Women Measure Independence

A few days back, during a CNN interview occasioned by the 50th anniversary of India’s independence, I was asked to give an assessment of Indian women. I stumbled through a sound bite answer, mouthing generalities like, “wonderful achievements and successes.” But I wasn’t satisfied. Once I was home, I kept thinking about the question, and about some valid way of defining women from India. But there are so many categories into which we fall--rural, urban, expatriate, poor, rich, middle-class, educated, illiterate, professional, working-class, belonging to this community or that one--that the task seems impossible. Yet as I considered the issue, an image came to me from a writer I’d read long ago in my hometown of Calcutta.

Bankim Chandra is celebrated in India for his novels featuring spirited women who battle and overcome many challenges. There is a metaphor that he uses sometimes to describe these women: baghini, tigress. It is a word that seems appropriate as I think today about the lives of women from India.

Tiger-hearted women--that is not how Westerners picture Indian women. They remember Indira Gandhi, yes, but are quick to point out that she was an exception. Far more numerous are the media stories of poverty and oppression, of females as helpless victims. But while oppression against women is a fact of life in India (where in the world is it not?), the spirit that battles oppression and demands dignity for women is equally a fact of life. And what that spirit has achieved in the last 50 years--even the last 10--is remarkable.

On the 50th anniversary of India’s independence, I think with admiration and gratitude of the hundreds of women who fought and suffered and sometimes died for that independence. Only a few names have come down to us--Sarojini Naidu, Matangini Hazra--for that is the nature of grass-roots movements involving women.

I think of the many women who battled and refused to give up, activists and mothers and sisters who protested the bride burnings until in 1994 the Mahila Act was passed, outlawing dowry demands and imposing strong punitive measures against those who harassed women or their families for dowry.

I think of the women of Andhra Pradesh who laid siege to the toddy shops in the early 1990s to protest the sale of alcohol to husbands who would routinely spend the family earnings on drink and come home to beat their wives and children. The determined stand of these simple village women--most of them without money, without education--rocked the entire state until a total liquor ban was declared.

I think of the women who took to the streets of the major cities, facing far greater dangers than we would in such marches in the West, and their vocal condemnation of the abortion of healthy female fetuses, which led to the passing in 1996 of the law that makes such an act a criminal offense.

I think of the women who are supporting Medha Patkar in her battle to prevent the building of the dam that will destroy the Narmada Valley. The women whose unrealized dreams and subsequent protests paved the path for Harita Kaur Deol to become in 1994 the Indian air force’s first female pilot. The “Chipko” women who chain themselves to trees to stop the lumber companies from deforesting the Himalayan foothills. The Muslim women of Kerala who in 1977 demanded, with success, that they be allowed to enter mosques. The women of a small village in Hoogly who recently defeated a fatwa forbidding females to play volleyball.

But most of all I think of the silent women, the invisible ones, the ones whose courage few will ever know of. Women like the ones I work with on MAITRI, a hotline for South Asian women in the San Francisco area. Women who have decided that they deserve a life without abuse, who are taking the often terrifying first steps away from a violent relationship. I think of the many dedicated volunteers at MAITRI and at other similar organizations across India and America and England and Africa, most of them founded in the last 20 years, who live with daily risk and danger so they can enable these women to begin again.

And so, as the golden jubilee of India’s freedom approaches, I salute my tiger-hearted sisters--of India and of the Indian diaspora--whose lives are a continual reminder of what independence truly means, and the price at which it is obtained.