Jain Spirit 2002 06 No 11

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 36

ART & LITERATURE
GIRLS CAN'T
STUDY?
Mira Kamdar continues her journey into her past, discussing the attitude to women and how disappointing
this was for Motiba
The education of women is a modern development.
It was not encouraged even fifty years ago
the Khara family, according to one of Motiba's surviving cousins, was that no female member of the family should be seen outside the house after the age of twelve. At age twelve, the girls were made to drop out of school and come inside the house for good. They entered into purda - the word simply means 'curtain' - a state of absolute invisibility to anyone outside the immediate family circle. If they needed anything, it was delivered to the house. Jewellers came to the house. Fabric merchants came to the house. Tailors came to the house. All manner of vendors came to the house. The practice of purda was widespread in the Muslim community, but it was something the Kharas and other prosperous Jain and Hindu families, adopted from the ruling Rajputs, feudal princes who were fanatical about the purity of their women. Keeping the women locked up was a powerful statement of superior social class. Only women of inferior social classes were free to move about in the world.
None of the women in my family were happy about being yanked out of school and locked up in the house at the age of twelve. For Motiba, this heartbreaking moment came even earlier, at the age of nine, following the premature death of her mother. She often told me and other of her grandchildren how much she lamented giving up her studies in the fourth grade; how, though she was intelligent, she couldn't become educated; and how important it was for us to achieve that which was forbidden to her. She never got over this trauma. Neither did her sister-in-law. Motiba's future husband was bright enough to win a full scholarship for his studies at the new English-medium school established in the Kathiawari town of Jetpur by the local Kathi ruler. His younger sister, Jasi, my Jasiphaiba, or
TOTIBA'S EARLY YEARS IN GOKHLANA WERE TYPICAL of any little girl's in those days in rural Kathiawar.
Childhood was, and in many cases still is, the freest time in an Indian woman's life. She does not yet require the strict shelter and control demanded of nubile women. In Hindu and Jain society of Motiba's era, girls were not considered to be real members of the family. They were merely 'on loan from God until such time as they could be delivered whole and pure into the 'real' family of their future husband. I once heard someone refer to this as growing flowers for someone else's garden'.
The prevailing wisdom was that it was best to take no chances with the virtue of sexually mature girls. For girls of Motiba's class and generation, the carefree phase of life came to a sudden and crushing halt at puberty. The rule in
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Jain Spirit. June - August 2002