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Table of contents
- Women of Kallar community in Tamil Nadu kill their female babies by feeding them poison
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- The Indian “girl” psychology: A perspective
LOG IN. In this Book. Additional Information. Female Infanticide in India is a theoretical and discursive intervention in the field of postcolonial feminist theory. It focuses on the devaluation of women through an examination of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India and the reemergence of this practice in the form of femicide selective killing of female fetuses in postcolonial India.
The authors argue that femicide is seen as part of the continuum of violence on, and devaluation of, the postcolonial girl-child and woman.
Women of Kallar community in Tamil Nadu kill their female babies by feeding them poison
In order to fully understand the material and discursive practices through which the limited and localized crime of female infanticide in colonial India became a generalized practice of femicide in postcolonial India, the authors closely examine the progressivist British-colonial history of the discovery, reform, and eradication of the practice of female infanticide. Contemporary tactics of resistance are offered in the closing chapters. Table of Contents. Cover Download Save. Contents p. Preface pp. Acknowledgments p. Because she crushes her family with marriage and dowry expenses she must be raised - from childhood - in financial and physical neglect Her birth, in many parts of the country is greeted with silence, even sorrow.
A boy arrives to the sound of joyous conch shells. Discrimination begins at birth. Comprehensive studies conducted by UNICEF as well as Indian social scientists reveal an organised pattern of discrimination against young girls and older women in India. Their revelations are startling.
India is the only country in the world where the ratio of women to men has been declining over the years. The sex ratio declined from females per 1, males in to in And India is one of a handful of countries where female infant mortality exceeds that of the male-notwithstanding the fact that the female child is biologically stronger at birth.
Girl babies are breast-fed less frequently, and for a shorter duration than boy babies. When they grow up, they are provided less nutrition than their brothers.
A recent survey of infants, toddlers and preschoolers showed that within their combined age groups, 71 per cent of females suffered from severe malnutrition, as against 28 per cent of the males. A related statistic reveals that boys are taken to hospital for treatment of common diseases in twice the number as girls. Boys do not fall ill more frequently than girls, they are merely provided more health care by parents who value sons more than daughters.
In the widening gender gap in India the female literacy rate - And the gap continues to widen. In the age group, nearly 84 per cent of boys are enrolled in schools, as against 54 per cent in the case of girls. For her sins, she is burned as an adult bride over dowry demands or, if she is a child bride, condemned to a lifetime of penurious widowhood upon the death of a husband even before her marriage is consummated. If young girls and older women are denied a living in most parts of India, it is only the next step of this cruel logic that they should be denied life itself.
Female infanticide - snuffing out the lives of newborn babes - is ultimately, the catharsis in the tragic drama of female life in this country. The cover story which follows is a graphic and chilling account of the trials and tribulations of families that kill their female infants. It focuses on the Kallars - a community of landless labourers in Tamil Nadu's Madurai district. It may be happening in one state, in one community, but it is a mirror in which all Indians must look and come face to face with the ugliness that surrounds them.
The challenge of developing India into a land of social and economic justice, as Nehru put it, is not just the creation of factories, and machinery and grandiose schemes. Normally, the day should have been one of great rejoicing for year-old Kuppusamy and his year-old wife Chinnammal, both agricultural workers in Chulive-chanpatti village in the Usilampatti taluk of Madurai district. It was a May morning of sparkling sunshine and Chinnammal, attractive and slim despite her pregnancy, was in labour inside her mud-and-thatch hut.
In a few minutes her second child would be born. Her first, daughter Chellammal, 3, played outside. The new-born cried lustily as it came into this world. It was a bonny child, fair of complexion, its eyes squinting at the sunlight that filtered in. But when the mother laid eyes on her baby, tears welled up in her eyes.
They were not tears of joy. Chinnammal had seen the sex of the child: a girl. What crossed her mind was not the anticipation of the joys of motherhood but the trials that lay ahead. How could a family of daily-wage agricultural workers belonging to the Kallar group of the Thevar community afford to bring up and marry off two daughters? How could they, when the dowry demanded by bridegrooms was always astronomical? The couple had decided to have a second child only in the desperate hope that it would be a boy.
