She Can Do It

Even though it was 16 years ago, Dipannita Ghosh remembers the conversation almost as if it was yesterday. It was late at night and her parents thought she was sleeping. Dipannita was seven then and remembers her parents whispering next to her. “But where will we get the money to put her through school and college?” her mother was asking. Most of the other women in the slum where they lived worked as maids—their daughters either looked after the household chores when their mothers went off to work, or took care of the younger siblings or themselves worked in different houses. But Dipannita’s father, an electrician, wou­ldn’t hear of it. “No, I will not let any woman in my family work in other people’s houses.”

Now 23, Dipannita is a scientist in the making—a bright student, by her own admission. “I have always come first in school since KG and have got a First Class in the BSc Honours Course,” she says. Dipannita is currently enrolled in Calcutta University’s MSc Geography programme and is planning to pursue a PhD from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. In her poor neighbourhood of the industrial town of Hind Motors, about 50 km from Calcutta, where ironically electricity was a recent arrival, Dipannita “used to study by the light of a small lantern...it’s unthinkable for girls here past the age of 17 to remain unmarried. But I wanted to be someone in my own right. I want to have my own profession. Domesticity can come later, if it must.”

Similarly, in the northern suburb of Uttarpara, in Bengal’s Hooghly district, 20-year-old Tanusree Patra is sure that she will not allow herself to be “married off” until she’s ready for it. Her mother, Lolita, was barely a teenager when she found herself having to abandon her dreams and marry Meghnad, a man who turned out to be a drunkard. “She brought us up by working as a domestic help in different households,” says Tanusree. Her mother would have liked to attend college but she couldn’t pursue those dreams. But she had Tanusree enr­olled in a BCom Honours and Accountancy course in a city college. Today, Tanusree has plans to be an investment banker.

The stories of Dipannita and Tanusree reflect an encouraging trend among Bengal’s rural and urban poor where girls are showing a new determination—defiance even—to break free from traditional shackles like early marriage and pursuing higher studies to become professionals.

Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee

“Our mother struggled everyday, brought us up by working as a domestic help in different households.”

Tanusree Patra

And they are starting young. At her home in Sonarpur village in the South 24 Parganas district, eight-year-old Sraboni Ghosh declares that she wants to be a teacher. If you ask the one activity she would choose to do 24 hours a day, she says emphatically, “study”. Her mother Papia works as a domestic help and her father is a plumber.

While sociologists differ about the reasons for the trend, it is most commonly attributed to family support and encouragement arising out of various government schemes for the girl child—which grant certain privileges for keeping daughters in school. These range from the Central National Programme for Education of Girls at Elementary Level (added by an amendment to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to grant specific benefits to the girl child) to the Kanyashree Scheme recently introduced in Bengal by the Mamata Banerjee government.

The social discrimination the Indian girl child, especially those from poor families, were subjected to in earlier times may not have been eradicated altogether but thanks to myriad government grants—given on condition of her education—these are also gradually helping change attitudes towards them. “It is true that in earlier days girls were treated worse than the boys in a family and they were considered a burden,” says Papia Ghosh, Sraboni’s mother, “because from the beg­inning the thought was that they would be given away to another family and that too with dowry. So no one wanted daughters. Now everyone wants a daughter and they want to educate her.”

Consider also, for instance, Nomita Pra­manik, from a village in the Sund­er­bans, who has taken up work as a domestic help in the Calcutta suburb of Garia so that she can put her daughter through school. Ganga, her 13-year-old,  loves acade­m­ics, but is undecided whether she will be a teacher or dancer, so her mother has also enrolled her in a Bharatanatyam class. In fact, the emphasis on extracurricular activities, over and above an academic curriculum, is an integral part of this trend. Not far from the slum where Nomita and Ganga live, in another shanty, Mamoni sets out from home at the crack of dawn, drops her two young daughters off at school, rushes to the apa­­rtment block where she works as a domestic help and dashes back to the school by 11 so that she can take them to art class.

And Shampa, another domestic worker, who tells prospective employers beforehand that her timing revolves around her daughter’s school and the many extracurricular activities she insists her daughter take up. “If the rich girls in the houses where I work can paint, dance or sing, why can’t my daughter? I want her to do everything that they do.”

And finally, what about the men? Are the fathers, brothers, uncles and other male relatives encouraging of the trend? Or are they still intimidated by the perceived threat to traditions of patriarchy? Mamoni’s husband, who is a rickshaw puller, gets back home early in the evening to help with their daughters’ homework. “He is much more conscientious than me about their education,” says Mamoni proudly. “In fact, he scolds me if I ever take too long at any of the houses where I work. Once when I took up an extra job, he made me quit it, even though it was well-paying, telling me, ‘You will get late taking them to school if you take up this job’.”

Of course, not every such story has a happy ending but clearly, contrary to popular perceptions, men from poor families are not averse to helping their daughters seek a better tomorrow.