PURULIA, India | Fourteen-year-old Rekha Kalindi, who lives in an eastern India village roiled by starvation and underdevelopment, has never watched India’s screen divas portray empowered women in lavish Bollywood movies.
Living in a mud hut on one meal a day, Rekha this year made a long journey by train from this obscure hamlet in West Bengal to India’s prosperous capital, New Delhi — where she was feted by the country’s first female president, Pratibha Patil.
The act that brought her fame: Rekha said “no.”
The girl said “no” to her parents when they arranged her marriage at age 13 last year, an audacity that sent ripples throughout a region where girls had never got up courage to defy their elders.
“My sister Jyotsna, now 16, got married at 12 and has already had four dead babies. She now lives with her second husband because the first one left her. Still, my parents wanted me to also get married, but I said no, I want to study. They finally agreed,” Rekha said.
She became an icon overnight in the region as the story of her defiance spread.
In India’s rural areas, steeped in tradition and seared by poverty, girls are revolting against early, arranged marriages with support from some government officials and international aid groups such as UNICEF, which is setting up schools for child laborers to make them aware of their rights to break a rife but outlawed practice.
Forty percent of the world’s child marriages occur in India, and 78,000 young Indian women die in childbirth and from pregnancy complications each year, according to UNICEF.
In other villages in the same Purulia district, teenage girls like Ahalya Kumar have said no, emboldened by what Rekha did.
“I will not marry before I turn 19. I want to be educated first and then take my own decision. I want to live a healthy life,” said Ahalya, who has three siblings.
The family makes a living by hand-rolling bidis — cheap cigarettes — and survives on a serving of starched rice once each day. Ahalya said her family married off her elder sister, who was forced to bear children before she turned 18, the legal age for marriage in India.
While poverty primarily drives parents to marry off daughters early in Purulia, a social norm steeped in tradition lies behind many child marriages in Rajasthan.
One of India’s most conservative states in the north, Rajasthan has often been in news for female feticide and once in 1987 for an incident of sati, a practice prevalent until the early 19th century in which a “virtuous” Hindu widow burns herself alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.
In villages where women still go out in veils, girls like Laxmi and Champa are daring to delay their marriages.
Laxmi, 19, is from Jodinda Bhojpur village in Phagi, about 22 miles from the capital of Rajasthan, which is a magnet of foreign tourists for its ornate places of erstwhile kings. She has chosen to pursue her studies and resist early marriage.
Health Ministry data show that 68 percent of girls in Rajasthan marry before reaching age 18.
According to Bharat, secretary of the nongovernmental organization Vishakha Group for Women’s Education and Research, which is working in 45 villages in Phagi, in every village there are now 10 to 15 girls who have stood up against early marriage. “Not all of them succeeded. But some have indeed been able to convince their parents.”
But saying “no” is not easy.
In Purulia, girls have had to fight the twin forces of poverty and parental pressure before their wishes prevailed.
Prosenjit Kundu, a government official working in the villages to support the girls in Purulia, said poverty combines with tradition to nourish the evil of child marriage.
“Rekha’s father, Jagdish Kalindi, stopped her food, water and soap for some days. But she stood firm and he finally came around,” he said.
Mr. Kundu said there have been no child marriages in the village since Rekha’s revolt.
The change among the girls like Rekha started taking root in 2006, when her village got a National Child Labor Project school to provide basic education to former child laborers.
“There they were educated about the problems of child marriage and gender equality, and the enlightenment acted as a trigger,” said Mr. Kundu.
Parents know about the illegality of such marriages, but in West Bengal, considered an intellectually progressive state, only two cases were registered in 2005 under the Child Marriage Restraint Act.
The figure was slightly higher, at eight, in 2006.
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