BANGALORE, India — Not long ago, an Indian woman, even a working Indian woman, would almost always have moved from her parents’ house to her husband’s. Perhaps her only freedom would be during college, when she might live on campus or take a room for a year or two at what is known here as the working women’s hostel.
Careers Give India's Women New Independence
Cauvery Cariappa, who lives apart from her parents in Bangalore, said: “I get to live how I want. There’s nobody telling me I can’t.”
That trajectory has begun to loosen, as a surging economy creates new jobs, prompts young professionals to leave home and live on their own and slowly, perhaps unwittingly, nudges a traditional society to accept new freedoms for women. The new opening has hardly rubbed away old restrictions. As they wrestle with new uncertainties and new choices, many young Indian women are embracing the changes tentatively, tinkering for the time being with the customs of the past. The changes are sharpest in the lives of women who have found a footing in the new economy and who are for the most part middle-class, college-educated professionals exploring jobs that simply did not exist a generation ago. High-technology workers and fashion designers, aerobics instructors and radio D.J.’s, these women in their 20s are living independently for the first time, far from their families. Many are deferring marriage for a year or two, maybe more, while they make money and live lives that most of their mothers could not have dreamed of. Bangalore, also known as Bengaluru, the capital of India’s technology and back-office business, is the epicenter of these changes. Once a quiet, leafy city favored by retirees, it now crawls with young people, with more than half of its 4.3 million residents under the age of 30, according to the 2001 census. Posters advertise rooms for men and women living solo. Coffee bars are packed in the evenings. Vegetable vendors ply their wares late into the night. So when Shubha Khaddar, 23, trudges home from work and stops to pick up something for dinner, she rarely finds herself alone. “You’ll find 10 other girls like you coming back with sabji,” Ms. Khaddar said, sabji being Hindi for vegetables. As she left one recent morning for the public relations firm where she works, her parting words to Pallavi Maddala, 23, her roommate and a software engineer, were to bring back some idlis, or steamed rice cakes, for dinner. She would be home late. Besides, idlis would be a low-fat option. Ms. Khaddar had been on a diet, partly egged on by her mother, who is trying to improve her marriage prospects from across the country, in Delhi. On the refrigerator, she had pasted a snarky yellow note to herself: “Lose Weight, You Fat Pig.” In November, Ms. Khaddar gave notice at work, because she could no longer stand the job. She said she was stressed out at the prospect of finding nothing in Bangalore and having to return to life with her parents in Delhi. “I don’t think I’m prepared to go home,” she said. Both women were trying to stave off their mothers’ intervention in the marriage department, though not entirely. Ms. Khaddar had been seeing someone but had yet to tell her parents, nor completely closed the door on her mother’s plans. Ms. Maddala, for her part, welcomed the prospect of having a husband chosen for her but not now, and not the overseas Indians for whom her mother has an affinity. Not long ago, Ms. Maddala showed Ms. Khaddar a photograph of one such prospect, a young man living in the United States. “The picture just freaked me out,” Ms. Khaddar recalled this morning, while getting herself ready for work. “I said, ‘Dude, you’re not getting married to that.’” Ms. Maddala laughed at the memory. She agreed that he was too big and tall for her tastes. A couple of months later, another marriage prospect fell through because the young man’s family demanded a hefty dowry that gave Ms. Maddala pause. More than anything, Ms. Maddala said, she wanted to savor her independence a bit longer. She moved here from Hyderabad, about 300 miles away, earlier this year. She described the lessons of freedom this way: “What is me? What is myself? How can I manage? We come here, we realize we are strong.” “Confidence,” she went on. “As a woman nowadays, really it is a must.” In this deeply traditional society, accustomed to absorbing influences of all kinds over the centuries, change comes slowly, if at all. And so the new economy, and the new lifestyle it has engendered, has hardly wiped away the old values, particularly with respect to marriage. Yet, for women like these, freedom has brought new choices, new problems and as Ms. Khaddar puts it, new guilt. Should she stay here and enjoy her independence for as long as she can? she sometimes asks herself. Or should she return home to Delhi, find a job, and allow her parents to fix a match with a young man from a north