Table Of ContentDon't Marry Me
to a Plowman!
Don't Marry Me
to a Plowman!
Women's Everyday Lives
in Rural North India
Patricia Jeffery
and Roger Jeffery
First published 1996 by Westview Press
Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright© 1996 Taylor & Francis
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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 13:978-0-8133-2621-4 (pbk)
ISBN 13:978-0-8133-1994-0 (hbk)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Queen Today in a Red Sari! 38
2 Just Because I Was Angry 53
3 She's Brought Plenty of Wealth 69
4 A Girl Seems Burdensome to Both Her Parents 83
5 Leaving Her Father's House 98
6 Who Would There Be to Sit with Our Boy? 114
7 No One of Your Own Will Be There 127
8 I've Become Shameless Because of the Children 142
9 The Daughter-in-Law's Era 155
10 Love and Peace in My Mother's House 171
11 Should I Become a Pauper? 187
12 Toasted on One Side 201
13 Why Have You Married Me So Distantly? 216
14 If My Uncle Saw the Situation I'm in Now 231
15 A Woman Should Die Before Her Husband 245
16 Allah Gives Both Boys and Girls 259
Afterword 274
Glossary 277
Bibliography 281
About the Book and Authors 289
Name Index 291
v
Preface and Acknowledgments
Since the early 1980s, we have been working in Bijnor District in the
north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. People's lives there are being
influenced by numerous interlinked changes: Whether in connection
with agriculture, religious conflicts, or health, the Indian state plays a
central role. Within this rapidly changing context, our research has
primarily focused on aspects of domestic and gender politics, especially
on issues surrounding women's autonomy and childbearing. During
our research, our expectations concerning how we would write about
our experiences in Bijnor followed well-trodden tracks. Our thanks,
then, must go to Carolyn Elliott for prompting us to experiment with
the storytelling genre that we have adopted here.
We are very grateful for the funding we have received over the years
from the Economic and Social Research Council, the Overseas
Development Administration, and the Hayter Fund at the University of
Edinburgh. None of these, of course, bears any responsibility for what
we have written here. During our research in Bijnor, we were helped by
Radha Rani Sharma and Swaleha Begum in 1982-1983, 1985, and 1990-
1991; by Savita Pandey in 1982; and by Zarin Ahmed, Chhaya Pandey,
and Swatantra Tyagi in 1990-1991. The material in this book comes from
just two of the villages where we have worked, Dharmnagri (a caste
Hindu and Harijan village) and Jhakri (a Muslim village). Radha and
Swaleha worked particularly in these two villages, and we are endlessly
grateful for the care and enthusiasm that they both brought to their
work. We arli also greatly indebted to Khurshid Ahmed, from Jhakri. In
1982, he helped to dispel people's initial anxieties about us, and he
prepared a map and a preliminary household census for Jhakri. From
late 1990, he worked with Roger for some three months, smoothing our
access to a nearby village, Qaziwala, where the combination of the
Ayodhya crisis, the brewing Gulf War, and Muslims' worries about the
implications of the national decennial census was threatening to derail
our research.
While we were based in Bijnor we relied on many people in Delhi
(and in 1990-1991, in Mussoorie) for hospitality and for intellectual and
moral support. In particular, we thank Meera Chatterjee and her family,
vii
viii Preface
Bina Agarwal, Loki Madan, Walter Fernandez and others at the Indian
Social Institute, Jennifer and Robert Chambers, Carolyn Elliott, Kamlesh
and John Mackrell, James and Willi Barton, June Rollinson, and Kunwar
Satya Vira and his family.
Since completing our fieldwork we have exploited the patience and
good humor of friends and colleagues who have commented on all or
some of the manuscript or discussed the general issues raised by our
writing. In particular, we thank our editors Alison Auch and Susan
McEachern at Westview, Colin Bell, Mary Buckley, Pat Caplan, Judith
Fewell, Ann Gold, Paul Greenough, David Ludden, David McCrone,
Ritu Menon, Pravina King, Judith Okely, Gloria Goodwin Raheja,
Ursula Sharma, Peggy Duncan Shearer and Jennifer Shearer, Nandini
Sundar, Sylvia Vatuk, Susan Wadley, and Shona Wynd. Toby Morris
provided valuable page-setting assistance. Catherine Robin based her
lovely line drawings on some of our own photographs, and we thank
her for all her efforts, which far exceeded what we had a right to expect.
As a two-year-old, our daughter Laura shared our first fieldwork in
Bijnor. She, too, has commented on this text, and we thank both her and
Kirin for their usual forbearance with our preoccupations.
As people in Dharmnagri and Jhakri often told us, our hearts are in
two parts, one "at home" in Edinburgh and one "at home" in Bijnor. In
no small measure this is because of the kindness and warmth so many
people in the two villages extended to us while we lived among them. It
would be impossible ever to convey our gratitude adequately and
invidious to pick out just one or two people for special mention. We can
only hope that something of our affection for them comes through in the
stories that follow.
Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery
Edinburgh
Introduction
0, mother, marry me to a man in service,
Don't marry me to a plowman!
When a plowman returns from his plowing,
A revolting stench comes from afar.
When an office worker returns from his office,
A sweet perfume comes from afar.
0, mother, marry me to a man in service,
Don't marry me to a plowman!
When a plowman returns from his plowing,
He eats a dozen or so pieces of thick griddle bread,
When an office worker returns from his office,
He eats just a couple of little puffed fried breads.
0, mother, marry me to a man in service,
Don't marry me to a plowman!
When a plowman returns from his plowing,
His goad shows up from afar.
When an office worker returns from his office,
Wads of hundred rupee bank notes show up from afar.
0, mother, marry me to a man in service,
Don't marry me to a plowman!
In north India, there are many occasions when special happiness is
marked by women singing in groups of varying sizes, usually with one
of their number taking the lead by beating out the rhythm on a drum.
Often, women's songs touch ironically on important aspects of women's
lives.1 This wedding song-reflecting the bride's point of view-would
be sung by women at the bride's house before a bride departed for her
husband's house. The rural economy throughout the region is so
dominated by agriculture that being married to a "man who plows"
would be precisely what happened to most women, however. For many
brides, indeed, the plowman would be just an agricultural laborer and
not an independent farmer, as only the fortunate could hope to be
married into a family that owned enough land to keep it in comfort. In
the north Indian villages that figure in this book, then, very few women
could seriously expect to be married to a man in "service," the local
1
