Introduction
Leela was the only daughter of a relatively well-off Dalit family in the South Indian village of Nampalli in coastal Andhra Pradesh.Footnote 1 She was seventeen at the time of fieldwork and conformed to all the ideals of Telugu beauty: fair-skin, plump cheeks, brown eyes with long eyelashes and thick black hair tied in a waist-length plait. Every day she woke at dawn, swept the house, milked the buffaloes, scrubbed the dishes and washed all the family's clothes by hand on the edge of the road outside her house. After she had hung them out to dry, she would sit on the doorstep with a cup of tea, combing her hair with coconut oil before heading off to work in the fields. The family doted upon Leela, especially her mother, Mariamma, who put aside bits of meat, fresh curd and milk for her daughter and bought her bangles, trinkets and hair bands from the market. Mother and daughter spent much of their time together; they laboured in the fields and shared the housework. Of all the family members, they suffered the heaviest burden of domestic and agricultural work, and Leela, in particular, resented such a gruelling regime.
Leela's family were considered one of the highest status households in the Dalit community. Although they were primarily agricultural labourers, they were one of the few Dalit households who could afford to educate their children. Leela's elder brother held a degree in computer applications and was looking for a job at the time of fieldwork. Her younger brother was enrolled in a private college in the local town. Leela herself was bright and studious, and among a small minority of Dalit girls to pass their tenth class examinations. Leela's uncle had been the first Dalit president of the village (sarpanch) in the early 1980s and the family owned over two acres of irrigated land. With the price of land in this area rapidly increasing, the family had now become crorepatis (millionaires) although they were still poor in relation to most upper-caste villagers.Footnote 2 The family had middle-class relatives in the city and political connections with the Congress-affiliated upper castes. As the educated, only daughter of the family, Leela was in an ideal position to marry ‘up’, and her education was clearly part of a family project to gain upward mobility. In the (modified) tradition of Dravidian kinship, Leela's parents had set their sights on her cross-cousin, her father's sister's eldest son. The boy lived in the local town and his father was a government employee. Through his father, her cross-cousin had good prospects for a job in the Electricity Department and he could offer Leela a sedentary life as a semi-urban middle-class housewife. The match was seen as an excellent combination: a cross-cousin marriage that fulfilled kin reciprocity and would not require the high dowry associated with a salaried ‘outsider’ bridegroom, but still offering a prestigious marriage into a better life. Both families had informally agreed to it, and they had allowed the cousins to talk alone on the roof one evening to encourage their familiarity with each other.
But Leela was as reluctant as her cross-cousin was keen. This was primarily because she had already fallen in love with one of the boys in her neighbourhood, Chinna. In childhood, Leela and Chinna went to school and played together, and in adolescence they had become involved in a love affair. Affairs such as these are not unusual in rural South India, but in most cases parents will contrive to arrange the couple's marriage post hoc. The problem in this case was that Leela and Chinna shared the same house name (intiperu) and belonged to the same patrilineage; as classificatory brother and sister they were categorically unmarriageable. When Leela's parents learned about their relationship they sent her away to her aunt's house and enrolled her in tailoring classes, hoping that she would forget about him. But Leela communicated with Chinna by telephone from her aunt's village and together they made a plan to escape. When Leela did not return from her tailoring class one day, the family were distraught. Two days later, amidst panic and anxiety, the men of Leela's family heard that the couple were being sheltered by a friend of Chinna's in the city of Amirpet, a notorious centre of prostitution. Having heard tales of runaway girls being sold to brothels, they hired a taxi at great expense and went to look for her in the middle of the night. Chinna managed to escape before they got there, but they found Leela in the house. They brought her back home and severely beat her. She was laid on a cot to recover over a period of weeks.
In the aftermath of the elopement, Leela stayed inside, barely ate and hardly uttered a word. She did no work and was ignored by the family. No one spoke about the elopement until Leela's father returned home at night. He blamed Mariamma for not putting a stop to it. ‘This is on your head!’ he said, ‘You have spoiled the family. Our prestige and reputation (paruvu-pratishta) is finished because of you!’ Rayappa became depressed about the situation and began drinking heavily; his sons were also withdrawn and defensive. When the women of the family wept about what had happened, they spoke of their lost prestige (paruvu), their spoiled name and their honour (pratishta), commenting, ‘Our prestige has been thrown into the road’ (mana paruvu bazaar-lo ekicharu). In a conversation one evening with Leela's grandmother, she listed all the names of the women of the family, telling me that they had been ‘good’ (manchi-ga). Of them all, she commented, Leela had been brought up with the most pride (garvam) and yet she was the one to bring most shame. Her actions had affected the whole family's prestige, honour and respect (paruvu-pratishta- gowravam), while Chinna's family's honour had been left virtually intact. In all these conversations about the Leela predicament, the same phrase was repeated: ‘paruvu- pratishta- gowravam’ (‘prestige, honour, respect’).
The elopement ruined the family's strategies for social advance; a prestigious upward marriage was now out of the question. With a modest dowry (both to compensate for her moral ‘defects’ and to give the impression of a decent marriage), Leela's family sought to restore their honour by marrying her a year later to an unrelated man from a distant village. Since no higher status family would accept a ‘spoiled bride’, he was inevitably from a family of inferior status to that of her own.
