Indian Woman Today | Social Issue Essay, Article, Paragraph for Class 12, Graduation and Competitive Examination.

Indian Woman Today

Scheme of the Essay

Exposition: Indian women experience several torments.

Rising Action: They follow the path of resistance.

Climax:

(1) Factors in history made them silent acceptors,

(2) Marriages result in slander,

(3) Women need protection for her biological role,

(4) Disharmony leads to threats.

Falling Action: Social organisations should explain the law.

Ending: Women must raise their voices effectively.

Sometimes ignorance is not a bliss. Especially when the unthinkable happens and you become an abandoned woman with nothing and no one to turn to. The appalling difference between one’s family and friends, the sheer despair of not being able to acquire custody of one’s own children: all this and much more, torments numerous Indian women years in and year out.

These are the voiceless ones. For some reason, they come to the parting of ways with their partners. They are forced to realize that the path of least resistance, of voluntary surrender of freedom, even total negation of their own individuality, and the constant patchwork that mended a tattered marriage will no longer keep the garment of respectability over their heads.

Factors throughout history have forced women to become patient acceptors. Although today among the educated liberated urban classes, the world over, there is no stigma attached to divorce, and a very little discrimination regarding job opportunities, yet the very hardships staring a separated woman in the face generate despair, and often defeat. Even those who truly believe that each individual is entitled to seek salvation and fulfillment do not know the basic rules of survival in this male-dominated human jungle.

What the Western woman automatically learns, like maintenance and child custody laws, are sealed secrets even to emancipated women in this country. The average Indian woman’s concept of law and her rights as wife and mother are practically non-existent. It is high time that mass-scale legal education is imparted to women in this country, for they have been treated as expendable human material for far too long. There ought to be legal aid centers attached to all women’s welfare organizations everywhere to generate awareness to rights and avenues of approach for bewildered and oppressed women.

In England, Europe, or America, any woman can walk out of an intolerable marriage with minor children, appeal to the nearest court, and become entitled to a reasonable maintenance allowance until legal separation or divorce is granted. If the husband tries to evade responsibility, he lands in jail or faces legal action for disobeying the court. In India, on the other hand, very few women would dream of getting involved in a legal battle. Firstly, the family won’t permit it. Then in this country legal procedures are extremely complicated, long drawn and expensive.

A separated woman seldom has enough to live on unless she holds a job or has wealthy parents. Paying lawyer’s fees, court dues and travelling expenses are often beyond her means. She also needs the advice, active help and active cooperation of male helpers, for she has not a clue about legal rigmaroles. Everyone tries to dissuade her. People talk with outward concern and inner relish of the effect created by the public spectacle of a broken marriage on children, friends and relations. Everyone concerned wants only one thing-to sweep the matter under the carpet as quietly as possible.

No one cares if a little bit of the woman her husband promised to love and cherish has been withering daily in a disastrous partnership. Woe betides the Indian woman who presumes to believe that it is a partnership. For whatever the scriptures may say, for women down the age’s marriage has been unconditional servitude only sometimes mitigated by true love, A male oriented priesthood formulated a set of values and evolved an ethos of self-negation for the female of the species so that nothing and no one could make man feel insecure.

Even today, the moment a marriage appears to be on the rocks, the wife immediately becomes the object of speculation and slander. Society expects her to compromise and live life on her husband’s terms and conditions. Very seldom is some understanding shown; she too has an identity, a destiny, a potential. And by bartering her body for social security she will end up by burying her true self under layers of non- entity.

Conceded that by her very biological role every woman needs protection. But have those who sit in judgement, condemning women to perpetual subjugation ever tried to understand the pressures that drive countless women, whom no one would consider militant feminists, away from husbands’ homes? Tales of brutality, neglect, often incredible sexual aberrations are waiting to be told. Baby battering is also a common feature of frustrated house-holds. The reasons for incompatibility are many and varied. They include infidelity, alcoholism, extravagance, mental cruelty, or just plain and simple emotional and intellectual disharmony.

Once disharmony prevails, it becomes increasingly difficult for a couple to maintain public and private decorum. Inevitably, the children too begin to suffer. And at last, after years of empty threats and attempts at compromise, the wife concludes that the relationship is just not worth any more heartbreak. Once she accepts reality, she must make the hardest decision of all-should she terminate her existence or learn to cope with wife alone?

For the courageous ones, nothing is going to be easy. But it is the woman who wants to live with dignity and sanity, who must make a conscious effort to exercise her legal rights. Since women in this country already have constitutional equality, all they need to do is to band together to ensure fair play. For too long women have been victims of the patriarchal system which places all economic and social power in the hands of man. They can know true liberation only when they too acquire earning power, shoulder responsibility, speak out against injustice and confidently go about building a future for themselves, alone if necessary.