Subarna Ghosh’s work suffered during the confinement, when more was expected at home
Doubts about who does housework during the recent coronavirus blockade have revealed India’s gender policy for households, writes the BBC’s Geeta Pandey in Delhi.
Household chores in India generally involve a lot of heavy work. Unlike in the West, few Indian houses are equipped with a dishwasher, vacuum cleaner or washing machine.
Therefore, dishes should be individually cleaned, clothes should be washed in buckets and hung to dry, and houses should be swept with brooms and mopped with rags. Then there are children to care for and old and sick to care for.
In millions of middle-class households, housework is delegated to hired domestic help: part-time cooks, cleaners, and babysitters. But what happens when aid cannot come to work because there is a national blockade?
The answer is friction and struggle, and in a single case, a petition urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene.
“Is the handle of a jhadu (broom) printed with the words: ‘to be operated only by women’?” ask for the petition, posted on change.org.
“What about the manual for the washing machine or gas stove? So why aren’t most men doing their share of the housework!”
The petition’s author, Subarna Ghosh, who was fed up with cooking, cleaning and laundry while trying to work from home, wants the prime minister to “broach the subject in his next speech” and “encourage all Indian men to do the same part of the domestic work “.
“It is a fundamental question, why don’t more people talk about it?” she wrote.
In India, domestic work is mainly treated as the responsibility of women.
Ms. Ghosh’s petition has gathered nearly 70,000 signatures, a reflection of the scale of gender inequality in households across India. According to a report by the International Labor Organization, in 2018, urban Indian women spent 312 minutes a day in unpaid care work. The men did 29 minutes. In the villages, it was 291 minutes for women compared to 32 minutes for men.
At Ms Ghosh’s house in Mumbai it was no different. The petition, he told the BBC, stemmed from “life experiences of my own and of many women around me.” The burden of housework had always been his, he said. “I cook, I clean, I make beds, I wash clothes, I fold clothes and everything else.”
Her husband, a banker, “was not the type to help with housework,” she said. Their teenage son and daughter sometimes intervene.
Ms. Ghosh, who runs a charity working on reproductive justice, said the expectation that she would be the one to commit the work was much higher during the shutdown.
“My job suffered, at least in April, the first month of the bull run. I was exhausted all the time, I was tired every day. Our family dynamics changed. I definitely complained a lot. And when I complained, people said, ‘Then I didn’t you do “.
Ms. Ghosh followed her advice: For three days in early May, she did not wash the dishes or fold the clothes.
“The sink was overflowing with unwashed dishes and the laundry pile was getting bigger and bigger,” he said.
Her husband and children realized how upset she was and cleaned up the mess.
Subarna Ghosh’s son and daughter washing dishes at home
“My husband started helping me with the chores. He understood that it affected me a lot, that it bothered me a lot,” she said. “But our men are also victims of this culture and society. They have not been trained to do household chores. They require a little hand.”
That’s because in India, like in many other patriarchal societies, girls are groomed from an early age to be perfect housewives. Household chores are assumed to be their responsibility and if they went out and got a job, they would have to do a “double duty”: managing both home and work.
“As a child, it was always me who had to do the housework, work in the kitchen, and help my mother,” wrote one woman, Pallavi Sareen, when I asked friends and colleagues on Facebook for their stories about the split. from work. “My brother doesn’t even serve lunch,” he said.
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Most of those who responded by saying that their homes were gender neutral had lived abroad or married men who had spent time in the West. The stories closest to home were different.
“Domestic work is still considered a woman’s work,” wrote Upasana Bhat. “Even if the men offer to help, how many will if the couple lives with the in-laws? That would be a truly progressive day. I know of women whose husbands help but can’t lift a finger in the kitchen when their parents visit. “
According to an Oxfam report, Indian women and girls perform more than three billion hours of unpaid care work daily. If it were assigned a monetary value, it would add trillions of rupees to India’s gross domestic product.
But in reality, the cost of housework is rarely calculated. It is seen as something a woman does for love.
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In most Indian homes, clothes are washed in buckets and hung to dry in the sun.
Growing up, Mrs. Ghosh thought differently. She saw her mother and aunts do all the housework and thought, “No way am I going to be like this.”
When she got married, failures in housework were partially hidden due to the presence of domestic help, leading to a false sense of equality in the home. “Domestic help also helps keep peace in our homes,” he said. “The tasks are in charge and everything seems to be fine.”
But the confinement brought the family face to face with the daily chores and the inequality that had “gotten under the rug.”
“The blockade made these chasms more apparent,” said Ghosh. “It also gave me an opportunity to look him in the eye and expose him.”
Then he began to ask the Prime Minister.
The women he spoke to in their neighborhood said they were equally frustrated with household chores, but most found the idea of their husbands helping around the house ridiculous.
“Many asked me, ‘How can you cook or clean?’ In fact, many praised their husbands for being easy to deal with, saying, “She is very nice, she eats everything I cook without complaint.”
The problem was so close to home that it was difficult to deal with, Ghosh said.
“When it comes to your own father, brother or husband, how do you ask them? But the personal is also political, so I need to talk about it, but I also have to be a good wife.”
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Indian women and girls perform over three billion hours of unpaid care work daily
When Ms. Ghosh told her husband that she was initiating a petition, he was “very supportive,” she said.
“His friends made fun of him. They asked him, ‘Why didn’t you do some housework? Look, now your wife left and asked Modi!’
“He took it on the chin,” she said, laughing. “She said, ‘Because more men listen to Mr. Modi than their own wives.'”
Ms. Ghosh’s request was also criticized by many people on social media. Many chastised her for disturbing the prime minister with “a frivolous matter.”
“Some people wrote to me saying that Indian women should do their housework. Yes, but where are the men?”
I asked him if he thought Mr. Modi would talk about household chores.
“I am hopeful,” he said. “Mr. Modi has a large base of support among women, so he should be talking about a topic that is important to women. When the rainy season started, he talked about cough and cold, so why not can you talk about gender equality? “
