May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (25 page)

For years, women had been treated “like dirt,” in the words of SEWA founder Ela Bhatt, by traditional bankers. As Chandaben, a dealer in used clothes, explained in one of SEWA’s reports: “We were not used to going to the big banks, and the sahibs would insult us.… We also wanted to open savings accounts, because though we sometimes manage to save some of our earnings, we have nowhere to hide it in the house. Our husbands or sons find it and use it up.” With the SEWA bank, Ela Bhatt explained—in a gentle tone belying the boldness of her thinking—“we will be able to nonviolently, in the most Gandhian way, eliminate the husbands.”

Ela Bhatt was an unlikely revolutionary. Small, shy and unobtrusive, she was a fifty-five-year-old woman with a little girl’s voice who dressed simply in handspun cotton saris and had learned to overcome a stammer she had as a child. All of the SEWA members added
ben
, for “sister,” to the end of each other’s name, so Ela Bhatt was simply “Elaben.” The women were in awe of her, and her reputation was such that Rajiv Gandhi had appointed her to the upper house of Parliament. As far as I could tell, she was a person devoid of egotism, and her manner was invariably sweet. When I told her, before I left India, that I would eventually be moving to Japan, she mentioned that she herself had once been to Tokyo. I asked her what she thought. “Too much neat,” she said in her tiny voice. “One is always afraid of making a mess.” I don’t know whether she meant this literally or metaphorically, but I now know she was right either way. Another time I sat near her at a dinner in Delhi, at a table with a dozen of the city’s most obstreperous intellectuals, all of them arguing in the usual flamboyant fashion about the failings of Rajiv Gandhi’s government. But Ela Bhatt was mostly silent; even so, when I looked around the table I realized that of all the guests, she was the one who had most successfully challenged the status quo. Parliament, however, had terrified her at first. “The first week I was quite dazed,” she remembered. “So many facilities, so much access to information, such easy access to power, so much respect. I was feeling like the fate of millions was there. And all the big names I’ve heard were sitting right next to me.”

Her humility, of course, hid the formidable personality that she was. When Barber Conable, the president of the World Bank, was visiting Delhi in November 1987, his office had arranged a meeting between Ela Bhatt and Conable’s wife, Charlotte, a specialist in women’s issues. Ela Bhatt politely told the World Bank office in New Delhi that she would be very happy to meet with Mrs. Conable, but wouldn’t it be nice if Mr. Conable were also available to discuss women’s development issues, which should not be of concern only to wives?

Ela Bhatt’s determination seemed to have come from her mother, a woman whose formal education had stopped at the age of ten but who had insisted that her daughter go to college, despite the reservations of Ela’s father, a High Court judge in Gujarat. Ela, who was from a strict, well-to-do Brahmin family, promptly did the very thing her parents had most feared—she fell in love, with a Brahmin, but a penniless one. It took her parents seven years to agree to the marriage. While Ela and her future husband waited for permission, they soaked up the exhilarating atmosphere on a campus stirring, in the early fifties, with Gandhian thought and plans to build a new nation. Finally they were married, and Ela received a law degree and decided to live and work in a manner Mahatma Gandhi would have approved. “I was very saturated with high ideals, and I wanted to work for the poor,” she said. “I never thought of women as such.”

Ahmedabad’s Textile Labor Association, or TLA, the oldest and largest trade union of textile workers in India, was a natural outlet for her. The union had been born out of Mahatma Gandhi’s first fast, in 1918, in behalf of striking workers who labored in the city’s textile mills, which had been responsible for the city’s economic growth. Ela Bhatt knew that the union was involved in extensive social welfare work among its members, and that its belief in Gandhian ideals of nonviolence and women’s equality would ensure that there was a place for her. “But there were no other women,” she said. “So working amongst men, all men, and doing the union work was quite difficult. I was very shy. Also, our people are not so kind, so they make all kinds of stories. I had to travel with them, and as I came up slowly in the leadership, I had to travel to all the places in Gujarat. I had to go by car, and with men. Then you also stay overnight when you go. So it was not much approved. So I had to fight a lot and I used to feel, What am I doing? Am I doing the right thing?”

