Girls with the guts to speak up
I glanced at her cherubic face — pink cheeks and a creamy complexion. Manbhari seemed a befitting name for the lovely girl. I smiled. Her eyes sparkled momentarily and clouded just as suddenly and her expression changed to an unsmiling emoji with downturned lips.
Manbhari was our new household help, hired thanks to the entreaties of her mother, who assumed that city life would drum some sense into the adamant and querulous girl. “Nobody will marry her,” she added. However, I found Manbhari a docile and willing worker. She was an eager learner and tutoring her was a pleasure.
As Manbhari settled in our household, she opened up. From the snippets she shared occasionally, we could figure out her family’s attitude and perception and reconstruct the story of her rebelliousness. Her family back in the village was frustrated with the birth of five daughters. “When I was born, they called me Manbhari because they were fed up.” It must be painful for the child to fight the negativity her name exuded, to combat the daily mocking of her schoolmates rhyming Manbhari with Rasbhari (raspberry).
“I don’t like this name, Didi ji,” she confided in me. “It sounds like eatables: Rasbhari, Jharberi or Imarti” — a la Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman. She yearned for a moniker like Pooja, her favourite teacher. It was amazing to have a glimpse of a rural world where girls were keen to assert their identity.
Manbhari’s story transported me back to the days of my research on gender issues in Maharashtra’s rural Satara, where I came across several girls named Nakoshi. In Marathi, Nakoshi means ‘unwanted.’ The story is almost identical — when daughter after daughter is born, the last one becomes unwanted.
Finding sympathetic listeners in us, the girls voiced their resentment. “Why don’t they call the sons ‘Nakosha’?” they argued. One Nakoshi reminisced how a teacher convinced her mother to change her name to Laxmi. Interestingly, these girls had a cherished list of beautiful modern names they aspired to have one day — Deepa, Juhi, Priya and the like. “Maybe my husband would understand and change my name,” quipped another Nakoshi, while others giggled.
Year after year, as we celebrate International Women’s Day, honouring urban women, conferring awards on them for their achievements and patting our backs for empowering them, let us be aware of the struggles of womenfolk in the hinterland who are still burdened with societal insensitivity and expectations. How can a woman, struggling with her callously chosen name that remains etched in her psyche, ever be empowered?
Yet there is a bright side to the stark picture. Girls like Manbhari and Nakoshi are mustering courage to speak up, to make their voices heard. “A woman with a voice is, by definition, a strong woman,” Melinda Gates has rightly said.
