Gender Politics in India

Edward Luce marvels on the differences between North India (Orissa) and South India (Cuddalre, Tamil Nadu).

Cuddalore ... is about a hundred miles south of Chennai. The district had suffered several hundred deaths from tsunami, and tens of thousands of people had been made homeless. Within a year of the disaster, the government had rehabilitated almost all of Cuddalore's displaced people in pukka accomodation. By contrast, in Orissa there were still people living in camps in 2006, people who had been made homeless seven years earlier by the cyclone. Mosts of the victims I met in Cuddalore were lower caste. But they were fully aware of their rights. "In Orissa the women were too afraid to come out of their huts and talk to me," said Joseph Williams, a Tamil doctor who had asissted in both disasters. "In Tamil Nadu it is difficult to get the women to stop talking."

--Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India 139 (2007)