When Archana Singh was 13, her parents arranged for her to be married to a man 10 years older than her. When she found out, she was jumping up and down and singing and dancing in front of her home in Bihar, India. She was excited, she says, because she didn’t know what marriage would involve. Her sister was two years older than her and married, but they didn’t talk about married life.

“I had no idea,” Singh says.

At the time, she was in Grade 8, and didn’t want to move into her husband’s family’s home, which was within eye sight of her parents’ home. “I always looked at my parents’ home and so I went back. My parents cried with me, saying, ‘You go, you go.’ But I didn’t go,” she says. “Everyday I went to school and I didn’t go to my in-laws’ home.”

After Grade 10, Singh moved into her in-laws’ house and by the time she was 17, she had two children—one son, Harsh, and one daughter, Khushi.

“It was very difficult for me because I had to do all the work—cleaning the house, washing clothes, and making food—every job was only me,” she says, noting that when she lived with her parents, she wasn’t responsible for any of those chores, having an older sister.
The marriage was “very difficult” for the first 10 years because she and her husband were not together. He was away at school, studying engineering, and she was alone with no money in her in-laws’ house. She says that her parents would come visit and bring her saris or give her money. She says her mother-in-law loves her and supported her through the years also, but her father-in-law was a “very angry person.”

Now, at 27, things are “much better,” Singh says. Both are living in Jaipur, an 18-hour train ride from their hometown, and working with a combined salary of 15,000 rupees per month ($275 Cdn). That’s enough to pay for private school tuition for both of their children and allows them to save minimally for their children’s university education.

“I passed 10th class but I didn’t go to university because I had two children,” Singh says, noting had she had the opportunity to go, she would have wanted to. “I like singing. I would’ve studied music.”

In Canada, the average age for marriage has gone up in the last 40 years. Between 1972 and 2008, the average age of a first marriage for women increased from 22.5 years to 29, according to Statistics Canada. The average age for women having children in Canada is 29.6 years, also up since 1975 when it was 26.7.

In India, the statistics are very different.

According to a major study by the Indian organization National Council for Applied Economic Research with 30,000 married women across small villages and large cities all over the country, half were married before the legal age of 18 years, and two in five women had no say in who their husbands were. Additionally, 22 per cent of women gave birth before age 18, according to 2006 statistics, which decreased from 28 per cent in 1992.

In 2001, the Indian federal government’s national policy for the empowerment of women stated that child marriages were “discrimination against the girl child.” The policy set out laws to force people to register their marriages and all births so that girls could use their right to refuse a marriage before the age of 18. It predicted that “by 2010 child marriages [will be] eliminated” through better education and incentives to keep girls in school if they were unmarried.

A 2009 report from the U.S.’s Guttmacher Institute, an organization focused on advancing sexual and reproductive health, notes that “In India, the persistence of early marriage reinforces women’s low status and social isolation and such marriage almost always force girls to prematurely end their education to assume household responsibilities. Consequently, early marriage reduces women’s employment prospects as well.”

The report, Adolescent Marriage and Childbearing in India: Current Situation and Recent Trends, also states: “Marriage also usually leads directly to childbearing, given pressure, largely exerted by mothers-in-law through their sons for a young bride to have a baby relatively quickly. … If young women in India are to play a more active role in their country’s social and economic development, they need greater autonomy along with education and training. These needs often go unmet, however, if teenage women assume the adult responsibilities of being a wife and mother.”

Of women between 15 and 49, 63.5 per cent have more than six years of education, and ranges from a low of 33.5 per cent depending on the region. “Education enhances women’s ability to interpret and act on those messages. Throughout the world, higher levels of educational attainment are consistently associated with higher status for women, related delays in marriage and desire for and achievement of smaller families,” the report says.

For women who do have an education, however, it can still be difficult, says Keerti Sharma, a travel executive with Idex, an Indian organization that works with foreign volunteers to teach English and math to children and women in slum areas across the country, to help run an orphanage and to help maintain an elephant village in Jaipur.

Sharma, 46, is married with four daughters. She grew up in Jaipur, near the Johari Bazaar and graduated from Rajasthan University with an honours psychology degree and later obtained a hotel management certificate. She joined Idex last month, but previously worked in hotels and the insurance industry. For the first 15 years of her marriage, however, she didn’t work. “For 15 years, I always tried to go for a job, but always I went and then turned back home and didn’t go for the job,” she says.

When asked why, Sharma, who had a love marriage, replies: “Because in the joint family, my sister in law, she didn’t work at that time so she didn’t like that I worked. They are educated but sometimes my elder brother-in-law’s wife didn’t like it, so everybody went with what she said.”

Sharma, whose father is a high court judge, says it’s not easy being a woman in India. “We have a male dominated society. They don’t like that women improve so they always try to put us down,” she says, also noting that there’s a cultural tendency to instill fear in women.

“Women are afraid to give their views, because of the society they live in. In Indian society, if you have a daughter, people teach them, ‘No, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can’t wear this, you can’t go here, you can’t go there.’ This is our society. Women are afraid. They always feel, ‘I can’t do this.’ They always feel in their heart, ‘I’m a woman so I can’t do. My father will not allow, my mother will not allow me.’ Our society is like that.”

