The truth about Sonia

Two recent dramas highlight the increasing intervention of the public into the private domain. The first was the rewriting of Gudiya8217;s ...

Two recent dramas highlight the increasing intervention of the public into the private domain. The first was the rewriting of Gudiya8217;s life by the custodians of Muslim tradition; the second is the intervention in Sonia8217;s life by the caste panchayat of village Asanda in Haryana. In both cases, the media jumped into action and brought desi reality TV into our drawingrooms.

These interventions highlight two sets of questions. One deals with the increasingly powerful and retrogressive role of traditional institutions of social control 8212; village and caste panchayats and religious clerics 8212; in people8217;s private lives. Powerless to promote larger developmental issues affecting their constituents, such bodies instead seek to retain their hold and exercise power in the private domains of family, marriage, inheritance. Thus, issues such as triple talaq bring media attention rather than women8217;s educational progress or well-being. The community8217;s battle for turf space in Indian politics since Independence is still being fought in the domain of personal law. Equally, while Nehruvian independent India attempted to reform Hindu panchayats by turning them into institutions for development and local governance, it failed to address their inherently iniquitous nature. Neither did the reform of Hindu personal laws address the power of caste panchayats. As a result, customary law dominates over reformed marriage and inheritance laws. In fact, the power of caste panchayats in the personal domain has remained hidden due to the post-Independence stress on panchayati raj.

The other set of questions deals with the ethics of the media entering into people8217;s private lives and beaming their trauma as a 8220;live soap opera8221;. In Gudiya8217;s case, you have two men, a woman and an unborn child fathered by one of them. The woman claims she wishes to stay with the second husband, the father of her child, while the first says he wants her back. The second is rendered voiceless. The issue is settled by 8220;elders8221;, a village panchayat again, the guardians of tradition. What could be more juicy for a channel which advertises that Gudiya8217;s fate will be settled on TV? After the melodrama is over and Gudiya et al are sent back to their pre-TV mundane lives, who will inquire after Gudiya8217;s trauma or her life8217;s trajectory? Who will show check whether the child is accepted or not or how the second, now wife-less child-less husband is doing? Television is not concerned with lives that they have altered or ruined once they have got their TRPs.

Cut to Sonia8217;s case. Sonia and Rampal, married for over a year, are expecting a child. Suddenly, the panchayat declares their marriage is incestuous as their grandparents possibly share the same gotra. But why the delayed reaction? Rathis and Dahiyas, the two Jat clans to which the couple belong, ostensibly have brotherhood ties which 8220;prohibit8221; marriage. The real objection, however, seems to lie in the jostling for power by these clans. Where traditional power and economic hierarchies of dominant castes and clans are being upset by economic changes, the battle for power is now being fought through hegemony in the private domain.

The gender dimension of this story is no less palpable. Sonia appears to have married Rampal of her own choice, as the marriage took place in the Rohtak district court. In doing so, while asserting her agency a fact that would instantly turn popular opinion against her she appears to have scotched her father8217;s ambitions of marrying her upwards. Significant is the reality that Sonia8217;s father wanted a 8220;government service8221; groom. In Haryana today, respect comes with a government job. It is not that government servants or what they do is highly respected. It is the security of life-time employment, a pension and a life-time possibility of graft and bribery that attracts the peasant looking out to diversify his portfolio outside of a plateaued agriculture. The price of a constable8217;s job in Haryana police runs into several lakhs. Once made, the investment has to be recovered. How else but through the myriad opportunities for bribery? A government job is also compatible with farming and being a landowner.

Haryana families wish to marry their daughters to men with government jobs, preferably those living in towns or cities. The new hypergamy women marrying upwards is not of caste status but of job and location. Contacts in cities, businesses and government are the new social capital that can be deployed to corner development gains and political clout in the village.

Can the intervention of the media help to bring about progressive, gender/human sensitive solutions? An interventionist media needs a slightly longer attention span to realise that in present day India, the private is increasingly embroiled with the public, the economic and political with the personal and the personal is becoming political in a very visceral sense. A sincere media can play a role in nudging tradition in a progressive, gender-sensitive direction. It can do this by highlighting the compulsions of intra-caste politics and the role of changing economic circumstances in rewriting caste and gender equations. It needs to sustain its interest in these issues to reveal why 8220;so-called tradition8221; is protected and defended and what the hidden text of such a defence is. In the Muslim case, it is most likely the protection of the space of influence of the leadership of a minority community; in the Haryana Jat case, it is the changing equations of dominant and upwardly mobile clans in village society.