May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (24 page)

The urban women’s groups took several forms. Some were in effect the women’s wings of the major political parties in New Delhi, most notably the All India Women’s Conference, the fifty-year-old establishment organization that had been part of the independence struggle and had longstanding ties to the Congress party. The more confrontational Mahila Dakshita Samiti was linked to the Janata party. The National Federation of Indian Women was the women’s wing of the Communist Party of India, while the All India Democratic Women’s
Association was closely associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist). (India’s Communist party split apart in the 1960s into two factions, one favoring the Soviet Union and the other favoring China; when the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to India in 1986, he had to meet with both. One of Gorbachev’s aides confessed at the time that he was “bewildered” by the existence of the two parties and stated with a certain irony that in the Soviet Union, one Communist party was considered sufficient.) Other women’s organizations were small, independent, generally leftist groups whose activities centered on demonstrations. Much of their protesting was aimed at dowry deaths, but they also took on anything—such as the sati in Deorala—that might be considered violence against women. In New Delhi, the group Saheli grew out of a demonstration to protest the burning of a young woman in her in-laws’ home; in Madras, members of the militant group Pennurimai Iyakkam threw eggs and cow-dung cakes at lurid movie posters to protest what they termed obscene portrayals of women in south Indian films. The groups also operated centers that helped poor women find jobs and housing and provided legal and medical aid.

And yet the scope of the groups was highly limited. Although some insisted that their membership included thousands of slum women, in truth there were rarely more than two dozen upper-middle-class women who were active in each organization. Each group wasted time on quarrels over ideology and personalities—conflict whose real source, I think, was the frustration they felt because of their inability to cross the boundaries of class and affect large numbers of women. “The purpose for which we had come together and had started Saheli does not look anywhere within reach,” Amiya, a Saheli member, wrote in a collective diary that she and her colleagues kept and then excerpted in a booklet about the group’s first four years. “Actually, no woman has been coming to us needing assistance … to me it looks as if gradually Saheli is becoming a place (a lovely club) where middle- and upper-middle-class women come and talk about their experiences, which are of no earthly use to anybody excepting themselves perhaps.” The urban groups were easy targets for feminists more interested in rural development, who saw them as cliques of elitists involved in the women’s movement because it was the fashion of the moment. Inevitably, the different urban groups squabbled among themselves, dismissing one another as “middle class” when, in fact, even the most militant women were from bourgeois, well-connected families. “They don’t like us because they think we’re elitist,” Radha Sridhar, a member of
the Madras Joint Action Council for Women, said of Pennurimai Iyakkam, the egg-throwing group. “But I don’t think I serve the cause any better if I take a bus instead of a car.”

The urban groups, however, served a purpose. If they did not represent the bulk of the movement, they certainly articulated the movement and molded feminism into a live, respectable issue in the government and the press. Without the urban groups, dowry deaths would never have received the attention they did. The sati in Deorala would not have become a national issue. In Bombay, the use of prenatal diagnostic tests to determine the sex of a child might still be a legal, socially accepted practice.

My next exposure to the women’s movement came in visits to the large voluntary organizations, most of them outside Delhi. These groups, too, were run by elite women, but the leaders had succeeded in breaking the bonds of class and caste and reaching the grass roots. There were perhaps two hundred such groups doing significant work relating to women in India—no one was sure of the number—and international funding agencies estimated that some sixty of these were doing outstanding work. One of the leaders in this voluntary movement was Jaya Arunachalam, an official of the Congress party in the state of Tamil Nadu, a Brahmin, who had become disillusioned with politics as a means of helping the poor. In 1978, in Madras, she founded Working Women’s Forum, an organization that arranged for small loans to poor women who sold vegetables, fruit, flowers, cloth and other goods in the streets. The organization had begun with loans of about twenty-five dollars each to thirty women; by 1987, the Working Women’s Forum claimed more than sixty thousand members in three states. It had its own bank and had expanded to include an unusually successful family-planning program. When I visited the organization in 1987, Jaya Arunachalam had just received an invitation to speak at a forum in Washington to discuss how to implement a bill that would provide three-hundred-dollar loans to small enterprises owned by poor people in the United States. “Rather than taking the charity-from-above approach,” Arunachalam told me, explaining her philosophy, “we must develop people instead.”

I have categorized as the third part of the women’s movement the mass peasant struggles—in some cases uprisings—in which women played leading, militant roles. These women would never have considered themselves connected with any urban feminist group, yet their actions were studied and celebrated by feminists in Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta.

The Chipko Movement, for example, one of the developing world’s most famous grass-roots environmental campaigns, was an inspiration for urban feminists because of the unusually prominent role that women played in it. The movement was born one morning in March 1973, in a remote hill town on the edge of the central Himalayas, when several contractors arrived, on orders from a sporting-goods store, to cut down ten of the village’s precious ash trees. The villagers asked the contractors to leave the trees standing, and when the men refused, the villagers stopped them by literally hugging the earmarked trunks. (
Chipko
means “hugging the trees.”) The following year, it was the women—the gatherers of fuel, fodder and water who suffer the most from soil erosion—who brought the movement to its dramatic climax. On a day when the men of the village of Reni were away in town to protest the auctioning of a forest near their homes, contractors with axes arrived in Reni to begin cutting down 2,415 trees. Two dozen women of the village, led by Gaura Devi, a poor and illiterate widow of fifty, successfully barred the path to the forest and sang, “This forest is our mother’s home; we will protect it with all our might.” One of the contractors spat in Gaura Devi’s face, but she and the other women refused to move.