Singh agrees. “Yes, it’s very difficult to be a woman in India. When she gets married, she’s only a child. She’s only 13, 14, 15, so she doesn’t know everything and her life is very difficult. At 14, 15, 16, she’s pregnant. Some women die from childbirth. After marriage, they always go to their in-laws’ home and they do all the work,” she says. “Women’s life is very difficult in India.”

There are signs that things are changing, however.

Sharma says, for example, 15 years ago she started following Japanese Buddhism. Her family criticized her for it saying that she had given up her Hindu faith. “For six years, no one was with me. My husband was against it. My father in law was totally against it,” she says. “In our society, people think that I have changed my religion. I haven’t changed my religion. I am Hindu also and worship my god. I also celebrate Holi and Diwali. But I follow Buddhism because in Buddhism, whatever problems are in my life, it’s from my past karmas so I have no right to blame anybody else in my environment. … It is my karma.”

Sharma says that her family saw the positive changes in her and also started following Buddhism. “They told me, ‘Yeah, you’re doing good. Whatever you’re following, just follow it,’” she says. “My in-laws, they are from a small village, Baswa. When my brother-in-law and his wife and cousins and their wives or elders in the village, when they heard about me, first they criticized. Now they appreciate me.”

At her age, she says, most women stay at home in India and don’t work. “Our society didn’t like women going outside at my age. My inlaws they always say, ‘Why are you doing this? I always tell them because I feel good. I don’t like to stay at home and gossip, ‘What are you doing, what things you said, what your daughter-in-law is doing.’ The gossip is like that. This type of gossip I don’t like. I like to read books, I like to read Japanese Buddhism. In Buddhism, they always prefer that women should be educated and women have the power to change the world. She can change whole societies. If she changes, then society will also change.”

Singh currently works as a translator and teacher for Idex in Jaipur. From Monday to Friday, for an hour and a half, women from the Ambedkar Nagar slum in Jaipur go to the Saarthak Centre (a one-room school with very little resources) to learn English, math and Hindi from international volunteers. Once a week there is a discussion on various topics concerning “women’s empowerment.”

During a women’s empowerment class discussion on March 6 on how they take care of themselves, volunteers ask the women what their perfect day would be like. One woman, 23-year-old Manju, says her perfect day was before marriage because she was free to go anywhere. Another, Punam, says the same. Another woman, 47-year-old Madhu, says the same.

Madhu was married at 12 years old and is now a grandmother. She notes that she has a lot of free time now to read and come to class to learn because she has both a daughter and a daughter-in-law at home to do the housework. In her own case, in one generation, one daughter was married at 18, but went on to graduate from university. Her second daughter is 23 and will only be getting married next year. Her son, 23, also married a 21-year-old women who’s also on her way to graduating from university.

The women in the empowerment group ask the volunteers—one from the U.S., one from Holland, and one from Germany—the same questions and want to know whether they have a dowry system in their cultures, at what age do people usually get married and have children, and whether they are enjoying India. Madhu says she doesn’t agree with the dowry system, but she accepts it. And no one in the room can understand how Stanny Bode, the 51-year-old Dutch volunteer, has three children, one grandchild and is not married.

Before joining Idex, Singh was a student in the class, starting with a stitching course and then joining the English class two years ago. For her and others, the classes have been a success.

“All the women are very happy to be here. When they go shopping, or to the market, they didn’t know prices but now they know math,” she says, noting that previously some were susceptible to getting the wrong change back or being overcharged when buying multiple items. “One woman, Susma, her husband didn’t go to school, her family members didn’t go to school, she didn’t go to school, but she went to the bank [to open an account]. The bank manager told her, ‘Please put your thumb in the ink,’ and she said, ‘No no, I can sign my name. I know my name.’ The manager looked surprise and said, ‘Okay, very good. Please sign.’ And she signed and he asked her where she learned. She told him, ‘I went to Saarthak Centre, Idex NGO. Volunteers are my teachers.’ She told me that and I was very happy.”

The UN estimates that 142 million children will be forced to marry by 2020, hindering education and health and continuing the cycle of poverty in the least developed countries. Statistics show that women and girls with secondary schooling are up to six times less likely to be married as children and for every extra year that a girl stays in school, her income increases by 15 to 20 per cent. That means when she does have children, they will be healthy and also more likely to attend school, breaking the cycle of poverty. The number one killer of girls aged 15 to 19 in least developed countries is child birth. Further, if 10 per cent more girls attend school, a country’s gross domestic product increases by approximately three per cent.

Sharma says that she sometimes worries for the future of her four daughters, and hopes that they will develop their own views about their world and themselves. “I wish that my daughters will have qualities to develop their own views so that they can easily connect with their husband,” she says. “I feel that if women are first strong in character then she can develop so many things on her own. I also teach my daughters that you should always first be strong with you. If you are strong by heart and soul, then you can do whatever you want in the future. … In India, women are not now equal, but they will be.”

For her part, Singh says she has an optimistic outlook for her daughter’s future. She says Kushi wants to be a doctor, and she believes it’s possible for her to be celebrated in the community when she achieves her goal. “I support my daughter, so the community will support my daughter. My daughter is a doctor and people will say, ‘Oh, she’s a doctor. Oh, her daughter is a doctor, so my son and daughter can be a doctor as well,’ or engineers or anything,” she says. “Daughter and son are the same, so I think things are changing.”

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