An Argument With Amartya Sen - Some Women's Day Thoughts

This lengthy post has 3 parts.

Part 1:
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Note: By argument, I do not mean opposition - I do not hold opinions opposite to those presented by 'the Argumentative Indian'. And it is not just Sen, my argument is on (not against) one of the points made by 'India: Economic Development And Social Opportunity' which Sen coauthored with Jean Dreze.

In the chapter, 'Gender Inequality and Women's Agency' in the above work, there is a section, 'Two Misconceptions'. I quote from Sen and Dreze and offer my own arguments in numbered footnotes:

"To begin with, we should deal with two misunderstandings that arise from time to time in popular discussions of the issue of low female-male ratios in India.
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The second misinterpretation concerns some alleged 'Muslim influence'. The reasoning, in so far as there is any, is that female-male ratios in India tend to be particularly low in the north-west of the country, which is geographically close to Islamic countries, has been underMuslim influence for a long time and even now, has a large Muslim population.---- (1)

A glance at the figures immediately exposes the fragility of this hypothesis. The state of Kerala which has the highest female-male ratio among Indian states (1.04 in 1991) comes second in the proportion of Muslims in the population. The state with the lowest percentage of Muslims (1 percent) is Punjab which has had the lowest female-male ratio among all Indian states until overtaken by Haryana in 1981. Haryana itself has a very low Muslim population (4%). ---- (2)

We can take a closer look at this whole issue by examining the extent of gender bias in child mortality rates among Hindus and Muslims in different parts of India. .... (graph shown)
... two points. First, regional contrasts in the extent of gender bias in child survival are far more striking than the contrast relating to religious identity. Specifically, the relative survival chances of girls are low in large parts of Northern India (including Punjab, Haryana, UP, Rajasthan, Bihar) and this applies whether they are Hindus or Muslims. Secondly, there is no evidence of any overall tendency for the female disadvantage to be particularly large among Muslims." ---- (3)

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(1) Dreze and Sen aver that there is a school of thought which blames the Muslim influence for the poor condition of women in India. But they have not given any references to substantiate this allegation. They assert "the reasoning, in so far as there is any, is that female-male ratios in India tend to be low in the north-west..." again without revealing who formulated this 'geographical' argument. Of course, then they proceed to debunk this 'sourceless' argument in some detail.

(2) The *present* low percentage of Muslims in Indian Punjab is only due to the Partition and the so-called 'population exchange' that accompanied it (there hardly are any Hindus/Sikhs in and around Lahore now, although together they were more than 40 percent of the population in 1947; Amritsar city, which has very few Muslims now, then had a slight Muslim *majority*). Before 1947, the population all over Punjab was a khichdi of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh components (plus a percent or three of Christians). Going back half a millennium, the very emergence of Sikhism owed a lot to the Sufi saints and Muslim influence. So, just because there are *now* very few Muslims in what has become Indian Punjab+Haryana, centuries of strong Islamic influence on this society cannot be discounted.

(3) The primary conclusions drawn from the graph are accurate. But, there are issues: North, where the lot of women is a lot poorer, is also that part of India which was ruled by Muslim sultans, emperors and nawabs and where the Muslims (at least till 1857) had power and influence far in excess of their share in the population. Kerala, despite its present large Muslim population, never went thru a period of Muslim rule and sustained domination as was experienced by the North and Deccan (raids by Tipu Sultan etc. were ephemeral phenomena and their real impact is a matter of dispute). So, the comparatively higher status of women in Kerala (allegedly) enjoy could well be attributed to the historic absence of Muslim policy-making.

Indeed, I have a more fundamental difficulty with this argument of Sen and Dreze: if the *present* lot of two communities in any given region is equally bad (or good for that matter), can one appeal to just this fact and conclude that neither party influenced the other over centuries of co-existence? To give another example, the literacy rates among the Hindu and Christian communites of Kerala are largely equal at present (they are certainly comparable); but it is universally acknowledged that Kerala education has benefitted heavily from the (disproportionaly large) efforts of Christian missionaries.

Part 2:
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Note:Sen et al are not directly involved any further with this post.

While a student in Hyderabad, I used to read in papers regularly about accidental burning incidents, which almost invariably affected young married women, often fatally. It was almost always implied that (at least) most were dowry-related murders or suicides. Among the many such cases documented in the papers, almost all concerned Hindu (definitly non-Muslim) women. This in Hyderabad which has a large Muslim population (around 40%?).

I wondered: "there are hardly any Muslims among these hapless young women. So, it appears they are clearly treated better by their community.". I raised this subject in a discussion at our university. A friend countered: " Let me only talk about the suicides. They indicate a revolt, a certain lack of acceptance of ill-treatment. The Muslim women may be so thoroughly subjugated and enslaved by their men that they cannot even contemplate suicide as a means to escape from their
misery!"

Part 3:
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A friend of mine once told me of an acquaintance of his (whose community will remain unspecified): "When his grandfather got married, he had to pay a solid sum of money *to* his in-laws. But in the very next generation, his father got a solid dowry *from* his in-laws."

Does this 180 degree flip in the direction of cash flow really imply a corresponding flip in gender equations/inequalities?