Recently, I watched a video made by a content creator. It showed a woman and her husband, a homeopathic doctor. The man said he had not wanted an engineer or a doctor for a wife; he had wanted a housewife and had married her despite her “only being 12th pass”. The woman said her dream was to achieve a lot in life and become independent. “When the kids become independent, I will stand on my own feet,” she added.
The video generated quite a buzz, with many feeling sorry for her that she was going to wait for several more years to fulfil her dreams. As the Nobel laureate Anne Carson writes in her poem, ‘Time passes time’: “Time passes oh boy. Time got/ the jump on me yes it did.”
Sometimes, women are married off early and sometimes girls are married off before they become women. In this piece, Abhinay Desphande writes about how the practice of child marriages continues in Telangana. The girls say they enjoy school but they are forced into marriages due to their family’s financial constraints. He writes, “...Some become mothers while they are children themselves.” These girls don’t even get the chance to figure out what their ambitions are, let alone pursue them.
While many girls and women have little choice, struggle within unhappy marriages, or feel tethered to their responsibilities, there are also more women, especially in urban areas, who are finding ways to buy more time for their own dreams: by postponing marriage so they can focus on their careers, by freezing their eggs or choosing not to have children, or by staying single to travel, start small businesses, write, or work for causes they believe in. I’m in my late 30s, and my women friends are all at a different stage of life. These are women with some level of privilege.
But even women with privilege struggle in other ways with the swift passage of time. For instance, there is still an expectation that women should look young. When actor Katrina Kaif stepped out a few weeks ago for an event, she was mercilessly trolled online, including by middle-aged men with pot bellies, for her postpartum body. Women who refuse to dye their hair are trolled too; a piece in TheGuardian noted that going grey can come at a cost. The consequences of ageing go beyond appearance: research by Ian Burn, an economics professor at the University of Liverpool, found that age discrimination in recruitment in the U.K. begins at least 10 years earlier for women than for men.
Women resist all these expectations in different ways. In Maharashtra’s drought-prone regions, women who lost their husbands to suicide are refusing to remarry, reports Radheshyam Jadhav. Unlike others in the country who celebrate Ram Navami, many women in this region celebrate Sita Navami, to honour Sita who lived life on her own terms after Ram abandoned her.
Sometimes, resistance begins in the kitchen. A friend in Karnataka told me her uncle refused to hire a cook. Her exhausted aunt, who prepared an elaborate meal every day, finally put her foot down and said she couldn’t cope any more, in her 70s. She was thrilled to find time to pray and play word games in newspapers.
Kaif made another appearance in London soon after she was trolled. She said in an interview that if she did let criticism or comments dictate her actions, she would be “paralysed with fear” and unable to function.
“There are times when the world is going to celebrate you,” she said. “... Other times you have to really be your own biggest cheerleader.”
Toolkit
There was an increase in the proportion of currently married women aged 15-49 using any contraceptive method, from 66.7% as per the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 (for 2019-21) to 69.1% in 2023-24. Though a majority of these women used modern methods of contraception, the use of these fell from 56.4% to 52.7%, while traditional methods — principally rhythm/fertility-awareness and withdrawal — have risen by 6% points in the same period. Read more about gender disparities in contraceptive use and sterilisation in the story by Bindu Shajan Perappadan and Nitika Francis here.
Wordsworth
Postnatal care: Also called postpartum care, this refers to the health support provided to both mother and a newborn from birth through the first six weeks. In India, while health initiatives and family support focus on newborns, they often leave the mother’s medical needs sidelined, writes Sowmya Josyula. She says “the maternal component focuses on danger signs, feeding, and breast problems rather than on recovery.”
Ouch!
I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know that women just dress like whores now.
American comedian Shane Gillis on Saturday Night Live
People we met
Dhvani Kothari started the National Ballet School of India during the pandemic. She tells Nivedita Jayaram Pawar that it is wrongly assumed that ballet is only for thin bodies. “Ballet is for every body type, because there is really no limitation to how you do it,” she says. Equally, she is yet to see more boys learn the art form, which many continue to see as “feminine”, even though the history of ballet has shown otherwise. The school, based across 12 centres in Mumbai, has 250 students of which only six are boys. “A proper classical ballet routine requires male dancers too, as certain roles demand their presence. I hope to see more boys pursue this form,” Dhvani says.