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The Women’s
Movement In India: Making A Difference
For a decade, I unwittingly followed Virginia Woolf’s advice to women writers, by leading the life of a secular nun, celibate, putting most of my earnings into Manushi, with virtually no personal or social life, working for a cause not related in any immediate way to my own being. I did a lot of writing in Manushi anonymously or using pseudonyms. My main pleasures were writing verse, reading and conversing with friends, who were colleagues either at college or at Manushi. ««« One of the jobs I did at Manushi was rewriting scholarly articles from various disciplines (by scholars like Veena Das and Alaka Basu) in a language our readers could understand. I also read huge quantities of Hindi fiction, in order to find and translate a story for each issue. This was enjoyable and I found some little-noticed gems like Ek Shauhar ke Khatir (which I translated as All for a Husband) by Ismat Chughtai, whom we also interviewed in the same issue. Those were the days before translation studies and I honed my skills entirely through practice. It was rewarding when major writers, such as Rajendra Yadav, Mannu Bhandari and Upendranath Ashq liked my translations of their stories and asked me to translate more for them. «««
««« One of the most terrifying moments I have experienced was in curfew-bound Meerut in 1987, when Prabha Rani and I, surveying post-riot damage, visited a gutted Muslim house and were surrounded by Hindu women, demanding to know our religion, and ready to destroy our equipment and assault us. Never have I been so glad to see policemen as when two arrived and escorted us away. ««« I also met many remarkable women and some men, who have disappeared from, or perhaps never appeared in, the annals of the movement. Women like Kamlesh, a young Hindi-speaking divorcee from Daryaganj, whose brothers mistreated her, and who volunteered regularly in 1980. She stopped coming over and then we heard she had died and been cremated; it seemed like a family-engineered death and we felt we had erred in not keeping better track of her. I still have a photo of her with some of us, all looking impossibly young, on the railway platform, saying goodbye to Patty, a volunteer from America who had spent a year or so at Manushi. In those days, cameras were few and far between, so Manushi’s activities were barely documented, but snapshots of these women remain in my head. There was Pushpaji, an older, witty and fun-loving widow from Defence Colony, who came into her own once her depressing marriage ended, but was still somewhat tyrannised by her sons. There was Usha, a doctor in Bombay, a single woman who had devoted her life to supporting her family, who seemed to suddenly explode or implode when catalysed by contact with Manushi. Kiran, who ran a Hindi printing press in Patna, eloped with her woman friend Khurshid to the Manushi office, pursued by Khurshid’s violent family. Manushi’s landlady in Lajpat Nagar, a feisty Sikh woman, was one of our greatest supporters; she often brought food up to us and told her two young daughters to model themselves on us. ««« Over the years, many students were drawn to Manushi through me. There was Fatima, a young woman of extraordinary intensity, who lived in Daryaganj, volunteered for a while and acted in a play, until her father threatened to have a heart attack. We went to meet her family, but though they seemed reassured, their opposition persisted and she was forced to leave. More tragically, there was Jyoti, whose rebellion against her dysfunctional family led her to drug addiction; she finally jumped to her death from Jantar Mantar. There were also several men, even less acknowledged. The Hindi playwright, who taught us page lay-out for the first issue, when our feminist volunteer failed to show up. The American demographer who helped in numerous ways, over many years. Madhu’s two brothers, always on call and many male activists in remote regions, who wrote reports, and collected subscriptions. ««« Among our more enjoyable activities was a Hindi street play, Roshni, improvised in a workshop directed gratis by Feisal Alkazi, on Manushi’s terrace, in one of Delhi’s wonderfully sunny winters. Madhu wrote the songs; I wrote the script, based on our improvisations; and we had an ever-changing cast, which performed all over the city, from Lajpat Nagar to Connaught Place to college campuses — WFS
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The
women’s movement took me to parts of the city that I would otherwise
have had no occasion to visit. I spent nights at printing presses in
Shahdara and Paharganj, the only woman among a dozen typesetters, as
they corrected errors and rolled proof pages off the machines. I found
my way by bus to far-flung residential colonies, to meet potential
writers and illustrators. I spent long days interviewing a range of
women, each as an activist in a slum beyond Nangloi, for our column, One
of Many.