A few weeks back, a friend from UK described to me the case of a Knanaya gentleman there who has been arrested for wife battery! He also told me of rumours floating around in the rarefied British air of more such individuals cooling their heels behind bars. Mention was also made about research done into family problems among Malayalee Christian families in the UK. The findings are startling – incidents of domestic violence are much more pronounced among Knanaya families than among non-knanaya families. He asked me whether I have any thoughts on this issue.
I replied that I can only speculate, an attempt that will be totally subjective. My focus here is on domestic violence that often follow marriages of convenience. This happens everywhere, but a few incidences of this type stand out like a sore thumb in the extremely small Knanaya communities in the UK and elsewhere.
Domestic violence is a worldwide phenomenon. Social, political and religious groups that are male dominated appear to be the biggest culprits in this regard. I spent twenty five years living among blacks in South Africa. I have seen for myself the total dominance of the male and the consequent violence against women. The physical abuse starts in primary school. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ is one dictum that is followed to the letter. It is not uncommon to see women in the Emergency Room of a hospital with eyeball pierced with a screwdriver or jaw cracked from violent beatings. One of the reasons for the fast spread of Aids in that country is that women have no say in the matter of condom usage.
With few exceptions, Muslim families are male dominated. The Talibans of Afghanistan have taken female oppression to a new low. Judaism too was male dominated. Their Yahweh was an angry revengeful male God. Christianity had its origins in Jewish traditions and hence male superiority was a given. St. Paul urges wives to obey their husbands, since the husband is the head of the family. This instruction is repeated in all Christian marriage rituals to this day.
Knanaya boys and girls grow up imbibing Christian traditions of male dominance. Added to this is a social environment that favours the male at the expense of the female. It is the male who carries the family name; he is the one to look after the parents in their old age. Girls get married off and are often a burden since a fat dowry has to be found. Up until about thirty years back, the well-off minority of the community was proud to be part of the feudalistic system that was prevalent at the time; the vast majority was poor and survived on subsistence farming and were dependent on the well-off minority. The education of girls was secondary.
The feudalistic attitudes prevalent among the elite made many of their sons complacent. It made them believe the party would last forever. The poor on the other hand were looking for a way out of their miserable existence. The oil boom in the Gulf was a turning point. There followed unprecedented developmental activities in all areas. One key area was the medical field. Nurses were in great demand. The salaries were unbelievable compared to the pittance that their sisters earned in India. Knanaya parents realized the economic potential and began to encourage their daughters to take up nursing as a profession. Within a few years the trickle of nurses to the Gulf became a torrent. That era also saw great demand for nurses in the US and Europe, particularly Germany. Recently Britain joined the bandwagon, the attraction being ease of language.
In due course, problems began to emerge. Girls who migrated in their early 20’s soon came of marriageable age. But parents put off their marriage as long as they could, since they did not want to lose their ‘cash-cows’ (literally). Parents of both boys and girls took this as opportunities – the girls to marry into families of higher ‘status’ and the unemployed/able boys finding marriage to a nurse the rosy road to paradise.
Here we have the root causes of some of the future problems. In any Indian family, the male is normally dominant but the woman wears the pant if she is the main source of income. This is not generally true in the more liberated western societies where male and female roles are not clear-cut and compartmentalised. In the case of the Indian family in UK and elsewhere, where the wife is the prime earner, male dominance can and do give way to female dominance. With little or no worthwhile qualifications or language skills to grab well-paying jobs, husbands end up not working or working for the minimum wage while the wife brings home the bacon. There is a role-reversal. The husband ends up doing the ‘woman’s work’ at home – cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, driving the children to school etc.
Many women develop a superior complex, while the egos of their husbands take a beating, unable to adjust to this role-reversal. Then a kind of vicious circle starts – after dropping children off to school, the man left alone to his devices helps himself to a couple of drinks to drown his bruised ego. In time this becomes a daylong affair. The humiliation is complete if he has to ‘beg’ his wife for money for his drinks. A bruised ego drowned in alcohol is a sure recipe for domestic violence.
There is an unmentionable angle often whispered sotto voce that intensifies the viciousness of the circle. Alcoholism has an effect on male potency. Alcohol in combination with inferiority complex can be disastrous in the privacy of the bedroom. Some women are tempted to look elsewhere for comfort adding fuel to the fire.
What factors have led to this situation? Community’s strict endogamous tradition? Arranged marriages? Get-rich-quick greed? Lack of a sense of dignity of labour? Lack of understanding of what family life is? Lack of parental guidance? Still extant chauvinistic attitude and strict division of labour at home? Our alcoholic gene? Lack of creative pursuits? It could be a combination of one or more of the above in various proportions.
What can be done to help troubled families? Someone suggested that priests, nuns along with the hierarchy should get involved in counselling. But, what kind of counselling can come out of individuals who are supposed to be ‘virgins’, who have never changed a diaper in their lives, who don’t spend 3 consecutive sleepless nights caring for a sick child, (they can do it for one night of ‘adoration’ at most), who do not know what it means to live with an abusive partner 24/7. What the community leadership can do is to encourage through scholarship or other means suitable laymen, preferably married, to become family counsellors to help couples in trouble. The hierarchy with its priests and nuns can themselves give up their feudalistic attitude and become more democratic in their thinking and actions. They can (using the various resources available, from pulpits to personal contacts) spread the message of dignity of labour, sharing of responsibilities at home, need to adapt to new circumstances etc. The three-day ‘thamasha’ called ‘marriage preparation course’ is just that, a thamasha, part of the hierarchy’s game-plan to keep the little lambs under control.
It might be a good idea during this Centenary Year to formulate some concrete plans to help troubled families and to follow up with time-bound actions. Let us not be just content to beat our drums and make the proverbial cacophony passing it off as celebration.
[Published in the April 2011 issue of Snehasandesham]
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