The drama of Leela's elopement was a constant source of gossip and speculation in the community during my fieldwork. What surprised me was how frequently Leela's education featured in these discussions, and the connection villagers made between education and the sexual transgressions of young women like her. Questions were raised about whether Leela had been educated too much, whether she had been given too much freedom, whether her parents had done the right thing in sending her off to boarding school. This sometimes led to conversations about the role of education in the Dalit community more generally and the fate of women in well-off families such as hers. In this paper, I look at the connection between education, marriage and honour, and I use this case study to evaluate the effects of upward-mobility in Dalit families. I show how education for girls is viewed as a fundamentally risky venture. While education has the potential to enhance a girl's value as a bride, it is believed that it also increases the possibility of pre-marital affairs. So while parents hope education will secure a girl a respectable, employed husband, they also fear that it may lead to her spoiling her reputation, which may in turn deter suitable bridegrooms. For some, this is a considerable gamble. The direct and indirect costs of educating daughters is substantial, even for better-off Dalits, and the risk of love-marriage, pregnancies and elopements due to a prolonged education is thought to be high. On the one hand, the education of girls holds the promise of an upward marriage, but on the other hand it holds the fear of a ‘spoiled bride’. Among the small minority of upwardly-mobile Dalits, the education of girls is rarely considered, but approached with caution when it is discussed.
This anxiety about education of girls may sound surprising in reference to rural Dalits, who are among the poorest, least educated and most subordinate social groups in the country. While it is true that Nampalli is more affluent than other villages in poorer regions of the state, Dalits here are not untypical. Nampalli is located in the heart of the ‘Green Revolution’ countryside, in the fertile, irrigated, intensively-farmed plains of coastal Andhra Pradesh. The village is made up of twelve castes. The ‘Untouchables’ (Malas and Madigas) are members of two of the largest Dalit castes in South India. Malas and Madigas together comprise one-third of the village population. The vast majority of Dalits in Nampalli are landless, agricultural labourers and tenant farmers. As in many villages, Dalits live separately from the other castes on the outskirts of the village in an area called the ‘palli’ in Telugu. The palli is seen as symbolically ‘polluted’: it is the residence of the buffalo-eating Untouchables, a liminal space between the outside wilderness of nature and ghosts, and the civilised interior of the main village, the uru.Footnote 3 More obviously, the palli is distinguishable from the rest of the village by its poverty; it has fewest facilities, the smallest roads and the most ramshackle houses. In Nampalli, the vast majority of Dalit men and women work as agricultural labourers in the fields of the upper-caste (Kamma) landlords.Footnote 4 They have the lowest literacy rates and income levels in the village. Most are classified in the government category of ‘Below Poverty Line’, which entitles them to collect subsidised food and fuel supplies from the panchayati office.
The district itself has been a hub of political activity throughout the twentieth century,Footnote 5 and since the 1980s Nampalli and its surrounding area has seen ‘unprecedented’ caste-based assertion and mobilisation.Footnote 6 Some of my informants are involved in Dalit politics and Dalit organisations at state level have representatives in the village. Men and women attend meetings and are familiar with the rhetoric of Dalit assertion. This newfound confidence tends to aggravate inter-caste tensions. But despite their increasing sense of caste pride, Dalits’ position in the village can be characterised as one of continuing subordination and dependence (in terms of credit, wage labour and rented land), however much they object to it. Not all Dalits are politicised and assertive of course—some accept their position as servants of the upper castes.Footnote 7
A small minority of Dalits own land, although none of these holdings are over three acres. Some Dalit men earn a higher wage by doing construction work on roads and buildings, labour jobs in the nearby sand quarry, or semi-skilled work like house painting or auto-rickshaw driving in the nearby towns. Several workers have lower level (class IV) government employment or menial jobs in offices. Non-farm jobs, better-paid wage labour and landowning, as well as education, have enabled a modicum of economic independence and changed the position of Dalits in the village. While this change may not have led to employment, it has heightened Dalits sense of entitlement and confidence in relation to their erstwhile superiors.Footnote 8
These better-off Dalits (families like Leela's) are the focus of this paper. They represent the top ten per cent of rural Dalits who can afford to withdraw their daughters from work and invest in their education in emulation of the rich middle classes. It should be remembered, though, that while this paper is about upward mobility, honour and education among Dalit women, the issues discussed pertain only to a small but significant minority among them (about ten per cent), Nampalli's ‘aristocracy of labour’.Footnote 9
The educational situation among Dalits in Nampalli holds no surprises. Although educational attainment is relatively low, major changes have taken place in recent decades. When the village school opened in the 1960s, Dalits were excluded from it and forbidden to enter. Today, the situation has reversed. Dalit children now constitute the majority of pupils in the school, while the upper-caste children are mostly educated outside the village in private English medium establishments. Gender, age and income largely determine education among Dalits. Girls are less educated than boys and are much more likely to ‘drop out’ after primary school; older Dalits are far less educated than the young, and the poorest Dalits tend to have the lowest literacy rates. Among women, literacy rates have soared in each successive generation. While none of the elderly Dalit women in Nampalli can read and write, almost all Dalit girls under twenty are literate and have had at least a few years in primary school.
But while more Dalit girls than ever before are being educated, we know relatively little about how their education is evaluated by Dalits themselves. This is largely because it is only in recent years that this question has become relevant. Development discourses in India often link female education to women's development, empowerment and participation,Footnote 10 links often reproduced in scholarly literature.Footnote 11 Education also features as the bedrock of ‘freedoms’ and ‘capabilities’ in the work of Amartya Sen.Footnote 12 Ethnographic research, however, shows how education can be a ‘contradictory resource’.Footnote 13
Indeed, contrary to the above, I suggest that Dalits envision female education as a route to a good marriage rather than a route to employment or equality, in a manner typically associated with the middle-class upper castes. While Dalits do not see education as particularly empowering for their daughters, they do hope that with a sizeable dowry it will facilitate marriage into the ranks of the Dalit middle classes, where their daughter may escape the daily grind of agricultural labour and instead occupy her time as a mother and housewife. But, as an educated wife she must have virtues befitting her status: her responsibility for maintaining the family honour increases, her movement outside the house is curtailed; her language, dress and manners are now expected to speak of shame and modesty. This marks a new trend among Dalits who were either previously constrained by economics to enforce this typically upper-caste sexual morality, or they had no interest in doing so.
