Who agrees with Germaine Greer

Prominent British feminist leaves Mumbai agape by rationalising female foeticide with another social evil — dowry

Feminist writer Germaine Greer is no negligible thinker.But her closing address at the just-concluded Mumbai lit fest not only decadent Indian stereotypes, but even supported female foeticide because “poor parents can’t afford dowry”.

True. But really One of the women sitting in the room was feminist activist and well-known theatre personality Dolly Thakore, who confessed she was tempted to leave the room. “I was incensed. She began to praise India, how gentle India was and how India looked after its old people. She had seen two daughters-in-law helping an old woman get on to a bus followed by two men. Then she started off about female foeticide (a subject I am closely associated with).

She went on about how it is important to have female foeticide because the poor parents have to pay dowry for the girl. I thought she was very bizarre. I was quite stumped. I couldn’t believe that somebody like her was so out of touch with what the reality is.”

Others couldn’t believe her either when she said if a woman chooses to abort her female child, she has her own reasons and that she should not be judged — a remark that fell on many indignant ears and was perhaps the most objected to.

Most felt she didn't take into account biases against women that begin from the womb.And why do we crib The condition of women in India is not as bad as we, complaining Indians, make it out to be, Germaine said in her closing address — “Women: The Glory and the Anguish of India”.That in fact, in India, women’s education is really stressed upon as compared to England, and we should take pride in that. That there is certain “gentleness” we have towards our senior citizens, something she has observed in her travels in airplanes and buses in India.

She said Indians typically speak of the mother-in-law, the “saas” as an agent of evil, while she feels it’s the mother-in-law who kept the family together when the men moved out to seek job opportunities. It is she who helped the young bride adapt to the ways of the family and so on“Germaine Greer’s observation that aged women are better off in India is grounded on western perception of the country’s fabled joint family — structural and emotional. But stereotypes cannot be reaffirmed by such blanket terms,” says Kolkata sociologist Abhijit Mitra.

Many aged women are in a wretched condition here. There are layers of their existence on the financial rung. Money can get you a lot of things, but at some levels they are perceived non-functional and are truly forsaken. In India today, people do not readily take responsibility of others,” Mitra added.

While the concept of matrimony ads is not exactly seen as particularly progressive, Greer also expressed her amazement at how these ads in India stress upon the educational qualifications in prospective brides. “Nobody in England cares about how educated their daughter-in-law is, because of course she’d have her own knitting and television to engage with.

I know I am drawing stereotypes but ” she trailed off in one of her sentences.Referring to the Dalit and Adivasi women’s protest movement and even to “what happened in that bus in Delhi” (Nirbhaya), Greer spoke in lofty terms of the courage Indian women display when they come out on streets in protest — she glorified the notion of “Shakti”. “Cherish it, develop it. Don’t think Western feminists can tell you how to do it — you are already doing it better,” said the author of The Female Eunuch.She quoted statistics from the Guardian to show how the percentage of rape in England far exceeds that of India, even though its population is much smaller.“So what ” Mitra asked.

“That would be the failure of the English police and their media. Here police action might not be often successful but rapes are noticed.”Did Greer then, in her trademark backhanded style, ended up critiquing the West She did find one supporter in Mumbai though — Flavia Agnes, legal scholar, author and women’s rights activist.Flavia says: “Our court system is British; the Indian Penal Code was drawn by the British administration. So our bias comes from England.

The bias against women, which is inherent in our rape laws, comes from the British laws. Rape rates in the UK are much higher as compared to India. They even have date rape, which we don’t. In UK, the conviction rate is much lower — about 7-8 per cent as compared to 24-25 per cent here. The bias against women there is as much. Their rape trials are even more demeaning than ours.”Reacting to Germaine’s comments on how the male child is given preference in England, Flavia pointed out England has a queen only because the queen has no brother. Preferring the male child is common in the UK, she said. “The physical violence inflicted on women there is much more acute. Husbands shoot their wives in the UK. We demonise the mother-in-law here, but in many cases husbands beat their wives after the mother-in-law dies,” Flavia says.

On Greer’s female foeticide stance, Flavia said: “Because women cannot abort their children, they are abandoning them. We find infants left in dustbins and alleys. Is that a preferable scenario ”

Inputs from Sushmita Murthy and Aarti Bhanushali