If the entire premise of Raksha Bandhan is that men protect women, wouldn’t it be reasonable to ask, protect us from what exactly? If the answer is “gropers on the metro,” I want to gently suggest that a length of red-and-gold thread has never once, to my knowledge, intervened in such a situation. The actual apparatus doing the protecting is, most often, a coven of women with sharp eyes and sharper elbows, nails and heels. I’ve often wondered, if brothers are so instinctively protective, why does that instinct switch off completely, with the reliability of a Delhi power cut, when the topic turns to the family inheritance?
Every August, millions of Indian women tie threads around the wrists of their genetically assigned bodyguards. In exchange, they receive a broad-spectrum oath of eternal safe-keeping, along with VIP seats to the tragicomedy that is watching their brothers inherit the lion’s share of the family ancestral wealth. I’ve never once heard of a woman being willed the factory that sired her family’s fortunes. What I have heard, multiple times, is the story of women benevolently receiving the ‘investment flat’ in the ‘up-and-coming suburb’ in the middle of nowhere.
A friend—educated, formidably capable and on genuinely warm terms with her brother—recently described him to me as “the human air quotes around her half of the inheritance.” She didn’t say it bitterly. They’re not feuding, she’s not plotting a villainous Bollywood-style hostile takeover. No hapless senior citizen will be conned into signing away their jaydaad ke kagaz. She’s simply done the thing Indian daughters are never expected to do: the inglorious, ugly math.
Every woman I spoke to for this piece, from families with net worths running into crores, most of them doting sisters to their brothers, described some version of the same inheritance heist. One, a 34-year-old from Delhi, watched dejectedly as the family business was handwaved toward her brother because he’s “running it, after all.” Another, a 41-year-old from Mumbai, was denied the foreign education her brother got when their parents could only fund one child’s pole vault across the MBA line. But she’s expected to be grateful for the ‘50-50’ split in the future. Never mind the breathtaking head start he was gifted for being a boy. The third, a 28-year-old from Bangalore, put it best: “I got a cheque and a proud Facebook post when I launched my startup. My brother got a suite of offices and a family Shark Tank.” Before we deride these women as selfish and spoiled, let me be clear: all three are grateful for the privilege and safety nets their families provide. They’re just wondering why theirs looks so different from their brothers’.
The number one response is that her share went to the wedding; an event she rarely designs, sometimes actively doesn’t want. As if the three-day carnival to establish the family’s social standing among 500 acquaintances they see twice a decade were a cheque made out to her personally. Curiously, this accounting never applies to her brother’s wedding—the band, the venue, the mare he rode in on like a rented raja—all funded with equal enthusiasm but zero expectation that a rupee of it would come out of his share later.
The second rebuttal arrives with the added heft of moral confidence. Sons are, after all, duty-bound to look after parents in their old age. We’d maybe make our peace with this if we didn’t already know that the overwhelming majority of actual hands-on care invariably falls to the women of the house. He wires the funds, she wipes the drool off a paralysed chin 20 times a day. Who gets to claim deeper exhaustion? And even that argument is rapidly becoming moot with a growing number of parents aggressively saving for old age, having witnessed their friends’ painful discovery that depending on a son’s virtue is the Russian roulette of retirement plans.