DO WOMEN NEED TOURISM?
Pranjali Bandhu and T. G. Jacob
“Tourism is vulgar, vulgar, and vulgar” (Henry James)
Our objective in this short article is to delineate the impact of international tourism as a development strategy on women’s socio-economic role, taking the specific case of Kovalam, a famed beach resort in Thiruvananthapuram district of southern Kerala.
The tourism model of development is a strategy of capital accumulation on a world scale, which drains resources from the peripheries to fatten the metropolises. Here we shall try to show how the changes in the political economy of women’s labour (both biological-sexual and socio-economic) brought about as a result of tourism development are rooted in the needs of the global accumulation of capital. By contrasting the economic and cultural role and status of women in Kovalam in the pre and post-tourism phases, we would like to prove that certainly the tourism model of development does not hold any emancipator potential for exploited women’s labour. On the contrary, it has led to a sharp increase in this exploitation. In general, tourism in this area as elsewhere in the third world has helped to create a situation of increased social tensions and misery, with the large majority of the local women being among the worst casualties.
Traditional Village Economy
It was more than thirty years ago that international tourism entered this fantastically beautiful beach village cluster. Prior to the entry of commercial international tourism this was a peaceful coconut growing, coir producing and fishing area. All these traditional economic activities continue even after the advent of tourism though on a much reduced scale. And in all these traditional occupations women play a major productive role. They also had their role in the cultivation of paddy and vegetables, though these were not the main economic bases of the villages of this area.
There is a clear cut gender based division of roles in all these activities. Among the fisher people the drying and retail selling of fish is largely the task of women. In coir production women do the backbreaking labour of processing the decayed husk into fibre by beating it with heavy sticks and then spinning the golden coloured yarn into coir of varying thickness. The retting of the coconut husks and its collection for defibration is the male domain. Coir production is predominantly a home based activity and the coir is bought up by cooperative societies or by private businesses for further value addition into coir products. In paddy cultivation too women perform the tedious tasks of transplantation, weeding, harvesting and winnowing. Vegetable cultivation around the homesteads was also their domain.
Women were thus valued for their productive labour both in the overall village economy as well as within the home as bearers of children and care-givers together with other domestic responsibilities. In this economy the phenomenon of dowry did not play any role due to the perceived productive value of women’s labour. In the words of a grandmother of 80, who has been witness to all the changes that the area has been undergoing, the social ethos earlier was work-based. Men and women, joined together in marriage, created the economic and other values needed for their comfortable living and growth as a family. Now, with the coming of tourism, marriage has become the means to gain quick wealth, either by angling to marry a foreigner, or within the local community by the incursion of the pernicious dowry system. Even a part-time auto rickshaw driver in Kovalam thinks he can command a dowry of up to Rs. 1 lakh. Television sets, refrigerators and cars are also demanded. For the first time dory related issues resulted in suicides in this area. But we are jumping too far ahead in our narrative. Let us first see what kind of economic activities were introduced into the area with the growth of tourism and what opportunities they offered to women.
The Tourism Economy
Global airline companies, multinational tour operators, hotel chains, beverage companies and financial institutions dominate the international tourism industry. The kind of tourism promoted by them is the production and sale of leisure as an “experience commodity” to sections ranging from busy corporate executives and professionals to the exhausted working people, catering to the pockets and tastes of all by a variety of “packages.” It is in the “consumption”, largely voyeuristic, of the third world by the first world that is promoted in the interest of capital accumulation. Resorts and hotels with European food, beverages and amenities spring up in small villages like Kovalam and its surrounding. Land is bought up from the local people and enclosed off, so are sections of the beaches privatized for the exclusive use of hotel guests. Lagoons, which were previously used for the retting of coconut husks for coir production, are made off-bounds for local people’s use because the resultant smell is not considered acceptable for the semi-clad Westerners walking around enjoying the sun n sand. Paddy field land is similarly taken over. Coconut trees are cut down on a large scale, leaving a few hybrid ones for decoration in the bald landscaped hotel precincts, again made out of bounds for coconut pluckers.
All the traditional economic activities are thus affected. Those earlier owning land and using it productively are offered alternative employment as gardeners, cooks, launderers, cleaning persons, hotel boys and girls, auto-rickshaw drivers etc. Fishermen can earn some extra bucks by offering catamaran rides to tourists. Among these occupations the local women may find employment as cooks and launderers. Even those women and children selling fruits and lungis and trinkets on the beach are often from other areas trying to fit into the new culture. Poverty and illiteracy have increased phenomenally and many women (and girl children) are pushed into the backbreaking labour of granite crushing for the booming construction industry for a pittance. Water shortages due to overdrawing by the resorts for their gardens and swimming pools add to the misery. Piped water supply does not exist and these stone workers can be seen bathing and washing their clothes in the dirty nullahs running by the sides of broad roads leading to the resorts. Price rises as a result of the tourist influx is another serious affliction.
