Places and form of power - India

Places and Forms of power

The notion I’m going to deal with is places and forms of power. In order to illustrate this notion, I’ve chosen to refer India on the move. We may therefore wonder to what extent can India be regarded as a land of contrast?

Firstly, we’re going to see the evolution of India society. Then we’re going to discuss inequalities among citizens. Finally, we’re going to discuss the inequality between men and women.

To begin with, the growth in India evolve, over the last 50 years, the population in India has been multiplicated by 3 from 1960 to 2016. We observe the social and economic gap, the poor population decreased by 18% whereas the GDP (the way to measure country’s economy) increase by 120%. And for the gender gap, in 2011, 66% of Indian women can read and write while 82% of men can, the priority is to educate their sons not their daughters. There is therefore a gap between men and women.

Then, the documents I’ve chosen to illustrate this aspect of inequalities among citizen is the cast system in India. In fact, India is divided into four unequal, hereditary social cast, making up the cast system. If someone was born into one of these cast, they can’t change marry someone belonging to another one. Another cast exists, but this is called an outcast, such as the Untouchables or Dalits. It’s the lowest cast because Dalits are only allowed certain jobs such as cleaner or cobblers. Discrimination against Dalits has largely disappeared in urban areas but it still exists in rural areas where they are obliged to use specific eating places, schools, temples… There are 170 million Dalits in India today. Less than a third are literate, well over 40 percent survive on less than 2 dollars a day.

If discrimination exists among citizens, then discrimination among men and women exist too in particular because of traditions. The traditions are so much important in mentality that even if India changes traditions persist, in particular that of the settled marriage. We were able to realize it with the text “first meeting” in which the narrator reminds us an episode of her life when she was 13 and her family broke the news one day of a visit of a perspective husband coming to inspect her. This very young girl was a victim of a settled marriage while she was only 13 years old. This tradition is also a problem for India because while one girl gets married, her family has to give a dowry to the family of her husband. There will be girls go missing in India, indeed Indian people resort to sex-selective abortions because they don’t want to have girl and pay a dowry. It pulls a reduction in the number of girls in India. Because of the India tradition girls can’t choose their life and it also create an imbalance in the population of the number of boys and girls in the population.

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