Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia

By Manjula Datta O'Connor

In the early 2010s a spate of domestic violence-related murders in the Victorian Indian community compelled psychiatrist Manjula Datta O’Connor to investigate the causes of patriarchal abuse in South Asian families. As a practitioner with many decades experience in the field, Datta O’Connor questioned whether a better understanding of history and culture could help these communities implement measures to prevent family violence.

But the most powerful lessons came from those she met through her practice - survivors of transnational abuse and of sexual and dowry exploitation. These women taught Datta O’Connor about human resilience and strength and the myriad ways women find the inner power to survive. These are the daughters of the goddess Durga, wielding the tools of history to produce meaningful change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780522878264

Book preview

DAUGHTERS OF DURGA

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2022

Text © Manjula Datta O’Connor, 2022

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2022

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design and typesetting by Megan Ellis

Cover design by Nada Backovic

Cover image by © Ninassart

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522878257 (paperback)

9780522879155 (paperback, signed)

9780522878264 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction

  1 Women of India

  2 The Happy Family

  3 The Costs of a Hierarchical Society

  4 A Daughter is Only Ever a Guest in the Father’s Home

  5 The Malady (Dowry Deaths)

  6 Societal Fear Paralyses Social Change

  7 Wish You Were a Son

  8 Caste and Honour Killings

  9 Huge Cost of Mental Illness

10 Migration, Family and Suicide

11 Education is the Key to Equality

12 The Burden on Men of Indian Society

13 Actions Against Dowry Abuse in Australia

14 The Way Forward: Manusmriti Reimagined

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

In the past decade, some Indian women in Australia have been dying in ways that have left the Australian-Indian community shocked and searching for answers. Of a cluster of suicides in a small area of Melbourne—seven of them in total—more than half had contacted police for family violence.¹

One woman per week is killed in Australia by a current or former intimate partner. Our Watch, the peak Australian body charged with prevention of the deadly problem, labels family violence a serious problem in Australia.²

It touches all segments of society, and never fails to shock. It is worse when it affects the people we know. We can no longer deny it. It threatens to disrupt our peace of mind.

One of the leading community members said, ‘we are blindsided, we did not see it coming’. Previous reports of murder-suicides reported in 2012 to 2016 were once again under focus in 2022, when Raj Sharma was charged with the murder of his wife Poonam Sharma and their six-year-old daughter Vanessa.³ A series of murders, then, of women and children in Victoria by the men they loved and who were meant to love them. Why were women and children dying in domestic violence episodes? The Indian community was in shock.⁴

Why the profound silence around mental health, and family violence?

We get by without thinking about it.

My work as a psychiatrist to women of mainly Indian and South Asian heritage had already given me some of these answers, and writing this book crystallised my thoughts.

Indian and South Asian women share many experiences with women across the world, but their lives are also different in significant and unique ways. It is in these differences that answers and solutions can be found. Answers and solutions that will make the lives of this group better. Answers and solutions that will keep them alive.

Exposure to industrialisation and modernisation is changing India, and with it, the lives of Indian women. They are better educated than their mothers, and wealthier. But sociologists and academics are curious: will modernisation benefit the status of Indian women? Will they continue to be the subjects of traditional societal gender roles of modesty and submission, or will we see a change in women’s position in the family and society?⁵ Is the new Indian woman going to be brave and claim her power, like the Goddess Durga, or will she follow the ideal of the submissive, pleasing wife modelled on Sita—the consort of Lord Rama of the epic Ramayana?⁶

Goddess Durga (literally ‘the Fort’ in Sanskrit) is the mother-protector of the Hindu Universe, the goddess of power. Durga is multi-limbed, and rides atop a lion or tiger so that she may always be ready to battle evil from any direction. Men pray to her. In the great battle of Mahabharat, Lord Krishna urges Arjuna to pray to Durga before the war. Women hope to imbibe her power.⁷

But Sita’s submissiveness and modesty is the ideal of Indian womanhood: a wife, who uncomplainingly administers to the needs of her husband, and bows down to his will. Sita is the consort of Lord Rama in Valmiki’s Ramayana. Written more than two thousand years ago, it is one of the most significant and influential narratives that has shaped Indian culture.

