May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (26 page)

Perhaps the truest measure of SEWA’s success was the pressure it had come under in recent years to admit men as members. When SEWA went to court to secure licenses for its vegetable vendors, for example, it also argued on behalf of a number of men who sold vegetables in the streets. The subsequent ruling stipulated that all SEWA members should be granted vegetable licenses. The men, who could not be members of SEWA, were left out. This put the organization in an awkward situation and forced its leaders to rethink its purpose and goals; as Ela Bhatt admitted, “When we are talking of social change, it can’t be separate.” But this was not the consensus of the membership. “Every time we talk about it, our members clearly say, no, we do not want men,” Ela Bhatt said. “I understand that, and I also realize that as soon as there are men sitting in a meeting, they in all good faith will want to dominate. Even if we did not give them the right to vote, or any right at the decision-making level, even then the very presence of men will make women withdraw, including myself.” I expressed surprise at this. “Yes, I think all women feel it,” she said. “My husband is a great supporter, so his expectations are much, much more than what I have been able to perform. It’s a very subtle thing, and of course never has such a situation come that he is
there in my official meetings. But maybe in the meeting I would be always unconsciously thinking, Will he approve of this? or, Is he of the same opinion or not?”

SEWA, of course, was not without its problems. At the time I was there in the fall of 1987, many of the cooperatives had financial troubles. The handblock printers, for instance, could not sell everything they produced, and the quilt makers had found it difficult to get cloth scraps since most of the textile mills had shut down. Two years before, after much internal debate and some resistance, SEWA had brought in “committed professionals” from the outside, all of them women, to manage the cooperatives, the bank and the union activities. This ran counter to the organization’s philosophy of bringing people up from the bottom, but as Renana Jhabvala, one of SEWA’s leading organizers, admitted: “There is no substitute for twenty-four years of study and experience. We came to the realization that if we didn’t hire professionals, the co-ops would all be at a dead end.”

SEWA’s rural wing also had problems. Encompassing sixty-five villages in several districts in Gujarat, the rural operation trained women to weave, spin, plant fruit trees, make roof tiles and raise milk-producing water buffalo. Many women had been organized into their own dairy cooperatives, eliminating the middlemen who routinely cheated them of a fair price for milk. But the problems in establishing the dairy cooperatives were enormous. The men left out of the co-ops became bitter and alienated, which SEWA claimed drove them to sabotage. In some cases, SEWA organizers said, the men poured water into the cooperative’s milk. These were just a part of the larger problem that SEWA had yet to solve in its village operations, which was a serious lack of qualified personnel. In order for any kind of rural development project to work well, it needed, at least in the beginning, intense supervision from the organizers. SEWA simply did not have enough trained people willing to leave their homes in Ahmedabad and live full-time in a mud hut in a village.

The organization tried to deal with the problem by sending its top organizers in for a day or two at a time—work that was both rewarding and colossally frustrating, as I learned the day I went with Anila Dholakia, the director of SEWA’s rural wing, to several villages in one of the most drought-stricken regions of Gujarat.

Dholakia, a former university professor who was never at a loss for words, had joined SEWA after she had lost patience with the women’s groups in town that held meetings to make needlepoint pillows. Like
a number of other Indian women’s activists I met, Dholakia assured me that she was opposed to “radical Western feminism” and that in India “we do not end our marriages, we do not burn our bras, we do not want to deglamorize ourselves.” (This reaction to Western feminism used to puzzle me, but I finally concluded that for many Indian women, no more recent development in the American women’s movement had been nearly so graphic as the reports of bra burning were.) Yet Dholakia was more of a feminist than she realized. As we drove an hour and a half southeast from Ahmedabad into a dustbowl of ochre-colored sand, Dholakia told me about an overseas trip she had been offered because of her work with SEWA. Everyone in her family, including her own mother, reacted by heaping praise on Dholakia’s husband for his generosity in allowing his wife to go. Dholakia herself felt completely left out. “If I had been a man,” she said, “people would have praised me instead.” As it was, the neighbors clucked that she was neglecting her children, her husband and her house. I asked her how she lived with this. “I rationalize,” she said, then shrugged. “People can’t help the way they think. They’re all prisoners of their own environments.”

As we drove along the highway, we passed streams of people walking south with bundles of clothes and little children, all part of a migration in search of water and work. In the sand were the drying skeletons of water buffalo, just some of the thousands that had died that summer. There had been no rain in four years, and if there was no monsoon in the coming year, people too would start dying. We were headed for the district of Dholka, where SEWA, in an effort to save the livestock that had so far survived, had begun distributing cut sugarcane grass for the cattle owned by its members. The purpose of Dholakia’s trip that day was to check on this fodder distribution in several villages. She knew from experience that sometimes the truck drivers who brought in the grass would sell it for a good profit, instead of delivering it to the right hands.

Our first stop was the village of Baldana, a sad little place surrounded by a flat horizon in tones of brown. The leaves of the few trees were coated with a thick film of dust, and there was virtually no green in sight. Dholakia went into what appeared to be the village council building, greeted the village pradhan, then found herself in the middle of a protracted argument. The gist of it was this: Ten days earlier, the pradhan had tried to buy one fourth of SEWA’s fodder for himself, but the SEWA worker in charge had become angry and
told him to go away because the fodder was for the women only. The pradhan and his minions now wanted the SEWA worker removed from the village. Dholakia, in an effort to appease the pradhan, whose ill will could have ruined SEWA’s work in the village, first apologized for the behavior of the woman and agreed that she should not have become angry. But then Dholakia pointed out that the pradhan should not have tried to buy the fodder since it was, after all, for the members of SEWA. The pradhan countered that he knew of a pradhan in another village who had been allowed to buy SEWA’s fodder. Numerous village elders joined in, and the discussion continued in heated Gujarati for more than an hour.

