Voices From the Street: An Ethnography of India’s Street Children, A Case Study of Delhi, by Lori McFadyen, Hope India Publications, 2004. Chapter 4

Voices From the Street: An Ethnography of India’s Street Children, A Case Study of Delhi, by Lori McFadyen, Hope India Publications, 2004.

Chapter 4: Locating the Street Children in the Indian Context

This chapter generated a lot of shock to me. I am constantly surprised by how I think that I have opened my perceptions so that I will not be shocked by the next thing I read…and then guess what…I am!
First of all, McFayden talks about gender relations. I had known that Indian society preferred male children to female children, and that women were seen as an expense because of their dowry…but McFayden took it to a new level for me in describing “kitchen accidents”. This is the term commonly used to describe how women are doused with kerosene and set on fire by their groom’s family because their own family either refuses to pay or does not pay enough dowry. What? This sounds like something outrageous that must have happened a thousand years ago at the most recent…but not. According to UNICEF, in the year 1994 alone, 5,000 women were killed this way. Now? Maybe it is somewhat better in 2008 than in 1994, but I seem to doubt that it would be completely eliminated in the span of 14 years. Wow…I just can not imagine…
In the case of female newborns, many are killed in the first week of life. One poem that McFayden sites that I find very interesting is the following:
Oh God I beg of you
I touch your feet time and again.
Next birth don’t give me a daughter.
Give me hell instead.
Wow…to choose one life over another. It is interesting to me that in many other culture, the female is the one put up on a pedestal, as I have seen in other readings for other classes. For instance, women in England and colonial America, the woman is seen as the most pious and pure of the society—a thing to be looked up to. But here in India, women are seen as a financial burden. One thing that I do wonder is whether there are some contexts in which women are admired in India that is not as outrageous that gets overlooked because it does not set the blood boiling of other cultures.
Another point that I found interesting: McFayden also discusses caste and says that caste has changed in India to be a division among economic lines. How does that manifest itself? What does this economic division look like? Also, marriages are still arranged according to caste lines, so is the caste system really over? Laws can change a lot of things, but making the caste system illegal does not mean that caste has disappeared. What is the real status of the caste system in India?