Women's Grassroots Activism and Social Spaces in Chitrakoot, India.

(From time to time, The South Asian will publish detailed research articles consistent with its mission in serialized form. This is the first of such articles.)

PART I

"I am a man. A man! A woman is like a pair of shoes for me--to be worn when I want, and to be discarded when I am done." Declaring this, the man kicked his wife Mantoria hard in her back. As Mantoria screamed and writhed in pain, several men of Bachhran Village quietly wiped their tears. --Aapka Pitara (1999, p. 13)

In every village where women activists staged the street play, Mujhe Jawab Do! [Answer me!], the response from the audience was intense. Villagers sat, watched, and passionately discussed the play not heeding the intense heat, or the time of the day, or the daily chores that were yet to be done. After all, one of the daughters or daughters-in-law of their village had recently been killed by the same kind of violence that took Mantoria's life. But it was not simply Mantoria's murder or its commonplaceness that they found unnerving; what disturbed them more than anything else were the questions with which the play confronted them--questions about the worth of wives, daughters, mothers and sisters in their own families and community, and about their deeply held beliefs regarding what constituted honor, violence, crime, and justice.

This is the story of a grassroots campaign of poor, rural women in the Chitrakoot (previously, part of Banda) district of Uttar Pradesh state in North India. Drawing on my recent fieldwork, I examine the two-step evolution of a campaign on violence against women in this area. The first step saw the rise of a politicized awareness about violence within two local women's organizations, Mahila Samakhya and Vanangana, which stimulated the collective production of the play, Mujhe Jawab Do, and the accompanying songs and Phad (a picture story enacted by two narrators). The second step was to take the campaign from within the organization into the villages and public spaces of the district government administration, and provoke a critical rethinking of gendered violence in the local communities.

Darakht phaldar nahin; Dharti kirdar nahin; Mard wafadar nahin; Aurat beniyar nahin! (The trees are fruitless; the earth, characterless; the men, unfaithful; and the women, shameless!)

These lines (supposedly written by the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb) along with the couplet Gagri na phoote, chahe khasam mar jaye! (Can't bear to lose my pitcher of water, even if my man dies!) are often repeated to caution visitors when they first arrive in Chitrakoot. The picture of a region characterized by a harsh climate, barren land, vanishing forests, and acute water crisis is further complicated by a long tradition of bonded (indentured) labor, an almost ubiquitous presence of bandits and daduwas (powerful men), and a general environment of hardships that produces not only "disloyal men" in the folklore, but also "shameless women" who proudly declare that their water means more to them than their men! Ranking near the very bottom of the national and state averages in income, sex-ratio (846 women per 1000 men) and female literacy (23.9 percent), with raping, burning, and battering of women as everyday occurrences, Chitrakoot district is often described as a "society driven by the rule of the gun". In this district, two women's organizations, Mahila Samakhya (Education for Women's Equality) and Vanangana (Daughter of the Forest) have led what some have termed "a grassroots revolution" that spells women's "real emancipation".

The Mahila Samakhya program (henceforth, MS) was launched in 1989 by the Government of India in three states--Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat--with joint funding from the Royal Dutch Government. Envisioned and guided by dynamic feminist activists such as Vimala Ramachandran, Kamla Bhasin, Runu Chakravarti and Abha Bhaiya, this innovative scheme for women's education explicitly committed itself to women's empowerment, and operated in collaboration with gender-progressive NGOs at the district level. Departing from traditional literacy campaigns which had very limited success, MS drew upon the National Policy on Education (1986), which emphasized the need for a "positive interventionist role" on the part of the government in the empowerment of women.

The mode of MS' functioning displayed a keen awareness of geographical scale. Although headquartered at the state-level, programs were implemented through district level units. While urban women with more formal education held the official positions in each district level organization, the pivotal forces were the rural women who worked as coordinators called Sahyoginis and Sakhis. Each Sahyogini was responsible for ten villages, and each village had a Sakhi serving as a link between the village women and MS. Together the Sahyoginis and Sakhis organized meetings with village women, helping them constitute action groups (Samoohs) to collectively reflect on their conditions, constraints and needs, as well as to determine concrete strategies and goals for their empowerment. The literacy component was introduced only when the women themselves demanded it. Thus, MS was “not only couched in terms of women's 'empowerment' but [also recognized] that organizing rural women into groups to discuss gender relations [was] a necessary first step toward that end." MS became one of the rare government funded organizations that allowed the most disadvantaged rural women to define and pursue empowerment on their own terms according to their varying place-specific realities. Not surprisingly, then, while sexual violence and gendered and class-based environmental conflicts became the focus of MS activists in some areas, MS programs in other places prioritized literacy, pedagogy, technology, and the relationships between landlords and farm workers. The success and uniqueness of MS is often attributed to its decentralized functioning and its sensitivity to local concerns.

