POLICE in Haldwani, a small town where the Gangetic Plain bumps against the Himalayas, shrugged when Kamini Sen lodged charges against her husband last October. What could be more ordinary than wife-beating and dowry extortion? The case got hotter when the 29-year-old, who holds masters degrees in both English and psychology, added that her spouse had also secretly married a younger woman. But only the final twist, revealed later when police tracked and caught Krishna “Sweety” Sen, shocked India. The two-timing swindler, said to like cursing, smoking and motorbikes, confessed that he was not a man but a woman.
在恒河平原和喜马拉雅山接壤地带的印度小镇哈尔德瓦尼（Haldwani），卡米尼·森（Kamini Sen）在去年10月起诉丈夫，镇上的警察却对此不屑一顾。还有什么比妻子受到家暴和丈夫敲诈嫁妆再平常不过的呢？29岁卡米尼·森同时拥有英语和心理学硕士学位。卡米尼·森指出，她的丈夫还同时跟另一个年轻女人秘密结婚。随之，这个离婚案子受到越来越多人的关注。但是在警方跟踪并逮捕克里希纳·森（Krishna Sen）之后，那个满嘴脏话、爱抽烟、喜欢摩托车，脚踩两只船的骗子自称“甜心”，坦承自己不是个男人，而是个女人。这样的结局反转着实让全印度大跌眼镜。
Growing numbers of Indian women are, like Ms Sen, breaking traditional gender barriers. India’s defence and foreign ministers are women. A woman recently stepped down as head of its biggest bank. There have been a female president and prime minister, as well as female chief ministers in various states. Women are becoming better educated, better paid and healthier than they were. Literacy among 21-year-old women leapt, for example, from 60% in 1990 to 85% in 2011.
越来越多像卡米尼·森的印度女性正在不断打破印度传统的性别障碍。印度的现任国防部长和外交部长都是女性。最近刚刚下台的印度最大的银行行长也是一位女性。印度历史上有过一位女性总统和一位女性总理，而在多个邦里也有过女性首席部长。与过去相比，印度女性在接受更好的教育，获得更高的工资，身体也更健康。例如，印度21岁女性识字率从1990年的60%跃升至2011年的85%。
Yet traditional practices still hold Indian women back. The problem is not just specific customs, such as the payment of dowries or living with in-laws. Deepa Narayan, a development consultant, argues in a new book titled “Chup”—meaning “be quiet” in Hindi—that women across social classes are still conditioned from early childhood to be subservient.
然而，印度一些惯常做法仍在阻碍女性的发展。这个问题不只在于某些特定的习俗，比如说印度女性在出嫁时须有嫁妆，或是与公婆住在一起。个人发展咨询师迪帕·纳拉扬（Deepa Narayan）新书《保持沉默》（Chup）中讲到，印度女性不管来自于哪个社会阶层，依旧从小开始都被教导要学会顺从。
Indian women suffer handicaps at every stage of life, starting with birth. Although determining the sex of a fetus has been banned since 1994, and in spite of an intensified campaign to stress the value of daughters under the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, parents wanting sons have continued to find ways to abort girls. The skewed sex ratio for newborns has not improved since Amartya Sen, an economist, calculated 28 years ago that India had some 40m “missing women.” In recent years it has got worse (see chart 1). In some districts the sex ratio at birth has fallen below 800 girls for every 1,000 boys. Disturbingly, too, widening gaps occur in some of India’s richer regions, suggesting that rising income enables more parents to act on their prejudices.
