Unravelling the Silent Tragedy of Missing Girls: A Study of Gita Aravamudan’s Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Foeticide
| Authors |
| Chinmoyee Saikia & Dipendu Das |
| Date of Publication: December, 2025 |
| Volume: XXV, No.- XXVIII |
| DOI:10.65734/tgi.ssei.avp.ijcsss.ti.25.28.4 |
| Abstract |
| This paper critically examines Gita Aravamudan’s Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Foeticide through the lens of Society, Culture and Change: Crossings and Intersections. Aravamudan’s work, which combines investigative reportage with personal testimonies, highlights the crisis of missing girls in India, placing female foeticide and infanticide at the intersection of patriarchal structures, technological progress, and sociocultural expectations. The work illustrates how society reproduces systemic inequalities by embedding gender hierarchies within kinship networks, inheritance logics, and community sanctions. Culture, far from being a static repository of values, operates as a dynamic site where modern technologies intersect with traditional practices to normalise gendered violence. The complicity of medical practitioners in enabling sex-selective abortions demonstrates how intersections of science, commerce, and cultural ideology sustain practices that devalue female life. By mapping these crossings, Aravamudan reveals the demographic, ethical, and political consequences of disappearing daughters: skewed sex ratios, intensified gender inequities, and the erosion of constitutional guarantees of equality. More significantly, the book invites reflection on how cultural continuity and social change operate in tandem, how aspirations toward modernity coexist with deep-seated patriarchal anxieties, producing paradoxical outcomes in which technological progress facilitates regressive practices. This study argues that Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Foeticide demands a reading beyond the documentation of a social problem; it is also a critical site where intersections of society, culture, and change become visible. The disappearance of daughters represents not only a demographic imbalance but also a profound cultural rupture that destabilises notions of justice, citizenship, and human dignity. Situating the book within interdisciplinary debates on gender and social transformation, this paper underscores the urgency of reimagining cultural narratives and instituting structural reforms to address the silent yet pervasive crisis of missing girls. |
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