girl child for granted that we
thought it would be salutary to remind ourselves of the prolonged
struggle that went into the appearance of the ‘girl child’, as distinct
from ‘woman’ on the Bengal social scene. Our epigraph (pH) is from
the Manuscunhita that exhorts that the girl child be nurtured and
educated. Vidyasagar had these words carved on the carriages
that ferried girls to Bethune School.
The second chapter analyses, not exhaustively, but through
select examples, the treatment of the girl child after independence.
The secondary material covered dates from 1974, when, due to
the appearance of the Status Committee Report and the UN
Decade of Women, there is a leap in the quantum of writing on
women. The writings that we have surveyed, mediated as they are
with the developmental perspective, show a distinct shift in the
class component. The girl child of the dominant class no longer
occupies the centre stage. The discussions and debates now focus
Preface ix
on the poorer deprived sections of society. What is emphasized is
the threat that society poses against itself in putting severe
constraints on the resources of survival that remain accessible to
the majority of the girl children among the rural and urban poor.
Ironically, both among the elite in its formative years and the
labouring poor today, it is the family that colludes with the various
ideological and economic apparatuses to deprive the girl of her
legitimate childhood.
A preliminary analysis of the survey results prepared by Jaba
Guha and Piyali Sengupta follows (Chapters 3-7). Chapter 3 gives
the particulars of the sample chosen for this study. The first part
of this chapter describes in detail the sampling technique, the
sample size, and the selection of households for survey. The
second part provides information about the six areas that were
chosen for investigation. These area profiles describe the physical
features of the regions, their demographic characteristics and the
facilities available to the people living in these areas. Because we
wished to investigate and observe the status and condition of the
girl child within the family, information about the household and
the family was therefore considered to be vitally important. The
family environment is of tremendous significance in the life of a
child—whether a girl or a boy. The living conditions within the
households, the socioeconomic status of the families, the cultural
background of the communities, parental attitudes, and so on,
are all determinants of her/his physical and emotional well-being
as well as of the opportunities available. These also play an
important role in shaping a child’s ideas and perceptions. Chapter
4 discusses the condition, the attitude and the perception of the
mother of the girl child who plays such a crucial role in her
nurturing. This chapter, too, has been divided into two parts. The
first part describes the kind of household that the girl child comes
from. It gives details about the physical environment that she lives
in, the family’s economic standing and its members, including the
father of the girl child, who is usually the head of the household.
The second part of Chapter 4 provides information about
various aspects of the life of the mother (widely acknowledged as
the primary influence on her daughter), her perceptions about her
children in general and of her daughters in particular. Chapter 5
is about the girl child herself. Four aspects of her life have been
studied in detail, and data about her health, her educational
status, her work and her socialization process are presented.
Statistical data often fail to reveal the subtle nuances of the
lives of the girl children observed during the survey. Individual
case studies may yield more effective and meaningful insight in
such matters and may help to bring into sharper focus some of
the problems and possibilities of the girl child. Chapter 6 presents
x Preface
individual profiles of selected girl children. These profiles contain
details about the lives of the girl children, their daily activities,
their perceptions, hopes, ambitions and prospects. Not only do
these case studies give information about the girl children them
selves. but these also highlight the ideas and opinions of their
mothers and other family members. This shows the extent to
which the personality and views of the girl child, as also the
opportunities she gets, are influenced by the attitudes and status
of her mother, and also indicates whether attitudes have changed
perceptibly from one generation to another.
Chapter 7 describes briefly the action programmes organized
by the investigators in two of the areas surveyed. The first was a
teaching-cum-leaming experience in Kustia village of South 24-
Parganas, and the other was an awareness-generation pro
gramme in Phulmalancha village of the same district. The findings
are discussed in the Conclusion.
As the Conclusion suggests, because of the constraints of time
and resources, we have not been able to carry out a satisfactorily
structured and detailed analysis of the data collected through this
survey. The discussion presented is based on aggregative simple
averages and Is, therefore, limited in scope and content. We can
perceive the emergence of certain broad features, and insight has
been obtained about some areas of interest requiring more in-
depth study, and we hope to use the survey material for further
research.
It hardly needs mentioning that a work of this nature would
not have been possible without initiative, cooperation and help
from a number of sources. First, our sincere thanks to the
Department of Women and Child Develpment, Ministry of Human
Resource Development, Government of India, for sponsoring and
funding the project. We also express our gratitude to S. K. Sen,
the then vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University, who gave us
active help and support while the work was in progress. We would
like to thank the Central Co-ordination Committee, specially S.
Anandalakshmy (convenor), Vina Mazumdar and Maithreyi Krish-
naraj for monitoring the project through guidelines and work
shops; Dr. Nijhawan of the ICSSR and Susheela Kaushik for their
painstaking help in processing the data.
The research investigators and the coding and tabulation
teams worked beyond their stipulated time to make the project a
success. Chandreyee Niyogi took part in a pilot survey and
translated into Bengali the original English questionnaries sup
plied by the Central Co-ordination Committee. The initial search
for the locale from census data was conducted by Dr. Baby Das,
Chandreyee Niyogi, Sarmistha Deb, Ishita Chakrabarty and
Samita Chatter)ee even before they formally joined the project.
