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August 18, 2002
REVIEW: The struggles of strugglers
“VICTIM or heroine, witch or goddess, housewife or prime minister — these are the dual images that persist in our minds about Indian women,” writes Raka Ray in the introduction to her book Fields of protest. Indeed within the popular discourse there is no mention of the millions of ordinary Indian or, for that matter, any other women who struggle singly and collectively inside and outside their homes. After all aren’t they — who are not always ‘powerful’ Indira Gandhi nor the ultimate victim-turned avenging queen Phoolan Devi — striving for betterment too?
Ray studies the political and cultural circumstances in which groups of women organize themselves to create and sustain movements. She compares activist women and women’s movements in two of India’s most important cities, Mumbai and Kolkata.
These are two cities in the same country, yet the ways in which activists engage women’s issues, the nature of the issues, and indeed the activists’ understanding of what constitutes a legitimate women’s movement are fundamentally different.
The Indian women’s movement can be traced back to the 1970s, when women were primarily active in radical protests against the Indian state. Today it exists in a highly decentralized form with hundreds of organizations active in both urban and rural areas throughout India. Together and singly these groups, unaffected by religious differences, have fought against alcohol abuse by husbands, domestic violence, sexual assault, forced prostitution of children, environmental destruction and the general portrayal of women by the media.
Surprisingly Kolkata is conspicuous by its absence in both academic literature and public discussion about Indian women’s movements. Urban women’s movements were visible in Mumbai and Delhi as well as in Hyderabad and Bangalore, but not in Kolkata. Ray investigates this puzzle.
Given Kolkata’s strong proclivity to political tempestuousness, it was obvious that the explanation for this city’s absence from the publicly acknowledged realm of feminism lay more in the issues women tend to organize around. There is an emphasis on issues of literacy, employment, wage discrimination, water, electricity, which can be generalized as economic or of ‘pragmatic interest’ to women.
On the other hand, in Mumbai, issues such as violence against women, sexual harassment, safe contraception, and amniocentesis are at the forefront. In other words, they are more ‘feminist’ and of ‘strategic interest’ to women.
So when Ray asks women activists in Kolkata and Mumbai, “What are the most important issues facing women today?” their answer is most likely to be ‘jobs’ in the first city and ‘violence’ in the second.
Thus to the international feminist community, Mumbai stands out as an example of the Indian women’s movement at its strongest. It is this perception of Kolkata’s failure to conform to the ‘feminist’ model that has written it out of the women’s movement in India. By working towards an understanding of why and how women organize in Kolkata in ways different from Mumbai, Ray hopes to expand the notion of ‘legitimate’ feminist issues and thus write Kolkata back into the annals of the Indian women’s movement.
Bengali women in the late 1920s and 1930s were energized not so much by Gandhi as by the Bengali revolutionary leader Subash Chandra Bose. Because women were largely instrumental in decision making with regard to household consumption, Bose targeted them to spearhead the boycott movement. Mahatma Gandhi was less popular in Bengal, since he effectively put an end to Bengali preeminence in the national movement.
In the literature on women’s movements, politically affiliated women’s groups, particularly those on the Left, have a tendency to focus on general issues of poverty and inequality. They take up matters of gender concerns when convenient, and often subordinate the strategic interests of women to the larger interest of class.
Politically autonomous groups, on the other hand, are considered to be more explicitly feminist. They do not subordinate women’s interests to those of party or for political expediency, and are thus able to focus on issues most threatening to men and patriarchal institutions. Above all, they concentrate on issues of sexuality and violence.
Kolkata is a city with a long-standing oppositional and anti-establishment culture. This is largely because of the Bengali bhadrolok, the urban Bengali elite, who participated in the administration of the colonial state. Subsequently they found their paths blocked as they tried to move up to the ranks of the British bureaucracy. Armed with the weapons of liberal Western education and administrative experience, it was these bhadrolok who formed the core of a strongly anti-British movement in the late nineteenth century.
Kolkata’s political culture has for years been more open to the borrowed ideologies of class struggle than to the borrowed ideologies of feminist struggle. Women in Kolkata tend to view the lack of consciousness as a problem far more than women do in Mumbai.
Ray’s argument is that Mumbai has a dispersed political field. There is no single dominant force in the city as there is in Kolkata. The Mumbaiites are largely immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Gujaratis, Parsis, South Indians and others co-exist, each group with its own culture, mutually influenced but growing independently. There is more recognition in Mumbai than there is in Kolkata of the need for women to have separate spaces, and indeed to have organizations without men in them.
Women in the same country, facing similar grievances and problems, articulate different needs and interests. Ray asserts that interests are not created in vacuum and it is through examining the operation of a political field that we find ourselves in a better position to understand their creation and deployment. Such an approach allows us a better understanding of the thousands of unsung, courageous and committed fighters for a better, safer, and more just world for women.
Ray’s work, incisive and deep, delves into how women’s movements are shaped within the framework of the history, demography, and political culture of the various units within the larger parameters of the state. So in any given state there need not exist only one field of protest but many according to the diversity within it.
Writer’s email: masoodm@emirates.net.ae
Fields of protest: women’s movements in India
By Raka Ray
Kali for Women, K-92 Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi-110016 Tel: 91-11-6864497, 6964947.
Email: kaliw@del2.vsnl.net.in
ISBN 81-86706 23 2 217pp. Indian Rs250
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