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Case Studies: Inorik and Panna
The different types of labor tell a story about each diarist and the way in which they earn part of their money. Take for example female diarist Inorik, who does casual work in shops in the Kapasia market like bringing water to shops and selling vegetables.
Inorik‟s story exemplifies how social relationships can shape one‟s capabilities. When she was a child, she witnessed how her mother was burned alive because of a candle that fell on her sari during a cold night. Inorik was traumatized by this. She was then married off when she was 12 years old. Immediately after she married, her husband took another woman, which she protested about and eventually decided to leave and go back to her parents. There was never any official divorce, as in Bangladeshi Hindu law documentation isn‟t legally required for a divorce.
After her first marriage ended, Inorik was subdued to be a housemaid for her brothers without any pay. Women who go back to their families after their marriages fail can be considered to be a financial burden and thus a “bad investment”. Since dowry is essentially a patriarchal transaction of women for money, there is no way of determining whether or not an investment will be “profitable” or not. After some time, Inorik‟s family forced her to marry a wandering beggar who died 3 years after their daughter was born, making Inorik‟s situation with her family even worse. Their home is just a few tin sheets propped against the wall of one of her brothers‟ houses. Inorik occasionally begs for money in the streets when she cannot get a job at the local market stalls.
Instead of wanting her daughter to marry by love, Inorik reproduces the rule of wanting to marry her daughter through an arranged marriage. Inorik, despite of her experience, is constantly saving for her daughter‟s education because she believes this will enable her to have a better marriage. This is why she saves money every day. Inorik only has one account with microfinance institutions and it‟s with Shohoz Shonchoy. Inorik saves 5 taka daily at Shohoz Shonchoy and has no financial debt to her name. During the diaries, her daughter was living intermittently at a distant relative‟s house, as Inorik was afraid of her brothers trying to make her daughter a housemaid without pay. Being virtually excluded from her hostile family, she is therefore forced to look for aid and work in
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places outside of her family network. Ironik has no financial debt and only asked one of her neighbors for a small loan once.
Inorik found a job working for the local hijras, or transgender individuals. Hijras were recently recognized by the Bangladeshi government as the „third-gender‟. In spite of this, they are still discriminated against because of their gender and are seldom employed.
They operate in groups, going to the market stall and shouting in order to get money from the people that attend the market. It is a well-known occurrence and people are expected to pay the hijras in order for them to stop harassing the place. Inorik - an outsider herself – is trusted by both the shop owners and the hijras. She is in charge of collecting the money for the hijras. The hijras pay her about 50taka (about 1USD) for her help each day and show interest in her life and stories.
Because a lot of the women in Bangladesh that marry end up working as housewives, they seldom get to develop their skills or study a profession. When a husband dies or leaves, women sometimes become a burden for the rest of their families and are forced into begging. Women that do get to work on their businesses or develop some sort of skill have relatively more freedom than those without. But having no husband can either be a curse or a blessing. Female diarist Panna‟s story provides a contrast to Inorik‟s life.
Panna reached class 8 and had to quit school in order to start working in her father‟s land after a theft to their rice paddy happened. She was working helping her father to process paddy when she was married, at age 16, to a cousin on her mother‟s side. She gave birth to three children: a daughter who is now married, a son who she managed to send to Malaysia and a third son who is now looking to go join his brother. Panna first moved to Dhaka to where her husband was working at the time and eventually opened a restaurant.
She lived in Dhaka for about 11 years. Eventually, she moved back to Targaon (close to Kapasia) while her husband stayed in Dhaka working. Within a year of her leaving Dhaka, her husband set a home with another woman with whom he has had three children so far. Later on, he too moved back to where they had initially married with Panna and opened another restaurant there. Panna seldom sees her husband now as he only occasionally visits to see his son.
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After leaving Dhaka, Panna lived with her children in a plot of land bought by her father, where her brother now lives. When she first went back, she opened an account with the Grameen Bank and began borrowing money from various sources. She took many loans and used them for goat and cow rearing, among other things. Later on, she put together savings from husking paddy, later from raising goats and then cows, and bought the land next to her brother‟s house on which she now lives. She has a lot of social capital in the community. Being one of the first women to open an account, the Grameen Bank agreed to give her a loan of 10,000 taka and write it as “cow rearing” in the official records even though they knew that it was actually to buy land. She registered the land in her own name and then built the house on which she now lives. For the house she took a 5-year 40k Grameen Housing Loan. She says that did not have that much trouble raising and educating her children, especially after her elder son started work on a mechanized boat.
Panna is the diarist with the most savings out of all the people in the study. She financed sending her son to Malaysia by borrowing from the Grameen Bank and relatives and eventually hired an agent who arranged everything. He remits back regularly between 30,000 to 50,000 taka. He has been in Malaysia for 10 years and only came back once, when he was married to a schoolgirl who remains at Panna`s home while he is abroad.
Panna never divorced. If she had, she would have lost her children as Bangladeshi laws usually favor men. Therefore, she was in a sort of in-between position, where she did not have the agency of her husband influencing her decisions in daily life, yet she was still married. This freedom from the men‟s rule allowed her to invest in the livelihood and education of her family as she deemed best. Conversely, her situation shows how having access to financial and social resources which enhance wellbeing and agency can improve one‟s situation. Panna had a land to go back to while Inorik lives adjacently to one of her brothers‟ house. Furthermore, Panna‟s family supported her while Inorik`s did not. On the other hand, because Inorik did not have access to a close family network, she eventually found other forms of support in the hijras, who are also discriminated against and have limited social resources to their command. Both financial and social resources play a big role in determining the outcomes of people who live in poverty, especially women.
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