This raises the question of whether or not the changes occurring among a few Dalit families (girls’ education, ‘prestige marriage’ and withdrawal from work) are a ‘good thing’ for Dalit women themselves, and whether Dalit social progress translates into women's social progress. The authors of the edited volume, the Violence of Development Footnote 14 argue strongly to the contrary. They say capitalism and liberalisation in India have eroded women's traditional rights and, despite positive trends for women in terms of literacy and employment, overall there has been ‘a strengthening of male-biased (patriarchal) norms and values across all castes and classes’.Footnote 15 Some of the starkest evidence of this comes from research on India's excess female mortality.Footnote 16 The practices of sex selective abortion, female infanticide and the fatal neglect of female children in terms of nutrition, food and healthcare are widespread in contemporary India, particularly in north India, in urban areas and among the prosperous and propertied social groups.Footnote 17 Harriss-White and NillesenFootnote 18 argue that accumulation strategies to keep wealth and property within the family result in an emphasis on dowry and a preoccupation with ensuring the correct paternity of the child for inheritance purposes (the ‘wealth effect’).Footnote 19 In landless poor families who derive their income from labour, labouring women are more valued (the ‘wage effect’).Footnote 20 Overall, they predict that as poor families emulate rich families, economic development will be accompanied by increased bias against females. A consequence of economic reforms, therefore, will be a greater, not lesser, female disadvantage.Footnote 21 Indeed, research already shows that the sex ratio is worsening in South India and among the lower castes and Dalits, groups in which traditionally gender relations have been egalitarian.Footnote 22 South Indian Dalits, the group with whom I lived during fieldwork, are of particular interest in this regard. Is it that the higher up the social scale a family moves, the worse it is for their female members?
This is the conclusion of Gerald BerremanFootnote 23 and Karin KapadiaFootnote 24 who both argue that upward mobility degrades women. For Berreman, it is sanskritisation that has demolished the previously favourable position of women in North India.Footnote 25 He says, ‘the most severe gender inequalities of all are found among the poor, low-caste groups which are striving for upward mobility in the traditional, ritually defined hierarchy’.Footnote 26 But Kapadia argues that it is capitalist modernity rather than sanskritisation that is destroying gender parity. She links the traditionally high status of non-Brahmin women in Tamil Nadu with the fact that women shared agricultural work with men. Now, ‘city sophistication’ demands that families seek a ‘prestige’ marriage with a non-kin outsider and that women withdraw from work.Footnote 27 This means that, ‘the status of women falls when that of the husband rises’.Footnote 28 My own research shows similar patterns, indicating that when economic circumstances allow it, Dalits adopt and/or enforce a gender ideology similar to that of higher status groups.Footnote 29 What I hope to convey here is an ethnographic illustration of the cultural elaboration of a particular notion of Dalit honour in relation to this.
The importance of honour in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North, West and Central India is well documented.Footnote 30 But the concept and practice of honour in South India and among Dalits is a less studied phenomenon. While it fits with established models of gender and upward mobility in South AsiaFootnote 31 and in many ways follows a predictable pattern, the content of Dalit honour, the particular form it takes and the reasons for its increasing significance require more attention.Footnote 32 Although largely poor, landless labourers, the Dalits I lived with are engaged in competitive strategies for social advance. These strategies are largely about respectability (hardly surprising from a group whose very identity has been defined by ignominy, subordination and degradation). Much of Dalits’ own sense of shame comes from their inability to protect and control their own women. Disrespectful treatment is meted out to Dalits of both sexes on the basis of the lack of Dalit women's shame (siggu). This is so often the case that women's modesty has now become a preoccupation for Dalit men, particularly in better-off families. This disproportionate emphasis on honour is connected with a few Dalit families’ shifting social position, their altered aspirations and their emerging political voice and identity. These factors, combined with intensified caste conflict, the frustrations of educated unemployment, and a despised but continuing tradition of Untouchable degradation, are crucial in helping to understand honour among Dalits.Footnote 33 This paper attempts to show that Dalit educational and marriage strategies cannot be understood without a grasp of the Dalit view of this concept, beginning with a brief description of the position of Dalit women in Nampalli.