从一出生开始，印度女性在人生每个发展阶段都面临障碍。尽管从1994年开始，印度禁止鉴定胎儿性别，而印度现任总理莫迪上台后，抓紧推动宣传生女儿有价值的活动，但是，印度父母们仍千方百计想要打掉女胎。经济学家阿马蒂亚·森（Amartya Sen）在28年前就做出过计算，认为印度有4000万女性“不见踪影”，28年后，印度严重失衡的新生儿男女比例一直没有得到改善。近些年来，情况变得更加糟糕（见图一）。在印度的一些地区，新生儿男女比例高于100:80。相同的情况也同样困扰着印度一些较富裕地区，这表明收入的增加反而让更多的父母将这种性别歧视的观念付诸行动。
Girl glower
印度女性之光更加黯淡
The Indian government’s authoritative annual Economic Survey posits another alarming figure: the country may have an additional 21m “unwanted”—and often neglected—female children. This number was reached using research conducted by two economists, Seema Jayachandran of Northwestern University and Rohini Pande of Harvard, who examined the order of births. They found that the last child born to Indian families is far more likely to be male, since sex preference prompts parents to keep trying until they have a boy, and then to stop. In Indian states with a strong preference for boys, the Economic Survey calculates that, when a firstborn child is the last a couple has, the likelihood that it is male stands at nearly 2 to 1. The figure for “unwanted” girls was calculated using the gap between normal sex ratios at birth and the actual sex ratio for families that had more than the average number of children—very likely because they kept trying to have a boy.
印度政府每年权威发布的《经济调查》揭示了另一个令人震惊的数据：印度每年还有2100万女婴“不是父母想要的”，大部分没有得到很好的看护。这一数据是运用西北大学的塞玛·贾雅彻德伦（Seema Jayachandran）和哈佛大学的罗希尼·潘德（Rohini Pande）两位经济学家的研究方法得出的。他们审核了出生顺序，发现印度家庭最小的孩子更有可能是个男孩，原因是对性别的偏好促使父母不断想要男孩，直到怀上男孩才停止。《经济调查》计算得出结论：在那些强烈偏好男孩的邦，如果一对夫妻只生了一个小孩，那么这个小孩是男孩的可能性与是女孩的可能性比例接近2:1。“不是父母想要的”女孩数量是通过计算新生儿性别比例和那些所生子女数量超出平均水平的家庭中实际性别比例之间的差距得出的，而这种家庭之所以有这么多子女，很有可能是因为夫妻一直尝试生个男孩。
Being “unwanted” can be measured in other ways, too. Recent reports from India’s 700 SNCUs (Sick Newborn Care Units), which were set up in a successful government effort to bring down infant mortality, show that parents are far more likely to bring in boys for treatment. Nationwide, boys accounted for 59% of patients in 2017, but in the most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, no less than 63% of the cases treated in SNCUs were boys. Ms Jayachandran has shown in other research that Indian girls are more likely than boys to be shorter than global norms. She posits numerous reasons for this, one being that mothers wanting a boy may prematurely stop breastfeeding girls.
通过其他方法也能计算出“不是父母想要的”女孩的数量。最近，印度700个患病新生儿护理中心（SNCU）发布的一份报告表明，父母更有可能带患病的男婴接受治疗。患病新生儿护理中心是印度政府为降低新生儿死亡率而建的，确实显著地降低了印度新生儿死亡率。2017年，在印度全国范围内，这些护理中心接诊的新生儿病患中，男婴占到了59%。但在人口最多的北方邦，患病新生儿护理中心接诊的病例中，患者有不低于63%的是男婴。塞玛·贾雅彻德伦在另一个研究中发现，印度女孩的身高要比印度男孩的身高更有可能低于全球标准。对此，塞玛·贾雅彻德伦给出了多个解释，其中一个是那些想要生男孩的母亲可能会在女孩断奶之前提早中断对女孩的哺乳。
Indian officials are rightly proud of boosting female literacy and school attendance. Gender gaps do remain in education, though. Notably, girls are far more likely to drop out of secondary school than boys (see chart 2). Perhaps more tellingly, an annual survey of education results for 14- to 18-year-olds, published in January, found differences in educational attainment. Whereas 82% of boys could count money and 66% could tell time in a simple test, the corresponding proportions for girls were 70% and 53%.
