Son Preference

Sex Selection, Gender and Culture in South Asia

Navtej K. Purewal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9789386141866
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The preference for male children transcends many societies and cultures, making it an issue of local and global dimensions. While son preference is not a new phenomenon and has existed historically in many parts of Asia, its contemporary expressions illustrate the gendered outcomes of social power relations as they interact and intersect with culture, economy and technologies. Son Preference brings together key debates on the subject of son preference by assessing existing work in the field and providing new insights through primary research. The book covers a broad range of social science discussions and draws upon textual and ethnographic material from India. Son Preference will be useful to students, scholars, activists and anyone interested in the issues surrounding gender inequity, sex selection and skewed sex ratios.

1 MAPPING KNOWLEDGES OF SON PREFERENCE

INTRODUCTION

Son preference has come to be known and told through a number of dominant narratives that rely on particular epistemological assumptions. While this has different inflections across the various sites of my research in Punjab, India and the South Asian diaspora, this chapter will outline the contours of a cartography of research and enquiry which privileges certain ways of 'knowing' son preference, while often silencing or appearing oblivious to others. The production of this body of knowledge, for the most part, has centred what can be described as evidence-based academic scholarship, which has ultimately produced an empiricist knowledge-base about son preference. The outcome of this is that constructions and understandings of son preference, which rely largely upon empirically-driven tools and methods meant to illustrate, highlight and trace the declining terms of gender equity against females, have dominated the discursive field. It is not my intention, however, to criticize empirical work. Empirical, primary research in various forms has produced some of the most rich accounts and slices of social and cultural processes that offer insights into the gendered social world in which son preferential processes and practices exist. It is the representation of empirical data in the framing of arguments and explanations for why and how son preference exists - in other words, representing an empiricism that suggests that it is possible to know or understand son preference - which I am interested in, i.e. how the object of study of 'son preference' or 'sex selection' has been created and reified in academic scholarship.

In any given context of social science research, there are risks of failing to acknowledge 'multiple realities' existing outside of the frames of 'the field' and categories of analysis (Long and Long 1992). It is precisely at this point that wider questions of'agency', 'power' and 'knowledge', as theoretical and methodological concerns of the social sciences, have much to offer in opening up the 'debate' beyond a simple anti-woman critique. While there is no dearth of sources upon which the social scientist interested in son preference can reflect, such as census data, ethnographic evidence, household surveys, observations, colonial historical records, fiction, newspaper and other media interventions, to name a few, what is noticeable is how the breadth of material is utilized within a predominantly empiricist knowledge-producing frame.

It is not my intention, however, to highlight empiricist tendencies within the literature, but rather to utilize the empiricist slant as a means of questioning different scholarly representations of son preference. For instance, non-academic activist and discursive approaches which problematize the overemphasis on son preference as one of the key problems of gender inequality have, by and large, been left out of the 'hard facts' of social science research on son preference. A number of questions remain unanswered when exploring the utilitarian nature of the 'gaze' of academic scholarship in this respect. For example, how would one 'write in' an activist agenda within an exploration of son preference in Punjab, a place so commonly characterized historically by female infanticide and foeticide? Can counter-hegemonic voices be heard, rather than being seen merely as futile voices within a direly gendered society?

Postcolonial feminist critique offers a deconstruction of some of the disciplinary engagements using this lens of objectification, whether it be through the use of quantitative figures or of the gaze of the 'objective' outsider or ethnographer. Such a critical perspective, which looks to the historical longevity of scholarship in its intellectual context, can offer critical tools for deconstructing and understanding how the politics of culture, gender and feminist epistemology inform the terrain of academic scholarship (Visveswaran 1994, Mohanty 1991, Narayan 1997; and Mani 1990, Kumar 1994). The knowledge production based upon empirical evidence of son preference, namely the census and sex ratios on the one hand, and ethnographic 'evidence' coming out of ethnographic studies on the other, has emerged from a long history of reportage on gender, culture and the household in South Asia. The inception and evolution of discussions on son preference is worthy of examination when looking at the politics of scholarship. The links often made between nineteenth- to twentieth-century and contemporary patterns of skewed sex ratios need to be critically approached in a manner which traces the historical development of the colonial census and scholarship and its utility for the colonial exercise before applying the same epistemological assumptions to contemporary discussions of foeticide. Just as son preference had a distinct place within the colonial project, the post-independence Indian modernist project has positioned son preference within wider development discourses and policies seeking to 'uplift' women.