Dholakia—who by this time had discovered that in any case there would be no fodder distribution that day because no trucks were available—finally left Baldana in order to drop in on a few other villages. Inevitably, this meant she spent the rest of her day troubleshooting. In the village of Dev Dholera, a group of weavers told her they didn’t want to allow some families they didn’t like into the weaving cooperative because they were sure they would cause trouble. “There will be more trouble if you leave them out,” Anila told them. “Do you want your looms to be set on fire one night?” The weavers agreed to talk to the families the next day. “No,” said Anila. “You talk to them now.” Toward the end of the day, Dholakia made a courtesy call on a local official, another whose goodwill was crucial to SEWA’s rural operations. After the preliminary tea and pleasantries, Dholakia began complaining that the people digging ponds as part of the district’s drought-relief work were not getting paid. She also wanted to know why additional drought-relief work, promised months ago, was not yet under way. The official offered a vague excuse, then promised to look into it. As an offering at the end, Dholakia gave him a large brick of what looked like gooey dark chocolate, telling him it was a high-vitamin diet supplement for livestock that she wanted him to try out on his cattle. The official thanked her, then looked at the brick with some suspicion. “Cadbury it is not,” Dholakia admitted.

During the ride back to Ahmedabad, Dholakia talked about her work and the problems that SEWA faced. “Maybe we’re too ambitious,” she said. “We just don’t have the infrastructure in the villages.” She told me it took her up to six months of visits every few days just to build up trust among women in the villages. Only then could she begin to think about starting a project that might improve their lives.
Most of the day I had been with her had been spent in the car, in transit between stops. It was obvious that she was spread much too thin.

The truth was that SEWA, for all its success, had not yet been able to clone itself. There were nine other SEW As in India, all of them for poor women and all of them independent, but none had been able to achieve the stellar results of the original in Ahmedabad, where much of the organization’s strength came from Ela Bhatt. She herself said, “I know realistically that we are not going to have many SEWAs, although I would very much like to. We work together as sisters, and I thought we would have been able to bring up a joint force, but so far it hasn’t happened so much.”

And yet, it was SEWA that proved to me what potential there was among the women of India. In the beginning, partly because my exposure to Indian feminism was limited to a few urban groups, I had been doubtful that the women’s movement would ever make much of a difference. By the time I left, my feelings had begun to change, and after I returned to the United States and had the time to review three and a half years of work, I realized, in pulling it all together, how much vital activity in behalf of women was occurring in all parts of the country. Yes, it was true, the movement was not unified, but I don’t know if it ever could be or should be in a country as diverse as India. And yes, the movement had so far affected only a minuscule minority of India’s four hundred million women, most of whom lived in complete ignorance of its existence and goals. Voluntary organizations doing work for women involved only two hundred thousand women at most, and some of the groups worried that they had reached a plateau of ideas. But to my mind the movement was a strong, vibrant beginning, even if in many cases it had so far only identified what was wrong. SEWA, the Working Women’s Forum, the peasant struggles and even the urban groups taught me it was possible to make a difference in at least some women’s lives.

ONE OF THE GREAT PARADOXES OF MODERN INDIA WAS THE RISE AND
tumultuous rule of Indira Gandhi, one of the most powerful women in the world, in a country where most other women were among the most impoverished and neglected on earth. How did Indira Gandhi win election as prime minister four times, and dominate the subcontinent for almost two decades, while the majority of women in her country remained unaware of the basic rights that Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi’s father and the nation’s first prime minister, had insisted be written into India’s Constitution for them? Why did Indira Gandhi, in many ways a surprisingly feminine woman, largely ignore those of her own gender?

Loved, feared, admired and despised, Indira Gandhi was a woman whose sensibilities were shaped by one of the most extraordinary dramas of the twentieth century. The story of her life was no less than the story of the traumatic, inspirational birth of India, in which one of the poorest nations in the world, moved by the ideals of democracy,
secularism and nonviolent disobedience, wrested its independence from one of the greatest empires in history. Indira Gandhi was part of a family that not only drove the course of events but also left her convinced that her destiny was to have her own place in history as well.

She was born in 1917 during the last days of the British Raj, into the aristocratic Nehru household, which became a headquarters for the civil disobedience campaign. As a child she never knew when her parents might be sent off to jail. After an erratic education in India and Europe, she struggled in an unhappy marriage and served as her father’s reluctant hostess at Teen Murti House, the prime minister’s residence. By 1966, less than two decades later, the shy, tag-along daughter had become prime minister herself. She emerged as a shrewd, forceful politician, one who silenced her critics and increasingly took on the role of dictator after she suspended civil liberties and declared a state of “Emergency” in June 1975. Two years later, Indian voters turned her out of office in a massive political defeat, but in 1980, in the most astonishing political turnaround in modern India, the same voters returned her to power. Her death four years later seemed a tragic commentary on an almost mythic life. Indira Gandhi, the leader whose consuming interest had been keeping India together at a time when people thought it was splitting apart, was finally assassinated by two men linked to the nation’s most threatening separatist movement.