Lending voice to the meek
Priyanka Singh

They Hang
by Syeda S. Hameed. Women Unlimited. Pages 183. Rs 275.

Believing that women empowerment and emancipation has been set into this enormous motion that would liberate the lot of women in our country, would be taking a naiveté’s view.

This book offers a harsh reality check, whereby with each story, an unshakable fear grows in strength that nothing has changed. Women who are more educated and dare to take on the might of a cold world, only get sucked in the whirl of the movement, often making some noise but not enough to yield a positive fallout.

Syeda, former Chairperson of the National Commission for Women, was in a position to make a difference but her own angst at running into a blind alley each time made the book possible. She says,: "...my screen brings up the faces of hundreds of women, each one pleading for my attention, demanding that I tell her story. Tell her story. Why? To plead her case? To deliver justice? Both? Yes, both. But during my three years as a member was I able to deliver justice to the women who appeared at my door? Did any state functionary click to attention at my call? I can count on the fingers of one hand the cases which came to a successful conclusion."

Her self-doubt and loathing at a brute system that makes it possible for a woman to be treated like a rag doll is central to the stories.

Be it an illiterate but plucky woman or a Cambridge graduate, a common thread runs through their lives, making them incapable of taking charge of their crumbling world. The stories are blood curdling, for these are true. Gangrape for honour, battering for salvaging pride, sexual harassment by the Principal of an elite school, parading the nakedness of hapless women...the grossness disgusts. Worse, more the determination to change the situation, more it fails to move people out of their inertia.

Syeda’s frustration is real. So is her pain that her efforts went to waste. The book is her last attempt to wake up anybody who would care to listen and make a difference. It is a resolve to restore the dignity of the woman who was yoked like an animal because she ploughed the fields as her fuddled husband lay dead to the world. It is an untiring effort to lend voice to the meek—a desperate attempt to make the stories of these women live in public memory, with a hope that some day they would cease to be rag dolls, to be twisted at will.

The book provokes anger and thought. Syeda writes, "All the women whose lives inform my stories displayed enormous pain-tolerance." India shining? Hardly.

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