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| ©Stephanie Sinclair |
This year in our FLC meetings we are also exploring the
larger world around us and learning, reading and writing about needs of other
girls around the word.
In a 3-week session we studied:
Too Young to Wed - The secret world of child brides
By Cynthia Gorney & Photograph by Stephanie Sinclair
(please note the copyright
for essay & photography belongs to Cynthia Gorney and Stephanie Sinclair)
Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to
the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted
late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in
this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for
their sacred vows. They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village
women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy
water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha
and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening. The
third, their niece Rajani, was 5. She wore a pink T-shirt with a butterfly
design on the shoulder. A grown-up helped her pull it off to bathe.
The grooms were en route from their own village, many
miles away. No one could afford an elephant or the lavishly saddled horses that
would have been ceremonially correct for the grooms' entrance to the wedding,
so they were coming by car and were expected to arrive high-spirited and drunk.
The only local person to have met the grooms was the father of the two oldest
girls, a slender gray-haired farmer with a straight back and a drooping
mustache. This farmer, whom I will call Mr. M, was both proud and wary as he
surveyed guests funneling up the rocky path toward the bright silks draped over
poles for shade; he knew that if a nonbribable police officer found out what
was under way, the wedding might be interrupted mid-ceremony, bringing criminal
arrests and lingering shame to his family….
…The people who work full-time trying to prevent child
marriage, and to improve women's lives in societies of rigid tradition, are the
first to smack down the impertinent notion that anything about this endeavor is
simple. Forced early marriage thrives to this day in many regions of the
world—arranged by parents for their own children, often in defiance of national
laws, and understood by whole communities as an appropriate way for a young
woman to grow up when the alternatives, especially if they carry a risk of her
losing her virginity to someone besides her husband, are unacceptable…
To read the full essay and see more photography please go
to: