Educational Media Reviews Online

Leaving Home follows the hopes and dreams of Renu and her cousin Dimple, young women on the verge of adulthood, and at the same time chronicles the fifty plus years of changes in a rural Indian village located about 100 miles north of Delhi. Social scientist and narrator J. Michael Mahar first visited this village as part of an Indian government rural development program in 1954, and he has returned at periodic intervals ever since. In the intervening years enormous changes have swept into the village: paved roads, tractors, tube wells, the development of sugar cane as a cash crop. Some farmers have even become wealthy. Mahar tells us, “I saw them move from the 18th century to the 20th century before my very eyes.”

The lives of women and girls have changed to a far lesser degree. While girls now go to schools because educated males do not want illiterate girls for wives, the caste system, although disavowed by the Indian government, in fact still exists. When Renu was asked, “What do girls do with their education?” She replied, “Nothing, they stay home.” Women still spin yarn using crude wooden tools, wives don’t leave their homes unless there is a very special occasion such as a wedding, and according to the wives all husbands beat their spouses. Girls can’t go out alone or ride bikes in the village. Renu had hoped to become a teacher of Sanskrit; instead she undergoes an arranged marriage and leaves her village. Earlier Renu said, “Our dreams will never come true.” Two years later she is the mother of a girl and appears to be happily married. She says, “I’m not what I used to be.”

The same could be said for rural India, yet as long as marriages occur within a caste group, there will be a caste system. Dowries are illegal but are done anyway in rural communities. While young men are better fed, clothed and educated, the rural environment simply does not have enough jobs. For young girls the frustration is that they will not be allowed to get a job; the only way they can leave home is through marriage whereby they move to their husband’s village.

Leaving Home is an engrossing examination of a complex situation and is highly recommended for public and university library collections.