"Wife-sharing" haunts Indian villages as girls decline

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/news/international/Wife-sha...

Oct 27, 2011 - 09:33

By Nita Bhalla

BAGHPAT, India, Oct 27 (TrustLaw) - When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young bride years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives.

"My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village community centre in Baghpat district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

"They took me whenever they wanted -- day or night. When I resisted, they beat me with anything at hand," said Munni, who had managed to leave her home after three months only on the pretext of visiting a doctor.

"Sometimes they threw me out and made me sleep outside or they poured kerosene over me and burnt me."

[Brickbat]

1. I wouldn't exactly call that "wife-sharing."

[pampango]

5. Edited to remove stupid reply.

[seabeyond]

6. edited cause poster removed stupid reply, lol. nt

[October]

7. Ridiculous reply. One has nothing to do with the other.

Women being raped, set afire, and forced to bear others' children = marriage??? Sick beyond measure.

And, fyi, plenty of women suffer during wartime, too, but this thread is about everyday life.

[McCamy Taylor]

2. Using women like cattle to breed sounds more like it.

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. And this is the culture that is benefiting from American business decisions.

[TlalocW]

4. Unfortunately, this won't change anytime soon

And it's because of Indian attitudes that men are more valuable than women, and then not wanting to deal with the expense of dowries for daughters. I read a non-fiction book of a British-born Pakistan man who had some ancestors buried in a tomb in India. The caretaker of the tomb - a good friend of the family, came to visit when the author was a child and did magic tricks for him. This instilled an interest in the kind of magic that various sub-sets of Indian culture do (example, a wish is written on a rock and thrown into a river, and the same written wish appears somewhere on the wish-makers body), and he went there to study it. During his travels, he runs into, "doctors," traveling from village to village with an old x-ray machine. Expectant mothers are x-rayed, and if the baby is a girl, an abortion is normally performed. He remarked that this practice would have consequences where there wouldn't be enough women for men.

A girl I dated in the late 90s was Indian-American, getting her masters in psychology at the time (eventually got her PhD), and she took a trip to India to visit her family there. Of course, views were a bit different and more conservative there, and her aunts couldn't understand why she wasn't married yet. She found it strange one day when ten different men visited the house, talked with one of the aunts then looked her up and down for a few minutes while she went about whatever she was doing. She finally realized that her aunts were trying to marry her off. None of the guys were interested though - probably thought she was past her prime at 24, and the desperation of the situation of the lack of females had not yet hit them hard enough that they thought they could do better.

TlalocW

[azurnoir]

8. That this goes so largely unnoticed by the west is largely political

we're so 'concerned' for women in Arab or Muslim countries that these abominable practices in India fly under the radar in some area's in India a shortage of women in the problem and in others where women are more available the practice of bride burning or the murder of a newly wed bride by the husbands family kitchen fire being a 'popular' method in order to obtain multiple dowries goes largely unabated

However India being a 'good' country gets away with this

[whathehell]

9. Pig-Primitive behavior.

[mopinko]

10. india is a harsh and brutal place.

a married woman is her husband's family's slave. slaves have ever been treated thus.
when people snarl about sending jobs to india, i think at least it is good for india. i know women who work in the hi tech sector there. they will never have to put up with this sort of thing.
someday perhaps we will all be citizens, in india, china, everywhere.