by Raji Jayaraman
The only light in the second-class train compartment came from the moonlight, which filtered through the rusty iron grill of the window. The sun had set hours earlier, a fiery red ball swallowed whole by the famished Rajasthani countryside. I sat at the window on the bottom berth of my compartment of the Sainak Express, headed from Jaipur to Delhi.
I was tired, but it was too early to bunk down for the night. Glued to the bench seat, I alternated between staring into the dreamy moonscape that lay beyond the window and glancing furtively at the exhausted looking woman sitting on the bench seat opposite me. She wore a crumpled cotton salwar kameez. There was nothing particularly remarkable about her, except that I don’t recall having ever seen someone so young looking so tired. In her arms lay a plump baby boy, who must have been four or five months old. Not that I was an expert in such things, not at age twenty anyway. Next to her sat a cross-looking woman who she addressed as “Mummy-ji”. Her mother-in-law.
Mummy-ji kept barking instructions in Punjabi at this haggard looking woman. It was not a language I understood but, from the daughter-in-law’s response, it was clear the older woman was orchestrating the rhythm of her grandson’s feeding schedule. The baby, having little choice in the matter, seemed bewildered. He was chock full. Finally, when he could take no more, he pursed his lips and turned away from his mother’s breast. He looked at me with a plaintive expression, as if begging me to tell them to stop. They did.
It was still too early in the night to clip up the back of the bench seats, to form middle berths in our six-person second class sleeping carriage. We remained seated. The train swayed from side to side. Ta-dak ta-dak. Ta-dak, ta-dak. It was enough to rock anyone to sleep. The older woman was the first wicket down. Her chin collapsed onto her chest, and spittle bubbled at the corners of her mouth. The baby was next, head still kipped in my direction and milk arching down his cherub cheek. His mother was still holding him. Her eyes drooped. As she nodded off her arms slackened. The baby dropped to the floor of the carriage, landing face-first onto the soot-blackened floor. Luckily, the fall was neither high nor hard. He wailed upon impact, but it was more in shock than pain. Hearing his cry the two women jerked awake, almost in unison.
I don’t remember what happened next, but the sheer exhaustion of that woman and the terror her mother-in-law inflicted upon her have stayed with me. It wasn’t my first such encounter, and it wouldn’t be my last. This is not to say that every Indian mother-in-law is cruel, but I think it is fair to say that the cruel Indian mother-in-law phenomenon is not an aberration. In “western” movies, a British or German villain is a common trope. In Indian cinema, that role is played by the mother-in-law. There are actors like Lalita Pawar and Sashikala, whose entire careers were built on playing the diabolical saas whose personas were built on tormenting their hapless bahus. This tradition has endured in modern India film, television, and streaming services. These mothers-in-law are often unlikable. But that’s the whole point. They are caricatures and we are unwilling, or unable, to grapple with the possibility that they may be characters in their own right, trapped by circumstance and shaped by culture.
I am the second of three children: girl, girl, boy. The gender pattern of that birth order is a common pattern in Indian families. When our brother was born my mother is said to have kissed him from head to toe, weeping with joy and relief. This is not to say that our parents treated us differently based on gender; they gave my sister and me the same love and opportunities that they gave to our brother. But sitting where my mother was then, as the daughter-in-law of a conservative brahmin family, I can understand how she must have felt. There is an old Indian saying. I think I remember reading it in one of M.N. Srinivas’ collections of Indian folktales: having a daughter is like watering a plant in your neighbour’s courtyard. There’s truth to that.
Upon marriage, according to Indian household survey data, roughly ninety percent of Indian women leave their parental home to live with their husbands in their parents-in-law’s household, following the tradition of what sociologists call patrilocal exogamy. This happens early: the median age at which Indian women marry is nineteen. With her arrival in her new home, comes a dowry that her parents have scraped together often at great personal expense. At this stage, a daughter is more or less lost to her parents. Given this seemingly inevitable loss, who can begrudge them their mixed emotions at her birth?
