English

Abstract

This qualitative study focuses on the challenges faced by the upper-caste Brahmin women in rural areas of the district of Katihar, Bihar, India by focusing on their education, cultural values, and choosing the means of livelihood in the milieu of newly transformed rural areas in Bihar. A drastically decreasing educational quality in terms of skill and morality combined with the message of education translated as knowing the rights to maintain equity and equality have excluded the upper-caste women from the benefits of government policies. There is a paucity of research that could reflect the suppressed voice of insecurity and psychological dependency of these women, who like other communities are an integral part of the harmonious rural transformation in India. Based on Grounded Theory, this study was conducted on 20 upper-caste women (age 24 to 44) through semi-structured interviews. The respondents of this research reside at three different villages: namely Manihari, Nepra and Pokharia of Katihar. The interviews ranged from 39 to 140 minutes with an average duration of 56 minutes and the study was conducted over 29 days. The analysis of the qualitative data reveals the agents of hindrances that keep this group of rural India economically handicapped and thus as a dependent but “commodity of honor” among their relatives or as a liberated but a “commodity of sex” for the others. The target of this study is Brahmin women who reside in the remote rural area of Katihar District, Bihar in India. Katihar District consists of 16 blocks and each block has four to eight village panchayats 1 . All the villages are in the proximity to each other within the radius of 3 kilometers to 20 kilometers. Due to the sensitive identity of the target group of this research, I used the snowball sampling to reach these Brahmin women. I chose three villages of different caste-based structures for this study, named Pokharia, Nepra and Manihari, falling between the varied ranges of 10 to 20 kilometers from the district headquarter. In India people of the same caste live together, and therefore practically each village has its caste-based identity. It should also be noted that due to this village structure the government development policies and initiatives targeted to improve the conditions of lowercaste people have also brought a region-based disparity in the rural areas. Pokharia is a small Brahmin neighborhood comprising of 18 Brahmin families but they stay very close to Other Backward-Caste (OBC) communities too. Nepra has 14 Brahmin