MS program in the Chitrakoot district first hit the headlines of the nation's newspapers when it accomplished the "incredible feat" of training the poorest and illiterate rural women from lower castes and the local Kol tribe as hand pump mechanics. While acute water scarcity and governmental apathy were the primary forces propelling rural women to master the technology of fixing handpumps, the acquisition of this skill stimulated a critical consciousness among women about caste, class, and gender relations, and a deep desire to attain formal literacy. Once women's confidence grew, they no longer wanted to rely on male mechanics for small things such as updating their log books. This led to the establishment of women's literacy camps in MS Chitrakoot, followed by a six-month long residential school for rural women. The "close link between literacy programmes and the hand pump project created an environment for the use of literacy skills. Women began to exchange news about their villages and homes . . . they were [motivated] to write their [daily] experiences and draw on walls." The evolution of Mahila Dakiya, a broadsheet published by the neo-literate women of MS Chitrakoot, was one of the most direct results of this literacy campaign. This "folksy, informal combination of [narratives], information blurbs, poems, songs and pictures," circulated and read in more than 200 villages of the Chitrakoot district, made a big splash in Indian newspapers when it won the Media Foundation's prestigious 1995 Chameli Devi Award for the "outstanding woman journalist".

In the meantime, as MS Chitrakoot's energies were spreading in various directions, two important changes began to occur. First, Madhavi Kuckreja, the director of MS Chitrakoot, started thinking about how women trained as mechanics and masons could obtain work contracts for government funded schemes. Within the structure of MS, however, such contractual work would have been illegal. Also, coinciding with the World Bank involvement in MS in 1995, MS organizations in Uttar Pradesh began to face increasing pressures to standardize their objectives and projects across districts, to generate reports of accomplishments, and to measure the progress of each village in terms of the numbers of women who had attained "empowerment". These factors pushed the leadership of MS Chitrakoot to envision the birth of a new organization, one that could work in cooperation with MS but not be stifled by the new constraints. As a result, Vanangana was born in 1996, and although Vanangana and MS have had their periods of tensions and conflicts, the two organizations have, for the most part, worked closely and complementarily with each other.

The campaign against violence is perhaps the most successful example of this close collaboration between Vanangana and MS Chitrakoot, a campaign which came alive under the leadership of Huma Khan, a student of gender, law, and social work, who succeeded Kuckreja as the director of MS Chitrakoot and subsequently took a position in Vanangana in 1998. Even as MS and Vanangana were forging ahead with their literacy and savings programs, their newsletters, and their handpump mechanics, masons and caterers, the supposedly empowered women who worked in these organizations to mobilize and empower others, were still being beaten, raped, and burned in their own homes. Workers were frequently harassed, threatened and tortured because of their involvement in MS and Vanangana; and at least once a month, officials were pushed into situations where they had to rescue their workers from their husbands or in-laws. To discourage future acts of violence, these officials frequently resorted to openly humiliating the male perpetrators by blackening their faces or beating them in public. And in the villages where these women worked, instances of dowry murders and domestic abuse abounded, forcing them to confront the limitations of a vision of empowerment that aimed at increasing women's access to technology and literacy, without addressing the violence that continuously reinforced their devaluation and disempowerment within their homes and communities.

These processes triggered within MS and Vanangana, a critical rethinking of the instrumentalist versions of empowerment in development theory and practice. As in other feminist movements in India, women also increasingly recognized that the tactic of shaming their male oppressors by deploying symbols of emasculation (men being beaten by women) and losing of face (blackened faces) was based on an acceptance of conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity that MS wanted to reject rather than reinforce. It is against this backdrop of contradictions that women faced in their personal and activist lives that we must understand the emergence of the street campaign on violence against women in Chitrakoot. In the next issue of The South Asian I will discuss the two step evolution of the campaign within and beyond MS and Vanagana.

Richa Nagar
Department of Women's Studies
University of Minnesota

[This article appeared first in Gender, Place and Culture (a Taylor and Francis Group publication) in 2000.]