Z is for Zenana

India has never been a woman's world. Muslims have routinely locked them away, Buddhists regarded them as one of the snares which bind us again to our fleshy, suffering body, and Hindus seem to have ignored them completely. Hindu goddesses tend to be either beautiful pieces of furniture like Lakshmi, or cruel vamps like Kali. The female pantheon comes across like nothing so much as a bunch of fractious film stars. It is probably no coincidence that it is on the screen - large and small - that Indian women have made their greatest impact.

Wherever you go in India there are cinema hoardings, crude and garish posters which almost invariably depict buxom women in slight undress, either looking helpless - like Lakshmi - or wielding guns and whips as Kali might. And where the women, who are young and lissom, tend to look fraught and hysterical, the heroes - who are at least forty-five and probably wearing a corset - always look calm and suave.

One advantage female film-stars have is that they tend to sing more songs than the men. For this reason they are necessarily indispensable. Often it is the music which makes, indeed, justifies a film, and the power and fame of the unseen singers - who are rarely if ever the screen actresses - is gratifyingly great.

The singing is just as popular on the small screen. But at least on television women have managed to make a more positive contribution. Much of the news, together with many of the programme links, is presented by women. Partly this is due to television's obsessive desire to offer visually attractive images; but it is also an indication of the medium's greater liberalism. The women who appear are clearly very westernised, and speak the perfect English of the Indian intelligentsia.

For women of the lower classes and castes, the prospects are not so good. In the country and smaller towns, a woman's destiny is simply to become married and produce children, and to work. Passing them in the road it is hard to tell whether they are fourteen or forty-four. It is very noticeable that you never see young courting couples; any couple is married: courting as the west knows it seems either non-existent or coyly invisible. Yet being married is a totally public activity, as neutral as any other business. Judging by the advertisements in the daily papers for brides and bridegrooms, which detail the required characteristics of body and background, this is almost what it is.

Indian women seem good for only one thing: dying. The greatest building in India is a monument to a dead wife. While the Rajput warriors donned their saffron wedding robes of martyrdom and rode out of doomed fortresses like Chittorgarh to certain but glorious death, the women inside built huge funeral pyres and committed the mass suicide known as jauhar. And even Mrs Gandhi, perhaps the dominant formative influence on modern India, may one day be best remembered for her murder at the hands of Sikh extremists. Whether in life or through death, Indian women are conspicuous by their absence. For them, Indian history is the history of the zenana, the area in a Muslim household where they were hidden from the world.

A Partial India A to Z

P is for Poverty

For the visitor, India offers a rich spectacle. The land is a seamless backdrop for the entrances and exits of massive Moghul forts, holy mosques, and towns which hover between the twentieth and the twelfth century. Around these impassive architectural displays, the Indian people swarm like a distracting cloud. If they are seen at all, it is only when they stumble into the picturesque: the wizened old man guarding shoes at a mosque; the bent forms of the women gleaning in the fields, swathed in coloured saris; naked nut-brown children playing by the river; the Sikh hotel doorman with his turban, moustache and thin-lipped salute. There are beggars and hawkers too, but they seem just another component of the bustling tourist scene. The abiding poverty of India, which lies behind all these images, too often remains invisible.

That poverty lives in the spaces between the sights on the tourists agenda. The planes fly above it, the air-con coaches ride round it. Only the riders of trains and rickshaws discover it.

Stations act as magnets to poverty. Enter them, and you find rows and rows of bodies lying on the ground, quite still, as if lined up to an attractive magnetic pole. But it is only the poor, camping out on the platforms. Elsewhere, the ground is littered with people hunkered down beside their few belongings. Like the porters balancing impossibly huge and precarious loads on their heads, everyone seems undernourished, their skin leathery.

But these are simply the relatively poor. Some may even be waiting for trains. To see real poverty you must take a rickshaw. In the tourist area of Delhi from Connaught Place, down Janpath to India Gate, there are only taxis and moped rickshaws. Further north, as New Delhi gives way to Old, the bicycle rickshaws begin to appear. In outlying cities and towns they are the norm. For a journey among India's real poor, a rickshaw is the only proper vehicle,

You begin to learn something of poverty and its impotence even as you climb into the bicycle rickshaw. In front of you is a tiny stick-man, his blue-black hair shining, his shirt greasy and frayed. He moves his almost muscleless legs with difficulty, rising high in the pedals. Throughout the journey you stare at his thin body as it sways with exertion you have bought. He will pedal all day, waiting patiently wherever you stop, not eating until you have done; for this he may be paid a couple of pounds. The poverty of India begins to rise in you from the pit of your stomach.

And yet the rickshaw driver is not poor. To find poverty you must travel further into Old Delhi. There the streets are lined with poor people; this is where they live. Around them are their few possessions: a pot, a blanket. They eat, sleep and die on this street. They wash at the public standpipes, their only privacy a cloth held up around them. And yet they seem strangely oblivious of the outside world, It is as if they had reached an accommodation with their poverty, having worn it so long. They are not abject or bitter. And this is disturbing. Angry poverty in the face of wealth would be reasonable, and could be coped with, This lack of reproach reproaches the visitor with the worst meanness of all: of spirit.

A Partial India A to Z