Babby* is dressed up in her bridal finery. Her cousins, friends and neighbours in the village of Dharhara, in Bhagalpur district in the northern Indian state of Bihar, are excited and there is a lot of laughter and good-natured ribbing as the young girl prepares to enter a new life as a wife.
Musicians are playing traditional wedding tunes before the woodwind shehnai changes its pitch to signal the beginning of the marriage ceremony. The bride is led out in a procession, but surprisingly not to the makeshift tent where the groom is waiting, but out into the yard where a forest of mango trees bloom.
There, she approaches a huge mango tree and proceeds to tie a sacred red thread around its trunk. The music reaches a crescendo as she completes the ceremony. Her new husband is, in fact, the mango tree. She embraces the tree, resting her cheek gently against its rough bark.
Babby, 19, is now officially "married" to the mango tree – which has provided for her since childhood and will continue to provide for her and her future daughters.
Ceremony over, she returns home. A few minutes later she will leave for another venue close to her home where she will marry the man who will be her real husband.
Although this might seem strange to many, she is only following an ancient village tradition, which includes accepting a mango tree as her guardian.
Parents plant ten mango saplings at the birth of every baby girl. The idea is that by the time she grows up, the revenue from the fruits of the tree will help secure her dowry and expenses for the wedding.
“Marrying a tree is a ritual villagers of Dharhara have to hold prior to the wedding,” says Kunal Sharma, who has made a documentary called Mango Girls about the story of Dharhara, where mango trees have changed the fate of its female population.
“The bride has to first ‘marry’ a mango tree, before the actual nuptials. At first, like others, we too thought it was just a lot of mumbo jumbo. But as we listened to their stories and unearthed the traditions behind this ritual, we realised it’s profoundly metaphoric. It speaks volumes about such a simple ritual – of the relationship between the girl and the tree, that the tree is actually the girl’s guardian.”
Money talks
Weddings of daughters can be nightmares for Indian fathers. The reason is the huge dowries demanded by prospective bridegrooms – anything from Rs1 million (around Dh60,730) to houses, gold ornaments or cars. That’s a reason little girls are looked upon as a burden in most parts of India.
A UN report last year showed that India is the most dangerous place in the world to be born a girl. From 2000 to 2010, there were 100 deaths among girls aged one to five for every 56 among boys.
There has also been a decline in the number of baby girls being born in India. In 1961 for every 1,000 boys under the age of seven, there were 976 girls. Today the figure has dropped to 914 girls per 1,000 boys. India’s ratio of young girls to boys is one of the lowest in the world after China. Social activists say the decline is largely due to the increased availability of gender screening during pregnancy.
There are a number of reasons large parts of India continue to nurture a culture of hatred towards its daughters, born and unborn. While sons ensure the continuation of the family name – something traditional families strive for – daughters are seen as guests within their own family, who will go away to join their husband’s family once they marry.
Also, the continuing practice of dowry feeds the perception that sons are profitable since they bring income into the family through marriage, while daughters are a financial burden. Consequently, an estimated 500,000 female fetuses are aborted every year in India, according to The Lancet journal.
Women under threat
In 2011 the Indian National Crimes Record Bureau declared that the police had received almost 100,000 cases of cruelty to women by their husband or relatives, and more often than not these cases were related to them carrying female fetuses.
A UN report says approximately 200 million girls in the world are currently "missing".
India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record, with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are said to be aborted, killed or abandoned at birth.
Dowry death is a regular occurrence in India and is on the rise. In 2000 there were 6,995 cases, according to the same UN report, whereas ten years later 8,391 cases were reported.
This bleak picture forms the premise of director Kunal and producer Robert Carr’s soon-to-be-released Mango Girls. As the film tracks the journey of fathers like Prabhu Singh in Dharhara, the idyllic village is shown to be a peaceful oasis in the otherwise turbulent state of Bihar.
When Prabhu’s second daughter Sneha’s marriage was arranged last year, he had none of the worries fathers across the country are usually plagued by.
The reason? A tradition that has been in practice in the village of Dharhara for 200 years. The mango trees provide vital funding for the lives of young girls and usually start paying off within a span of five to seven years when they start to bear fruit.
“The money collected from the sale of the fruit takes care of the girl’s wedding, education and well-being,” says Kunal.
Ten trees yield mangoes worth Rs2 lakh (approximately Dh13,300) every year – a huge amount in India – which is put into the girl’s name in a bank account.
“This practice is setting an example by saving the lives of girls, as well as creating a sustainable economy and a benefit for the ecosystem,” says Kunal.
