Bishakha Datta
No image available
/ 16 January 2008

Choice or force?

This might sound like a plot line from a Bollywood blockbuster, but it’s for real. Gouri Roy, the eldest of eight sisters in India’s West Bengal, was married off when she was 11. Her husband did no work. After a decade of working as a domestic in other village homes, bearing two daughters and a son, and recurring bouts of battering, she started looking for work away from home.