Blog #3

For this blog, where we were assigned to read about a culture different than our own, I read an article about women in Indian culture from washingtonpost.com. I had no idea that the typical womans role in a marriage, as portrayed in the book we're reading in class, was still very common in Indian culture today. The author writes, "Because of the traditional custom of paying high dowries to a groom's parents, he said, girls were seen in the past as a heavy burden". This directly relates to our book because we see how this is a burden on families a few times: when Rukmani was married to Nathan and uses much of what was left of her families savings for her dowry, when Ira was born and Rukmani saved parts of what little income she made for Rukmanis dowry, and when Ira is given back to her family from her husband because she cannot bear children. My article, in contrast, was about how this stereotype is finally starting to fade as women gain more power in society. This, in turn, is leading to more violence in men. A statistic that shocked me was that there are 19,000 reported rapes a year and that violence against women is one of the fastest growing crimes in India. Knowing the history of Indian culture, it isn't hard to see that the probable reasoning for this is the recent change in womens social status and mens trouble adapting to it, or relunctancy to accept it.

MLA:
Wax, Emily. "In India, New Opportunities for Women Draw Anger and Abuse From Men." Washington Post Foreign Service. 25 Aug 2008. 8 Feb 2009.