North and South - Gender Differences

Why are the North and South of India so different on the status of women? On infant mortality, education, age of marriage, asset ownership, (relative) freedom of movement… Dr. Alice Evans takes a stab at the question. She points out:

“A woman with the exact same household wealth/ caste/ religion will likely have more autonomy if she lives in the South.”

And these differences go back a long way:

“In 1900, girls were more likely to survive infancy, go to school and marry later if they lived in South/North-east.”

She considers all the usual suspects.

 

Poverty: Is the reason poverty? Not really, she says, since the North East is poor too, yet the status of women there is far better than the North.

 

Was colonial impact different in different regions?: Doesn’t seem so. Rather, the South was ahead even before colonialism and stayed ahead.

 

Matriliny: Kerala may be that way, but not the other southern states. So that can’t be the reason.

 

Cousin marriage: In the North, girls marry into unrelated marriages, so do families “invest” less in a member who’d move away? Conversely, the South had cross-cousin marriages: did that mean continued connections beyond marriage, in turn incentivizing families to treat girls better? Then again, cross-cousin marriages are common in the Middle East, but girls aren’t treated better there.

 

Invasions: Did repeated invasions of the North gradually lead to a culture of keeping the women tucked at home, safer from the invaders? Conversely, invading armies never too far South… And when the invading Mughals settled in India, did their power and influence gradually codify Islamic treatment of women into the way women were treated across the North? Not by diktat but by osmosis?

 

Breadwinners, soil quality and climate: Yes, men were breadwinners everywhere. But in the South, where soil quality was good and droughts or famines rare, families rarely had to “pick” which child should survive in severe times. Did the more common famines and droughts in the North force families to choose which child should survive (inevitably the potential breadwinner, i.e., the boy child)? Did this gradually become the mindset towards girls in general?

 

Nature of cultivation: In the South, cultivation is far more labour intensive (think rice). That meant women were needed in the fields. Did that lead to the value of women being higher which then translated into other aspects of how they were treated? Whereas wheat cultivation in the North isn’t that labour intensive, and so women weren’t needed in the fields… On a related note, when men and women work side by side in the fields (rice fields of the South), the women and thus their whereabouts could be observed, which could have led to less mistrust amongst the men and thus fewer restrictions…

 

So yes, it’s complicated with no clear answers. But Evans feels the reasons with highest weightage would be (1) invasions and (2) the “legacy of wheat-cultivation”.