印度政府确实应为提高女性的识字率和入学率而欢欣鼓舞。但印度的教育中确实仍存在性别差距。女孩明显地比男孩更容易从中学辍学（见图二）。印度今年1月份发布的一份关于教育成效的年度调查结果可能更有说服力。这份调查结果显示，在一个简单的测试中，14至18岁的印度青少年里，有82%的男孩会数钱，66%的男孩能说时间，然而女孩的测试结果分别是70%和53%。
Although impressive numbers of Indian women now go on to higher studies, with ever more venturing into fields that were long male preserves such as engineering, their efforts may not bring similar rewards. One survey of college students across northern India found that whereas a sadly low 26% of men said that they themselves, and not their parents or others, chose their careers, the proportion for women was lower still, at 11%. And while women with college degrees are more likely to work than those with just high-school certificates, the number of them with jobs is still under 30%. In fact, the proportion of women in the workforce has been steadily dropping for more than a decade, reflecting both a steep decline in farm jobs and a preference among newly urban families to show that their womenfolk do not need to work (see chart 3).
尽管接受高等教育的印度女性的数量显著上升，但是要进入长期以来由男性主导的领域（如工程学），她们所做的努力可能不会得到相似的回报。一项对印度北部在校大学生的调查发现，在自主择业男大学生比例只有令人沮丧的26%，但在女大学生中的比例更低，只有11%。尽管拥有大学学历的女性比只有高中文凭的女性更有可能会参加工作，但是，在印度，前者参加工作的比例低于30%。实际上，在过去的十几年里，印度工作的女性比率在一直不断下降，这表明农场活数量的减少以及新兴城市的家庭对女主人不需要去工作的选择（见图三）。
Of all the hurdles Indian women still face, sex and marriage may be the highest. The vast majority of marriages are still arranged by families, and some 94% of them among Hindus are within the same caste. Women are expected, by and large, to become part of the husband’s family, and to bring along a sweetener. In-laws can press their demands in unsubtle ways. Aside from an annual average of around 8,000 “dowry deaths”—wives killed because they have not coughed up enough money—recent newspaper reports tell of such persuasive methods as beating with hockey sticks, stealing a kidney and blackmailing with sex tapes. More broadly, violence against women in various forms appears to be on the increase (see chart 4), although this may chiefly be the result of an increased tendency to report such crimes.
在印度女性所面对的所有障碍中，性和婚姻可能是最大的障碍。印度绝大部分的婚姻还是由父母一手包办，而在信奉印度教的家庭中，94%的婚姻双方是属于同一种姓。一般来说，女性都要成为丈夫家庭的一员，要带上丰厚的嫁妆。男方父母可以毫不避讳地反复强调他们的要求。印度每年平均大约有8000起“嫁妆惨案”，即妻子因为没有给够钱而遭*害。最近有相关的新闻报道揭露了其中令人信服的手段，例如用板球球板殴打妻子，偷走肾脏，用色情录影带进行敲诈勒索。总的来说，女性受到的不同形式的暴力似乎有上升的趋势（见图四），尽管这可能主要是因为对此类犯罪的报道有增多的趋势。
If so, the change is desperately needed. A research paper from 2014 that compared police records of sexual violence with survey results estimated that less than 6% of such crimes outside the home, and less than 1% of sexual assaults by husbands, are officially reported. Out of some 340,000 crimes against women reported in 2016, 110,000 were cases of cruelty by a husband or his relatives. And family health surveys reveal that 52% of women believe that husbands are entitled to beat their wives.
如果确实如此，不能不做出改变了。2014年的一项研究将印度警方对性暴力的犯罪记录和调查结果进行比较后，估计高于94%的此类犯罪是发生在家庭内的，并且由丈夫实施的性侵犯中只有不到1%向警方报了案。2016年，被报警的34万起针对女性的犯罪中，11万起犯罪是丈夫或者丈夫的亲戚实施的。家庭健康调查显示，52%的印度女性相信丈夫有权殴打妻子。
Part of the trouble lies with the caste system. The compartmentalisation of society into narrow layers negates what should be a supply-and-demand empowerment of women due to their shrinking proportion. In essence, women’s families still compete to ensnare the best husbands within a relatively limited pool. The conservative Hinduism of the northern Hindi-speaking heartland does not help, either. In parts of the south, Hindus have a long tradition of matriarchy. By the same token, Muslim and Christian minorities have long given women rights to inheritance and property. But Hindu inheritance law was only substantially reformed in 2005, and in the patriarchal north it is still considered proper for sons alone to hold property and perform religious rites. The north also happens to be the heartland of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which can make it awkward for the government to campaign too forcefully for women’s rights.
