Even though the Northeastern states are economically poorer compared to North India, male oppression in the society is lesser. In this article, Sriram Ananthanarayanan talks about the status of women in these societies.

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The under-represented, over-stereotyped region of Northeast India usually evokes images of conflict in the mainstream Indian media. Facing the brute hegemony of the armed Indian state and reeling under the ensuing conflict with numerous nationalist and sub-nationalist actors, the verdant region continues to have much of its small town and rural population face heavy repression. For years, development for the region has not been accorded the priority it merits. And often the mainstream Indian consciousness is used to internalising condescending reductions such as the “Northeast Problem” or “Integrating the Northeast with the rest of India”.

With the stereotypes of violence, backwardness and poverty that the Northeastern states and its people face all over India, what is often overlooked are some of the remarkable features of the region, one of the foremost being the wonderfully open presence of women in almost every facet of life, which I was able to witness again and again to my unmitigated joy, a feature not exactly common in many other parts of the sub-continent.

Travelling within the region for my research, I was struck by the strength and public presence of women. I had certainly read of the considerably lesser levels of patriarchy and male oppression in comparison to North India, but it really was uplifting to witness firsthand. This is a heartening sight in the states of Assam and Nagaland, and from what I’ve heard, the rest of the region as well. While economic development levels in the region are comparable to some of the poorer North and Central Indian regions, both visually and from data corroboration, what is astonishingly different about the Northeast when compared to North India is the significant public presence of women, cutting across age, class and community. This is similar to what I’ve seen in the better developed South Indian states.

On buses and roads in Guwahati, on crowded bus rides to and from Nagaon in Middle Assam and Gossaigaon in Western Assam as well as walking around the streets of various towns and cities in Nagaland, at least half the people I saw were women, even at night. There was also a discipline shown by men on buses getting up from women’s reserved seating when women came in. On the streets, one sees many female students, workers, vendors, and housewives mulling around the crowd and travelling on public transportation without any hesitancy or fear. Small rural villages have young women across socioeconomic classes present in very public areas throughout the day, rare to see in villages or towns in North India. Even at night as I was travelling back by bus to Guwahati from Nagaon, I saw many young women in uniformed skirts, stockings and shoes, manning a petrol station along the highway on the outskirts of Guwahati.

Another noticeable feature, due to this large public presence of women, is the markedly lesser leering and harassment that women face here, particularly in comparison with Delhi. Certainly the experience on Guwahati buses has been far more tolerable than the macho, molesting madness in Delhi, where one can see, as clear as day, women being leered at and groped. Now I’ve no doubt that cat-calls, groping and harassment of women very much exist in Assam and the rest of Northeast India, but so far, each and every woman I’ve spoken to, who has also been to Delhi, said they feel much safer here than they ever did there.

Even many of the men I spoke to highlighted the huge amounts of sexual harassment that their female friends from the region faced in Delhi, when studying or working there, facing the oppressive brunt of it as much because of their gender as their place of origin. There’s something in this place that a lot of the other cities and towns in India can learn from.

Spunk and paan-stained teeth: A particular incident stands out in my mind that again was uplifting to witness. On a cramped overnight train ride from Gossaigaon back to Guwahati, the compartment I was precariously standing in was overflowing with large gunny sacks filled with vegetables. They belonged to a group of about 6 middle-aged women, all with weathered feet, beautiful dark skin, strong arms, red paan-stained teeth and wearing worn-out, tattered saris. From the ornaments they wore and the large bindis on their foreheads I guessed that they might be of Bengali origin, but wasn't sure. They sat with the poise and strength of daily struggle.

I tentatively approached one of them, a tall robust woman, who looked like the leader of the group, and asked where they were heading. Through a paan-filled gurgle, she said that they were going to sell vegetables at the weekly Sunday markets in Kokhrajar town and Guwahati. They bought veggies from across state lines in West Bengal (where there’s always a surplus and thus much lower prices) and sold them at the markets for a small profit. Since Gossaigaon is one of the Western-most sub-districts of Assam, bordering West Bengal and a small part of Bangladesh, many vegetable vendors, mostly women, make trips on a frequent basis to sell produce in various markets across Lower and Middle Assam. I was witnessing, first hand, the gritty entrepreneurial spirit of the working poor that characterised their will to survive in extreme hardship.

