Manjula Datta OConnor - Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia

DAUGHTERS OF DURGA

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

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

www.mup.com.au

First published 2022

Text Manjula Datta OConnor, 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.

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Text design and typesetting by Megan Ellis

Cover design by Nada Backovic

Cover image by Ninassart

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522878257 (paperback)

9780522879155 (paperback, signed)

9780522878264 (ebook)

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 Melbourneseven of them in totalmore than half had contacted police for family violence.

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.

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.

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 womens position in the family and society?

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.

But Sitas 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 Valmikis 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 Sens book The Argumentative Indian influenced me profoundly. In bringing Indias missing women into the lighta result of systemic elimination of females in utero and in infancyit 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 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 comingtransnational 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 womens lives, but its not always a happy one, be it in India or elsewhere in the worldincluding 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 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 Indiathat of being called characterless or a loose woman if she spoke to a member of the opposite sex. At medical school in Indiaa supposedly modern and progressive institutionId 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 fearsomething 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.