Dalit Women in Nampalli
Sexual equality is often explained in terms of women's economic productivity.Footnote 34 In India, Dalit women contribute to, and often take responsibility for, household finances, especially in rural South India where the majority are agricultural labourers.Footnote 35 The ‘feminization’ of the agricultural workforce has only increased this phenomenon.Footnote 36 Dalit women are mostly regarded as an asset to a family rather than a drain, and this is so in Nampalli as much as anywhere else. Even cursory observation suggests that Dalit women have more freedom and independence than upper-caste women; they tend to speak, move and dress differently from others. At work in the fields, Dalit women express themselves in a forthright and direct manner; they unashamedly swear, make bawdy jokes and playfully banter with co-workers and even supervising landlords. Dalit women are expected to look after themselves outside the house and they stridently rebuke men they find offensive.Footnote 37 Dalit women dress for practicality rather than for modesty. They hitch their saris up to their thighs when transplanting rice; they tuck the end of the sari in at the waist or pull it between their legs whilst at work and few are anxious about covering their blouses. Some older women prefer not to wear blouses underneath their saris.Footnote 38 In contrast to the upper-caste females, in the fields, on their way to work and in the palli, Dalit women move with relative ease, physical assurance and self-confidence.Footnote 39
In the palli, nuclear family arrangements mean that women are less scrutinized by their kin. The sexes are not strictly segregated and there is little deference to men in the household or the community. Few would question the importance of women to a healthy household. Apart from bringing in an essential wage, without women, there would be no one to cook, clean, wash clothes, make fires, fetch fuel and water and tend to children. If not at work or school, young girls look after their younger siblings, enabling their mother to work. To lose a daughter through marriage is to lose an extra pair of hands, reflected in the payment of bride-price or token gestures of dowry paid in the past. Although dowry has now hugely increased and wedding gifts have become increasingly asymmetric, Dalit grooms still host and bear the expense of the wedding celebration itself and are obliged to give substantial gifts of gold and clothing to the new bride.Footnote 40
Dalit women's economic productivity has implications for marital autonomy. Divorce, ‘love marriage’ and widow remarriage are more common among Dalits.Footnote 41 Although undesirable, it is possible for Dalit women to survive on their own earnings. This allows for an element of choice in their marital arrangements and enables them to escape abusive marriages. Genealogies show that around one-third of Nampalli Dalits over the age of fifty had divorced (often more than once) and almost all had remarried. The deceased father of my elderly next door neighbour married five times. Only a longitudinal study could show whether younger generations will follow suit, but if anything, marriage has become more, rather than less, stable.
Of course, among Dalits, there is no question that men are greater (goppa-ga) than women and any household in which a wife dominates her husband is seen as transgressive. Dalits too see sons are important since they inherit any property, take over the family home and take care of ageing parents. But even so, it is rare to find parents lamenting the birth of a girl. In fact, parents are often disappointed if they do not produce a daughter. My neighbour, Rani, spoke about her sterilisation after the birth of her second daughter. Her decision had partly been influenced by the incentives offered by the government's ‘Rendu Chaloo’ (‘Two is Enough’) campaign, but she also explained that she was happy to have two daughters because girls form closer emotional bonds with their parents and siblings. Despite the fact they move away after marriage, Rani explained, they have more love for their parents. This was a view I had heard from other women too, including Vanaja, a mother and labourer, in a conversation with her and her husband.
CS: Who do you have more love for, daughters or sons?
Ram: Sons because we don't have to lose money. With sons we know we will get money for dowry.
Vanaja: What do you mean sons? Daughters care for their parents much more than sons. Whenever they have any kind of fever or cold, the daughter will come from her mother-in-law's house to look after them. The son might live next door but he won't look after his parents. He goes about his own business and forgets about them. But daughters lovingly take care of their mother and father.
Dalit daughters are still mostly married into neighbouring villages, and in the case of cross-cousin marriage they live in their mother's brother's or father's sister's households. They rarely sever the bonds with their consanguinal family and return to their natal home frequently. In the first few months of married life, bride and groom go on a series of trips between their respective villages, known as nidralu. The first trip back to the bride's house is for the consummation of the marriage. This is followed by trips of diminishing frequency and duration until the girl is settled in her marital home. The girl gives birth in her mother's house and may stay there for weeks or months. Daughters also go back for life-cycle events and celebrations, to help take care of ailing parents, to assist with domestic chores in a family crisis or in the event of a conflict with their husbands’ family. During the rice harvest, several married girls return to Nampalli, taking advantage of the work available. Women enjoy returning to the communities in which they grew up.Footnote 42 They move about freely, socialise with everyone, flirt openly with men of their age and enjoy being treated as a daughter again, especially with the added prestige of having successfully married and borne children.
Although women receive roughly half the salary of men, it is their wage that often keeps the household afloat.Footnote 43 Women's earnings are often spent on food, clothes and daily household expenses, while men spend a larger proportion of their wage on the cinema and alcohol. Leela's father, Rayappa, for example, spent his earnings from the sale of buffalo milk and agricultural produce on repaying debts and his nightly trips to the drinking hut. In contrast, Mariamma collected her own and Leela's wages from manual labour which was largely spent on food and household expenses. Spending habits are a major source of conflict between men and women in the Dalit community. In Bina's house one day, a group of women discussed the issue. Bina said,
Some families become backward because husbands will take the wife's gold and pawn it for the sake of drink. Others go and spend all their money on the cinema. Take her husband [pointing to a friend], he always goes to the cinema, spending Rs. 50 on a good seat and comes home drunk. Then take Kirthi's husband who doesn't drink and brings a few vegetables on his way back home. Some men will not think about saving, they won't put anything aside. If it is in their pocket they have to spend it, they cannot hide it away. How will they develop if they do that?
‘Men will take the earrings from their wife's ears and rip the tali from her neck just to get a drink’ added Lakshmi. ‘They're mad for drinking, they make their children starve; they hit their wife and waste their money. Why don't you get them to close the shops? We will die because of alcohol.’ Some women try and impose sanctions on drunken husbands by refusing to cook for them. But most feel that a wife should dutifully serve her husband rice and if she refuses to feed him, she can expect to be beaten. Women dislike the influence of alcohol in the community, but they accept their own role as the breadwinners and take it for granted that while their husbands could spend their wages as they wished, their own wage was meant for the household.
Women also take the responsibility for saving and the majority of Dalit women are members of savings and credit DWCRAFootnote 44 groups. These groups are efficiently run, well attended, and the loans provided have enabled some of the women to buy chickens, sewing machines and to set up tea stalls and small shops. During the meetings in the palli, a few husbands hover ineffectually around the discussion group and offer their views on loans and repayments. But all agree that savings are better managed by women than by men.
