Firstly, let us be clear that the two stories are not connected, except that in both cases, family members felt the need to approach courts for redressal in matters of reproduction. So some years ago, Raphael Samuel was in the news for wanting to sue his parents – for giving birth to him without his consent. To me, this made a weird kind of sense though I am the adoring mother of two children myself. And now there is a couple suing their son for not producing and giving them grandkids.
Sanjeev and Sadhana Prasad from Uttarakhand want a grandchild. They are irked that their son has been married for 6 years without the couple producing any offspring. It is their submission that they spend a lot of money on the upbringing, education, professional training, wedding and honeymoon of their son and daughter in law. They used up all of their savings on their son and as such, they are entitled to compensation for their outlay they say.
The suit before the court claims that their son and daughter in law’s refusal to have kids, has invited taunts from the community. This, they say is ‘mental cruelty’. The couple has demanded redress for this cruelty in the sum of Rs. 5 crores. Either give us a grandchild or pay up, they say. The senior Prasads are worried about their family name dying along with them if their son, as an only child, produces no children. They are unhappy they say because now that they are retired they want to be grandparents and they are being deprived of that joy.
Parental pressure on married children to produce grandkids is par for the course in India. Why blame the Prasads – they may be the first to actually go to court, but we see this overt and covert pressure all around us all the time. Not just the in-laws, everyone in the extended family and even neighbours feel entitled to ask married women to start producing babies. It is an expectation that cuts across class and economic strata.
The whole family got together in wishing the newly-minted Ambani, bahu Shloka a Happy Birthday. The whole video is cloying in the extreme but the message that stands out is the one from the family patriarch. In an entirely unveiled hint, father in law Mukesh asks the bride to get cracking on Project Ambani NextGen. The end of the video features the newlywed son winking broadly to convey the same message.
As a comment below the video says “This should have remained in the family what's app group”. It didn’t and instead garnered over 2M views. While many of the comments below were mocking, many thought that it was sweet and lovely and wholesome.
The fact that India’s biggest business family had no compunction making public this I-want-a-grandkid message dressed up as a birthday wish is telling. We as a society see nothing wrong in demanding grandkids, and pressuring young couples to have babies regardless of their own wishes, finances, professional aspirations or long term plans.
Everyone has their say and the volition of the couple in all this seems almost secondary. The wish of the woman in particular, who is to undergo the rigours of pregnancy and have her whole life irrevocably altered by motherhood, is often completely undermined. She will be made to feel guilty or inadequate, she may be threatened and coerced into something she is unwilling/ unprepared for. I, as a mother, feel that being a parent is such a major undertaking, that no one must have kids unless they really, really want kids; unless they feel able to cherish and devote time to the life they are about to bring into the world.
And then comes the issue of the kind of entitlement some parents feel towards their children. The Prasads’ demand for monetary compensation may be just a threat – but it is smacks of the transactional nature of the relationship. They feel that their son owes both money and duty to them because they chose to give birth to him, took care of and spent money on him. It is as if they did this with the expectation of later payback.
Again as a parent, I feel that my children owe me nothing. It was my decision to bring my children into existence, my choice to feed, educate and nurture them. My choices cannot hold them responsible nor should that dictate their choices and their actions. And I would certainly be most unreasonable in expecting any kind of payback – in the form of grandkids or otherwise. Clearly, Sanjeev and Sadhana Prasad have a very different worldview.
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