I will give a brief overview of selected contemporary engagements with gender and son preference, with some studies specifically looking at son preference, while others speak more generally about gender relations and dynamics, from various disciplinary standpoints and positions. Each study carries with it certain disciplinary histories of knowledge production while also occupying a positionality which is by no means outside of the scope of subjectivity. The authors and publications selected for analysis are not meant to be viewed as representative of any discipline, nor have they been chosen to represent entire trajectories of academic scholarship or discourse. Instead, they have been selected because of their significance in charting engagements with son preference, in which there are, of course, many other contributions by other authors, all of whom could not be included here. The aim is to ask a number of questions of each contribution in terms of their reflections on their published research, how they understood or theorized gender and/or son preference, how they characterized it, the tools they used and how they located themselves within the study. All research, even that which has not involved interviews or communicated directly with people, reflects a methodology and represents a set of epistemological concerns. This chapter reflects my concerns with tracing routes toward more reflexive, critical approaches to researching son preference, which often requires the 'looking glass' to be turned back toward the commentator. This is precisely the focus, in terms of addressing a politics of research which can further contribute to a more robust intellectual project.

HISTORICIZING THE GAZE

Each discipline has generated its own type of 'gaze' toward how son preference articulates itself within South Asian societies. Whether it be orientalist, economic reductionist, or culturalist, the academic disciplines, as Said (1979) so poignantly alerted us, are at the centre of perpetuating a cultural imperialism toward cultures and populations with linkages to formerly colonized people and places. The connections between the enlightenment project and the development of the social sciences is one which is not just historical - it is a history of knowledge itself and one which informs how current scholarship has evolved out the development of certain canons. Thus, the various disciplinary contributions to 'understandings' of son preference and sex selection, each with its own methods and tools, have spoken not only on behalf of women and men in South Asia but also, it could be inferred, on behalf of the unborn female foetus. In the search for evidence and a resulting inability to see beyond the respective gazes that academic scholarship on son preference and female foeticide have generated, subsequent silences have been produced which offer important insights into how more critical ways of approaching son preference can be developed - outside of some of the disciplinary encasings which have resisted this to date.

My attempt to think, write and articulate on son preference and sex selection follows a long history of discourse on son preference, ranging from early colonial record-taking and reporting in the early to mid-nineteenth century to more recent demographic and anthropological literature. A historiography of the disciplinary contributions to and bounded theorizations of son preference requires first an unpicking of the hegemony of Western social constructions of the 'self' and the 'other' through understandings of cultural 'difference' and gender. Such notions of gender, 'difference' and culture were rooted in colonial social enterprise, yet these notions have continued to silence Third World women, as they are, for example, 'spoken for' within development policies which, as Spivak (1988) purported, muted subaltern voices through academic modes of rigour and enquiry.

The manner in which anthropology, demography and South Asian area studies have contributed most, in developing understandings of the social mechanisms behind the preference for sons and what some of the 'outcomes' of this might be, is revealing of the intellectual baggage that each of them carries with it in relation to son preference. Each discipline utilizes tools and methods laid out by the disciplinary concerns and questions raised from within. For instance, the demography of South Asia has its roots in the colonial enumeration exercise which was utilized for the colonial project in creating while also breaking up various social categories in generating colonial knowledge (Cohn 1996; Pandey 1990). A Malthusian discourse on population control was at the centre of the census' creation, with female infanticide providing an opportunity for imperial discourse on population to graft violence against women upon it (Bhatnagar et al. 2005). Thus the census, while providing data sets for understanding population trends and changes historically and in the present, can also be viewed critically for what purposes it serves and for what it does not tell us. There is, of course, a continuity of discourse from the colonial civilizing mission that accompanied the enumeration exercise to the postcolonial - 'the colonial census comes into being at the site of female infanticide' (Bhatnagar et al. 2005: 129) - where the foundation of understanding population in India was through the tools offered by the census but also supported by colonial administrative accounts of female infanticide.