But by 1968, Ela Bhatt had taken over the women’s division of the union. Historically, the leaders of the women’s division had focused on social work among the union members’ wives. Ela Bhatt would
soon demolish the assumption that what the wives really needed was handouts from well-meaning people like herself. Many of them were in fact workers themselves, laboring as vegetable vendors in the streets or as seamstresses in their homes, yet, typically, what they did was not viewed as work. That began to change in 1971, when Ela Bhatt went to one of Ahmedabad’s markets and met a group of “head loaders”—the women who carried cloth on their heads between the wholesale and retail markets—who complained that the cloth merchants routinely cheated them. The merchants, it turned out, did not keep proper records of the number of trips a woman made each day, or of the distance traveled and weight carried. Clearly these women needed organizing, not welfare. Ela Bhatt helped them form a group so they could collectively demand better wages, and then she wrote an article about their plight for one of the Ahmedabad newspapers. When the merchants countered with an article of their own, asserting that they were paying the women fairly, Ela Bhatt printed the merchants’ claims on cards and distributed them to the women.

Out of that effort grew SEWA, a trade union for self-employed women based on the Gandhian principles of nonviolence and the need to uplift the poorest members of society first. Gandhi believed that India’s economy should be based on agriculture and small-scale cottage industry—a conviction that India’s leaders immediately discarded after independence but that Ela Bhatt reinterpreted as a Gandhian basis for her work among the self-employed. Her first battle, however, was for the right of her union to exist. Until that time, Indian labor laws had recognized trade unions only in situations where there was a formal affiliation between employer and employee. The self-employed had no such relationship, but SEWA argued that the self-employed, like other workers, should have the right to organize. The state government finally acquiesced by agreeing to accept a broader definition of the law.

Over the years, SEWA learned that with the power of numbers, women could agitate for higher wages and better working conditions and against exploitation from middlemen and corrupt police. Women were organized into what SEWA hoped would become self-reliant cooperatives of weavers, block printers, basket weavers, patchwork quilt makers and kerosene vendors. Their goal was to take over the production and marketing of their own products, eliminating the middlemen who had cheated them in the past. SEWA also expanded, with mixed success, into the most drought-stricken rural areas of the state of Gujarat.

The organization, which had a $200,000 annual operating budget, was funded by the Indian government, the Ford Foundation, the International Labor Organization, Oxfam, the Unitarian Universalist India Fund and other donors. Ela Bhatt was also chairwoman of a government-appointed national commission investigating the status of self-employed women throughout India. She often said that nearly 90 percent of the labor force in India was self-employed (only twenty-five million out of eight hundred million Indians draw a paycheck), and of that 90 percent, at least 40 percent were female. It was these women, she argued, who should be leading the movement. What they most needed was a sense of their own worth. “The moment a woman is associated with a group on the basis of her work, and outside her role as a mother and a housewife, two things happen,” she told me in an interview in the sparse New Delhi flat she had been allotted as a member of Parliament. “One is that for the first time in her life she perceives herself as a worker. She realizes that she is doing something important and making a contribution. And when that happens, that leads to integration with other communities, and the distances of caste and religion are gradually cut down.”

Some of SEWA’s most important work occurred among the twenty thousand Harijan women who picked up waste paper for recycling from Ahmedabad’s streets. The story of the paper pickers is a dramatic example of how women’s organizations like SEWA have had to fight government corruption as well as poverty, and how strength comes from numbers. In telling it, I have relied on a report by Elisabeth Bentley, a Harvard student I met in Ahmedabad, who was on a year-long fellowship to work with the paper pickers in their struggle to organize.

In Ahmedabad, as in the rest of India, nothing is unused. Visitors to India learn quickly that if they buy vegetables from a vendor in the local market, he will hand them over in a bag made of last Saturday’s feature section from
The Times of India;
the cardboard cylinder inside a roll of toilet paper will be covered with a discarded office memo from the Ministry of Agriculture. The women paper pickers of Ahmedabad were crucial to this large recycling industry. Much of the reprocessing was very profitably performed by machine, but for the women the work was low-paying, exhausting and dangerously unsanitary. More than half the paper pickers roamed six miles during the course of a twelve-hour working day, carrying on their heads sacks that when full weighed forty pounds. Their wanderings took them into the city’s
most squalid garbage dumps, where they came in contact with raw sewage, dead animals, empty chemical containers and jagged glass. The women suffered from frequent infections, cuts and poisonings and made little more than a half dollar a day. Forced into the streets over several generations, they were classic victims of the kind of industrialization that had benefited men and marginalized women.

