Elisabeth Bumiller must be one of the bravest journalists around, and not just because she’ll calmly curl up for the night with a water buffalo snorting near her bed. A Washington Post writer who accompanied her husband, Steven Weisman, to India when he became a correspondent there for The New York Times, Bumiller set herself a daunting assignment: a portrait of Indian women–all 400 million of them. Few subjects offer so many pitfalls for Westerners, who are likely to be charged with either sentimentality or cultural imperialism depending on their conclusions. But Bumiller, who cries-crossed the country for three and a half years seeking out women of all social strata, is a persistent reporter with no interest in stereotypes or glib analysis. Reflective and unpretentious, she zeroes in on women and ends up illuminating a whole world.
“May you be the mother of a hundred sons” is meant as a blessing in India, but it’s also a warning. The religious and social pressures to produce sons can be fierce; moreover, the birth of a daughter can pose huge financial problems to a family that may have to go into debt for her dowry. Many girls receive less education, less medical care, even less to eat than their brothers. Bumiller took a special interest in the lives of village women like Phula, who was married at 7 and is now in her early 40s. Daily she works in the fields, tends the cows, makes cow-dung cakes for fuel, hauls water and of course cooks and cleans. Although in Bumiller’s view Phula works harder than her husband, she has no complaints beyond a statement of fact: “Sometimes he beats me if I make a mistake.”
Bumiller found extraordinary strength and resilience among the women she met; and she found signs of progress, too, including a feminist movement active in such projects as rural women’s cooperatives. Even Phula came up with an ambitious leap of the imagination that seems astonishing in context. Bumiller regularly asked village women what they would do if they could have any job in the world. Most chose teaching, for they had all seen women teachers. But Phula, who has never attended a political meeting in her life, said she would like to be her village’s pradhan, or chief-a job no woman has ever held.
