The nurturing and education of girl children in India has been a problematic domain. The circumstances that weave the context for the upbringing of female children have not merely been economic. Contours of the cultural context do play a role in this process that need to be understood. During a session of Vimarsh in Sri Aurobindo Center of Arts and Communication on 30th October,09 Prof Krishna Kumar dealt some of the aspects of this issue with a different tool of meditative deliberation.
Prof Kumar invokes memory of the punch line of an of-repeated social advertisement about 'right' age of marriage for the girls. This state-supported advertisement suggests appropriate age of girl's marriage and says that till that time 'the body of a girl is not fit for marriage'. Prof Kumar invited the audience to meditate and reflect on the meanings implicit in the message. A follow up session of dialogue helped deconstructing the message and opened up many un-attended inherent symbols and interpretations.
The session of dialogue discovered that the words used in the advertisement are heavily loaded and figured out how state institutions function within a cultural context. Through the selection and representation of images regarding role of girls in the society in a particular fashion, the state institutions and civil society knit a specific cultural context for the upbringing and education of the girl children. This process works the other way round too. This advertisement can be studied to explore how a mass medium uses various concepts as 'body of a girl' or 'fitness' in the given case to convey some hidden cultural messages.
Through this study partners of this dialogue discovered that many a times 'so-called' modern and secular institutions play a role of reducing a human being into an object. The process of state publicity regarding girl education and marriage demonstrates how the girl children can be dehumanized. Prof Kumar suggested to explore gray areas both in traditions and modernity and to avoid the make-believes that one or the other is perfect.
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