[Haryana’s khaps focus much of their energy on
defending a single ancient prohibition: Men and women are not allowed to marry
anyone from the same village. The local interpretation of ancient Hindu texts
holds villagers to be brothers and sisters, rendering their unions incestuous.
Young people defy the ban very rarely, but those who do are sometimes murdered
by a gang of male relatives. As much as the khaps condemn these “honor
killings,” they are just as adamant about preventing these romances, a quest
that involves tight control over women.]
By Ellen Barry
 |
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
CITY LIFE Meena, a student in Rohtak, warns young women that moving to a
city does not keep people back in the village from scrutinizing their actions.
“I tell them, we have to be careful,” she said.
|
ROHTAK,
India — Meena, 20, was a village girl herself, so she can recognize the
changes that come when girls from the village arrive in this city as students
and take their first gulps of freedom.
Blue jeans, forbidden at home, are crammed into
a corner of the backpack for a midday costume change. A cellphone is acquired
and kept on silent.
She always tells them: You never know who might
be watching. If word gets back to the village that a young woman has stepped
across the village’s moral boundaries — it could be something as simple as
being spotted chatting with a group of male students after class — her life
could be upended in a day.
“I tell them, we have to be careful,” Meena
said. “Maybe they are not aware that someone can watch them and go and report back.”
As young Indian women leave rural homes to
finish their education in cities, often the first women in their families to do
so, they act like college students everywhere, feeling out the limits of their
independence. But here in the farming region of Haryana State, where medieval
moral codes are policed by a network of male neighbors and relatives, the
experience is a little different. There is always the danger that someone is
quietly gathering information.
The old and new are continually rushing at each
other in India, most starkly in places like Haryana, a largely rural,
conservative state abutting New Delhi whose residents can commute 20 miles to
work in nightclubs and office buildings. But their home villages are sleepy
places, whose main streets are patrolled by glossy, lumbering black water
buffalo.
The villages are ruled by khap panchayats,
unelected all-male councils that wield strong control over social life,
including women’s behavior. That job becomes much harder once the women have
left for the city. When one khap leader listed city shops that were allowing
young women to store mobile phones and change into Western clothes, another
suggested posting informers outside the shops with cameras to capture
photographic evidence as women came and went.
Om Prakash Dhankar, a khap leader who voiced his
support for this approach, said measures like these would protect young women
from much worse dangers that might follow if they freely cultivated friendships
with men.
“The mobile plays a main role,” he said in an
interview. “You will be surprised how this happens. A girl sits on a bus, she
calls a male friend, asks him to put money on her mobile. Is he going to put
money on her mobile for free? No. He will meet her at a certain place, with
five of his friends, and they will call it rape.”
A generation ago, women here lived in complete
seclusion from men, and could appear in public only wearing a lightweight cloth
that completely covered their head and face. Though that tradition is fading,
many women are still not allowed to leave the house without permission from a
father or husband.
Haryana’s khaps focus much of their energy on
defending a single ancient prohibition: Men and women are not allowed to marry
anyone from the same village. The local interpretation of ancient Hindu texts
holds villagers to be brothers and sisters, rendering their unions incestuous.
Young people defy the ban very rarely, but those who do are sometimes murdered
by a gang of male relatives. As much as the khaps condemn these “honor
killings,” they are just as adamant about preventing these romances, a quest
that involves tight control over women.
Meena, who left her village several years ago to
escape an arranged marriage, said young women there were terrified of the
elders in the khap, who scrutinized their behavior and issued a steady stream
of criticism. The criticism, in turn, terrified her parents, who feared being
ostracized.
“They would say, ‘Why is your daughter going
around in the village with her head naked?’ ” she said. “If you were
walking with your head straight, the khap guys would say, ‘Look down at the
ground, don’t make eye contact. Don’t have irrelevant conversations.’ ”
Whether their influence extends to college women
in Rohtak, one of Haryana’s largest cities, is another matter.
As young women poured out of the gates of
Maharishi Dayanand University recently, walking down the road in the golden
light of afternoon, they described the alchemy that takes place when young
women from the village mix with classmates from big cities. Some begin illicit
romances, something strictly forbidden at home. But for many, the changes are
modest ones.
“In the cities, the girls have phones, because
parents provide them, but in the village we are not given phones,” said Sunita
Meham, 23. “She comes to college and sees that other people are using phones,
so she also wants to use one. If her parents agree, and if her friends call her
on that phone, they say, ‘Why do you have so many friends?’ To save herself all
these questions, she has a secret phone.”
Satish, who runs a photocopy shop
next to the college, said the khaps are simply too far away to monitor
students’ behavior. Phones are often exchanged as gifts and kept secret from
the family, he said. “Generally,” he said, “everyone around here has two
mobiles at least.”
Sonal Dangi, 20, shrugged off the talk of
tighter controls. Social change had taken hold in Haryana, she said, and it
could not be halted.
“Everything has its positive and negative
sides,” she said. “But they can’t stop it.”
But others were far more wary. The moral
arbiters from the village have informers everywhere, Meena said. Police
officers often work with the khap, many said. A young man from the same village
might report back to a woman’s family if he spotted her walking with a man,
others said. So could the rickshaw driver who drove her to the city.
All the young women interviewed in Rohtak could
reel off stories of classmates who simply disappeared, withdrew from school and
were swiftly married to men of their parents’ choosing after word of a moral
infraction reached their village.
The possibility of violence ran like a thin
blade through their chatter: Just last month, a young man and woman studying in
Rohtak were killed in public by the woman’s relatives after they were
discovered violating the ban on same-village romance. The man was beheaded.
“You know,” said Puja, a 19-year-old student,
“the first time the parents hear that the girl is roaming around, either they
take her home and get her married or else they kill them.”
Even within the khap panchayats, there seemed to
be little consensus on how, or whether, to keep an eye on young women away from
home. In interviews, numerous local khap leaders scoffed at Mr. Dhankar’s
notion of placing surveillance units at places where young women change out of
their traditional, billowing clothes.
But Mr. Dhankar was undaunted, saying the
photographs could be shown to the girls’ parents, or to friendly police
officers, who could threaten to press trumped-up criminal charges unless the
behavior stopped. Great dangers await, Mr. Dhankar said, when a young woman
keeps secrets from her family.
“It starts with a small lie,” he said. “Then
they get into borrowing money and other bad things. The end result is that she
will commit suicide or someone else will kill her.”
As he was explaining this, his daughter, a high
school science teacher in her early 40s, chimed in with a robustly dissenting
view, and Mr. Dhankar admitted cheerfully that the women in his house generally
ignore what he says.
Growing serious, he added that it was misguided
to see any collision of interests between young women and the traditionalists
in the village. They are, he said, on the same team.
“As long as the girl lives within moral codes,
she can have as much freedom as she wants,” he said. “If they are going after
love affairs or extra freedom, then they are killed.”
