May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (23 page)

I could never agree with her reasoning, and yet I thought no better of the affluent women of Bombay who aborted their female fetuses. Although the Bombay women had all of the benefits of modernity, their values remained as backward as those of the villagers. Some of them were from families with enough status in the community to set an example by refusing to pay any dowry at all, but this option did not occur to them. It was especially depressing to me that educated women apparently valued themselves so little as women that they were willing to prevent a female child, just because she was female, from coming into the world. To those women who argued that this was their “choice,” I would counter that “choice” is not made in a social vacuum, and that their “choice” had in fact been determined for them by thousands of years of prejudice and discrimination. Ultimately, the “sex test” was proof that education and material progress alone cannot alter traditional attitudes. I learned that there has to be a place for political action—as in the case of the feminist movement to ban the “sex test” in Bombay—that raises people’s consciousness as it tries to change the system from outside.

IN THE EARLY 1970S,
VINA MAZUMDAR WAS A FORCEFUL, OPINIONATED
and well-known university professor with two children, a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford and sixteen years of teaching political science behind her. Like most Indian women of her class and sensibility, many of them educated far beyond the dreams of their mothers, Mazumdar had looked around her comfortable world and assumed that the problems of the Indian woman had been solved at independence. The Indian Constitution guaranteed women complete equality with men. Not only could women vote and sit in Parliament, but the highest office in the land belonged to a woman, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The rest of India’s women, it appeared, only needed a little more time. “We hadn’t a clue,” Mazumdar recalled.

So when the Indian government appointed a commission to investigate the status of the nation’s women, Mazumdar thought it was, in her words, “a joke.” She and her friends used to ask each other, she said, “What is the government of India up to that they want to
investigate the status of women? Is that still a problem? Equality is a state of mind. If we are not yet equal, it is our failure.” The government had in fact commissioned the study as a reaction to new thinking within the United Nations, which during the height of the Western women’s movement in the early 1970s had begun prodding developing countries to improve the status of billions of forgotten women—the uneducated, rural poor who made up the vast majority of the world’s female population.

The Indian government, like everyone else, had no clear idea how the changes at independence had affected, if they had at all, the lives of the women in the villages. The inquiry was to take three years, but halfway through, when it became clear that the commission was lagging far behind in its task, the government asked Mazumdar to take over. Most of her friends told her to turn down the offer, arguing that the timetable was impossible and, more important, that the work would narrow her focus, diverting her from the larger concerns of her academic career. Mazumdar was not particularly interested in women’s issues, but she took the job anyway, accepting the limitation that there would be little time for new research in the eighteen months she had left. The committee worked mostly with existing data, but Mazumdar got intelligent people to analyze it, and the result was the first comprehensive compilation of material on the subject of India’s women.

Its conclusions were shattering. The committee found that the majority of Indian women, far from benefiting from the country’s material gains, were actually worse off in significant ways than they were before independence.

“The first thing I felt was shock,” Mazumdar remembered, sitting enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke one afternoon in a cramped, cluttered office at her research institution in New Delhi. She was a blunt and commanding woman, in her middle fifties, with a husky voice and stylishly short hair, in an unadorned sari she seemed to wear as an afterthought. “The second thing I felt,” Mazumdar continued, “was a tremendous anger—‘Something has to be done.’ Then I began to question why even a social scientist can remain so damn ignorant. Not only about the situation of women, but even our knowledge about our own society is so appallingly unequal.”

The 480-page report, “Towards Equality,” published in December 1974, was the first thunderbolt announcing what is so well known today. Social change, development and other trends under the heading of “progress” had in many cases made the lives of women worse. The
percentage of women in the labor force in India, rural and urban, had declined to less than 10 percent. Although most experts agreed that the official statistics ignored many women who did in fact work, particularly the millions of self-employed, the figure was still alarming. Industrialization and new methods of agriculture had improved the lives of men, but women were not trained to acquire the new skills demanded by modern industry. In factories, they had been displaced by technology, and the work they had once done for an income at home—spinning, oil pressing, tobacco processing—could not compete with factory-made goods. The literacy rate of women was half that of men, and the custom of dowry, which had once been confined to the upper castes, was sweeping the country. Concerns about women’s problems, which had been central to the freedom struggle, seemed completely forgotten. “Our investigation has revealed that large masses of women in this country have remained unaffected by the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and the laws enacted since Independence,” the committee concluded. The report would change Vina Mazumdar’s life. “My earlier work,” she told me, “was only earning a living.”

Today, Vina Mazumdar is one of the matriarchs of the current women’s movement in India. Her work with the report led her to establish the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, a small but influential research institute in New Delhi that has forced the government to change important policies affecting women and to admit where it has failed. Mazumdar’s group has also worked to organize and train women in villages. “What those women have taught me I did not learn in fifty-five years of my previous life,” she told me. “They cured me of my feeling of guilt, that all this involvement was detrimental to my family. They gave me new insights into a woman’s relationship with the environment and nature, of which I was totally unaware. They taught me that the achievement of equality does not necessarily mean giving up being a woman. These women taught me that I should not be ashamed of being different.”

