Book review: No Country for Girls

The book’s thematic twinning of China and India could be seen as inapposite since such forced comparison between two continent-sized countries would end up doing injustice to both. But the book bucks such an outcome, its importance underlined by the fact that a behaviour pattern marking China and India — which account for over a third of humanity — impacts the gender balance of the globe decisively.

It also brings into theoretical domain comparative data from two countries that always lacked adequate mechanisms to facilitate the exchange of knowledge on important issues. Third, and importantly, there are striking similarities in the way the catastrophe has unfolded in both countries.

Historically, universal marriage and son preference had a deep historical grounding in China as well as India. Ancient gender biases surfaced aggressively in modern times aided by indifferent policymaking. Two aspects of such policymaking emerge as major factors contributing to skewed sex ratios — crude population control measures, inspired by neo-Malthusian theorising of the kind the Ehrlichs made fashionable; and economic neoliberalism that marketised, technologised the medical sector.

The censuses of 2001 in India and of 2005 in China revealed the full extent of the demographic damage. Neerja Ahlawat points out in ‘The dark side of the marriage squeeze: violence against cross-region brides in Haryana’ that the 2001 census revealed that deficit in girl children went far wider geographically than the historically masculine states of Punjab and Haryana. Similarly, China’s 2005 census reflected a staggering sex ratio at birth of 119 boys to 100 girls.

The real-life consequences of this are only now being realised.

In their study, ‘China’s marriage market and upcoming challenges for elderly men’, Monica Das Gupta, Avraham Ebenstein and Ethan Jennings Sharygin show that there is a disproportionate concentration of unmarried men in poor areas in China and those with a higher presence of ethnic minorities, raising fears of social instability. The fate of spouse-less men is now a major thrust in ethnographic research in the field. Ironical that an issue involving discrimination against women comes into focus when it affects male chances of marriage!

Yet there are important negative impacts this holds for women too, like the commodification and ill-treatment of “exported” brides or rise in intimate partner violence.

Looking at India, the book throws up contending viewpoints on whether “exported” brides gain agency or lose it. Mattias Larsen and Kaur, in their ethnographic study, ‘Sex ratio imbalance and shifting social practices in northern India’, cite evidence to conclude that the reproduction of son preference is being affected in ways “that may point to improved sex ratios and greater gender equality in the future.”

Other contributors disagree with such optimism. Sunita Bose, Katherine Trent and Scott J. South in ‘The effect of a male surplus on intimate partner violence in India’, believe that a relative shortage of women will, in fact, encourage violence and male control in order to constrain women’s interaction with other men and confine them to wifely functions. Patricia Jeffery, in ‘Dowry, daughter aversion and demographic change’, takes on the argument that fewer daughters will bring down dowry practices, positing that “dowry and daughter aversion can both continue, even if demographic shifts might appear to suggest the reverse” and nothing will change without profound structural transformations.

Such structural changes, says Rajni Palriwala in ‘Acts of omission and acts of commission’, first demand a rigorous examination of the state’s acts of omission, not merely commission. She cites the example of how the Indian state has failed to act in cases of criminal intimidation by parents and the community in matters of marriage.

Attempts to interrogate policymaking, whether in China or in India and bringing aspects like caste into the discourse, is a strong feature of the book. Despite its limitation of being a collection of conference papers from a 2012 event hosted by the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies and UNFPA, this work has brought important new dimensions to the telling of an old and tragic story.