SPECIAL ARTICLE Economic & Political Weekly EPW JUly 26, 2008 109 Dispensable Daughters and Bachelor Sons: Sex Discrimination in North India Ravinder Kaur W hile pursuing the puzzle of the unwantedness of daughters, I was struck by certain parallels among contemporary northern jat and southern gounder peasant households. 1 Both these social groups desire a family that consists of only one son. Why has the preference for children been reduced to such a minimum in these communities? To answer this question one has to return to the question of how families consciously and unconsciously decide on the size and composition of their families. Indeed, this is the pressing question facing us as we try and understand why large parts of the country evince a strong preference for sons and have rapidly taken to new technologies which allow couples to control family size and achieve a desired family composition of mostly boys with one or no girl. This paper, instead of going into the details of the already existing rich research on the causes of son-preference, female infanticide and female foeticide, argues that by concentrating entirely on the dyad of son-daughter, in which sons are preferred while daughters are not, we are missing out on significant gains yielded by taking other cross-generation and same generation members of the family into consideration. To develop our understanding, we need to take into account the varied roles men and women perform in the agrar- ian economy. Perhaps the key to the north Indian conundrum is not that sons are wanted and daughters are not but that daughters are not wanted while daughters-in-law are absolutely essential to the family. This will help explain the current “rush” to acquire brides from far-flung parts of the country by Haryanvis who have reduced their own female population to a pitiful 861 women for every 1,000 men. The paper also argues that we are helped in solving the puzzle of long-standing female adverse sex ratios in the north and north- west by including in our analysis family strategies vis-a-vis the sons in the family. Historical and contemporary data shows that the preference for sons is not as all-encompassing and undiluted as we have been led to think. Evidence is that among large agrarian castes more than a certain number of sons was often frowned upon and the family’s treatment of sons was often severely differentiated, privileging one or two sons while others were left to a lesser fate. There is no doubt, however, that unwanted sons did not meet the fate of an early death, which unwanted daughters did. Even today, a male foetus is rarely eliminated wilfully while innumerable female foetuses have been condemned to never being born as is made transparent in the recent censuses. The paper argues that for peasants in the northern countryside, especially those for whom fragmentation was a constant fear, the solution to the optimum family was not simply female infanticide but a combination of female infanticide and non-marriage of some sons. Both these strategies helped to reduce claimants on family Daughters may not be wanted but daughters-in-law are necessary for family well-being and perpetuation. Similarly, not all sons in the family receive equal treatment and those who are left bachelors suffer a lesser fate. This paper attempts to move beyond currently available explanations of low sex ratios and daughter elimination. While supporting the hypothesis that large peasant castes in the north and north-west practised infanticide, non-marriage of men and polyandry as strategies to control family numbers in relation to available resources, this paper makes three arguments: one, that these strategies occurred together, two, that one needs to go beyond this explanation to understand why daughters were the dispensable ones and, three, that the number of sons wanted was by no means unlimited. I am extremely grateful to T N Madan and A M Shah for valuable comments on a draft of the paper. And, as usual, to Surjit S Bhalla for discussions. Ravinder Kaur (ravinder.iitd@gmail.com) is with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.