Abstract
‘Women hold up half the sky,’ proclaimed Mao Zedong nearly 50 years ago. This is perhaps true, but women certainly do not constitute half the children born in either China or India. In China, there are only 100 girls for 116 boys; in India, the corresponding figure is 100 girls for 111 boys. These gaps in the sex ratios in the two countries, caused by sex-selective abortion, are further aggravated by neglect of daughters, resulting in higher-than-expected mortality among girls. Surely that is against the laws of nature; as the catchy lyrics from the musical film Casbah (1948) would have us believe, ‘for every man, there is a woman’. What happens when this chain is broken wherein social structures and norms create conditions that leave one in six men without a mate? This is the question that the chapters in the book under review set out to answer.
Demographers have responded to this concern by arguing that societies will adjust to these gaps by changing the amount of time that men spend being married. Twenty years ago, noted demographers Mari Bhat and Shiva Halli predicted that a declining female population would result in an increasing age gap between the bride and the groom, thereby reducing the proportion of men who get married and increasing the incidence of divorce. They ended their predictions on an optimistic note, claiming that by the early 21st century, ‘it is almost certain that the demographic trends which contributed significantly to the present state of affairs in the marriage market will be reversed, and thus the marriage bargain will lose some of the coercive character it has acquired over the years’ (Bhat and Halli 1999: 143). The nuanced sociological analyses in this volume point out that these general statements fail to take into account the intricate threads of gender, class, caste and nationality that are woven together to determine which men find a bride, whom they marry and how these marital bargains shape gender relationships in the affected communities.
The various chapters in this volume highlight the factors underlying the decline in the number of women vis-à-vis men in India and China, but quickly move to the impact of this gender imbalance. They cluster around three themes. First, several chapters point out that bride shortages are higher in some regions than in others; one way of coping with this situation involves the import of brides from other regions, and in some cases, from other countries. The chapter by Jin et al. documents the common practice in the richer regions in China of using marriage brokers to import brides from the poorer regions. The chapter by Paro Mishra suggests that pervasive bride shortages in Haryana have opened doors for the import of brides from distant locations, sometimes as far away as Kerala and Assam. Many of these brides are from different castes. Ironically, Haryanvi society, despite its strong opposition to inter-caste marriage when both parties are from the same region, does not mind overlooking differences between the caste backgrounds of these imported brides and those of the men intending to marry them. These chapters thus foreshadow a potentially profound disturbance in the social relations in the areas affected by bride shortages.
The second observation emerging from these chapters is that bride shortages do not uniformly affect all men. Regardless of the sex ratio of the population, men from richer backgrounds manage to find wives, while it is the poor men who are either left as bachelors (or sometimes resort to polyandry) or are compelled to import brides by paying a bride price. Patricia Jeffrey suggests that there are multiple marriage markets in the same region. One marriage squeeze operates against men without resources or employment prospects who experience a shortage of women, whilst another favours ‘suitable boys’ who are sought out as grooms. This is an interesting analysis that allows us to reconcile escalation in dowry and rising marriage expenditures as parents seek hypergamous marriages side by side with the payment of broker fees and bride price by poorer grooms.
Third, these chapters also examine the role of bride shortages in re-negotiating the patriarchal bargain. Does scarcity increase women’s bargaining power and reduce gender inequality? Here the answers seem mixed. Larsen and Kaur find that in India, women in areas with bride shortages face lower constraints on their physical mobility and are more likely to support their parents. In contrast, Bose et al., using data from the National Family Health Survey–III, find that in areas where there is a shortage of women, more women report being slapped, punched and subjected to controlling behaviours by their husbands.
The unique contribution of this volume lies in its incisive analysis that seeks to link broad societal patterns shaping daughter aversion causing bride shortages on the one hand, with the deeply personal experiences of both men who find it difficult to find brides, and women who fill this gap by migrating long distances to marry these lonely bachelors, on the other. Although imbalanced sex ratios in India and China have for long been researched, their consequences are only now beginning to draw attention and the chapters in this excellent volume not only provide new data but also offer an analytical frame through which the emerging phenomena can be viewed.
One of the challenges confronting the volume, shared by almost all studies on this topic, is the difficulty in disentangling cause and effect. Social transformations take time to work their way through. Daughter aversion on the part of grandparents leads to bride shortage in the parental generation, and may promote greater appreciation of the value of daughters in the subsequent generation, at least among some sections of society. Long-distance brides in a highly patriarchal area may be vulnerable to discrimination and abuse, but as these long-distance marriages become the new norm, a critical mass may emerge to provide support to these strangers in a new land. While the various chapters in this volume, particularly the Introduction, alert us to an impending tectonic shift in areas facing tremendous bride shortages, it may perhaps be too early to draw conclusions about how these gender imbalances will reshape our social landscape. However, they have at least managed to achieve one thing: we will no longer look for universalised effects without differentiating between the rich and the poor.