torch

Sri Lankans like to think that they're better than the rest of the subcontinent. Higher literacy rates, better infant mortality rates, a smaller proportion living underneath the poverty line; you name the useless statistic and normally we're better at it. We also like to think that we're slightly more advanced, liberalized culturally and socially than those redneck Indians, with their village practices of suttee (wife-burning) and child marriages and widow brothels and whatnot. Obviously too, most of these horrific practices are always perpetrated against women.

Yet the empirical evidence would seem to prove otherwise. The Hindus in the plantation region of Sri Lanka are generally from what is classified in the Brahmin system as low-caste (Harijans, or children of God as Gandhi called them). As a result, paradoxically, as is often the case, they embrace the rituals , superstitions and blind prejudices of the same Hindu caste system that perpetuates their down-trodden status. One such example is of a woman who works with us in a menial capacity. She had a 21 year old daughter who did not want to get married. She forced her daughter to get married to a family that the daughter specifically did not want to get married to. (21 years old is already too old you see, to be unmarried. ). This was accompanied by much prayer and rituals. Almost immediately, the daughter was pregnant (and the advent of the baby was hastened by the mother's supplications at approximately 20 temples). The baby was born 6 months ago. Incidentally, for the last year and a half, there was some problem with the payment of the dowry (given by the bride's family to the groom's family normally before marriage). Some grooms are happy to wait for the bride's family to take on untold debt and pay off the dowry gradually. Some grooms send back the wife to their parents' home if the dowry does not arrive. This groom's family's patience was wearing thin.

Last week the baby was in an accident. In a fire. The baby has third degree burns and was rushed to the Colombo hospital from the central province because they were unequipped to deal with the severity of the burns. The baby is now disfigured for life, although she has survived after four days of intensive care. The doctors all grimly assert that such a disaster could have in no way been an accident. The daughter has come back to her family and she will not explain what happened. The groom's family is silent. Everyone knows what happened, that the groom's family torched the baby as a sign of their discontent over the insufficient dowry. Meanwhile Pushpa has not stopped crying for 12 days, at the plight of her daughter and grandchild. And yet no one will file a case against the husband and his family, no one will torch his family. They do not question their right to mutilate the baby because of a rational annoyance over dowry.

It reminds me of a story I read in a newspaper. Of how an unsuspecting NGO worker advised a Bihari family in northern India not to give their 9 year old daughter in marriage. The article went to prosaically state that doctors, after 18 hours of surgery, have managed to reattach the arms that were hacked off by the angry father at the NGO worker's interference.

Development? What use? What a fucking joke. All over the world and throughout human history, I think religion has a hell of a lot to answer for.

And forgive the rambling, but it also brings to mind Shylock's poignant query,

If you prick us, do we not bleed,

If you tickle us, do we not laugh,

If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

And yet it is not true. Suppression does not necessarily provide revolution. One needs a sense of basic human rights, one needs to subsequently know that there has been violation, and finally one needs to want to progress, to advance. But if a community is happy to live according to medieval structures, under modern suppression, if tradition alone defines the value of lives lived, then development? what a fucking joke.