I am always surprised about how religious fanatics are extremely concerned about the morality of women. The menfolk’s morality or immorality is not their concern and neither do you find it preached about in our churches’ pulpits.
Every culture has its own customs and traditions to protect and guard the womb. The dress restrictions for young girls and old women in India, is not as much as it is for young and middle-aged women. More than age, I feel the criteria here is fertility and the womb.
Have you noticed that purdhas or traditional dresses like sarees and salwars are imposed only on fertile women rather than infertile (pre and post-menopause) women? Even the imposition of dress codes in colleges can be related to this. College managements in India have traditionally disapproved of dating, love marriages (problems with police or the registrar office), and fashionable clothes; because in India educationists also act as moralists and don’t want the womenfolk in their college to be attracting attention from the menfolk. To ensure this we have the dress codes in a few of the ultra-strict city colleges in Chennai.
Young girls in India can happily play with boys on the streets wearing only their undergarments or nothing more. But the minute they reach puberty, they will be cautioned by their mothers not to “speak to boys.” In India, people also have the disgusting habit of holding a grand function in which all friends & relatives attend, when the girl attains puberty. I don’t see anyone celebrating a boy’s attainment of puberty in India.
In this protectionist environment that Indian girls grow up in, sex education becomes a bad word. One of
my classmates, who attained puberty in standard VII, didn’t know anything about her body’s changes and thought she had got blood cancer. The only sex education, she got was from us – her classmates, who were also an ignorant lot. We reassured her that she didn’t have blood cancer, it was just her “chums.”
No one teaches our girls the need for hygiene during one’s periods. I know of many Indian families, who for cost-cutting measures still make girls wear cloth pads for their periods. Cloth sanitary pads are Ugh! Spotting, wet, dirty, clumsy, leaking; in short torturous for a 11 or 14-year-old. When parents can buy beautiful, sequined clothes and gold jewellery for the child’s birthday, why can’t they buy whisper or tampons?
When I was in my standard VIII, in the “sex education” class, we were taught by our teachers, if you get “too close to boys, you get pregnant.” Lucky for me, my mother told me all about the birds and bees. She didn’t want me to know about sex from my ill-informed peers, dirty magazines or from the net. My friends were very surprised that my knowledge of sex came from my mother and they were soon besieging her with all their questions. Some of my Christian friends, even wanted to know if it was okay to touch the Bible during your periods from my mother.
In India, a girl who loses her virginity before marriage is immediately labelled a “slut” and a “prostitute”. But if a boy does so, his parents and relatives will gloss over the event, his friends will dismiss it as “boys will be boys” and he will become a hero among his peers. If its bad for a girl to lose her virginity before marriage, why is not bad for a boy also?
In many countries, girls have become out castes if there is no blood found on the nuptial bed, in proof of her virginity, even if her hymen had been broken due to sports activities or her hymen was absent or elastic. I remember recently, reading an article in the newspaper that girls were going in for hymen reconstruction surgery, as they felt it (virginity) would become a major problem with the boy, their parents had fixed for them.
Also, it’s the woman who gets pregnant in a pre-martial or extramarital affair; No one knows the father, but everyone knows the mother and can ostracize her. So to protect property, money and the family, a woman’s sexual activities have been greatly controlled.
That is why, even though economics state that women also go to work in India, women are supposed to return home at a particular time, not have any men friends, not go for social activities unless accompanied by the husband or some other member of the family and never ever flirt with any man other than the husband (even her fiance).
That is why traditional households prefer a girl, who’ll stay at home. Women are encouraged to be teachers,
because the job ensures that they are chaste, the children looked after (timings) and the housework doesn’t suffer.
Earlier, all the Mills & Boon heroines would be virgins, while the men would have had “casual affairs” with other women, but never experienced love + carnal lust in one woman before this.
Now, with liberalisation Mills & Boon heroines are girls, who have had sex with one guy, with whom it was boring & uninteresting (they are never, ever promiscuous). Then comes the hero with whom they have the perfect, passionate love affair (and even here they are passive, never aggressive or making the first move in the bed).
So, ultimately everything in the marriage market comes down to fertility and the woman’s womb doesn’t it?
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My birthday also heralds the arrival of Diwali. As a toddler, my mother used to tell me the whole city of Chennai was celebrating my birthday with fireworks and sweets. The sweet fiction lasted till I was five years old; by then I had figured out it was Diwali people were celebrating, not my birthday. Still I always got terrible excited…Being a Christian kid was no deterrent to celebrating Diwali and bursting fire crackers. For the neighbourhood ragamuffin gang of kids – thats me and my friends, the order of the day was bursting crackers and bingeing on sweets. We also got to sample all the goodies, prepared by our mommas and aunties (we would of course have to reciprocate the gesture with cakes and biriyani during Christmas, just like our Muslim neighbours were expected to invite us over for dinner during the end of Ramzan).
teetotaller), Ayoodha Pooja, Vijaya Dasami and Diwali. Only once, Diwali fell on my birthday and I could not get decked up in ribbons & lacey dresses and show off at school. Wearing your birthday dress to school was an important event in the life of a school kid. Since you had to wear the school uniform the whole year round, wearing your colourful birthday dress made you the star of the day. Also most schools sing “Happy birthday” during the Assembly session after morning prayers. Many a times, I was the only one in the school celebrating my birthday on that day, so the whole school would sing “Happy Birthday to Rachel Chitra..” instead of “Happy Birthday dear children…” Gave a kid quite a high!
Spinnin' a yarn 
