Girls as disposable commodities in India

Abstract

A novel by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, The First Century after Beatrice, tells of the rumour of an Egyptian scarab whose powder has the property, when taken by men, of screening out females at conception. A drug with the same property is developed by a multinational corporation and marketed under the name and aura of the scarab. It starts to get around. But its impact is irreversible. Throughout what Maalouf calls the 'South' a generation overwhelmingly consisting of boys is produced. The result is unexpected and horrific: the proliferation of men deprived of full social identity, mass violence, terrifying insecurity for a minority of girls, a new kind of traffic in women, widespread physical reprisals against the 'North', a global descent into economic autarky. Not the answer to the population problem, the scarab instead catalyzes a demographic and economic disaster strewn with violence, beside which our own era of degenerate capitalism appears as a golden age. In India real life has begun to mimic science fantasy. Females are being screened out as foetuses before birth, and as children afterwards. It is done through a violent but insidious process of gender cleansing that takes place in the bosom of the family, often with the complicity of women. While girls are very far from being as scarce as in Maalouf's narrative, their current scarcity has started to produce anecdotal and symptomatic evidence of the kind of reactions described in the novel. India's gender imbalance both reflects and feeds on kinship patterns, and on caste and class inequalities that are woven into the fabric of everyday social life.