Indian Brahmin family like her own? She is in transition, she said, between being “completely independent” and “a homely chick,” meaning, in Indian English, a life of domesticity. Ms. Khaddar knows what her parents know, and it makes her nervous: that finding a match will be difficult for a woman like her, a student of philosophy, who thinks for herself, lives apart from her parents and likes classic rock. A bigger fear, she confesses, is not being married at all. “I’m torn about this whole independence thing,” Ms. Khaddar said. Indian women are marrying later, though still relatively young compared with the West. The mean age of marriage inched to 18.3 in 2001 from 17.7 years in 1991, according to the census, and as late as 22.6 years for the college-educated. Nearly a third of the work force is female, with rural women employed mostly in agriculture and urban women in services. Although their ranks are minuscule at the top rungs of corporate India, it is common to see women in jobs that either did not exist a generation ago, or in jobs that would rarely be filled by women, whether gas station attendants or cafe baristas, magazine editors or software programmers. Every now and then, a high-profile crime against a woman prompts new hand-wringing and outcry over women working at night. But the young working woman living on her own is now firmly part of the urban mainstream. Apartments are easier to rent, unlike when accommodations were limited to a room in the home of a nosy landlord who would cluck her teeth if a boyfriend spent the night, and radio talk shows feature callers talking about the pros and cons of a live-in boyfriend. “I think it’s a very significant shift,” said Urvashi Butalia, publisher of Zubaan Books, based in New Delhi, which promotes women’s writing. “It signals a kind of change and acceptability. It testifies to women’s desire and wish to be economically independent, to be able to interact in public space and be in the same world as men.” Equally important, she said, is the attitude adjustment among elders. “For families to accept that women will remain single, that they will live on their own, that they will work and defer marriage, is a very, very significant shift,” she said. “Even if it’s very small, it’s beginning to happen in a society where before, if you wanted to do that you’d be out on a limb.” Ms. Butalia, 55, went out on that limb herself. Thirty years ago, she joined a New Delhi publishing house where she recalls being told that women were not welcome in executive positions because they inevitably married and quit. As it happened, she remained single, becoming one of the best known figures in Indian publishing. Women in the younger generation, like Cauvery Cariappa, find themselves still bucking their elders on the subject of living alone. She broke the news to her parents after graduating from a Bangalore college in 2000 that she would not be returning home to Ooty, about 180 miles away. Instead, she would work and rent a place here. “People will talk,” was her parents’ first reaction. They coaxed her to come home. Then they threw what she called “emotional tantrums.” Then they asked her to meet prospective husbands. She refused. “The trend is once you’re 21, once you graduate, if you’re not doing something productive, you get married,” she said. “‘Productive’ according to your parents is very different from your own terms. For them, back then, it was a doctor or some other known job.” Ms. Cariappa, now 28, went through a gamut of jobs, all of them fruits of the new economy: first at an advertising agency, then a call center, a bank, and finally she decided she would try her hand at designing clothes. The apartment she shares now with two roommates is mostly bare, with a shelf loaded with shoes in one corner, cushions on the floor, and empty liquor bottles lined up smartly on a ledge, which made her mother gasp on her first visit. Ms. Cariappa said she assured her they had not all been consumed in one go. Here, her boyfriend can come and go without anyone asking questions. She can go out with friends. For safety, she carries mouth spray as a substitute for mace. One of her roommates carries a long dog chain, which she once had to use to repel a man. “I get to live how I want,” she said. “There’s nobody telling me I can’t.” But after fighting so hard for her independence, even she could not resist the pull of tradition. In November, Ms. Cariappa announced that her freewheeling days were coming to an end. She and her boyfriend of seven years had decided to marry. That, too, was a break with her family’s tradition, because he is from another community, from another part of the country. She would soon move out of the apartment. “Yeah, eventually most of us get there!” she said in a text message. “The same thing’s happened 2 my roomie, hence the msg. R u or any of your friends looking 4 a place 2 stay?”
