A woman’s choice

A woman’s choice

Vijay Gopichandran


I am not going to falsely claim that I even understand one-hundredth of the difficulties that a woman faces in our patriarchal world to work, to be noticed and sometimes to even exist. A few events happened last week and I saw a patient yesterday, all of which made me think about the choices that a woman has in this world. This essay may sound patronizing in some ways because it is a man writing about a woman’s choices. However, it is not intended in that tone. It is the expression of the helplessness of a few men who find it as hard to live and work in the toxically patriarchal world.

I saw a movie last week which portrayed the herculean difficulties that women face in achieving a name in the game of football. The fact that it needed a toxic super-masculine male to ‘emancipate’ the vulnerable women itself speaks pages about the stereotypes that it perpetuates. The movie itself had several inconsistencies in the way it handled issues of feminism and I am not going to go into the details of critiquing it. But I did like the movie because it was of good entertainment value and if the gender angle was removed from it, the movie spoke to me and said, “there is hope for those who are struggling hard to get acknowledgment and recognition for their talents and hard work. Gender, caste, class, social status, having a beautiful face, having a slim figure, etc. are not important, talent and confidence are.” Following this movie, I had a discussion with my cousin, whom I met the following day for conversations and iced tea. The movie had portrayed an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family as being highly patriarchal and preventing a talented girl from pursuing her dream of making it big in the game of football. My cousin’s view was that this is not a phenomenon that is unique to Tamil Brahmin families, but a universal phenomenon. We had a very interesting discussion on the intersection between Brahminism and Patriarchy. The best way to understand why Brahmin families are many times strong perpetrators of patriarchy is, to begin with understanding the concept of Brahminism. Brahminism must be understood not merely as the ideologies and religious views that are held and promoted by the priestly upper caste of the Hindu society. It must be understood as the line of thought that insists on a strict social order based on unequal power dynamics negating the principles of freedom, equality, and equity. Therefore, when I write of toxic Brahminism, I am not writing against the Brahmins, but I am writing against the social structure which Brahminism promotes. Unfortunately, it happens that orthodox Brahmin families (both men and women, sometimes women more than men) tend to perpetuate this social order and ideology. Having said this, there are also very progressive thinkers and social activists born into Brahmin families and regressive, patriarchal, casteist ideologists born in non-Brahmin families. So my cousin and I decided that we will read more of the works of Periyar and also talk to our own elders in the family to understand the lines of patriarchal power and control that exist in our family.

Whenever we spend a lot of thought and energy into an issue, we tend to see various dimensions of it all around us in our everyday lives. We saw a patient yesterday in the clinic and she made us think a lot about Brahminism, patriarchy and the choices that she had in her life. This 27 year old lady came to the clinic with complaints of irregular menstrual periods. She was a very smart, well put-together woman and spoke very comfortably and clearly. On spending more time talking to her, we understood that when she was in the school leaving year (+2), she developed very high blood sugars and kept on losing weight. She was diagnosed to have type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a form of diabetes that occurs in younger age and insulin injections is the only definitive treatment for it. The young school girl did not like the idea of injecting herself everyday and kept defaulting. She also found herself a ‘kind doctor’, who wrongly switched her over to tablets. But she continued to lose weight and did not respond to the tablets and was put back to insulin. This kept going on – switching from tablet to injections, and then injections to tablets and so on. An year ago, she was given away in marriage to a man concealing the fact that she has type 1 diabetes. This was because revealing the diabetic status substantially reduced her marriageability quotient in the marriage market. Recently the in laws have discovered her diabetes status and want an annulment of the marriage. The typical arguments were, “you cannot bear a healthy baby”, “you are too sick to even have sex”, “we cant take care of you each time you become sick”, “you will die because of your sickness and we have to anyway look for a new bride” etc etc. The woman was very strong, or at least she put up a very brave and positive front to us. She just wanted to know if she is capable of giving birth to a normal child. If she was assured that she can, she was willing to sign off on the divorce papers because she would then be clear that it was not her fault.

Yesterday I saw another young man, also 27 years old and with early diabetes. I am talking about him here to contrast to you the life choices and trajectories that these two people have. This young man was thing built and had a height of about 140 cm and was anxious that he was losing more weight. He was accompanied by his wife who was a normal looking woman. Initially he just told me these complaints, but once I took him aside into a private room for examination, away from his wife, he started revealing more details. He had hernia (protrusion of part of the intestine outside the body into the scrotum) when he was in school and at that time, they found that he had undescended testis. The human testes develop inside the abdomen and it is around the time of birth that it descends into the scrotum. Sometimes the testes never descend and remain in the abdomen. If the testes remain in the abdomen for many years, they never develop the ability to make sperms. This young man had undescended testes till the age of 15 years, which neither the parents nor any responsible adult had identified early. So, when they did the hernia surgery, they had to remove the testes. This is because the undescended testes were damaged and dead. So, this man knew before marriage that he could not make any sperms and concealed this news and got married. So, he was trying to hide this information from his wife. He asked me whether there is a possibility of having a child. I told him that without testes there is no possibility of making sperms and it is impossible to naturally have a child. But assisted reproduction is a possibility with the help of donor sperms. He also had diabetes and I had to start him on treatment.

The contrast of these two stories kept me thinking for a long time. In the former story the woman, who could potentially have a normal reproductive life if her diabetes was well treated, was easily dismissed as an unfit candidate for marriage and was asked to sign the divorce papers. In the latter story, the young man, though having absolutely no chance of a reproductive life, was living in a acceptable marriage based on lies and deceit. Both of them had concealed information about their health prior to marriage. But the woman was bearing the harsh brunt of this lapse in judgment, whereas the man was living a socially acknowledged life despite the mistake. He would probably play on the ignorance of the wife’s family and blame the infertility on the wife herself, when the question of infertility arises.



I learned yesterday that put in similar life situations the woman has seriously restricted choices compared to the man. The choices faced by the man were – continued concealing of the health condition, playing on the ignorance of the families, playing on the shame and humiliation that the woman would face for wanting a normal marital life and for leaving this husband. The choices faced by the woman were – accepting divorce, being punished for concealing the information about her health, being socially ostracised. The choices are very unfairly distributed. There is a need for a major social change and attitude shift regarding marriage and marital life. I feel bad for young women with health conditions who are subject to such rejections and for the young men who don’t meet the standards of masculinity set by the society who have to lie and live a fake life.