On a Cultural Change

Statisticians say that soon, and possibly even now, the nation of India is the world’s most populous. The country is hardly a monolith, with a wide range of cultures and mores, beliefs and practices as well as a disparate history spread across a country that is the seventh largest in area. However, one constant cultural tradition had endured in India for hundreds of years: Women experienced lives that had fewer rights and choices than men have. Now, that was often the case in the western world as well (see the differences in pay rates for women verses men even today in most western nations), but India’s discrimination against women often bordered on servitude. But the culture has experienced change in the prospects for women mostly in the past 100 years. Most of that drastic change has occurred in the past almost 40 years due to an interesting addition to the lives of most Indian families.

The typical Indian family used to be patriarchal, hierarchal, and relegated women to specific roles and jobs within the family. For example, traditionally, women in India couldn’t own land or have any sense of self-determination. Multi-generational households depended on keeping the men as the decision-makers and keeping women in the supporting roles. Again, this was true to a degree in the west as well, but in India, the oppression was somewhat harsher before the 1900s. Change began happening during the period of British control of India (one of the few good things to result from that period, perhaps); women were granted more rights, and a few upper class Indian women were even allowed to serve as governmental administrators.

And that’s an added layer of oppression for women in India, historically: The Caste System. The upper class, made up of priestly families, is followed by an administrative class, a skill worker and famer class, and then a laborer class is at the lower end. Even still, there is one more class below the laborers–the untouchables, the poorest of the poor and lowest of the low. The British not-so-subtly used this caste system throughout their occupation, using the upper classes and Christian Indians in governmental positions almost exclusively.

However, women in India were given the right to vote at almost the same time women in the United States were given it–1921. But the combination of a tight family organization and the caste system kept most women from achieving their dreams and ambitions.

That began to change dramatically in the 1980s, and it changed for an unusual reason. You see, the change began to happen because of the purchase of a consumer item by most Indian homes. It has been documented that, in the year 1988, for example, five of these items were sold in India every minute, and the purchase of the item radically changed women who were exposed to it. The women of India were introduced to other women through the item; they were able to see that there were options to the lives they were living and those their daughters could have in the future. And the laws in India in the modern era meant that there was nothing legally the men in the families could do to stop the women from pursing their dreams and goals. They began shunning old traditions, according to one source, and they began to become more independent. They began practicing self-determination without the control or interference of the men in their lives. That means that today an entire generation of Indian women have reached their 30s with this new mindset and this new-found freedom of self-determination.

And what was the instrument of this radical change in India society among the women there?

Television.

On Concentration Camps

Some topics almost hurt to even think about. This is one of those topics. The abject, heartless, evil, and inhumane (and inhuman) treatment that occurred there is almost beyond our comprehension as a species. And that’s a major reason we need to be reminded of these supreme examples of human inhumanity.

Let’s start with some facts. The system that created the camps was overly racist. There was nothing hidden or deceptive about that. While some others were swept up in the net of the camps, they were created to imprison specific ethnicities and groups. That can’t be denied (although many in recent years have tried to do so). And, while many of the victims who perished in the camps were murdered outright, we tend to forget that there were oh so many others who died of disease and malnutrition.

You see, the camps were poorly built and the supply chains that were supposed to give them even the bare needs of food and even water were often disrupted due to other miliary and national priorities and then by the war itself. The men who ran the camps had little interest in insuring that the camp internees were seen to or provided for. Thus, basic sanitation was non-existent. People were crowded into spaces designed for several times fewer than the number who eventually were placed there. As supplies dwindled nationally as the war continued, the government’s position was that the military and then their “own” people should have the priority of receiving proper nutrition. These “other” people who were in the camps? Well, not much thought was given to them regarding any relief at all.

Thus, thousands died of having no food or water, and thousands more from typhus, dysentery, and other diseases that could have been easily preventable if proper rationing had been instituted nationwide and if simple, proper sanitation elements were employed. But that was the choice the government made, so please don’t argue that these deaths by starvation and disease were somehow “accidental” or even beyond the government’s ability to help.

Some of the first reports on the dire conditions in the camps that made it back to the shores of Britain were made by a woman named Emily Hobhouse. It seems that she had managed to get a tour of one of the camps because the administrator simply didn’t care who saw what was happening to those placed there. In fact, Hobhouse later reported, he seemed rather proud of the fact that these people were suffering and dying. She was understandably shocked and stunned by what she saw, by the attitude of the camp commandant, and by the guards who stood passively by as people fell dead at their feet.

Hobhouse made a report to members of Parliament during the war. But most members who heard about her story, while outraged to a degree over what she reported, said that there was little they could do. That was a continent away, they argued, and they had no ability to make changes. Besides, compared to the war itself, the conditions of those in the concentration camps were way, way down on the list of British government priorities. So, nothing was done.

Finally, the war ended. The camps were broken up. But the damage had been done. The incredibly high rate of deaths among those imprisoned stunned the outside world. The especially high morality rate among children shocked many the most. How could a civilized nation allow this to happen? Emily Hobhouse’s report was resurrected, and the Parliament debated what to do about those in charge of the camps, but nothing was done to punish or condemn the camp administrators.

And, to this day, we don’t know for sure how many Dutch and African men, women, and children died in the British concentration camps of the Second Boer War from 1899-1902.

On a Policy that Never Happened

The racist hatred that white/European settlers in the early days of colonial settlement of North America would probably surprise even the most strident Klan member today. Governmental policy as practiced first by the British Parliament and then by the United States throughout much of early American History pretty much subscribed to the “good Indian is a dead Indian” philosophy even that that wasn’t overtly stated.

Not that it needed to be. In our national conversations about race, we carefully work our way around how native tribes were treated throughout the history of North America because we don’t want to address the facts of that hatred. Broken treaties. Unprovoked attacks and wars. Theft. Let’s not even get into the rampant abuses of the current reservation system. Terrible and disturbingly racist governmental policies. For only one example, look up what Andrew Jackson did to ignore a Supreme Court decision by using the US Army to remove the Cherokees from land in Georgia. It’s genocide, folks, and we have pretended it wasn’t for so long by casing it in language shaded with religious imagery by calling it such things Manifest Destiny and other such rot.

Well, some might argue, at least we didn’t use germ warfare against the native population. Or did we? The traditional story is that the British first came up with the idea in the 1760s to provide blankets to native tribes–blankets that had been laced with the smallpox virus. It’s not that this method of “taking care” of the “Indian problem” was more humane; no, it was more a case of the British feeling that such a method of killing was much more palatable to the soldiers who would ordinarily have to “endure” the difficult task of shooting.

Yikes.

And then the stories about the American Army giving similar smallpox-laden blankets to natives during one of the several Trail of Tears journeys during the first part of the 19th Century. There is anecdotal evidence of similar practices happening after the Civil War in the west when tribes were being moved onto reservations. What contributed to these stories was the fact that most native tribes often had a high rate of small pox infections. And blankets were given to native tribes. But, other than some possible talk in government circles about such practices in theory, there is no hard evidence that smallpox blankets were given to tribes–ever–by either colonial or state/federal governments or their agencies.

Again, some people will point to this myth as being only a myth and say that while natives were indeed killed, at least white people never conducted a systematic campaign of genocide against native tribes. But that’s like arguing that, while Hitler killed his millions, at least he never used a pea shooter to do it.

I’ll let the memory of the approximately 20,000,000 natives killed over the centuries since European colonization answer that argument.