Experiments like one in Bangalore to fill jobs colliding with an old way of life
Rural Indian girls chase city dreams
THE factory floor is going full throttle when the new girls walk in. Everywhere is the thrumming of sewing machines, the hum of fans, the faint burning smell of steam irons.
The new girls smell of the village. They have sprinklings of pimples. They woke well before dawn to prepare themselves for their first day of work, leaning over one another’s faces in silence to shape the edges of each eyebrow with a razor blade. Their braids bounce to their hips, tight and glossy, as if woven by a surgeon. On their ankles are silver chains hung with bells, so when they walk in a group, they jingle.
But it is impossible to hear this sound over the racket on the factory floor. The tailors glance up for only a moment, long enough to take in an experiment. The new workers – teenagers, most of them – have been recruited from remote villages to help factories like this one meet the global demand for cheap garments. But there is also social engineering going on.
A government program has drawn the trainees from the vast population of rural Indian women who spend their lives doing chores. In 2012, the last time the government surveyed its citizens about their occupation, an astonishing 205 million women between the ages of 15 and 60 responded “attending to domestic duties”.
Economists, with increasing urgency, say India will not fulfill its potential if it cannot put them to work in the economy. They say that if female employment were brought on par with male employment in India, the nation’s gross domestic product would expand by as much as 27 percent.
Experiments like the one in Bangalore run against deep currents in India, whose guiding voice, Mohandas K Gandhi, envisioned a socialist future built on the small-scale economy of the village. They also collide with an old way of life, in which girls are kept in seclusion until they can be transferred to another family through arranged marriage.
Bangalore is the first city the 37 trainee tailors have seen. They are dazzled by the different kinds of light. Picking their way through the alleys around the factory, a column of virgins from the countryside, they stare up at an apartment building that towers over the neighbourhood and wish their mothers could see it.
Among them are two sisters, Prabhati and Shashi Das. They have come from a village at the end of a road, a place so conservative that the single time they went to a movie theatre, their male cousins and uncles created a human chain around them, their big hands linked, to protect them from any contact with outside men. They are, as far as they know, the first unmarried women who have ever migrated from the village to work.
Neighbours in the village are waiting to see what happens. The nasty ones say, with obvious relish, it will end badly. They whisper about migrant workers whose eyes were removed by organ traders while they slept. They say Prabhati and Shashi will be “used this way and that”.
Still, they go. Prabhati, at 21, is stubborn and able, and Shashi, two years her junior, pretty and fizzing with suppressed laughter. The two sisters hook pinkies when they walk down the lane that leads to the factory.
“All the flirts and ruffians in the whole world must have been born on this lane,” Shashi grumbles, but she is laughing. Attention is like water to her.
The sisters are waiting, too, to see what will happen to them. They are both at the age when they could be summoned at any moment to be displayed to a family of strangers as a potential daughter-in-law. And each of them wants something else, something impossible.
It is late May, the first day of their factory summer – of love letters folded into squares and dropped onto work stations; of fevers sweated out on the floor of a bare hostel room; of supervisors shouting in a language they do not understand, a couple of words – “work” and “faster” – gradually becoming clear; of capitalism, of men and of a bit of freedom.
It all started in March, in the drippy jungle of rural Odisha, when two distant relatives happened to meet on the roadside.
One of the men had found employment as a “mobiliser” for Gram Tarang, a for-profit agency contracted by India’s government to recruit and train workers. He mentioned that Gram Tarang was offering a cash incentive – roughly 450 rupees, or about $6.75, a head – to mobilisers who identified young women willing to enrol in a training program for garment factory jobs.
The second man, Hemant Das, perked up, sensing the approach of a change of career. Hemant had an underfed look and teeth rimmed with tobacco stains. Among the first college graduates from his family, he had tried his hand at laying bricks, tutoring schoolchildren, programming computers, setting up wedding tents and waiting tables before finally falling back on the only job widely available to men here, working as a field hand for 200 rupees a day.
Hemant was from a village called Ishwarpur, and as it happened, idle young women were something Ishwarpur had in great quantity. That they could be monetised came as good news.
On its economic merits alone, Hemant figured, the government scheme would prove tempting: After two months of training, their daughters would be placed in a factory in the industrial centre of Bangalore, where they would earn the legal minimum wage, 7,187 rupees per month, or about $108, which is more than most of their fathers make. Six months after arriving in Bangalore, they would be free to return home if they wished.
Hemant set out the next day with a fistful of pamphlets and an uncharacteristically sunny disposition. But as he made his rounds of local families – 30 of them, at least – they shook their heads. No.
“Letting go of female children is dishonorable, in itself,” explained Pramanand Das, who presides over an informal family council.