The rise in landlessness, unemployment and underemployment (employment being mostly confined to the tourism ‘season’) among the youth are inevitable. But they are now caught in the cultural vices unleashed by tourism. On the one hand, they have lost interest in the traditional occupations (while taking pride in being waiters in beach shack restaurants) and are not prepared for the productive work involved in small-scale domestic market-based industries. On the other hand, they have developed a taste for cheap foreign goods, drugs, women, the hopelessly ridiculous pidgin lingo, and alcohol. Some of these aspects have linkages with hippie tourism, which was the precursor of the current international charter-tour based tourism, but there is also involvement of mafia operators who have a national and international base. Crime and thefts are on the increase.
From the point of view of women the repercussions on family life are tremendous due to the rise in drug addiction and alcoholism. Earlier the drinking of coconut based mild toddy was integrated into their lifestyles and its consumption was family and community oriented having its economic value addition aspect as well. Now the introduction of beer and hard foreign liquors as well as costly drugs has led to endless family squabbles, increased domestic violence and break up or separation of couples. With the invasion of the beaches by sunbathing nudes, the beaches become out of bounds for the local women and their families and they have lost their customary usages. Avvad Thurai (now Eve’s beach or Hawwa beach in Malayalam) was earlier the place for post-cremation rites. Earlier, children would go to the beach to play in the shallow waters but now this does not happen. Instead they go begging, stealing or rag picking. Young women do not feel free to visit their own beaches or to bather there. Due to the excessive and exhibitionist promiscuity of the foreigners the local culture becomes restrictive for the local women, curbing the few freedoms they had earlier.
Prostitution Tourism
A highly visible by-product of international tourism in poor countries is the growth of prostitution tourism. There is a meteoric rise in the volume of sex tours since the 1970s, particularly to South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, the Caribbean and Kenya.
In sex-tourism marketing the images that are portrayed are of “beautiful, exotic and submissive” women and are clearly meant to appeal to the racial and sexual stereotypes carried by the men who make up the demand for sex tourism. The break-up of the family unit in advanced capitalist countries is creating a captive market of sex-customers.
Prostitution is not confined to women alone in Kovalam, with the sex workers hailing from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and even Nepal. Male prostitution by local youth including married men becoming gigolos is a fairly common phenomenon here as in many tourism areas all over the third world. It has been noted in this connection that German men go to Thailand while the women go to Jamaica, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Goa and Kovalam. This results in a public perception that sees all “gringas” (white women) to use the Latino lingo, as sluts. These are usually mutually exploitative relationships with the men trying to hook a woman at least for one season consistently to be able to solve some of their financial problems and get some money to invest in a shack restaurant or some such petty tourist enterprise.
Some of the marriages that do take place also have the characteristics of prostitution. There is a Dalit hamlet in Kovalam where mail order marriages between white tourists and Dalit girls have become common. These are in fact no marriages at all. The tourists are merely buying flesh and these girls are only means of sexual gratification for the Europeans. For each such marriage a sum of money changes hands, and the girl is literally sold to the customer. Before the onset of the tourist season, there is a spate of mail orders for the “brides”; the touts get active, and as soon as the customer lands up, the girl is sold. This is a widespread phenomenon in the Dalit localities. It is ironic that it is happening in the area, which saw the birth of the Ayyankali-led movement for the self-respect of the Dalits.
The latest entry in the field is sex trade involving children of both sexes. Child prostitution rackets, which are a multimillion international industry involving use of the Internet to solicit customers, are a well-investigated aspect of international tourism. Children as young as five are lured, abducted, adopted or sold by their poor families into brothels for prostitution and pornography to serve the increasing demand of tourists and organised sex tours from industrialised countries. A reason attributed to this growing phenomenon worldwide is the AIDS scare, which incorrectly presumes lower risks from children. In fact, this is sheer nonsense as children are more liable to catch AIDS and sooner.
Relationships between men and women can tend to lose its balance under such circumstances and the gulf between the two grows. A ‘schizophrenic’ attitude to life develops. The local women at times tend to be looked upon as “backward, traditional and unattractive” by the male cohabiting with or chasing the scantily clad, “emancipated” white woman. Vice versa those local women hankering to better their economic situation develop the same attitude towards their male counterparts. School girls become call girls to enjoy the good life. Rapes and sexual harassment cases increase. More and more drug addicts die. The number of AIDS cases is on the increase. Women from this area find it difficult to get marriage partners from outside because the place has become so notorious.
This is the general picture at many coastal tourist locales from Kovalam to Goa.
We can certainly conclude from the above description that the disruption of a self-reliant economy into an international tourism-dependent one has too many negative features for the societal fabric as a whole to be acceptable as a mode of development. Tourism has a tendency to ravage a place and then move on to fresher pastures. This is already happening in Kovalam today. Wealth from tourism is a shimmering mirage for the local people. The government bureaucrats, politicians, middlemen and builders within the State may profit. But the local inhabitants and especially the women lose their one and only asset: an integrated social fabric.
References:
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3. D’Cunha, Jean: A Study of Tourism, Development and Women – the Case of Goa. Unpublished report commissioned by ECTWT, Bangkok, 1993.
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(First published in Women and Environment – A Newsletter of Adivasi, Environmental and Women’s Issues from the Irula Women’s Tribal Welfare Society, vol. 3, no. 1, January-June 2001)