Dalit women are not ashamed to work and some use it as proof of their superiority. They believe their bodies are strong, quick and competent while upper-caste bodies are soft, weak and incapable, lacking stamina and endurance. Kamma women could not bear as many children and they could not perform hard labour. Palli women are ranked according to their capacity for work and their execution of particular tasks. Any woman can tell you who is the fastest at planting rice, pulling up turmeric roots, or weeding and these women are admired for their physical ability. Of course, they also believe that their bodies deteriorate faster. Work in the sun makes them black, child birth makes them weak, lactation makes their breasts shrivel, constant activity in the fields and in the house leaves them depleted. Even so, they see their bodies as intrinsically stronger and capable of such hardship. Upper-caste women neither have the correct physical make up nor the ‘habit’ of work. My neighbour commented, ‘Kammas just sit in the house and don't do anything. They get all the diseases: ‘sugar’, ‘BP’ [diabetes and high blood pressure] and paralysis. All they do is stay inside, watch TV and lie about.’
Similarly, the most derisory comments Mala and Madiga women could muster about western women concerned their laziness: they got up late, did not know how to wash or sweep and they had machines to do everything. My own (to them) preposterous style of washing clothes and dishes only confirmed what they had witnessed on television. Amongst themselves, Dalit women derive a certain amount of self-esteem from their productivity. Their economic capacity means that they are seen as productive assets and it gives them a certain amount of influence, importance and value.
But, however much value work brings them within their communities, ultimately it is well known that women's work lowers the status of the caste as a whole. This leads to ambivalence among women within the community as values transform and evolve. A new breed of secluded women are now beginning to make an appearance in their very own communities, and working Dalit women do not quite know how to react to them. Ostensibly, they mock them. Sitting at the tea shop one afternoon, Madiga women laughed about the situation of a newly arrived, educated, housebound Madiga bride. One woman nodded towards her house and joked, ‘What does she do in there all day? Just like the uru women, simply eating and sleeping, eating and sleeping!’ But they also recognise it as a superior way of life. At a certain point, when Dalits have the chance, they reproduce the practices they once derided. Labouring Dalits value work and make fun of upper-castes gender norms. But once they are able to, they dispense with this mockery, educate their daughters, withdraw them from labour and marry them into the Dalit middle classes. These strategies of self-improvement and honour are considered below.
‘Outsider’ Marriage and the Education of Dalit Girls
Education, as a means to acquiring a good husband rather than a good job is a fairly old phenomenon among the middle-class upper castes.Footnote 45 In the 1970s, Srinivas called colleges ‘respectable waiting rooms’ for unmarried women from good families.Footnote 46 The educated wife may be confined to the domestic sphere, but her schooling is not seen as a waste. Rather, she is thought to make a more companionable wife, a better mother and more efficient housekeeper, a notion which has its roots in eighteenth century Hindu reformist, missionary and British colonial ideas.Footnote 47 Ethnography from upper-caste communities shows how families attempt to reconcile the demand for seclusion with women's education, mostly favouring the latter.Footnote 48 Although recent work on globalisation has shown that the idea of education purely as prestige has become outdated among the urban middle classes, where women work in a variety of professional settings,Footnote 49 in rural areas, it is often educated upper-caste women who are often the most secluded and economically unproductive.
Although typically associated with the upper castes, upward marriage to educated ‘outsiders’ (baitivallu) is occurring with more frequency among the class-fractured Dalit community. In Nampalli's Madiga palli, of the seventy-one married couples, thirty-three unions are between kin, while thirty-eight are between non-kin.Footnote 50 In the Mala palli, of the eighty-nine married couples, twenty-eight are between kin and sixty-one between non-kin. The difference between Malas and Madigas notwithstanding, broadly speaking, the younger and more educated the couple, the more likely they are to be married to an outsider.
But whilst there is a visible trend for prestige marriages,Footnote 51 Dalits still like to marry their daughters to kin if a suitable match is available. One major advantage of cross-cousin marriage is the connection the girl retains with her home and the reinforcement of the sibling relationship attained through the exchange of children.Footnote 52 Parents often feel more assured that their daughter will adapt more easily to life with known kin. Her link with the natal home leaves her less vulnerable and gives her greater support in asserting her interests. Of course, some Dalits prefer outsider marriage because girls in troubled kin marriages cannot be protected without causing major rifts in the extended family. Even so, on the whole, Dalits in Nampalli still view cross-cousin marriage favourably.
But the desire for cross-cousin marriage is set against the desire for a marriage ‘upwards’. Today, the demands of both class standing and Dravidian kinship must be met. This means that finding suitable cross-cousins is increasingly difficult as the educational and economic levels of the potential spouses need to be matched up as far as possible. Raju, a teenage Madiga labourer, had for years hoped to marry his cross-cousin, but the girl's mother was stalling in the hope of finding her well-qualified daughter a groom with better prospects. Similarly, Raju's degree-educated friend, Anil, had fallen in love with his father's sister's beautiful daughter in a neighbouring village. Although Anil's parents knew that she would get on well with the family and make a good wife for him, they also realised that they would forego a better match and a higher dowry if they gave their permission to the union. Leela's distant cousin, Sunderamma, was married to her mother's brother's son during fieldwork. From the marriage negotiations it was clear that the boy's family would not have chosen her had she not had some education to match his. Although the desire for cross-cousin marriage exists, it is not always easy to satisfy the demands of kinship obligations, personal attraction and upward mobility.
The slight but significant variations of wealth and education in each Madiga and Mala family mean that the chief concern of parents is to marry their daughters into families of greater status. Faced with the choice of a poor cross-cousin or a rich outsider, parents will certainly opt for the latter, if they can afford the dowry. The result is that as socio-economic differences grow, the desire for prestige marriages takes precedence over the claims of the cross-cousin.Footnote 53 In all these negotiations, the girls’ education is treated as an important factor in choice of marriage partner.