The story of their displacement began sometime after the turn of the century, when many of the paper pickers’ grandfathers, originally weavers by trade, left their villages in search of work in Ahmedabad. Once there, they moved their families into the city’s slums, where there was no room in the cramped huts for the large handlooms they had once used in the villages. Fortunately, the men were able to find jobs in Ahmedabad’s textile mills, but their wives, who traditionally had done the pre-weaving and post-weaving work—spinning, preparing the yarn and removing the cloth from the looms—were left out. Some wives did manage to find work in the mills, but after 1930, when new technology and a changing world market forced the mill owners to cut back on labor, the women were the first to be let go. By the 1980s, when 70 percent of Ahmedabad’s mills shut down, the crisis in the industry forced ever more women into the streets, a source of enormous humiliation for them. As one of the paper pickers explained in a study written by a SEWA leader: “When I was in the mill, we used to look down upon the paper pickers. We would say, ‘We are the mill workers, we earn a good salary. These paper pickers, they wander around everywhere without shame. They are dirty.’ Today, I am degraded too. When I first had to start picking paper, I would try to make my [veil] long so no one could see my face. I was so ashamed. How low I have fallen.”

SEWA’s involvement with the paper pickers began in 1975, when it secured contracts that allowed a group of women to pick up waste paper directly from the textile mills. By 1981, internal turmoil had split the paper pickers into two factions, but those still with SEWA won the right to collect waste paper in bulk from government offices and warehouses. This meant they were able to shovel chest-high piles of paper into the sacks rather than scavenging for trash piecemeal in the streets. Naturally this reduced their working hours and improved their wages, but it also interfered with an elaborate system of secret deals between longtime paper contractors and low-level government officials. When the paper pickers began to suspect that one contractor was stealing paper that belonged to them, they complained to government
officials, who promised to look into it. Not willing to take the government’s word, the paper pickers decided to stake out a warehouse where they made their pickups. One night, just as they had suspected, a large truck pulled up. Several men got out and began rapidly loading bags of paper. When the truck was half full, the women came out of hiding. Umbabehn, a SEWA paper picker, was one of those leading the confrontation. “Whose orders are you following in taking this paper?” she demanded of the men. But the men refused to tell her and instead challenged SEWA’s own right to the waste. “But we were not fearful,” Umbabehn recounted. “I said, ‘You show your papers. Who are you to ask me?’ ” The women went to the police, but the police did nothing. SEWA then charged that the police inspector, the contractor and the government official who controlled the release of the paper were acting as a united front. SEWA’s action might have reached a dead end, were it not for the power of the media. In 1983, Doordarshan, the government-owned television network, broadcast a show about the paper pickers’ struggles, in which Luxmibehn, one of the youngest of the paper pickers, made sure to mention the full name and position of every man involved in the illegal pickup. There do not appear to have been any arrests, but the public humiliation was apparently enough. Within a week, the women were once again collecting the paper they were due.

The paper pickers were not the only women whose lives were changed by SEWA. On a hot November afternoon in a slum in central Ahmedabad, I met two sisters, Assammaben and Chandraben, who had been making bidis, the rough Indian hand-rolled cigarettes, for twenty-one years. As they sat outside their mud house, their legs crossed under them, Assammaben cut the leaves and Chandraben rolled. Between them, they averaged one thousand bidis a day. Before SEWA, they had made twenty-five cents a day, but after joining the SEWA union, which had argued for increased wages, they made almost a dollar a day. SEWA had also transformed illiterate women into video producers who made instruction tapes for the rest of the membership. It started when the United Nations University in Tokyo provided SEWA with some video equipment. Jyoti Jumani, one of SEWA’s college-educated leaders, found herself having to explain to poor women how to operate a camera, use sound equipment, conduct an interview and edit tape. Her task was further complicated by the fact that the equipment was labeled in English:
play, rewind, fast forward, volume, eject, microphone, headphone
and so forth. The women could not
read and write even in their own language, Gujarati, so Jumani decided the easiest course would be to teach them to memorize the English words on the machines.
“I
felt bad about teaching them in English, but otherwise we would have had to invent Gujarati words,” she said, apparently unaware that she was recounting another chapter in the story of how English became the world’s language of technology. By the time I visited SEWA, a dozen women knew how to use the video equipment properly; particularly skillful was Lilaben, a former vegetable vendor, who was working full-time at SEWA’s video unit. “She’s a very good producer,” Jumani said. Lilaben had made a tape about the vegetable vendors and how they organized, and another about women who made their living transporting sand on the backs of donkeys. I saw a video on the SEWA bank, of very good quality, which included an interview with a garment maker who had received a loan for a sewing machine. Other videos taught women how to speak in court, or how to make the kind of mud stove that did not give off suffocating clouds of smoke in the house. “We started using the video to organize our members,” Jumani explained. “But as I continued to use it, I started understanding the potential of the medium. Then I started using it to teach people.”