The British 'discovery' of female infanticide in 1789 in Benares eventually led to the Female Infanticide Act in 1870 (which made infanticide illegal) when it was observed that the practice was most prevalent among land-owning Hindu castes (Vishwanath 1998). In Panjab, Major Lake reported to the Panjab Board of Administration in 1851 that 'it is an undoubted fact that there are some 1000 families of bedis who, for the last 400 years have destroyed all their female offspring' (Lake, in Viswanath 1998: 1105). The Bedis, a Sikh khatri caste who claimed direct descendancy to Guru Nanak and who were ranked highly among other Sikh khatri families, received girls from other lower-ranking khatri families but refused to marry their daughters to boys from lower-ranked families and hence resorted to female infanticide.

Similar 'discoveries' were made about other groups such as Rajputs who similarly occupied a conspicuous caste position and thus were said to have practised female infanticide rather than compromising their privileged status by marrying their daughters to groups lower to them. By 1870, the British 'discovery' of a bias toward the birth of sons over daughters became a colonial intervention in the Female Infanticide Act. Yet, it is less the content of the reporting that has caught the attention of postcolonial commentators than the intentions that such colonial endeavors symbolized. Lata Mani's (1990) critical view of the civilizing mission in India raises questions about colonial intentions in highlighting cultural practices such as sati and dowry. The contradictions between 'uplifting' women in India through the banning of sati and simultaneously implementing draconian measures to maintain control of the British Raj highlighted the insidiousness of social control and political domination under empire. Sen (2002) similarly looks to how the British colonial anti-infanticide campaign began to label 'aberrant communities' who came to be 'identified in terms of caste, tribe, village, and the crime itself', as an infanticidal society. Sen's study looks to the archive of colonial records as her source of 'data' and begins the chapter with a clarification of her position as historian: 'I do not use this chapter to question the "truth" of female infanticide in India... Instead, I explore the debates that led up to the (Female Infanticide Act) law, and the colonizing strategies that the law represented' (2002: 53).

Interestingly, the archives of colonial records have provided revisionist and postcolonial commentators with a wealth of communication with regard to how gender featured in the colonial encounter. Indeed, the enumeration exercise was a central founding narrative within demographic studies in India. If we make even a tacit acknowledgement that the tools used by recent demographic studies have emerged from this history of enumeration-followed-by-'discovery', then what do such quantitative indicators say about contemporary society and economy in terms of son preference and gender? As one study of sex ratios in China clearly states, the purposes of calculating sex ratios for demographers are as follows:

First, if they are assumed to be accurate, they indicate the gender balance in a society. This balance is determined by the sex ratio at birth and by sex-specific mortality and migration over the life course... The measured sex ratio at birth can be compared with a suitably selected 'standard' sex ratio reflecting known biological patterns to determine the degree to which infants of one sex suffer excess mortality. Second, if the sex ratios are thought to be incorrectly measured, they may be examined to determine the degree to which one gender group is systematically undercounted in a register, survey, or census. (Hull 1990)

