Loved in Posters, Controlled in Life

India claims to worship the feminine. We pray to goddesses, celebrate Kanya Pujan, invoke Shakti, and shout slogans like Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao. Yet the real girl child – flesh, blood, curiosity, desire, anger – is treated not as a person but a problem to be managed.

This contradiction is not accidental. It is structural.

India’s attitude toward the girl child is ridden with double standards all through – from her birth to her death.

Her birth is received with a sigh rather than joy. A boy is born into possibility in India; a girl is born into precaution. She is loved despite being a girl, not because she is one. Her arrival is accompanied by calculations: education costs (for what – because she is not ours in the end), marriage expenses, safety concerns, and potential threat to social reputation of the family.

From infancy, her body becomes a site of anxiety. The Indian girl child is wrapped more in warnings than in clothes.  

Girls now top exams. They fill classrooms. But education, for many families, is still not about liberation; it is about market value. A well-educated girl is a better marriage prospect, a more profitable wife, a mother with certificates. In the end, she is expected to be the ideal Indian wife: a role-player rather than an independent individual. She can succeed, but not question. She can shine, but not disrupt the social order designed by men.

Her body is a battlefield of sorts.

She must be modest, but attractive.

Independent, but not assertive.

Modern, but not ‘loose.’

Traditional, but not opinionated.

Her clothes are designed by men. Her friendships are monitored. Her phone is checked. Her silence is a virtue.

When violence happens, the questions begin – not about the perpetrator’s entitlement, but about the girl’s dress or behaviour which provoked the man.

India loves its goddesses precisely because they are symbolic, silent, and controllable. A girl should be all that too. A girl who speaks back, rejects marriage, refuses motherhood, or demands pleasure is far more threatening than a demon.

We worship Durga but suppress daughters.

We invoke Saraswati but silence curiosity.

We celebrate Lakshmi but deny economic autonomy.

The girl cannot write her own narratives, nor control them.

In a society where the men are not taught to be accountable, the girls are forced to live in cages. It is called safety. In reality, it is subjugation.

The River Ganga is perhaps the apt symbol for all this. It is the most sacred river for Indians. It is also one of the most polluted rivers in the world. And she is a goddess.

PS. Jan 24 is the National Girls Day in India which my blogger friends Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed are celebrating with a blog hop. This post is part of Voices of Her Blog Hop under #EveryConversationMatters blog hop series.