Professor Amartya Sen’s book The Argumentative Indian influenced me profoundly. In bringing India’s missing women into the light—a result of systemic elimination of females in utero and in infancy—it illuminated the lives of those women of India, and Indian women in Australia, who suffer abuse. In its pages, I understood the suffering of Indian women from the cradle to the grave, living as a burden to their families from conception to widowhood.

Life without bearing a child, preferably a son, is incomplete for many women in South Asia. This event brings joy, power, gifts and status. Perhaps even an aspiration that she will one day become a powerful mother-in-law and have the authority to inflict onto her daughter-in-law the abuse and violence she herself suffered. Deniz Kandiyoti, a Turkish writer, identified this patriarchal bargain in 1988: women suffer at the hands of the patriarchy, yet pray to have sons and will give them preferential treatment over daughters in the hope they will get power back from their association with their son. If she is widowed, she will once again become a burden to her son and his family. As a woman, she will not have the resources to live alone. And, even if she managed to, she would find herself in a dangerous situation.⁸ Living alone as a single or widowed woman is a serious safety risk for many in India.

More than twelve years ago, I began my work supporting victim-survivors of domestic family violence in Australia. The most hard-hitting stories kept coming—transnational abuse, dowry exploitation, economic exploitation, domestic servitude, and sexual exploitation. How could these things be stopped? To answer this question, I had to find answers to many others. What makes women travel to Australia? What are the roles of globalisation, culture, migration, acculturation stress, the pressures of moving into a new country? My passion to find answers was sustained by the parents of victim-survivors, many of whom had travelled from India to Australia to support their daughters and were themselves often suffering from extreme distress, insomnia, clinical depression and anxiety triggered by the pain of what their daughter had been through. Marriage is an essential, defining moment in many women’s lives, but it’s not always a happy one, be it in India or elsewhere in the world—including Australia.

I was luckier.

I am a child of a middle-class, educated family. We had no affiliations to caste. I grew up knowing that we as children could bring female or male classmates and friends to our home, or if I was to choose a partner for myself, it would not be a big problem for my family. Many of my girlfriends’ families were the same. So, when I fell in love with a man well outside of my family’s caste and religion, an Australian man of Irish-English descent,⁹ my parents and family did not put up any barriers.

When I came to Australia in the early 1970s as a young wife, I had some idea that Australia would be very different to India. But I did not know how different.

I loved this country from the day I arrived. Almost the first thing I noticed was the freedom from a persistent fear felt by every woman in India—that of being called ‘characterless’ or a ‘loose woman’ if she spoke to a member of the opposite sex. At medical school in India—a supposedly modern and progressive institution—I’d had a male friend who was a year senior to me. I found his company intellectually stimulating and would often go to have a conversation with him. One day he told me, ‘People say you are shameless,’ in a tone of voice that was both protective and censuring of me. I had no idea that such things were being said, and this only added to my deep-seated feeling of oppression. The modern education of intelligent young women and men was not bringing in the fresh breeze of new ideas or new freedoms for Indian women. I stopped talking to him.

As a small child, I always felt uncomfortable when I went to play with my friend next door. Her father would make us sit in his lap and I can recall feeling his erection and not knowing what it was but becoming very anxious. After this happened a couple of times, I stopped going to her house. Around this time, a middle-aged man grabbed me and took me to a fire-escape staircase and shut the door. I felt fear—something evil was going to happen. I was not sure what it was, but I knew I had to escape from him. Quick thinking at the age of five, I said, ‘I can hear my mother, she is calling me.’ He opened the door and let me go.