Minati Das, the mother of a 19-year-old, got to the point quicker.
“Not everyone wants a daughter-in-law who is a working woman,” she said. “They think she has lost her chastity.”
Hemant would have been completely out of luck if he had not thought to try Karuna Das, who had two daughters of marriageable age – Prabhati and Shashi.
Karuna was a sinewy day labourer, and he had roamed far from the village in his younger days to work in iron foundries in Chennai and Hyderabad. The gossip was that Karuna agreed to enrol his eldest daughters because he was unable to scrape together 100,000 rupees for dowries. That was undoubtedly the case.
“They were reluctant to go anywhere because they were a bit scared,” he said. “I told them being scared is OK. OK, you’re scared. Now you have to move on.”
Prabhati has never seen a train, much less ridden in one, and on the 33-hour journey to Bangalore the earth seems to heave under her. As kilometres of paddy fields slide by, she vomits. Thatch roofs are replaced by peaked roofs, and she vomits. When they reach south India, rain begins to hit the window in fat spatters.
It had come as news to Prab- hati that the training program involved travelling 900 miles. But some intention had hardened within her. She wanted to prove the neighbours wrong. She did not care about her marriage prospects because, after examining the marriages that surrounded her in Ishwarpur, she had decided she does not want to marry at all.
“I will go to Bangalore,” she told her parents. “If I come back, then you can get me married. If I don’t come back, you can’t get me married.”
Shashi sits beside her retching sister and strokes her back. She had not wanted to come. Happy enough with a future as a housewife, she had focused her energy on making mischief. Among friends, she introduced herself as “45 kilograms of hotness”. Out of the corner of her mouth came a stream of dirty jokes, and she made the other girls dissolve in helpless laughter by comparing breast sizes to vegetables (including, mournfully, a kernel of corn).
Working on an assembly line was not Shashi’s idea of fun. But Prabhati plunged forward, and, as usual, Shashi cruised along in her wake.
The sisters, lugging a bag of clothes, sit with 35 other girls from Odisha who are making the same journey.
They have all dressed in baggy purple-and-grey uniforms, with ID cards swinging from their necks. Their parents had made last-minute attempts to keep them from leaving, which had to be repelled with sustained tantrums. A girl called Baby, who is 18 and bespectacled, said that she had secured her mother’s permission only by refusing to eat for two days.
“They wanted me to come home,” she says. “I’m not going home.”
The sun has not yet risen when they arrive at the hostel that will be their new home for the next six months: 137 women in 15 unfurnished rooms, every inch covered with girlish flotsam, underwear and bras drying on the window grates, sentimental verses penciled on the walls.
Prabhati and Shashi’s room is being painted, so on the first night 25 of them crowd into two rooms, so tight that one of their roommates stretches out on the kitchen counter.
“I thought there would be beds,” murmurs one, and the chaperone from Gram Tarang looks exasperated.
“They complain, ‘You could have given us this, you could have given us that’,” he says. “We sweetly explain that it is not possible. They don’t have the bed system in Bangalore.”
But the girls are too keyed up to sleep. Climbing onto the roof, they can see the sun rising over a landscape of other roofs, where, in all directions, migrants seek a breath of quiet. There they can gaze up at the 22nd storey of an apartment building, where residents come out to hang their laundry on balconies. It is the most amazing thing they have ever seen: big people looking tiny.
“I want to see what I haven’t seen,” murmurs one of the girls, sleepily. “I want to see what I don’t even know exists.”
Baby says something about her eventual return to India, and when someone corrects her, she looks up sharply.
“Bangalore is in India?” she asks.”
For the first few weeks, everything is new. Stepping out of the hostel, the trainees are surrounded by men: Men on balconies, men on scooters, men lounging in doorways, staring. The road is plastered with signs saying “tailors wanted”, and one girl gives a yelp of alarm, mistaking them for wanted posters.
On the day of a Hindu festival, Prabhati peers down from the roof at a troupe of transgender dancers, smiling and twitching suggestively as men press in around them. When one bends down so that an onlooker can stick a folded bill in her cleavage, Prabhati is so shocked that she has an impulse to reach for a stone and throw it.
“If this happened in the village,” she says, “you would all be dead.”
In rural Odisha they like to say that “a girl’s shyness is her jewellery”. But here, there is no space for the newcomers unless they make space for themselves. To cross the street – a throbbing two-lane road coursing with auto rickshaws, clattering cargo trucks, scooters carrying whole families – requires stepping in front of the slower-moving vehicles, if necessary stopping them with their bodies. The girls waver – and just they contemplated life in the big city – then they plunge.