Honor and Shame in Rajasthan

Honor and Shame in Rajasthan Woodrow W. Denham Fujairah, United Arab Emirates 25 February 2001 The great earthquake that hit the Indian State of Gujarat in January missed us by about 300 miles. When it happened we were riding in an old car on a bumpy road in the Aravalli Hills of south-central Rajasthan. We felt nothing, but other people in the vicinity who were not travelling felt it when it happened. No serious damage was reported in Rajasthan, but as I'm sure you know, it took an enormous toll in Gujarat. Estimates of the number dead range from 18,000 to 100,000, and the actual number almost certainly never will be known. When we traveled for three months in South India in 1990, we still fancied ourselves to be old hippies. We followed our Lonely Planet Guide religiously, found hotels on the run, rode the trains a lot, and had the “real” India right in our faces for much of the time. This year we looked carefully at our ages, our past experiences in India and Bangladesh, and our tight schedule of only fifteen days, and did it differently. Emirates Airlines carried us back and forth between Dubai and Delhi, and we flew Indian Airlines to Jaipur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer. We had advance reservations at good hotels and ate safe food all the time so we never got Delhi-belly. However, both of us came down with respiratory infections. I recovered quickly, but Nancy ended up with a nasty form of pneumonia, a close cousin to Legionnaire’s Disease. She’s on the mend now, but swears she’ll never return to India. India is a difficult place to travel regardless of how you do it, even if the earthquake misses you. One of our major concerns about returning to India proved to be unfounded. During our travels in 1990 in South India, Agra and Delhi, we were constantly besieged by touts trying to sell us things we didn’t want, lepers waving diseased hands in our faces and demanding money, and unwelcome encounters with dead bodies lying in the streets waiting for somebody to haul them off. We saw none of that this year. Perhaps the economy really has improved, maybe Rajasthan is more fortunate that some other parts of the country, maybe we were just lucky. Alhamdulillah. January is the middle of the dry season in Rajasthan. We did not encounter a drop of rain during our visit, and the sky was perfectly blue throughout except for 12/29/2002 4:18 PM a few clouds one day. However, January is the season for morning fogs in New Delhi, so our arrival there from Dubai was delayed by eight hours, and all of our Indian domestic flights were delayed from four to eight hours because of poor visibility in the capital. We read a lot in airports. The State of Rajasthan is a synthesis of thirty-six Rajput princely states, formerly called Rajputana, that emerged after the British Partition of India in 1947. The Rajputs are and always have been Hindus, they are members of the Kshatriya or warrior caste, and are among the world's great militaristic peoples. When the Moslems invaded India, they ultimately established the Mogul Empire centered in Delhi in the 15th century. The Rajputs fought them relentlessly and while the Moguls acquired a lot of influence over the Rajputs and established marriage alliances with most of the princely states, they never conquered many of them even though the eastern border of Rajputana was only a few miles from Delhi. The princely states of India were notorious for exploiting the peasants and nomads who lived on the land. But while trampling the little people into the ground, the Rajputs constructed magnificent mansions, palaces and forts, leaving a vast legacy that is well represented in UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites. We focused our travels on their monumental architecture and the arts and crafts the Rajputs developed to decorate themselves and their buildings. In South India, we completely overdosed on Hindu temples, and it would have been easy to do the same on palaces and forts in Rajasthan. But this time we were reasonable enough to see the experience as a kind of gargantuan buffet dinner where we had to sample carefully rather than consume everything and remember nothing. Honor and Shame As is our wont, we spent a good bit of time talking about the little people who were trod upon in the process of building the Rajput high civilization, but we spent much more discussing the status of women in Rajput society, for the architecture that the men built makes no sense without a clear understanding of their women’s roles. Having lived in the Middle East and South Asia a lot in recent years, we were aware that the linked concepts of honor and shame largely define people’s attitudes toward themselves, and especially their attitudes toward women, not just in Islam, but throughout that vast region. The trip to Rajasthan brought this alien cultural world into focus more sharply than ever before. Rajasthan 2 12/29/2002 4:18 PM The European fringe of the honor-and-shame culture area lies in the Christian Mediterranean where honor killings still occur in Italy and Greece. It extends throughout North Africa and traces of it appear in the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. In prevails in the Moslem lands of Turkey and the Middle East with special emphasis on Revolutionary Iran and ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia where veiling is mandatory. It reaches into Central Asia and especially Afghanistan where the Taliban government keeps women in their place with a vengeance. It encompasses Pakistan where the novel Shame is perhaps the premier novelistic treatment of the concepts, and it has produced a skewed population structure in Bangladesh that indicates that millions of female babies have been systematically exterminated there since Partition. Finally it dominates much of Hindu India with special emphasis on the awesome chivalric code followed by Rajput royalty well into the 20th century. The forms vary somewhat depending upon one’s religion and location, but the bottom line is pretty much constant throughout the region. From an Eastern perspective, most of the honor of one’s family is intimately connected with the purity of its women. In order to maintain that purity, no action is too extreme. Such actions include performing female infanticide as needed, refusing to educate female children for fear they will be polluted, performing child marriages and arranged marriages with no regard to the wishes of the women, secluding high status women in a condition called purdah or a location called zenana or harem, requiring that women cover themselves in public ranging from symbolic veiling in some areas to total concealment in others. Among the most extreme manifestations of the load carried by women in these honor-and-shame cultures was the demand in India for individual suicide called sati when a woman’s husband died, and mass suicide called jauhar when the destruction of a city or fort was imminent. In the case of jauhar, all of the women were expected to throw themselves onto a mass funeral pyre and destroy themselves rather than suffer the defilement that would occur in the event of their capture by an invading enemy. Records show as many as 24,000 Rajput women committing suicide on a single day when their men were certain to be defeated in battle. Jauhar seems to have happened as often as several times a century in what is now Rajasthan until it was outlawed and suppressed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sati still happens rarely, but jauhar probably is extinct. Most men and a great many women in that region argue that purdah, zenana, harem, veiling, jauhar, sati and an enormous complex of related cultural concepts are designed to honor and protect women and insure the purity and sanctity of the family. As such they must be followed scrupulously, and women may have even more interest than men in doing so as a means of protecting their own positions in society. But from a Western perspective, and increasingly from an Eastern perspective as well, the practices associated with enforcing honor on the women are viewed as Rajasthan 3 12/29/2002 4:18 PM barbaric. According to Western feminist thinking, they do not honor women, but rather enslave and destroy them. Half the population is systematically denied even the most basic human rights, a concept that is distinctly Western and is fundamentally incomprehensible to many in the East. Individual and mass suicides are coerced, hence are not suicides at all but rather are murders, including India's infamous bride-burnings. The female half of the population is simply thrown away by means of sex-selective abortion and infanticide, ignorance, confinement and condemnation to a life that is limited almost exclusively to reproduction. Such arguments against the traditions tend to skip right over powerful women like Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Hasina, Benazir Bhutto, Hanan Ashrawi and many others who are products of the honor-and-shame culture. They also tend to ignore the evidence of the stones – that is, evidence concerning women’s status and roles that appears today in the architecture of the vast array of mansions, palaces and forts scattered throughout the region from Morocco to Northern India. We didn’t go to Rajasthan to investigate honor and shame. In fact, we weren’t fully attuned to the extent to which honor and shame were issues there until we arrived and began to look around us.

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