Thus, following on from this statement, the intellectual project that demographic studies on India have charted out has been one of finding, as Amartya Sen's (1990) piece coins, India's 'missing women'. Emerging out of these high-profile demographic discoveries and predictions, there is an overwhelming dominance of quantitatively driven studies of son preference in South Asia, when one begins to 'map' out the field. The counting of males and females in the Indian population resulted in a surge of enquiry on the demographic outcomes of skewed sex ratios, biases toward male children and the new technologies of sex selection such as ultrasound scans and pre-diagnostic procedures. Indeed, Tim Dyson (2001) showed that when levels of enumeration fall, the numbers of women counted also falls, showing a sensitivity of the sex ratio to enumeration levels. Other studies have highlighted how population statistics are alerting us to various changes going on with declining ratios against females, including the 'intensification effect' in places like Punjab - where couples are having fewer children but where there is also an increasing desire for at least one son, thus intensifying the manifestation of son preference (Das Gupta and Bhat 1997). The knowledge produced from the use of quantitative indicators is based upon statistical evidence showing trends of female disadvantage over time, yet utilizes assumed cultural interpretations of gender to understand and read the data. What would it mean experientially, for instance, to be the third- or fourth-born female child in a household where the 'intensification effect' was taking place (see Chapter 3)? The picture that quantitative indicators offer is an insight into population trends, as an outcome of gendered processes. Thus, the finding that 'excess mortality of girls continues after birth and still constitutes the main method of removing female children in India' (Das Gupta and Bhat 1997: 314) has come to constitute a widely accepted analysis of the demographic sex ratio outcomes of son preference.

An example of a 'quick-fix' demographic explanation of son preference shows a leap from an analysis of China to that of India:

Strong male domination and discrimination against women have a long history and have not yet been fully eradicated in spite of great progress made in China, especially during the second half of this century The current family planning policy does not allow couples to have as many children as they desire, but social and cultural traditions and daily living conditions make it very important to have a son, especially in rural areas... Progress in medical technology has made prenatal sex identification and sex-selective abortion feasible. Therefore, people with a strong desire for a son usually have the resources to bribe medical personnel to perform an illegal examination and to use sex-selective induced abortion to achieve their desire. (Zeng Yi et al. 1993, cited in Krishnaji 2001)

The quote above presents a 'commonsense' explanation of the state of affairs in China with regard to the outcomes of social patterns of son preference, sex selection and state family-planning policies. For our purposes, what is even more interesting is how the statement is utilized to speak of the Indian context: 'Only a few changes in the above text are needed to describe the Indian situation' (Krishnaji 2001: 31), which implies that statistical evidence and the analytical reading of two such contrasting national contexts as China and India can utilize the same tools yet adjust the findings according to the specificities that the data point out.

To merely view quantitative indicators as impersonal and generalizing would be to crudely and simplistically reduce that method to figures and numbers. My purpose in raising such questions is not about comparatively questioning various methods, but to look to epistemological concerns emerging out of various types of representation in the literature. Further, mixed-method analysis has become a significant means of representing son preference. The presence of qualitative analysis within quantitative enquiries and of quantitative evidence in qualitative studies shows how methods are commonly combined and mixed in tandem with one another. Some have even argued that without the gender disaggregated data or 'evidence', it is difficult for more qualitative studies to emerge:

My own experience in China suggests that the absence of gender-disaggregated statistics on sex ratios and gendered indicators of infancy and childhood discrimination is a major factor limiting both national and community awareness. And that further advocacy and sensitization is contingent upon reliable data showing the scale, dimensions and trends in discrimination against daughters ... ultimately it seems as if it is the power of statistical data which is gender disaggregated that gives credence to ethnographic voices and is persuasive in convincing national, community and familial decision-makers that it is important and necessary to allocate attention and resources to girls' development. (Croll 2000: 184)

While demography's 'field' lies in the stores of vast data sets, ethnographic techniques privilege an authenticated 'field' in locating the terrain of enquiry. One study utilizing ethnography within a journalistic style is Bumiller's (1989) book, in which the reader is taken along a 'journey' among 'India's women'. From the onset of the book, the fieldwork sets out a voyeuristic methodology, with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mapping Knowledges of Son Preference
• 2 Son Preference in the Colonial and Postcolonial
• 3 'Figuring out' Son Preference
• 4 Anti-Female Foeticide: Between Activism and Orthodoxy
• 5 Narratives of Reproductive Choice and Culture in the Diaspora
• 6 Girl Talk: Cultural Change and Challenge through the Eyes of Young Women in Contemporary Punjab
• Conclusion by way of Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index