Although aspirations for girls are on the whole limited (as one Madiga father said, ‘If they can learn to read and write, it is enough’), it would be overstating the case to say that education is solely to enhance a daughter's value as a bride. The huge leap in female literacy rates show that parents want their daughters to be literate, and women make considerable efforts to learn to read and write themselves. Some years previously, Madiga women took advantage of evening classes run by representatives of DWCRA, during which they learnt basic literacy and numerical skills. The small church groups also require members to buy and bring along a Telugu Bible, regardless of whether or not they can read it. During these services, sections of the Bible are narrated, sometimes haltingly, by members of the group. Women also read the Bible alone or with family members at night in their houses. In the Sunday service, literate girls are asked to read out Bible stories which are broadcast from the loudspeaker on top of the church. Parents of these girls feel proud to hear them reading out loud. For many of the girls themselves, reading the Bible is the only time they use their literacy skills. The expectation of literacy in order to participate more fully in worship clearly has an impact on attitudes towards education among women. Illiterate women also feel embarrassed at having to ask strangers to read them the place names on the front of buses when they travel, and they report being at a disadvantage in the market place where they cannot read signs. All of these experiences confirm the importance of literacy to Dalit women.
However, the value of post-primary education finds its place in the marriage market, as illustrated by Leela's case described earlier and in the following examples. Apart from my hosts, Babu Rao's family also boasted a well-educated female member. Babu Rao was a class IV government employee in the Railways Department and one of the first Madiga men to study in the village school, educated up to eighth class. Unlike his hut-dwelling neighbours, he lived in a plastered and painted cement house with an ornamental balustrade on the roof, a walled-in courtyard and a private water source. Babu Rao's eldest son, Srinivas, had completed a two-year vocational training course in an Industrial Training Institute in the neighbouring district. After two unsuccessful apprenticeships in a nearby town he was temporarily working in his mother's grocery shop. During my fieldwork Srinivas got married with a rumoured one lakh dowry. Srinivas’ value as a groom was enhanced by his father's government job and regular income. His new wife, Vijaya, was from a small town and she held an Arts degree from one of the local colleges in the area. After her arrival in Nampalli, Vijaya was barely seen. To the consternation of the women labourers, she occupied herself with domestic work and never went out of the house.
In the Mala palli, there were several aspiring middle-class families with educated daughters and daughters-in-law. Among the older generation, Aisha was one of the most educated. She was the Muslim wife of communist Ambedkarite called ‘Rajarao’, who had a relatively well-paid government job as a postal assistant. The couple had met at university in the nearby town. She dropped out after the second year and they married soon after. Aisha had not worked since marriage; she was a housewife and a mother of six. She had not used her education, but she hoped her eldest daughter, who achieved top results in her tenth class examinations, would become a teacher.
Missamma's mother had a government job as an ayah at Nampalli's kindergarten school (anganwadi). With her mother's financial support, Missamma obtained a BCom degree in 2003 from an all-girls’ college in the city. Having attained her degree in May, she took a data processing job in Hyderabad with a small IT company. She stayed with relatives who lived in the capital, but quit and came home to Nampalli after two months because she said the hours were not good. Later it transpired that she experienced harassment from one of her colleagues. Since then she had stayed at home, waiting for her parents to find her a suitable marriage match.
The only educated girl in the Dalit community with concrete aspirations for salaried employment was Sujatha, a Mala girl, who was studying for an engineering degree at a college in the city. Sujatha was living with her recently widowed sister, Ankamma, and her four daughters. Ankamma had had a violent property dispute with her husband's brother, and she was in the process of filing a case against him. Sujatha was sent to Nampalli by her parents to support her. Although the college was only a short commute away from Nampalli, Sujatha found it difficult to study in a two-roomed house with erratic electricity, four malnourished children and an anxious sister to look after. Sujatha had a brother, but because of his ‘bad habits’, her parents had decided to invest in their one unmarried daughter instead. Sujatha herself was practical and determined. Having seen the difficulties her sister faced as a widow, she did not want to get married and instead she wanted to be independent, ‘to stand on her own two legs’ (rendu kaalu meda nilapadadtunanu) as she put it. Sujatha hoped to become an engineer or work in the IT industry.
But Sujatha was an exception to the rule, and even in her case it remains to be seen whether her aspirations materialise. After all, the most highly educated married Dalit women in Nampalli are housewives, and their unmarried sisters-in-law are likely to follow suit. Education enables these girls to marry government employees or small farmers and to live in households where there is no need for them to work. Escaping the ‘labour in the hot sun’, instead they are employed in ‘status production work’.Footnote 54 Drawing on the model of the educated, middle-class wife and mother, they become key symbols of family respectability.
Of course, in practice, education does not necessarily produce girls who are better wives, mothers and homemakers, let alone daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law or family members. Some Madigas are sceptical about girls educated beyond tenth class and none would accept a girl who had studied to a higher level then their son. A girl who has studied to Intermediate level would be eighteen at the time of marriage, and a degree-qualified girl would be in her early twenties. They suspect that such an aged bride would have difficulties in adjusting to a new household and she may be arrogant, proud and disrespectful. Many Dalits believe that educated brides are demanding and expensive to accommodate. They may be supercilious and look down upon other wives of the family. They may require expensive products or equipment to undertake domestic tasks and their modern ways of washing, sweeping, preparing food and cooking may cause conflict among the other women in the family and put pressure on their husbands. Moreover, they are no use in times of financial trouble as they cannot work in the fields as others could. It is also expected that they will want to live in the city where there are more modern facilities, leading them to drive their husbands away from the family.
