Every revision of “Where things stand”

In most of northern India, the birth of a daughter is met with quiet or sorrow. Among the Banchhadas, families celebrate it with music and feasts. The joy is not equality: the eldest daughter is expected to earn for the household through sex work.

The men in the community find little work outside daily-wage labor on construction sites. The household depends on what the daughters bring in from roadside settlements along the highways of Neemuch, Mandsaur and Ratlam.

“Sitting in her older daughter’s room, where one corner is covered with maps and math formula sheets, Savitri, a 40-year-old former sex worker, recalls when she began hating her profession. ‘It was when my girls turned five and seven,’ she says. ‘I had decided that my daughters would never live the life I had. They would live with dignity.’”

Savitri, in The Hindu

The custom is locked in place by marriage debt. Under rules enforced by the community’s jati panchayat, as recorded by India Development Review, when a young man marries, his family must pay ₹2 to ₹2.5 lakh to the bride’s family. That money is earned by the groom’s sister. If a woman wants to leave an unhappy marriage, the panchayat orders her family to pay back double, up to ₹5 lakh. Going to the police or the courts changes nothing; families have to live under the panchayat’s authority every day.

“When a man gets married, the bride’s family is paid a sum of INR 2–2.5 lakh. That amount is earned by the groom’s sister,” adds Anjali. These terms are dictated by the jati panchayat, a unit of the village panchayat that dictates the conduct of a particular caste.

Anjali, community organizer, in India Development Review

The law has made escape harder, not easier. The British declared the Banchhada a “criminal tribe” under the statute of 1871. India denotified the community in 1952 and listed it as a Scheduled Caste (as recorded on Wikipedia), but the stigma never lifted. Employers refuse to hire people known to belong to the caste; educated young women hide their identity or change their surnames to find work.

Then there is the paperwork. As documented in reporting on Shobhita Thakur’s short film Khilawadi, fathers are rarely named on official records, and government offices routinely refuse caste certificates to the children. Without a certificate, a child cannot claim a school seat, a scholarship, or a reserved job.

“The idea of women being pushed into a profession because of where they are born and the caste they belong to stayed with me for a long time,” says filmmaker Shobhita Thakur. “The fact that such exploitation is upheld in the name of tradition makes it even harder for women to escape these systems.”

Shobhita Thakur, director of Khilawadi, in The Hindu

The break is coming from women who refuse to pass the work on. Former sex workers are resisting family elders to keep their daughters in school. Local youth groups, including Akash Chauhan’s Jan Shaurya society in Neemuch, help families obtain caste certificates and support women who want to leave the trade. In Khilawadi, and in reporting from Neemuch, what happens to Banchhada daughters is no longer accepted as an unalterable tradition: it is a cycle of family debt and paperwork that mothers and daughters are fighting to end.॥