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Special Article
Wedded to work
Indian Men Find Career Women Difficult To Handle
By Suhit Sen
The Supreme Court passed final orders in a divorce case early this month. The story behind the suit and the court’s judgment raise interesting questions about conjugal relations in a rapidly changing urban society.
The story, as reported in the media, is as follows. A man filed for divorce from his wife who was, at the time they got married, pursuing a doctoral degree in biochemistry at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. The man alleged that his wife was refusing to bear a child because that would jeopardise her career and had had three abortions in 1984, the year they got married, 1985 and 1989 without his knowledge. He further alleged that his wife had deserted him and left for the US in pursuance of her career.
The woman refuted all the charges. In her defence, she said that the first two abortions had been necessitated by medical conditions ~ the first caused by exposure to radiation in her laboratory and the second by a kidney inflammation ~ and the third had been a natural miscarriage.
As for the trip to the US, she had been awarded a fellowship, which she had taken up. While the husband further alleged that his wife had told him several times that he could remarry or adopt if he was desperate for a child, the impugned woman said in her defence that she was highly educated and wanted to deploy that education in service of society.
The court ruled that the denial of a child, the husband’s legitimate conjugal right, constituted torture, and, while dismissing the charge of desertion, granted the divorce sought by the man.
Changing roles
Let us note at the outset that there are three actors in this drama and we shall look at their actions one by one ~ the husband, the wife and the judiciary, specifically the Supreme Court, though the case came up from a lower court through the high court.
Let’s begin with the petitioner ~ the husband. While, from within a certain frame of reference, one may be critical of a certain lack of sensitivity, of which more in a moment, one cannot fully fault the husband, especially since the bareness of the narrative available in the media makes it impossible to reconstruct the context, for wanting a child. Nor can one fault him for wanting a divorce after having been denied fatherhood. Let us assume, charitably, that he tried to prevail upon his wife and convince her of the depth of his desire to be a father and only after having failed did he take recourse to the divorce option.
Fine. But a digression is in order. In this particular case the wife alleged that her husband was “jealous” of her professional success ~ “progress” ~ when she got her fellowship and went to the US instead of being happy for her, which was the proximate cause for filing the divorce suit. Without going into the merits of this allegation, if for no other reason because we are in no position to, some general points can be made. In India’s rapidly changing urban society, the social and professional space for women is opening up virtually with every passing day. This enlargement of space and the consequent liberty and freedom that women are increasingly enjoying is also being diffused more widely across social classes and reaching women from more diverse, hitherto traditional, backgrounds. Men, especially those from more traditional and conservative backgrounds are finding it difficult to cope with the new social and professional roles and aspirations of women in general and their wives specifically.
There is another aspect to this. The new social and professional freedom in the public space that women are beginning to enjoy is mirrored in the private space ~ that of the family and the household ~ by an increasing rejection of traditional roles. Thus women not only have different expectations, say, about the division of household responsibilities, but also about the control of their bodies, their selves, their destinies which in traditional contexts they were denied, especially within the ambit of the concept of the joint family and the responsibilities that entailed (whether or not the actual household was nuclear or joint). These claims to freedom are even more problematic for men in traditional contexts. That is the lesson of the husband’s story, whether or not it applies in this case.
Now to the woman. Much of the foregoing applies to the wife. She wanted a career and was well within her rights not to have a child if she felt that would impede her career. Motherhood may not be the ultimate epiphany for all women, whether married or not ~ marriage, in other words, does not have to come with a promissory note inscribed with the promise of a child or children, even though a majority of men may think it does. The woman’s allegation of professional jealousy is plausible in the broader social context, whether or not it is true in this particular case ~ given, as we have argued, that men find both the new public and private roles of “their” women and women in general difficult to negotiate. If there is something both inexplicable and to an extent indefensible, in this particular case, however, is the wife’s desperate attempt to deny the husband a divorce. If their registers were so very divergent, from the outside and given the limitations of our knowledge of the full story, it would appear logical to agree to a parting of ways ~ she to pursue her career and he to find a wife more in tune with his expectations and, crucially, willing to bear his child.
The most interesting action was that of the third actor, however ~ the judgments passed seem to encapsulate the still hugely dominant social consensus about the public and private roles of women and the relations between men and women, specifically the relation of conjugality. In its order, while upholding the lower and high court judgments, the apex court dismissed desertion on account of the woman having taken up her fellowship in the US on purely technical grounds ~ the couple had not lived apart continuously for two years.
Rights and duties
The grounds on which the divorce was in fact granted in the lower court was that the wife’s refusal to bear a child ~ and in this the husband’s version of events was accepted ~ constituted cruelty, a view at least tacitly endorsed by the high court and Supreme Court. The Supreme Court threw out the desertion plea, but, as cryptically reported in the media, ruled that the continuous cessation of “marital intercourse” constituted “legal cruelty”.
In the absence of context the phrase “marital intercourse” is difficult to interpret, but at the very bottom there seems to be the notion that bearing a child is an inalienable conjugal duty a wife undertakes upon marriage and conversely it is the husband’s inalienable conjugal right to demand compliance. The woman argued that even if the charges ~ the three abortions ~ were true, the issues involved were part of the “normal wear and tear” of a marital relationship ~ in other words, having or not having a child should have been a matter of negotiation within the marriage.
By refusing to buy that, the Supreme Court gave the “marital” duty of bearing a child an absolute, non-negotiable, legal imprimatur, which, while being in line with the dominant social consensus, hardly accords with an equitable, enlightened and just construction of the relationship between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.
The writer is Senior Editor, The Statesman
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