Grooms may also be unenthusiastic about educated brides, fearing that they may be less subservient and amenable.Footnote 55 This concern is not unfounded and in some families class divisions seriously affect norms of sociality. One man described how his parents had been insulted by their nephew's wife on a visit to their house. This educated, urban, Madiga housewife had been contemptuous of her husband's uneducated rural relatives from Nampalli. She saw how they were dressed and suspected that they had come to borrow money and reluctantly served them tea. The couple felt so ashamed that they never visited again.
But the fact that educated daughters-in-law can be troublesome family members is beside the point. Their value in bringing status and dowry outweighs the everyday difficulties they cause in the running of the household and matters of commensality.
Of course, education can only act as a means to social mobility if the girl has a dowry to match. Parents expect a dowry to compensate for the cost of their son's education. After all, if his future wife will share the rewards of his education then she should at least pay for it.Footnote 56 Poorer Dalits are only too aware of this, and when asked why they had discontinued their daughters’ education most said that since they could not afford the dowry, there was no point in educating her any further. This became most obvious to me during a discussion between Krista (Leela's cousin) and her husband. The couple lived in a small house with three children and had constant financial problems. Krista's brother had offered to pay Rs. 5,000 a year for their clever eldest daughter to go to a private secondary school. The couple considered the offer but eventually rejected it on the grounds that she would be too educated to marry an ordinary labourer. They could only afford a dowry of Rs. 20,000 ‘and what educated groom would accept that!’ Krista said. If the girl is an ‘Inter-pass’ but with a small dowry, it looks as though the family has lived beyond their means, they explained, and this would make them look foolish to the groom's family. Even in the unlikely event of their daughter securing a job, her earnings would go to her conjugal family. So they decided to educate her up to tenth class and arrange her marriage after that. The money offered was used to educate their younger son instead.
Spoiled Brides, Honour and Education
But the principal concern is that daughters will undermine any educational advantage by having an affair. Parents like Krista believe that the risk of a scandal outweigh the benefits of education. The ‘outsider’ groom learns about a girl's reputation by enquiring among neighbours when he visits for ‘marriage looks’. A bad reputation may make his family demand extra dowry in compensation or put him off completely. A girl who is ‘not good’ may have to settle for a groom with comparable character flaws, a lazy man or a drinker perhaps. Having seen what had happened to Leela, Krista feared jeopardising their own daughter's marriage chances in such a way. If they could only offer a ‘spoiled’ bride and not much dowry, her chances for a good marriage were slight. Instead they chose to limit her schooling and pre-empt another elopement catastrophe.
Osella and OsellaFootnote 57 show the centrality of flirting and male-female friendships in Kerala's ‘college culture’. In classrooms and campuses, students converse, exchange jokes, flirt and establish relationships without the supervision of their kin or superiors. Educational establishments are often the setting for cinematic love stories and are often seen as sites of ‘romance’ in Telugu films.Footnote 58 So much so, that the longer a girl stays in education, the more doubtful potential grooms will be of her virginity. This is not only because there is more opportunity at college, but also due to the ‘fast’ culture and ideas of romantic love that circulate there. This is corroborated by the fact that the two most scandalous cases of inter-caste marriage in Nampalli are between couples who met at college.
In one of these cases, a Kamma girl in Nampalli had married her Madiga classmate who lived in a local town. He is from a middle-class family and works as a journalist for a reputable local newspaper. His family are wealthier than hers, he speaks good English and he has relatives in America. But despite his class credentials their marriage had been condemned in Nampalli, and some of her family had cut them off completely. Madigas also had mixed reactions to the Kamma-Madiga marriage. Some thought that it showed how the young are beyond reproach, while others saw it as evidence of the desirability of ‘our Madiga boys’. Had the boy been a labouring Madiga from Nampalli, it never would have been allowed. But with money and education, caste does not matter, they observed. Above all, it proved that college is the place where ‘romance’ occurs, just as the films depict.
Leela's elopement is also illustrative of this point. One day I was called over by the teashop owner's wife and her friends who lives on the main bazaar of the Mala palli. She enquired about Leela's health and raised the subject of the elopement. To her, it was no wonder Leela had eloped: she had continued school after puberty; she had been sent on the bus to the secondary school in a neighbouring village and then sent away to a boarding school. ‘That is what happens when you educate our girls too much!’ she proclaimed. The elopement was apparently the result of her ‘over education’.
They were not the only ones who put this transgression down to excessive schooling. Indeed, it was a fairly common explanation. Two young Madiga wives speculated that that was how the affair had started. In their opinion, the family was to blame for the elopement because they had not kept her ‘with them’ or ‘near to them’. They had too little ‘fear’ by sending her away to study.
Leela's elopement confirmed the fear that education spoils brides. Education is a risky strategy, for some too risky to be deemed worthwhile. Nagaiah, a Dalit labourer explained,
N: Now society has developed people are sending girls to school outside the village. But they [parents] don't know what they are doing there. So sometimes they will send them off and then take them back again. If they get a suspicion [about their daughter] they come and get them out of the school and they won't send them again. The school staff will tell us and then we go and get them. After that we might send them to a school near home, otherwise not at all.
CS: Up to what level do you think girls should study?
N: Up to tenth class because that is the time girls get married so we stop them then. Then it is the time for their maturity ceremony (pushparvati), so we won't let them go after that.
CS: What about sending them to university?
N: Abbo! Fear! She might do something wrong. What wrong things (tappu) might she be doing? What is going on? Where might she be? We think all of that and we are frightened! In our caste, when a girl reaches sixteen or seventeen, we would be suspicious if she were studying. Why are they not getting her married off? Why are they keeping her like that? It will be difficult to get a girl like that married off because there will be a lot of suspicion [about her].