Harassment and assault, and even rape were ever-present dangers for a young girl growing up in India. The societal pressure was not on men to change, but on young women to always prove and protect their ‘honour’ in the face of men’s behaviour. In public spaces, particularly, extreme caution was needed. In the first two years of going to medical school, I had to travel there by bus. I would always attempt to grab the seat labelled ‘women only’, but every other woman would want that seat too, looking to avoid the gratuitous staring, touching and rubbing we were subjected to. There was some public discussion about this behaviour—dubbed ‘eve-teasing’, which both minimised and mischaracterised what was occurring—but even now, it’s still ever-present. In 2012, a physiotherapy student, Nirbhaya, was gang-raped by five men in South Delhi, in a moving bus at night. The driver stopped the bus to rape her as well. Not even having a male friend with her protected her from what they wanted to do. She later died from her injuries. According to the BBC report, these were ‘ordinary, apparently normal and certainly unremarkable men’. The case drew worldwide attention. One man, a bystander who had nothing to do with the case, told a BBC reporter that she should not have fought back. These accusations—also made by women doing the work of patriarchy—inhibit and constrict the lives of girls and women all over India, and bring shame and dishonour to the woman’s family. Boys and men have no such constraints. They are free to explore the world and speak to whomever they wish. They may gamble and drink. Their behaviour brings no shame or dishonour. And the patriarchal system remains firmly in place: favouring males, enforcing unequal treatment, and ensuring women’s lives remain secondary to those of men.

In Australia, that women talked to men or vice versa was simply not noteworthy. There was no concept of shame and dishonour for the family, only accountability to oneself.

But it also dawned on me that Australia has its own deep work to do regarding racism and colonisation.¹⁰ Family violence is still present. In Australia it touches 1 in 4 women, and 1 in 13 men suffer partner abuse.¹¹ One woman per week is killed by an intimate partner. Violence against women is a wicked global problem, not confined to any class, religion, and country. The question is what tools or tactics are used, by whom, and in what context.

Over time, I was to learn the tools of the trade of domestic violence used by men and their families against South Asian—including Indian—immigrant women, as well as what could be possible solutions.

In my role helping victim-survivors, I was reaping the fruits of the hard work done towards the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century by women’s and feminist movements of both India and Australia. In pre-independence India, many women led social reform movements. Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay were among the first women to participate in the freedom struggle. Then there were others, like Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy (1886–1968), the first woman House Surgeon of Maternity Hospital in Madras Constituency; Amrit Kaur (1889–1964), the first woman to head WHO and Minister in India; and Purnima Sinha (1927–2015), a physicist who built her own X-ray machine from recycled war materials in Calcutta. Numerous other women, such as Savitribai Phule (1831–1897), Tarabai Shinde (1850–1910), and Ramabai Ranade (1863–1924), spoke up for disadvantaged women. Women leaders also proved to be catalysts for female participation in political processes, influential enough to get Indian women the vote in new India in 1947.¹² These women defied the patriarchal silence and paved the way for millions of Indian women to find their voices, myself included. Simultaneously in Australia, Edith Cowan, Mary Lee, Rose Scott, Vida Goldstein, and many others were fighting for women’s rights. Their pioneering work led to the age of sexual consent being raised to sixteen and equal inheritance laws. In 1902, Australia became one of the first countries in the world to give women the right to vote in federal elections, and the first country in the world in which women could stand for national parliament (except, in both instances, for those who were ‘aboriginal natives’ of Australia, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands).

With the passage of time, life changes, and a new partner, I started to examine my position as an immigrant in Australia. I acquired a deeply analytical attitude to my continuous study of Western versus Eastern cultures, and of Indian versus Australian culture. I learnt of the enormous strengths that lie within both cultures and their values. Simultaneously, I learnt of their weaknesses and harmful cultural practices.

Migration, I recognised, added yet another layer of complexity to the life of South Asian women and men. There are many challenges to be faced—changing gender roles, greater freedoms, loss of family, new language, and more. How do these add to vulnerabilities like family violence and mental health issues?¹³ Many of these issues are dealt with in this book.

After more than a quarter century in Australia, I reconnected with my heritage through teaching at Dev Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya, a university in Haridwar where students come from all over India to learn a mix of Eastern and Western subjects. The university is ‘devoted to the preservation and propagation of the Indian Culture … that could combine the precepts of practical knowledge (shiksha) and spiritual education (vidya) to create truly enlightened individuals’¹⁴. The university has a program that welcomes foreign tutors and lecturers willing to donate teaching time in return for board and lodging. I would go to the university twice a year for six weeks at a time and enjoy the calm and quiet; its gates leave the busy cacophony of cars and trucks outside. The residential quarters are surrounded by gardens and a temple. There are many buildings for the senior academic staff, lecture halls, a library, and a student hostel with separate areas for men and women.