The dowry is promptly handed over to her in-laws. Then she is put to work. Not work in the sense that she goes out, works a job, and gets paid for it. Only one in four Indian women of working age is employed in the labour market. India has one of the world’s lowest rates of female labour force participation, even relative to countries at similar levels of development. Her work takes the form of unpaid domestic labour. According to recent time use surveys, on average, married Indian women spend seven hours a day doing domestic work.
Most of this time is spent cooking and cleaning. If you have seen the daily drudgery of the wife in the beautifully crafted Malayali movie The Great Indian Kitchen, you have a pretty accurate picture of the daily rhythm of their lives: cook, clean, repeat. In that movie the woman’s tormentor is her husband. Control of Indian women by men in the family has deep roots in Hindu tradition. The Manusmriti (or Laws of Manu) is a legal text thought to date back from somewhere between 1st and 3rd centuries CE. Chapter 9 covers Manu’s “eternal laws” of dharma for women. In it, he states, “Guarding the wife day and night men should keep their women from acting independently; for, attached as they are to sensual pleasures, men should keep them under their control. Her father guards her in her childhood, her husband guards her in her youth, and her sons guard her in her old age; a woman is not qualified to act independently.”
As India modernises many of its ancient traditions have fallen by the wayside, but this one seems strangely resilient. If you don’t believe me, read the remarkable, and remarkably depressing, series in the New York Times on the trials and tribulations of India’s Daughters. In much if not most of India, women have little individual agency. Their terms of engagement are often dictated by the men of Manu: fathers, husbands, sons. This is reflected in economic agency, both in terms of employment and wealth. According to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, daughters and sons are entitled to equal rights of inheritance. In practice, however, patrilineal inheritance customs are commonplace: when a father dies his sons tend to inherit everything. His daughters often get nothing (that’s what their dowries were for!) and his wife may get life-long maintenance rights if she’s lucky. It is no surprise then, that widows in India are among the most marginalised communities in the country.
All of which brings me back to mothers-in-law. At the end of the day, they too are women. So my question is: Where do they get their power over daughters-in-law from? And why is said power so monstrously exercised? Many Indian household surveys, such as the IHDS and DHS, have a separate module that is administered to women. These modules typically include questions regarding who has decision-making authority in the household. As it turns out, the person with them most say in the household is never the daughter-in-law. This is where gender-based norms supporting patriarchal structures intersect with generational norms demanding filial piety. The latter demands deference to elders in the family, and the former, to men. Practically, this means that outside the kitchen, the person calling the shots is the household head, who is almost always a man—typically a woman’s father-in-law (if he’s alive), or her husband.
In the kitchen, it’s the senior woman, and who that person is depends on a woman’s marital status. The mother-in-law calls the shots in the kitchen while her husband is still alive. Once he dies and she is a widow, the daughter-in-law is promoted to senior woman, and she rules the hearth. All of which is to say that the answer to my first question is: the father-in-law. Whether knowingly or unwittingly, they are the likely source of mothers-in-laws’ power over their daughters-in-law.
A psychologist would be better equipped than I to answer the question of why this power is unleashed at the daughter-in-law, and to her detriment. It may be part of a broader cycle of abuse, where the woman who was once a victim later becomes the abuser. Or maybe, since married women in India have so little agency to begin with, they are inclined to exercise it where they can: on someone who has no protection, who is lower in the pecking order, and who is only permitted to operate in the shrunken sphere of house and kitchen, which happens to be the realm in which a women have any say at all.
To be clear, I’m not saying that all Indian mothers-in-law are cruel. Nor am making excuses for their mistreatment of daughters-in-law. Believe me: my mother too was a daughter-in-law in a traditional Indian household. I am just trying to grapple with why some of these women would deliberately hold other women back. My sympathies lie firmly with the young woman in the rail carriage, too tired to hold her own baby. I think of her now, thirty years later, and realise that she must be older than her mother-in-law was at the time. Perhaps she is travelling in a similar compartment, seated next to her new daughter-in-law, making the young woman’s life a living hell. I wouldn’t like her behaviour, and I certainly wouldn’t approve of it. But I understand better now than I did then that although some caged birds may sing, most are driven to madness.