一个麻烦在于种姓制度。尽管印度女性的比率不断下降，由于印度社会被划分成了若干个种姓阶层，这种划分使印度女性丧失了在婚姻供给和需求关系中本应有的主导权。从本质上来说，女方家庭仍旧为在有限的选择中抢到最好的女婿而竞争不断。在主要说印度语的北方地区，保守印度教家庭对于改变女性地位也不会起到什么作用。印度南部一些地区长期以来是母系社会。同样地，穆斯林和基督教少数民族从很早开始就给女性继承遗产权利。但印度教的继承法直到2005年才大幅改革。在父权社会的印度北方地区，仍认为只有儿子才有权继承财产，主持宗教仪式。印度北方地区也恰巧是执政党印度人民党的核心地区，因此，执政党要想在这个地区大力提升女性权利，十分棘手。
In important respects, however, not just numbers but attitudes are definitely changing. Within Indian homes, women are winning more respect: between national health surveys in 2006 and 2016, a striking number reported stronger participation in family decision-making. Ever more Indian women are also voting. In the national election of 1991, 10% more men than women voted. At the most recent election, in 2014, this gap was down to 1.5%.
尽管如此，在一些重要方面，出现决定性好转的不仅仅是数字，还有态度。女性在印度家庭里赢得更多尊重：2006年到2016年间的印度全国健康调查显示，女性参与到家庭决策的数量在这10年间显著上升。越来越多的女性参与投票。在1991年的印度全国大选中，男性投票数比女性投票数高出10%。而在最近的2014年大选中，男性投票数仅比女性投票数高出1.5%。
Canny politicians such as Mr Modi have not failed to notice, and increasingly tailor their policies accordingly. His project to equip households with cooking gas to replace solid fuel not only saves thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost to smoke inhalation, it also directly targets women voters. Mr Modi has also courted Muslim women by attacking “triple talaq”, an arcane tradition long since abandoned in most Muslim-majority countries, which permits a man to divorce simply by saying the word three times.
像莫迪这种精明谨慎的官员都注意到这一现象，相对应地调整政策。莫迪在推行的一个计划中给每个印度家庭都安装上煤气灶，而不是使用固体燃料。这一计划挽救了成千上万条生命，不用再因为吸入烟雾颗粒而丧命。这一计划还直接瞄准了女性选民。莫迪还通过抨击“三声塔拉克”（“triple talaq”）来获得穆斯林女性选民的青睐。“三声塔拉克”指按伊斯兰教教规，丈夫只要连说三遍“塔拉克”，就可以休掉妻子。这一令人费解的传统在大多数穆斯林占主体的国家早已废止。
Female voters have helped put issues such as public safety, underage marriage, alcohol abuse and sanitation at the centre of national politics. “We might be on the cusp of a real transition,” says Yamini Aiyar of the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi. “From the way people dress—rural women have dropped their dupattas [gauzy scarves] and now wear kurtas [long shirts] over jeans—to changing marriage expectations, to forging a woman-centred political narrative, the pace is speeding up.” The two-timing Ms Sen should have realised that men can’t get away with what they used to.
女性选民同时推动了一些问题成为国家政治的焦点议题，例如公共安全、童婚、酗酒、卫生等问题。“我们可能处于一个真正的转折点，”德里的智库政策研究中心（the Centre for Policy Research）的研究员雅米妮·艾亚尔（Yamini Aiyar）说道。“从人们的着装（乡村的女性抛弃了薄纱长围巾，穿上了宽松的库尔塔衫和牛仔裤）到人们改变对婚姻的期待，再到形成以女性为中心的政治叙事，改变在不断加速。”像克里希纳·森这样脚踩两只船的男人应该意识到，再也无法像过去那样，做了坏事还能逃脱惩罚。
编译：LixiuhuiBFSU
编辑：翻吧君