I connected with these students, women and men of all socioeconomic backgrounds, and I learnt to speak Hindi properly. I taught Western subjects of psychiatry, mental illness, diagnoses, neurochemistry, medication, and cognitive behavioural therapy, while the students taught me yoga and meditation. I often met with the dean and with the vice-chancellor, Professor Surya Prasad Mishra, to discuss the concept of combining Eastern and Western treatments for patients suffering mental illness. And those patients who attended the university’s clinic received both types of treatments to achieve the maximum benefit—meditation, prayer, and their intense belief in their faith, sometimes coupled with appropriate medications. Through working with children of nomads who were in primary school at a local NGO Divya Prem Sewa Mission in Hardiwar, I learnt about the lives and resilience of some of the poorest people. I also met victims of domestic violence. Their experiences reinforced the truisms stated in The Argumentative Indian.

Finding solutions to the many problems faced by Indian women, whether in India or Australia, couldn’t be done without fully learning the life cycle of the Indian woman. This book is the culmination of fifty years of thinking. It is a distillation of analysis and thoughts about my culture in comparison with other Asian and Western cultures. It wonders how to harness the strengths that existed in ancient knowledge and combine them with the modern evolving India and the science-based culture of the West to shape the destiny of the modern, mobile Indian woman, whether in India or in Australia.

It is an attempt to support modern-day activists and advocates in line with the vision shared by Prime Minister Nehru in the most famous speech in the history of modern India, delivered to the people of India on the day of independence from the British Raj, the 15th of August 1947:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.¹⁵

The question this book seeks to answer is this: how can we enhance the living conditions of women such that both halves of a heterosexual relationship, woman and man, are recognised as equal and essential for each other’s survival? Lord Shiva and the Goddess Parvati in Hinduism are always depicted as a man and a woman together, and Parvati is referred to as ardhangini—a Sanskrit word for a woman, which means the other half of the man. According to the sacred Hindu text Satapatha Brahmana, ‘The wife is verily the half of the husband. Man is only half, not complete until he marries.¹⁶ How can we effect change so that society, families and individuals do not see daughters as a handicap, but rather as individuals who add strength? Where daughters and sons are equally valued, and parents do not have to wish their daughters were sons?

This book is a synthesis of my education, cross-cultural experiences, research, deep clinical observations, and community-based work. It is built on the foundational experiences of my family life, inspired by India’s thinkers and leaders, and most of all by the vibrant women of India and Australia. It gives expression to my inner thoughts and breaks the enforced silence of those women who are unable to exercise free will, who feel trapped, who are unable to see options and possibilities; it is for those who are traumatised, depressed, anxious, or suicidal; it is for those who are forced into domestic servitude or who have had their visa sponsorship withdrawn and been deported. It is for those for whom change did not come quickly enough—the women who took their lives or were killed by those who were meant to love and protect them. Those seven women in one small area of Melbourne. The many, many others.

Domestic family violence is an enormous and complex issue to explore. This book has a tight scope. It is about the lives of migrant victim-survivors of domestic abuse as they presented to my clinical psychiatric practice. It does not purport to be a comprehensive treatise on the role of caste and gender in domestic violence as it is found in India; rather, it investigates some parts of the women’s heritage (which I share), and its role in their problem, and solutions. These women reveal to me that while victims of abuse suffer, they are not passive; they have strengths, and they use them to survive the unspeakable abuses caused by this crime called family domestic violence.

It is a privilege to be a psychiatrist. Every day I learn about humanity from the vantage point of an insider. Though I listen to unimaginable stories of trauma and abuse suffered by my patients, usually inflicted by other humans, my patients have also taught me about human resilience and strengths and the myriad ways in which they find inner power to survive.

