Social Problems in India in the Nineteenth century!

Social evils facing women

 The socio-cultural attributes in society have left a deep mark on women empowerment in India. Parents depend on sons for support in old age and looked  to them as potential builders of family prestige and prosperity whereas daughters are considered to destine for others. Women in India need and expect equal access to education, health, nutrition, employment and productive resources. In fact they are fighting for their rights to decide their own path for development. All women oriented social evils took place in the nineteenth century and is still continuing.With reforms taking place in the west, India was lagging behind in catching up with the rest of the world. Superstitious beliefs clouded the society forming  darkness among women in India. A heavy weight was felt even among the society causing stunted growth of women in particular.

1) Infanticide:

One biggest social problem facing India was infanticide. A girl child born was actually killed as soon as she was born!!!Killing of girl-child was not a crime during those time because she is considered a bad luck in the family because they are thought to bring in lots of other social evil-related issues.
Poor families in certain regions of the country sometimes resort to killing baby girls at birth, to avoid an unwanted burden on family resources. Sex selective abortion has also been common in the country. It's dangerous to abort the foetus after 18 weeks of pregnancy and quiet harmful for the  mother too at such a late stage. Various techniques of sex determination and sex pre-selection have been discovered during the last fifteen years, such as sonography, fetoscope, needling, chorion biopsy, and the most popular amniocentesis have increasingly become household names in India. 

2) Child marriage:

Marrying off a daughter means one less mouth to feed. A girl child is therefore sent forth to her so-called husband's house with no further say of her own likes or dislikes. A rare phenomenon it is for Indian women to be allowed to marry a man of their own choice.

3) Dowry system:

Dowry remains the major reason for discrimination and injustice towards women in India. When dowry demands are not met, it precipitates into serious consequence for the young bride. Woman are exchanged with material possession. A woman's happiness or tragedy lies in the amount of money or gold her parents can give during marriage.

4) Sati system: 

"SATI" was one notorious superstitious belief then in Indian society. A practice carried out to avoid the widowed women from becoming an object of desire or shame in the community. When widows were compelled to follow their dead husband in the cremation ground to be burnt alive along with her husband. The system of downright discrimination against women.

3) Prohibition of women's education

Women were kept away from attending schools as they were destined to only live around the house; do household chores like cooking, cleaning, washing, drawing water from the well and rearing of a child.

Thus, all these issues dominated the society and hampered the living condition of women leaving the world uninformed about women's work and occupations, values and emotional lives, and health and physical well-being. Hence there is hardly any works where one will find the contribution of women to the society. Women were fully neglected and considered less of a being in comparison to their male counterparts. 

4) Crimes against Women 

Crimes against women are of various natures. It includes, crimes involving sexual exploitation for economic gains like prostitution & trafficking, adultery, abduction, rape, wrongful confinement, and murder etc on the one hand and crimes related to women's property like dishonest misappropriation, criminal breach of trust, domestic violence, dowry extortion and outraging the modesty of women etc on the other. These crimes are not only injurious and immoral for the women but for the society as a whole. 

5) Domestic Violence

In Indian society it is widely accepted that within the family the man is the master and women is the inferior and subordinate partner and societal pressure force women to maintain this status quo. Wife beating is the most prevalent form of violence against women in the Indian society, and it is viewed as a general problem of domestic discord. According to National Crime Report Bureau, 1.5 lakh crimes against women are registered annually out of which nearly 50,000 are related to domestic violence in their homes. 

Encounter with the Missionary

My family and I are a staunch believer in the faith, and my father makes sure to keep up the tradition of the catholic church. But I have always wondered as to how all these change came into being? How has it influenced my life, my parent's and the women in India?

The earliest missionary began their evangelical work of proclaiming the good news through going village to village teaching the gospel.  Some of the earliest forms of Woman's Work for women were taken up by the wives of the early missionaries. Missionary wives had, in fact, been participants in the overseas missionary enterprise for almost as long as men.

Church History in India

A missionary from the West to the East has its successes and failures, but the success stories make it up of all its shortcomings. Missionary societies initially sent out only married couples and a few single men as missionaries, not women. It is rather hard to trace back the beginning of who and why did women from one end of the globe decided to travel on the other end to make a difference. The opinion of male-dominated missionary societies was that unmarried women should not live unprotected and alone in a foreign country and that the spiritual work of missionaries could only be undertaken by ordained men. Over time, there came to be an increase demand for women missionaries for Christian schools. This was necessary to attract and educate potential Christians and leaders and change foreign cultures that were unreceptive to the Christian message as proclaimed by male missionary preachers.

The following excerpt from one of the famous book, "Gender, Religion, and "Heathen Lands" American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s-1940s):


 "From the day of my arrival in Naynee Tal, I felt a most intense desire to speak to the people in their own language... Sometimes, when mingling with people, I would feel such a longing to speak to them that it seemed as if I would make any sacrifice if only my stammering tongue could be loosed."
                                                                                                              -Rev.J.M. THOBURN,
                                                                                                            My Missionary Apprenticeship

With almost 19.9 million Catholics in India, the Roman Catholic Church is now one of the largest church in India.