Nobody knows how this came about, but everyone is agreed that it is of huge benefit to the village. “This great idea helps to relieve the worries for the safety and security of our newborn girls,” says Vinod Bala Singh, a former radio DJ with All India Radio and a resident of the village.
The revenue the fruits give in three years is sufficient to conduct the wedding of a girl, says Prabhu.
Nobody can remember a dowry death incident in Dharhara, where the female/male ratio is an amazing 957 for every 1,000 males compared to Bhagalpur district as a whole, where the gender ratio is 879 for every 1,000. These figures prove how female-friendly Dharhara is.
Not only is the village going green, the economy is blooming too. “Mango trees are more profitable than traditional farming, and as the money flows into the families, it also provides for the education of the girls,” says Prabhu. “In fact, after girls marry, the orchards will pass to the boy’s family, their brothers or father. In this way, planting mangoes has become the base of the whole socioeconomic structure in the village.”
Prabhu is a small-scale farmer with a meagre income, but he was not worried about the high expenses Sneha’s marriage ceremony incurred. “When it was time for Sneha’s marriage, we sold off the fruits of the trees for three years in advance and got the money to pay for my daughter’s wedding,” he says. “The trees are our fixed deposits.”
Sneha, who gave birth to a baby girl last year, did not give up the tradition even after moving to her husband’s house in Dasharathpur, a neighbouring village.
While on a visit to her home in Dharhara with her baby, she planted ten mango trees among the trees that had helped her get married. “This has been done for generations before me, I am only continuing it and I’m sure my daughter will too,” says Sneha. She also plans to plant five trees at her husband’s village.
A happy accident
The story behind the film Mango Girls is as quirky as its subjects. Kunal came across it by accident in a newspaper report while researching a film on environment degradation in the region.
The 36-year-old had been working as an assistant director in the film industry in Mumbai since he moved there from Bihar ten years ago. “It more than piqued my curiosity, it sounded incredible,” he says. “I connected with it immediately, as gender bias and ill-treatment against women for dowry touches a core in every responsible human being. More so for me, as I have seen many of my relatives and close friends affected by this practice.
“Although I am a native of Bhagalpur I had not heard of this. I felt I must make it known to more people around the world. It seemed like a light shining in the middle of the dark gender issue. I wanted to do a film on the phenomenon and contacted Robert Carr, who was equally excited on hearing the news.”
Robert first came to India in 1966 on a spiritual quest to meet the famous Indian philosopher J Krishnamurti. Since then he’d been returning at regular intervals, during breaks from his career as a producer with bands like Pink Floyd and later in the TV industry in the US. He met Kunal in 2006 and they’ve shared a teacher-student relationship since.
“We decided to make a film on the village. We just had to, given the importance of the phenomenon,” says Robert. The story they uncovered is as strange as it is fascinating.
A touching story
There are now more than 100,000 trees across Dharhara. “Planting trees has also had a positive impact on the environment, as Bihar needs this extra green cover,” says Robert.
Kunal came across many amazing stories while shooting Mango Girls, but there was one in particular that touched him. “There was a middle-aged woman who, after hearing about a girl child found abandoned at a hospital in a neighbouring village, decided to adopt her,” he says. “We were there when she, with just a few yards of land around her humble hut, planted a few mango trees on her land for her adopted child. It was really wonderful.”
This tradition has benefited the people of Dharhara in more ways than one. “Now we’ve stopped doing traditional farming of wheat and paddy,” says villager Shyam Sunder Singh. “We plant as many trees as we can – they are profitable and dependable. One medium-size mango orchard is worth around Rs2 lakh every season. They have great commercial value.”
“This is our way of meeting the challenges of dowry and female foeticide,” says Vinod. “There has not been a single incident of female foeticide or dowry death in our village.”
The villagers take great pride in showing off their orchards and their pristine reputation, although they don’t shun the dowry system completely. “We look at it this way: it is serving the most honourable cause of stopping female infanticide and dowry death, educating girls, bringing prosperity to the village and even increasing the green cover,” says Vinod.
Mango Girls is still in the final stages of being put together. “I wish to take this film to every corner of the world to show how two vital parts of our lives like women and trees who generate the future generation can be woven together
to form the most wonderful fabric of our planet,” says Kunal.
But for the villagers of Dharhara, it is a way of life. The village’s oldest resident, Shatrughan Prasad Singh, 86, has planted around 500 mango and lychee trees on his 25 acres of land. His granddaughters Nishi and Ruchi play among the trees, confident that their family will have no problem paying for their weddings.
“The world should emulate us and plant more trees,” says Prabhu. “It will not only save the girl children, it will also save our earth.”
*Name changed
