Another International Women’s Day has passed. Social media were full of posts attributing the writer’s success to women. Some said women were goddesses in human forms. The posts agreed with the adage, “There is a woman behind every successful man”, but forgot to complete it with what Mark Twain had said, “…but there are two behind every unsuccessful man.” Not one referred to the aged women abandoned in distant railway stations, red-light areas, drunken husbands beating their wives, or the steadily increasing number of old age homes. Neither did they mention that the condition of most women in the villages remained miserable after decades of independence.
The other day, I was present when my friend got a wedding proposal for his city-bred daughter. He knew the boy, and had no objection if the girl married him. The only hurdle was her insistence that her new home should have certain facilities she was used to at her home. They included items that would turn the women of bygone eras green with envy.
Her first concern was the kitchen. She wanted, among other things, devices like a cooking range, an electric oven, a refrigerator, a freezer, an electric kettle, pressure cookers, a mixer grinder, and a wet grinder. She had grown up seeing her mother preparing food, or storing them by manipulating electric switches.
I recalled the lives of my mother and sisters during my childhood. They sweated out in a kitchen with no modern gadgets. Hearths were wood-fired. Womenfolk usually split the firewood. The kitchen was smoky, especially when the firewood was not dry. Coconut would be part of most dishes, and its paste would be prepared, along with other ingredients, on a flat grinding stone.
Being farmers, the store-room for storing paddy was a prominent part of the house. Rice was extracted from paddy at home. Two or more women would stand around a mortar, pounding the paddy rhythmically with pestles. Broken rice was kept separately for preparing gruel and for using in the batter for idlis and dosas. The batter was prepared by the womenfolk the previous evening in a large grinding stone. Water for cooking and drinking was drawn physically from the well near the kitchen with a bucket tied at the end of a long rope. The only mechanical help available was the pulley over the well, through which the rope passed. We also had a few cows, and it was usually the duty of women to take care of them.
As most houses did not have bathrooms, women would take the clothes of all family members to the nearby river for washing. An average home would have about half a dozen members. It was mainly the women’s responsibility to look after the children.
Keeping the house and its immediate surroundings clean was left to the women. It was also they who lighted the sacred lamp at twilight before the image of the deity and led all members in prayer. During the mango season, it was they who prepared different types of pickles with tender mangoes and ripe ones.
Naturally, they did not have to go to gyms to remain healthy.