But on this sunny day, the dream lay shattered. There was only one way out of a lifetime burden of bringing up two daughters. And Kuppusamy decided on what they had to do. That evening he trudged - somewhat unsteadily - into a nearby field, plucked a handful of oleander berries that are known for their lethal poison, and returned home. Chinnammal mashed them into a milky paste and fed her crying infant with the substance.
The parents then shut the small door of their hut, sat outside, and waited for the poison to do its work. Within an hour the baby began to twitch and tremble fitfully. Slowly she started spouting blood through her mouth and nose.
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The parents heard her whining. A few more minutes, and all was quiet. Chinnammal knew that everything was over. She quietly walked over to her mother's hut close by, dug up a little patch of ground inside, brought and buried the dead baby. A mother who has borne a child cannot bear to see it suffer even for a little while, let alone bring herself to kill it. But I had to do it, because my husband and I concluded that it was better to let our child suffer an hour or two and die than suffer throughout life.
Kuppusamy, at first reluctant to talk, admitted later during an interview: "I get Rs 13 a day as agricultural wages, on the days that I manage to find work. My wife gets Rs 6 a day. I cannot dream of decently marrying off two daughters. Killing girl babies due to fear of the dowry problem is very common in our Kallar community. India Today's investigations reveal that over the last 10 to 15 years, female infanticide has come to be increasingly accepted among Madurai district's Kallars a 2-lakh strong martial sub-caste as the only way out of the dowry problem.
Said S. Muthuramalingam, who has a small farm in Paraipatti village: "The practice has grown among the Kallars during the last 10 years, and has become very widespread after The Kallar group of Madurai district is concentrated in Usilampatti taluk and its villages, and accounts for nearly 80 per cent of the taluk's 2.
In a damning confession, Muniamma of Ayodhyapatti village, an agricultural worker, said after some prodding: "There is hardly a poor Kallar family in which a female baby has not been murdered some time or the other during the last 10 years. Chinnammal was not the only Kallar mother who administered poison to her baby daughter last month.
Twenty-five-year-old Chinnakkal of Echampatti village, the wife of a counter clerk, Gopal, in the village cinema theatre, delivered her second baby daughter in the wee hours of May 10 in the Usilampatti government hospital. But Chinnakkal reported back to the hospital after a week, not with the baby but with her own mother. She came to consult the gynaecologist, Dr Suthanthiradevi, because her breast milk had clotted.
The clotting occurred because there was no baby to breast-feed. When asked by the doctors what had happened to her baby, Chinnakkal explained: "The little one died within four days of birth due to fits and fever. The answer was barely audible: "I couldn't afford to do that. Later, under persistent questioning, Chinnakkal gradually revealed the tragic truth: "How can I afford to bring up two daughters in these difficult days? Even to bring up my first daughter is going to be an unbearable burden.
My husband has not come to see me after I gave birth to my second female child. He must have hated me after knowing it is another daughter. I should let him know that I have done away with the baby. Dr Suthanthiradevi said that Chinnakkal and Chinnammal are not exceptions but very much the rule in the Kallar community.
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She has been practising in Usilampatti for over five years and disclosed that, on an average, 1, delivery cases come to the hospital every year. Of these, nearly half deliver female babies. Said Suthanthiradevi: "Over 95 percent of the women who give birth to daughters abscond immediately after the babies are born, and we have recorded this in our registers. We can come to our own conclusions about the motive for absconding. The statistics are shocking. Nearly female births in the Kallar group are recorded in the Usilampatti government hospital every year, and out of these an estimated babies vanish with their mothers no sooner than they can open their eyes to the world.
Hospital sources estimate that nearly 80 per cent of these vanishing babies - more than - become victims of infanticide.
The Indian “girl” psychology: A perspective
Besides this, deliveries also occur in primary health centres and in the private nursing homes and maternity hospitals that have mushroomed in the taluk, for which no comprehensive records are available, not to speak of the child births in the village households. Some odd private nursing homes, which admit maternity cases also, have come up in Usilampatti town alone.
Said Dr Sugandhi Natarajan, who runs one of these private nursing homes: "We get about 12 to 15 delivery cases a year even in our small nursing home, and roughly seven of them deliver female children. Almost all of them run away immediately after childbirth, and come to consult us again after a week or 10 days because they invariably have this problem of breast-milk clotting, which has to be corrected with hormone tablets.