“The day I was born, my father tried to bury me alive,” Manju Singh tells me. “The moment he knew he’d had a daughter, he charged into the windowless room in which my mother had delivered me and started digging a hole in the mud floor. The umbilical cord had just been cut. My maternal grandmother scooped me up and fled.”
“That I lived is nothing short of a miracle,” she continues. “My mother had to fight real hard to keep me alive. Even while I was growing up, my father tried several times to kill me. He’d beat me to pulp. But somehow, I lived through it all. I was just that stubborn.” She laughs.
For generations, no girl child in Singh’s family had been allowed to live. When she was 10, her father told her that he had watched his own sister get buried alive by his father. Killing newborn female progeny was family tradition. There was a strict “sons only” policy, implemented ruthlessly. What happened in Singh’s family over generations was neither isolated instance nor aberration. Female infanticide, though now rare, was actively practiced in India for centuries. The methods varied from region to region, but all were equally macabre — feeding the baby grain husk to cut her windpipe, a morsel of rice to choke her, tobacco juice to poison her. Also strangulation, starvation, overfeeding and the fate Singh escaped — being buried alive.
“That I lived is nothing short of a miracle,” she continues. “My mother had to fight real hard to keep me alive. Even while I was growing up, my father tried several times to kill me. He’d beat me to pulp. But somehow, I lived through it all. I was just that stubborn.” She laughs.
For generations, no girl child in Singh’s family had been allowed to live. When she was 10, her father told her that he had watched his own sister get buried alive by his father. Killing newborn female progeny was family tradition. There was a strict “sons only” policy, implemented ruthlessly. What happened in Singh’s family over generations was neither isolated instance nor aberration. Female infanticide, though now rare, was actively practiced in India for centuries. The methods varied from region to region, but all were equally macabre — feeding the baby grain husk to cut her windpipe, a morsel of rice to choke her, tobacco juice to poison her. Also strangulation, starvation, overfeeding and the fate Singh escaped — being buried alive.