This sentiment is echoed by one of Corbridge et al.'s informants in rural West Bengal who says,
Education for girls is needed for marriage purposes only. Education up to class VI or VII is sufficient. We do not want higher education, because we can't afford it. The girls won't get a job anyway, so higher education is useless.Footnote 59
One might expect Dalit girls to potentially benefit the most from upward mobility. Ideologically free from the strictures of upper-caste patriarchy, Dalit girls could be in a good position to convert their education into salaried employment. This does not seem to be the case, however. As Nagaiah pointed out, education is synonymous with ‘civilisation’ (manchitanam) and ‘development’ (abirudhi). ‘Educated’ seems to be a catch-all adjective to describe those who dressed neatly, spoke well and acted morally.Footnote 60 In Nampalli, notions of civilisation and development are concurrent with a new kind of sexual morality. If middle-class mores demand a daughter's education, they also demand that her opportunities for amorous encounters are limited. Education and honour go hand in hand.
It may seem surprising that Dalits are so concerned with such notions. Although this may be interpreted as a case of sanskritisation, Dalits with whom I lived tend to emulate the Dalit Christian middle classes more than the Hindu upper castes. Most Dalits are loath to follow those they regard antagonistically and there is enough class differentiation within Dalits for them to avoid it. One explanation for the heightened concern about honour is that it is the most accessible way of elevating one's social status. Although a few Dalits have secured low level government employment and small jobs in the local towns, most are poor labourers dependent on the upper castes for work, rented land and credit. Some Dalits in the village are educated to post-graduate level but educated unemployment is high. Although Dalits are familiar with the rhetoric of radical political movements in the area, they are still largely excluded from the structures of local governance. In the light of their lack of resources and political power, the control of women is one way they can more easily achieve a status that fits with their emergent self-image of respectability and dignity.
Recent research has pointed to other reasons for the increasingly violent control of Dalit women by Dalit men. Anandhi, Jeyaranjan and KrishnanFootnote 61 argue that Dalit men in rural Tamil Nadu have embraced a model of aggressive masculinity detrimental both to gender relations within the Dalit community and to caste relations outside it. Far from being victimised, they argue that young Dalit men have now become a disruptive force in rural India, instilling fear not only among the upper castes, but among their own women as well. Compensating for their historical sense of disenfranchisement, they show how Dalits are now developing their own form of ‘hyper-masculinity’ set in contrast to the upper-caste landed gentry.
This is certainly the perception of the upper castes, as highlighted in a recent article by Prem Chowdhry in which he describes how cases of inter-caste marriage and elopement are seen as forms of Dalit assertion, provocation and attack.Footnote 62 Hugo GorringeFootnote 63 also argues that it is the politicised rhetoric of honour, pride and shame which is most effective in inciting Dalits to violence. Controlling Dalit women in the name of honour as well as attempting to dishonour upper-caste women appear to be crucial elements in the Dalit quest for dignity, prestige and respect.
Conclusion
Evidence from Nampalli shows that girls’ education and marriage patterns can only be understood in reference to Dalit notions of honour. While education for employment is unheard of among Dalit women, education as a means to marriage is a recognised part of the pursuit of respectability, class standing and self-improvement for those few Dalit families who can afford the associated dowry. But as all those who gossiped about Leela reminded me, education for girls is a risky business. On the one hand it can enhance a bride's value but on the other hand it gives scope for the loss of honour. For this reason alone, many parents like Krista decide to discontinue their daughter's education.
These developments help in the examination of social mobility and its effects on women more generally. While Kapadia and BerremanFootnote 64 believe that such changes have eroded traditional equality between the sexes, women themselves view the situation rather differently. Dalit women's labour may mean that they are regarded as a useful asset rather than a financial burden and it may give them some level of value and influence. But the life of a female labourer is gruelling and monotonous and their working conditions and remuneration are often exploitative. In this situation, becoming an educated, house-bound, middle-class wife represents a veritable advance.
This problematises Kapadia'sFootnote 65 conclusion that development and modernisation are detrimental to women. Dalits see women's withdrawal from work and seclusion as progress, colloquially, escaping a life of ‘hard work in the hot sun’. This means that the diabetic, weak and secluded upper-caste women that Dalits once mocked, they end up emulating. When they do withdraw they may be isolated and economically useless but at least they can sit back knowing they have achieved a greater social standing than their labouring counterparts. Dalit women themselves believe that they are better off; for them (and for the moment), sedentarisation represents progress.
Of course, when women embrace honour-related restrictions it is difficult not to conclude that in doing so they endorse patriarchal values and collude in their own subordination. From a feminist point of view, upwardly mobile Dalit women are turned from valuable workers into sedentary status producers. But Patricia Jeffery's ethnographic study of pirzada women who live in strict purdah near a Sufi shrine in Delhi cautions us against this view. It reminds us that when women themselves favourably evaluate a situation feminists would find abhorrent, this need not be cast off as a simple case of mystification. She argues that their views must be situated within a wider context. For the pirzada, ‘being immured in a cage’ has its attractions over the degradation of impoverishment and back breaking work’.Footnote 66 Despite their complaints, the pirzada women are content with their life of well-appointed idleness; they find a personal logic in it and believe it to be part of the privilege of high social standing. Women themselves logically assess their situation within a particular economic and social framework. This reminds us to look at the values that underpin Dalit women's active participation in the pursuit of honour and strategies of upward mobility, even when they seem detrimental overall. And while Dalits may not be using education in the way that liberals, feminists and policymakers expect, they are eager to educate their daughters nonetheless.