In recent years, spurred on by the rape of Nirbhaya in India in 2012, the concept of female ‘shakti’, or power of women derived from goddesses of India, has been mobilised to challenge oppression and violence suffered by women.¹⁷ The title of this book is inspired by that movement, but it represents stories of all women. It depicts women who, as survivors of domestic or other forms of violence, have shown themselves to be strong like Goddess Durga; with power, they have shown themselves to be not passive recipients of violence. The book shows how these women can produce a meaningful change. The mythology is Hindu in origin, but the book Daughters of Durga represents the power of all women, no matter what segment of society they come from.

1

WOMEN OF INDIA

When my father developed cancer of the liver in the year 2000, I took leave from my practice in Melbourne. I wanted to do all I could to help and to be with him in Delhi in his last months. It was painful to watch him lose weight each day, to go from a strong, healthy, once-powerful man to this thin 84-year-old in distress and pain. I decided to turn that period into something worthwhile, and I asked him to tell me his life story.

My father spoke to me about his father. In the early 1900s, my grandfather lived on the North-West Frontier of Pakistan in a province called Dera Ismail Khan, where the family attended their local temple regularly and were devout followers. They did not have a lot of money, and when my grandfather’s older brother died of a heart attack they couldn’t afford to pay for his funeral. They asked the priest to help them and do the cremation free of charge. He would not. This enraged my grandfather, and he had his brother cremated in the woods with no rituals. The family renounced the temples and idol worshipping, and adopted a newly formed social-religious movement—the Arya Samaj, which translates as Society of Nobles. Founded in 1875, in British times, by revered thinker and ascetic scholar Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, Arya Samaj is a modern Hindu movement inclined towards programs of social reform and away from superstition. It is based on the wisdom of ancient Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, written 3000–4000 years ago in the ancient and highly evolved language of Sanskrit, known as the mother of all languages. Vedas are known to Hindus as the ‘revealed truth’ spoken by God to ancestors.

The Arya Samaj opposes caste-based discrimination. It does not believe in the abhorrent concept of a caste system, and the ‘untouchability’ of the so-called lowest caste, Dalits (originally Sudras), or in child marriage, which was widespread when outlawed in 1929.¹ It believes in the empowerment of women. These are the values of my family, and the values I grew up with.

Mahatma Gandhi, who paralysed the British Raj by mobilising nation-wide peaceful spiritual protests (called Satyagraha), was also a follower. He believed in and respected women’s abilities and pushed for women’s equality in the early 1900s. The same values were reinforced by his protégé Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the popular leader of the Indian National Congress during the struggle for independence from Britain and, later, prime minister of India, from 1947 to 1964.

We children adored Prime Minister Nehru. I can recall listening to his Independence Day speeches every year on the 15th of August. They were always stirring and, with the tricolour flag swirling on top of the Red Fort, we felt very patriotic and proud of our country. India was on the march to becoming a modern country. He inspired us children, me and my younger sister and brother. He envisaged the women of India to be modern and fearless. There would be no dowry and no female feticide in the land of Nehru. Women would be educated, leaders, equal to men and equally valued. But this support for women was not Westernised: it was firmly based on ancient Indian cultural practice.

Gender relations are largely power-based in societies globally—largely patriarchal systems devised by men.² But in India, women were educated and mixed with educated men, according to ancient Indian traditions dating back more than 3000 years.³ In the Rig-Veda period (1000–1500 BC), women in India enjoyed an unprecedented position of strength and respect, described beautifully in the eloquent poems of the time. The Vedas were written in Sanskrit by a number of unknown writers, including, many believe, more than twenty women. Of Goddess Saraswati:

Thou art the goddess of letters … Thou, beautiful goddess, art knowledge of devotion, great knowledge, mystic knowledge, and spiritual knowledge, which confers eternal liberation. Thou are the science of reasoning, the three Vedas, the arts and sciences: thou art moral and political science.⁴

The national character of modern Indian womanhood is strongly influenced by its educated women: religiously equal, politically savvy, fearless warriors and queens, poetesses and ones who were allowed to choose their own partners in a ceremony called swamvaar depicted in poems of Rig-Vedas, the dramatic stories in Puranas, the tales of Mahabharata. The Upanishads—part of the Vedas—contain accounts of learned women, including that of