But Vina Mazumdar’s metamorphosis is, more than anything else, a reflection of the unique problems that face the present women’s movement in India. Like the feminist movement in the United States, the Indian movement was founded by an elite; most of its leaders are from the English-educated ruling class. Devaki Jain, for example, whose time-allocation studies of village women led to her evolution as the other matriarch of the women’s movement, is from one of the
leading political families of south India. As she admitted of her own background, “It’s not a clear case of emerging out of what you would call feminist struggles.” But unlike American feminists, whose firsthand experience of economic and personal injustice influenced the movement to focus largely on such middle-class issues as job discrimination and equal pay for equal work, Indian feminist leaders have come to the realization that their effort is meaningless unless it attempts to change the lives of the 80 percent of Indian women whose most basic concerns—access to clean water, animal fodder and cooking fuel—remain alien to their own privileged world. “We knew so little about India,” Madhu Kishwar told me, describing the first few years of publication of
Manushi
, the feminist magazine she edits. “To talk about Indian women, and women’s movements, is ridiculous unless you systematically attempt to understand who these Indian women are.” The problem is also one of overwhelming numbers. “You are talking of four hundred million women,” Margaret Alva, Minister of State for Youth Affairs, Sports and Women, told me with some exasperation. “The one thing I have realized is that whatever you do, you feel you’re still just scratching the surface. For every woman who sits in Parliament, or has done a Ph.D. or goes to the Supreme Court to argue a case, you have thousands in the villages who don’t even know about their basic rights and that they are equal citizens.”

It was partly my work in Khajuron that prodded me into an exploration of the Indian women’s movement. After my time there I was skeptical that any movement would ever make much of a difference in the lives of India’s rural women. Was it possible that a smattering of upper-class women could ignite millions of poor villagers to rise up against repression when the village women themselves did not think they were particularly repressed? Were there any rural-based movements organized by the poor? How much, if at all, was the current Indian women’s movement influenced by the American and European feminist movements?

It took me the better part of three and a half years to try to sort out a jumble of theory and action that spanned regions, political parties, class and caste, embraced both Mahatma Gandhi and Karl Marx, worked at often divergent purposes, encompassed elite groups and mass struggles and did not, in most cases, even think of itself as a collective movement. Indian feminists were always debating exactly what constituted “the movement,” and were intensely self-critical about the gains they had made. “There is still no clarity, despite a great
deal of enthusiasm,” Vina Mazumdar complained. Ela Bhatt, a pioneer who founded the most powerful women’s trade union in India, was also far from satisfied. “We are able to come together on a particular issue and raise our voices,” she told me, “but beyond that, we are still scattered. We still have not learned to work together.” Many Indian feminists frequently criticized the women’s groups that accepted money from Europe and the United States, arguing that funding organizations like Oxfam and the Ford Foundation were trying to buy control of the Indian groups. I never saw any evidence of this, but India was still so sensitive to its colonial past that the funding issue was heatedly debated at women’s conferences. Within the Indian government itself, where feminists had begun to have a voice in development policy, thereby making the women’s movement a livelihood for a growing number of people, quarrels and disputes were routine. In the summer of 1988, when a government-appointed committee released a preliminary draft of a national plan for Indian women up to the year 2000, there was an uproar from those feminists who had not been included in the planning. They retaliated by denouncing the report in the press. When I went to see Margaret Alva, the minister who had overseen the report, she was fuming. “There are many who ask, ‘How did you draw it up without involving us?’ ” she said. “But my point is, unless you have a draft, you can’t have a debate. I can’t just go and announce I want a national debate on women’s programs. I would get ten thousand or twenty thousand letters saying ‘You do this.’ That’s not the way to draft a plan.”

Occasionally a troublemaker would question whether the women’s movement in India even existed. In 1988, Madhu Kishwar of
Manushi
infuriated feminists when she asserted at a conference in the southern city of Trivandrum that there was in fact no women’s “movement” in India at all, but rather “mobilizations” and “sporadic struggles.” I myself would certainly describe all the activity that is occurring on behalf of women in India as a “movement,” but one with three separate parts: first, the urban feminist groups; second, the larger, more rural-oriented voluntary organizations; and third, mass peasant struggles. In the following pages, I will take a brief look at these three segments of the movement and then explore in more depth the Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, a trade union that I would classify as belonging to the second part of the movement. SEWA emerged in the 1980s as the premier women’s organization in India and a model of what was possible in the development of the poor.

Like most foreign journalists, I made my initial contact with the Indian women’s movement through the first group, the urban feminists, since they were the most accessible to me. These were young, articulate, highly educated and contentious women in New Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta who had begun to form feminist groups in the mid-1970s. The atmosphere in the country was ripe for them. “Towards Equality,” the report of Vina Mazumdar’s committee, had just been released to a flood of dramatic coverage in the press when the United Nations declared 1975 to be International Women’s Year and the beginning of a UN “Decade for Women”—giving Indian feminist leaders a context for their actions and later, through international conferences, opening up a worldwide network of contacts for them. In 1977, after the lifting of the Emergency, the suspension of civil liberties imposed by Indira Gandhi, there was an “explosion,” in the words of Vina Mazumdar, “of people wanting to participate.” The women’s movement—vocal, critical, focused on social issues—became a natural part of the new era. The current Indian women’s movement is also, of course, propelled by the American and European feminist movements, although Indian women’s leaders continue to debate the extent of the influence. Those women working with rural groups argue that the Indian movement is unique and indigenous, and from their point of view, they are right. Westernized feminists in the big cities, however, have established ties. Devaki Jain is a friend of Gloria Steinem’s and stays with her when she is in New York. Ritu Menon, who cofounded Kali for Women, a feminist publishing house, received a master’s degree in American Studies at Vassar and then worked at Doubleday in New York in 1970, the year that Doubleday published Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
. “There was the excitement of the moment, of being there when something really significant was happening,” Menon remembered of her time at Doubleday. In India, she founded Kali in part because “in the long term, there are few activities that are potentially more subversive than writing.”