KEY POINTS:
Heena may have appeared to have everything that many young Indian women aspire to.
She had her own burgeoning career, a marriage and two children. What she also had - albeit largely hidden from public view - was an alcoholic and abusive husband.
For Heena, an interior designer living in Delhi, the time to get rid of that husband was when he started to get violent with their children. "You carry on as long as you have hope ... But the day he turned on my children was the day I said 'enough'," Heena said.
With her own career developing, Heena moved into the ground floor of her parents' house and began the long and arduous task of trying to rebuild her life after 11 years of marriage. But her experience is not unique.
India is a society where great significance has always been attached to marriage, where wedding ceremonies have traditionally been elaborate, lengthy affairs and where divorce was all but unheard of. Indeed, there is no word in Hindi for divorce. (The word that is usually used, talak, is borrowed from Urdu.)
But as parts of Indian society undergo rapid social and economic transformation, increasing numbers of women are deciding to get out of unhappy or abusive marriages and start their lives afresh.
Buoyed by unprecedented financial independence - brought about as a result of India's surging economy and a new sense of empowerment that women's entry to the workplace has brought - countless thousands of younger women are making a decision that their mothers and aunts would hardly have dreamed of. "Part of it is to do with economic independence," said Heena, 42, who has two teenage children and asked that her full name not be used.
"But part of it is that my parents' generation is changing the way it thinks about what is going on. My mother would never have had the financial or emotional support that I did.
"In her generation to be divorced or thrown out would have been shameful. It would have been thought of in the same way that, sadly, Aids is thought of in India."
Official national statistics are unavailable because divorce proceedings are dealt with at a local level, however studies in some of the country's major cities have indicated a huge rise in the number of couples undertaking divorce proceedings at family courts. A study of recent trends showed that such cases are significantly rising in small towns and semi-urban areas.
"Many young couples, particularly [the] women, have been filing petitions for separation, which was unheard of in the 1970s," K K Patel, a supreme court lawyer, said recently. In Kerala, India's most literate state, the number of such filings has increased 350 per cent in the past 10 years.
Even in Punjab and Haryana, traditional agricultural states, divorce proceedings are rising. Some estimates reckon the national divorce rate to be at 6 or 7 per cent.
"Women are economically more independent. They have started working. They are also more aware of their rights," said Vandana Sharma, the president of the Women's Protection League, a Delhi-based campaign group that provides counselling and assistance.
She added: "Also families are changing. You used to have joint families with everyone living together and sharing their problems."
Though marriage has always been hugely important in India, the institution has traditionally treated women as less than equals.
Historically, dowries were paid by the family of the bride to that of the groom as part of the marriage arrangement - something that was long abused and often resulted in poor families struggling to make payments.
Such was the burden placed on the families of prospective brides, that female feticide - the selective aborting of female babies - has become commonplace. Though dowries have officially been illegal since 1961 and the use of ultrasound machines for prenatal gender testing banned since 1996, both practices remain widespread.
Likewise, the newspapers of the country's largest cities are full of stories of "dowry deaths" in which newly wed brides are either murdered or driven to commit suicide as a result of bullying and harassment for a dowry payment by the groom or his family.
Figures suggest that such incidents - or at least the reporting of such incidents to the police - is increasing. At the same time, in many parts of India there is a gender imbalance that appears to be worsening as a result of this preference for sons over daughters.
In 1981, the national ratio of children up to the age of six was measured at 962 girls for every 1000 boys. Twenty years later, the ratio was found to have fallen further, with 927 girls per 1000 boys.
With all the figures suggesting divorce is increasing, some experts caution that getting out of unhappy relationships remains a tough challenge and is an option only usually available to wealthier Indian women.
"When they talk about divorce, they are talking about the sliver of the middle class. We need to look beyond that," said Dr J Devika, a feminist scholar at the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, in Kerala state. She said that in most segments of Indian society, divorce was still stigmatised and that even when women felt they were able to file for divorce, the slow pace of the country's judicial system meant that matters of alimony and rights over children were processes drawn out over years. "A woman's social membership in society is largely based on her marital status. It is hard for a woman if she is single, even if she is upper class," she added. "You can get out of the marriage but it does not mean your problems are over."
- INDEPENDENT
