With its breathtaking monuments, Kolkata is the cultural capital of India and also the capital of the state of West Bengal, with a wide range of manufacturing industries. For a long time, I had wanted to get an idea of the city as a business location. On my visit to Kolkata in 2020, I wanted to find out about the living and working conditions of the factory workers in the city. Isha, a well-connected colleague at the German Consulate General, knew a remarkable entrepreneur named Lata Bajoria. She is the owner of a jute factory, and I wanted to meet her and her 2,000 employees.
So, we set off early in the morning from the hotel near Maidan Park and arrived at our location in half an hour. On arrival, it felt like we had travelled back in time, with buildings that looked like they belonged to the early industrial age of the nineteenth century. Nothing seemed to have changed in 150 years; you almost expected a colonial official to be the supervisor. I don’t think the brick buildings had ever been renovated. A friendly welcoming committee of foremen, board members and an interpreter were already waiting for us. I spoke to several workers – despite the hard work, they seemed satisfied and grateful for their jobs in the factory. They received a relatively good salary, including overtime pay and bonuses. In general, they were very well disposed towards the owner.
I looked around curiously and caught sight of Lata Bajoria, dressed in a blue-and-white sari, smiling. Even at the age of 69, her eyes were shining with energy and joie de vivre. The boss welcomed me there, on a day in November 2020, in the midst of “her” factory and “her” workers. It was an encounter that would stay with me for a long time. An incredible life story that sounded like the Indian version of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It must be included here, at the beginning of this section on disenfranchisement, as an unfortunately rare example of the successful fight against it!
Lata’s story goes like this: At the age of 20, the beautiful, educated young woman from a liberal home in Bombay was married to a patriarch from Rajasthan, who was 15 years older than her. He was an entrepreneur who had become wealthy in the jute business. In keeping with tradition, the couple moved in with her husband’s family in Calcutta, where Lata was forced to lead a life in a gilded cage for the next three decades. She was hardly allowed to have any contact with her biological family, was obliged to obey her husband, and was constantly humiliated by her mother-in-law and the members of her new “family”. Cut off from the world and well-shielded from the eyes of visitors and business partners, she was kept hidden away on the third floor of the residential palace. She was only allowed to go shopping when accompanied by her husband. Reading the newspaper or asking her husband for details about business or politics was impossible, and was deemed unacceptable for a wife. Her little kingdom was the garden, which she was allowed to tend. It became a refuge from her decades of social confinement and isolation.
She never entered the Jute Baron’s factory halls, which were less than 200 m from her home. She was also forbidden to do so. She often wondered what it might be like in the factory, what the workers and foremen actually did. But to ask her husband this question would be an affront to the patriarch. There was enough money, clothes and food. Her daughters were her consolation. Lata devoted herself to them. But inwardly, she said, she had died early on – of loneliness and broken self-esteem.
She became a widow at the age of 57. And only then, after the death of her husband, as she revealed later in an interview with Outlook Business, Women of Worth, did she take a step towards herself. She suddenly found within herself what she seemed to have given up on decades ago: will, self-esteem, desires and an identity of her own. She felt a sense of resilience, the courage to assert herself and to stand up for her rights, even and especially in the face of masculine dominance.
As the widow, she was the rightful heir, but who cared? What did a law mean when compared to centuries-old traditions? A cousin – it could just as easily have been a brother, uncle or father-in-law, or even a male friend of the family – filed claims as a matter of course. The men in the family, business partners and supposed guardians of tradition eagerly agreed for the cousin to take over the business. No one had imagined that the widow would dare to make her voice heard. But that was exactly what she did. After a brief period of shock, Lata fought her way into a first visit to the factory – a sensation, a provocation. But the people in the factory understood: She was the new maalkin (the owner).
This was also how the judges saw it, awarding her the succession to the company management after years of legal proceedings. The administrators – all men, of course – saw things differently. They badmouthed Lata to their business partners, tried to deny her access to meetings and hid documents from her. But Lata didn’t let them bring her down, and took matters into her own hands. Today, she not only runs the factory, but is also involved in many different ways – by standing up for oppressed women whose rights have been trampled upon.
And she is not the only one. Bala Vikasa in Warangal, 150 km north-east of Hyderabad in Telangana, is one of the many initiatives that help widows help themselves. Among other things, the association organizes trainings for young widows that help them in gaining skills and livelihoods to support themselves and their families.
There, the widows offer each other encouragement and tangible support. There is financial help, and the interactions and discussions generate new ideas. In courses, women develop skills that enable them to take up work making them independent of their families. Lata’s successful fight against patriarchal structures is still an exception. All too often, the progressive inheritance law passed in 2005 remains rather vague and theoretical, showcasing minimal practical benefits for women. In any case, this law also provides for exceptions for individual religious groups and its validity is limited. Even more importantly, social or familial pressure in everyday life often ensures that women do not claim the rights to which they are entitled, as they are threatened with social ostracism and expulsion from the family. A lot is at stake for them, especially in the rural areas. After all, the family and the village community are the most important social networks that women have.
Inheritance is just one issue faced by women in India, stuck between centuries-old tradition and modernity. Law and justice have changed significantly in favour of women in recent years. Nevertheless, the sad reality remains that, despite all the legal improvements and the resulting changes in awareness, the situation of many women in India is characterised by violence and discrimination. The belief that women are worthless compared to men is still deeply rooted in society. The worship and reverence of women in India (as described earlier) do nothing to change this. Moreover, there is further, often tragic, evidence of this.
It is not for nothing that a number of statistics show India to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women. It starts even before birth: expecting a girl child is considered unfavourable, partly owing to this very idea of inferiority, but also because there are apparently tangible disadvantages to raising a girl. In India, I heard a saying that is only used by a few today, but is certainly always remembered – spending money on a daughter is like watering the flowers in your neighbour’s garden. This refers to the tradition of the dowry. It is still widespread, especially in rural areas, and is based on the absurd idea that the value of a person can be expressed in material goods. However, the custom does not only result in hardship when it comes to the payment itself, the problems begin much earlier.
Despite legislation that has prohibited prenatal sex determination since 1994 with the Pre-conception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, what scientists call prenatal sex selection is probably still frequently practised. In simple terms, some parents use modern medical methods to determine the sex of their child during (early) pregnancy and decide to have an abortion if necessary. It is for this reason that prenatal sex determination was criminalized by law in India. Some who do not have the financial means to take this route even go so far as to abandon or kill female newborns. This horrific practice is rightly denounced by the UN, and its abolition is a key SDG of the UN 2030 Agenda.
Even when I skimmed through an Indian geography textbook while visiting a private English-language school, I saw that among the maps and statistics was one that focused on the gender ratio of the individual states and used it, along with other indicators such as literacy levels, to show progress in terms of equality. That may be true, and the number of female and male infants may be slowly equalizing in some places due to stricter laws and changes in awareness. However, this is of no use to all the girls who were never born and is detrimental to a society that is becoming increasingly male-dominated. Researchers suspect that this could be accompanied by anti-social behaviour and increasing violence, and that the pressure on women to get married would also increase if there were comparatively fewer women, as compared to men, living in a region. Further consequences are unforeseeable, but the fact that the problem still persists is alarming.
Excerpted with permission from What the West Should Learn from India: Insights from a German Diplomat, Walter J Lindner, Juggernaut.