In the southern state of Kerala, it was the women who were in the forefront of a struggle for the rights of fishermen and women, demonstrating in the streets and sending protest groups to the government long before the men became involved. In rural areas of the state of Maharashtra, during a movement in the early seventies to organize agricultural laborers, Gail Omvedt, an American academic and feminist activist now living in the area, reported that male organizers of the leftist parties said that women were “the most ready to fight, the first to break through police lines, the last to go home.” In the small town of Nipani in the state of Karnataka, seven thousand women working in the tobacco industry rose up in March 1980 to strike for a minimum daily wage of fifty cents and an eight-hour working day. For the first time the owners of the tobacco factories were forced to the negotiating table, where they met the workers’ demands. The strike set off a continuing struggle between the factory management and the workers’ union, and although the union leadership was male, the initiative and militancy came, once again, from the women.

Sometimes more specific struggles for women’s rights have evolved within the larger struggles. This was the case in a brutal battle over land in central Bihar, a bleak state in the plains of the northeast, the poorest in India, where thousands have died in recent years in clashes
between militant peasant militias and “armies” fielded by wealthy landlords. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the villages around the town of Bodh Gaya, a group of educated young activists, inspired by the late revolutionary leader Jayaprakash Narayan, led poor villagers in a fight for redistribution of twelve thousand acres of land controlled by one local religious leader. Some of the activists were feminists from the city of Patna, Bihar’s capital. Their initial goal was land reform, but in meetings with the villagers, the feminists asked why the women had to do all of the housework, although they labored in the fields as hard as their husbands—and why their husbands, as a matter of routine, felt they had the right to get drunk and beat their wives. After these discussions, one village woman went home and told her husband that from that day onward, he could wash his own plate after dinner. His response was to fling the plate in her face and beat her brutally. Yet the discussions had some positive effects. For example, one woman who was beaten by her husband for having a sterilization operation was rescued by her neighbors, something that might not have happened before. Later, when it became clear that a portion of the religious leader’s land was to be redistributed to the men only, even though the women had been in the front lines of the demonstrations, the feminists led the village women to object. Eventually, only one thousand acres were given to the villagers, but some women did receive land in their own names. Many more had at least been made aware of rights they had never known before.

That was apparent when I visited Bihar in late March of 1987, at a time when the fields were already dry and brown, stripped of their harvest of wheat. In Shekhawara, a relatively prosperous village, I met Kunti Devi, a poor woman who had fought in the Bodh Gaya struggle. Unlike the shy, terrified women of Khajuron, Kunti Devi looked me squarely in the face, smiled and invited me into a mud house to talk. She wore a printed orange sari and was thin and muscular, with a tattoo on her arm. Her face was pretty but weathered by the sun; she might have been twenty, thirty or forty. We sat down on a charpoy. “Before the struggle,” she told me, “I had to work all day in the fields and then come home to do all the housework while my husband did nothing.” It wasn’t clear whether her husband had now been reformed, but what amazed me was how openly she talked. Unlike the women of Khajuron, she was aware of the unfairness of her life. Kunti Devi told me that she owned land jointly with her husband, another breakthrough, and that when she and her friends heard of any man who was beating
his wife, they rushed as a group to stop him. When I asked her to which caste she belonged, she refused to tell me. “I don’t believe in it,” she said. Coming from a villager, this was a remarkable statement. The raising of women’s consciousness, here in the middle of Bihar, had accomplished an extraordinary thing: qualifying this village woman to be considered part of the larger movement in India.

WHEN I FIRST WALKED INTO THE MAIN OFFICES OF SEWA IN THE GUJARATI
city of Ahmedabad one hot October morning in 1987, I was met by a cacophony of clamoring women, all of whom seemed to be having a good time. Crowds of them were noisily milling around tellers’ desks with small handfuls of coins; others were eating chapaties and nursing babies along the sides of the room. It turned out that I was in the middle of the SEWA bank, a growing financial institution of nineteen thousand depositors, all women, some of whom had received loans for as little as four dollars. The Self-Employed Women’s Association—the acronym SEWA corresponds to the Indian word
sewa
, or “service”—was a sprawling organization for the economic empowerment of women. It had organized poor women into unions of garment makers, cigarette rollers, vegetable vendors and tobacco processors, and had enabled them to open their first accounts in the SEWA bank. Every day, three hundred women walked through the doors to deposit a dollar or take out thirty cents, and every day the excruciatingly patient tellers had to fill out the deposit and withdrawal slips for their mostly illiterate customers. Frequently a depositor would forget that she had made an earlier withdrawal, and when a teller read out her passbook balance, she would become angry and complain. “So lots of explaining has to be done,” sighed Jayashree Vyas, the bank’s managing director, who had been lured away by SEWA from a high-paying job at the Central Bank of India.

Vyas talked with me in her office, a glassed-in cubicle that looked out on the pandemonium. On her desk were stacks of loan applications, and when I asked her about them, she selected one from the pile. The form said that Maniben Parmar, a seamstress who made petticoats and dresses for a living, had just been approved for a $400 loan. Maniben Parmar bought her cloth from a middleman and made thirty cents a day; she had eight dollars saved in the SEWA bank. She was the mother of four children and belonged to a low caste. Her husband, who worked at the telephone office, made the relatively impressive
sum of $120 a month. Maniben Parmar wanted her loan to make house repairs. A friend, Ashaben, had recommended her. “It’s not for a productive purpose,” Vyas admitted. “But it’s for improving their living standards.” Even though her husband’s income had helped her secure the money, the loan would be in Maniben Parmar’s name alone. Her husband could not make withdrawals from her savings account, nor could he apply for a loan of his own.