Anthropologist Lina Fruzzetti spent a year researching the roots of female abandonment in India. The mother of two daughters, she found the work emotionally trying
One day several years ago Lina Fruzzetti rented a caravan of buses and took 250 girls on a picnic into the countryside of India. They ate box lunches and went to a museum, and as evening fell the buses turned toward "home" in Calcutta.
It was only a short trip but the girls would remember the outing and recall it happily to Fruzzetti, a Brown professor of anthropology, whenever they saw her in the ensuing years. For Fruzzetti it was a bright spot during an emotionally difficult study into female abandonment in India.
The girls were orphans who, like hundreds of other young girls in India, were abandoned because Indian culture traditionally values sons over daughters, said Fruzzetti. Abandoned to a society that places much emphasis on identity, the orphaned girls have a hard life.
"Ultimately their future I wouldn't say is all that bright," said Fruzzetti.
Fruzzetti began researching the abandonment of females in Calcutta more than a decade ago as part of a larger plan to study the roots of violence toward women that country. She became interested in the subject after visiting an orphanage - called "homes" in India - with a friend in the mid-1980s, where she was struck by the fact that the home was full of girls.
Soon Fruzzetti began seeking reasons to explain the situation. The result of her work is slated to be published this summer as the book "Orphans, Women and Poverty: Women's Movement in India" by Heritage International Press. It is the first in what the publisher hopes to be a series on the social and cultural anthropology of India, and is one of the first anthropological books on the situation, she said.
To do the research Fruzzetti moved to India with her family for a year. Raising her own two daughters, then ages 8 and 13, while examining the situation was difficult, she said.
"What surprised me was that I found the research so hard for me," said Fruzzetti. "I, the mother of two girls, put myself into that context."
Her research focused on a half-dozen orphanages in Calcutta, where she studied how the girls were raised, their daily activities and education.
The children, abandoned in places like railway stations, were sometimes found by social workers and brought to the orphanages. In other cases the girls' mothers would leave them at the orphanages with the understanding that the daughters could visit their family homes on major holidays. There rarely were any boys in the orphanages, said Fruzzetti.
Fruzzetti thinks that much of the female abandonment in India stems from the perpetuation of a dowry system made illegal in 1961 but still practiced, particularly in India's rural areas. Under the dowry system, the bride's family pays the groom's family with a specific amount of money or property to ensure the union. Once married, it is the traditional view that the wife becomes the responsibility of her husband and she lives with his family, said Fruzzetti.
Those who are abandoned often come from large families in which there are many daughters, who are seen as a potential financial burden on the family.
"The first priority a family has is to try to get their daughters married off - they say it's a father's main responsibility," Fruzzetti said. "So if you have three or four daughters ..."
As unemployment increases in India, so do the demands for dowry as well as the number of abandoned females, according to Fruzzetti.
Being an orphan is a difficult role to have in India because of the significant emphasis its society places on one's family, kinship group, lineage, caste and religion, said Fruzzetti.
For orphans, the days are very similar. Visiting teachers sometimes provide instruction on such income-generating activities as carpet weaving, basket weaving and printing. The girls take their meals together and divide the chores among themselves, said Fruzzetti.
Some orphans eventually run away and have few options other than disreputable work. Others are married off in arranged unions, she said. Most are not adopted and some even spend their entire lives in the homes. The oldest orphans that Fruzzetti met were in their 60s.
"I came across very little local adoption ... I heard of one or two," said Fruzzetti. Only one of the orphanages she studied in Calcutta, the Mahila Seva Samity, worked to place children in homes overseas, she added.
Fruzzetti acknowledged the emotional difficulty she had pursing this research.
Her older daughter, Leila Ostor, remembers how difficult it was for her mother to try to answer questions she posed as a 13-year-old about why the orphans would not go home to families at the end of the day.
"It was difficult to see girls my own age and my sister's age who had nothing," said Ostor, now in her mid-20s. "We would ask my mom 'Why aren't they going home?' It was hard ... she had two daughters of her own and she was trying to do this research - it's not easy to sort of displace yourself and not identify with your feelings."
Most troubling, said Fruzzetti, was that "I kept conceptualizing the problems, but not a way out of the problems."
Family-planning efforts or government-established quotas on the number of children allowed each couple are unlikely to reduce the size of families or female abandonment, Fruzzetti said. Education - about equality of the sexes and hardships imposed by the dowry system - may work, however. Until something changes, the orphanages will likely continue to swell with girls, she said.
Years after beginning her study and just as her book is slated to be published, Fruzzetti is again thinking about what she saw in India. Her daughter Leila is planning to marry, which has brought fresh comparisons between the traditions in that country and this one.
The foremost difficulty in the dowry system, she said, is that it results in orphaned girls who grow up to find that society lacks a role for them.