Upon reaching the first station, Kokhrajar, the women proceeded to unload these monstrous sacks, all the while barking at the men in the train to move aside. The large sacks were heaved with consummate ease over the heads of ducking passengers and placed on the platform. I asked the same woman whether they needed help unloading the sacks and with a smile, she replied in broken Hindi, “Bhaiyya, we do this all the time, no problem for us”.

Real spunk, I thought to myself.

My heart did take a little dive when I saw the local Sub-Inspector at the station demand his weekly bribe as they were unloading the sacks, but even here the women’s chutzpah was evident. One of them handed him a twenty-rupee note, and when he asked for more, she brushed him off with élan. I’m not sure what she said, but she seemed to indicate the exact bodily orifice that he could shove his baton in. The khaki-clad lout slunk away, muttering something to himself, probably looking for the next handout. I believe this weekly exercise is because it’s illegal to transport produce on passenger trains, particularly across state lines…but then again this is India and indeed, South Asia…the people always find a way to survive. Three women got off with half the veggies as the train trundled on, and the same cycle of events repeated itself when we reached Guwahati in the wee hours of the morning.

I don’t know what it was that lifted my spirits, whether it was their spunk, the way they chewed paan, their powerful forearms that heaved sacks I would find myself struggling with or their entrepreneurial spirit in the face of obvious hardship. Maybe it was a bit of each or just the picture of the hardened working-class woman, tougher than anyone else.

Jhum and the markets of Tuenzang: Speaking of hardened working class women, it would be a travesty to not mention the hard labour of women in Nagaland.

Driving along the undulating hill roads of the region with a couple of friends, my eyes were greeted with what can only be described as a riot of green starting with the tea gardens in Upper Assam that border Nagaland to a verdant explosion once we entered the tribal state. Now, my roots are in Kerala, which I chauvinistically believed to be the greenest region on the planet but I’m now forced to beat a timid retreat from that position, particularly as I was told that it was one of the driest times of the year! However the lush and dense foliage covering the steep hills pose a particular problem with respect to cultivation for the local population…a problem overcome only by dint of hard labour. And that is where once again, I came to witness the awesome strength of the local population, particularly women.

The primary form of cultivation practised in Nagaland and in many other parts of Northeast India is called jhum and is essentially cultivation along hill slopes. Anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is hard work. Now imagine chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (uphill) back to your village in the evening for cooking fire. Add to this, household chores, preparation of meals in the morning and evening, tending to livestock as well as rearing children and you’ve pretty much got a vague picture of the sheer volume of hard labour that rural women here (and all over the world for that matter) are immersed in. I’m not going to fall for the liberal middle-class trap of romanticising the idyllic village life while hardly being able to function without a computer, cell phone and a grocery store round the corner. What I saw with the women in Nagaland was hard work, the hardest there is, and it required not just strength of character but actual physical strength as well (both abominably lacking among upper-class city folk).

I was also told by locals and friends familiar with the area that jhum is usually a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest. The practice of jhum is however sadly affected in certain parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.

Cut to the main market in Tuenzang town, and one can see that out here almost every element of public commerce has women pretty much running the show. About 90% of the vendors were women, many clad in jeans and t-shirts, and wearing makeup. They were selling anything from vegetables and tubers to snails and frogs. To those of you whose quasi-brahminical sensibilities are a little pricked, I would like to add that in many European and Asian countries snails and frogs are delicacies in some high flung restaurants (they just have some hoity-toity name for it that make it sound all exotic when some upper-class twit eats them with a small silver fork).

Mothers, daughters, relatives, and friends ran small stands together, many with babies on their laps. Older children would sometimes take the young infants on their backs and care for them while the women worked at the stands. Unloading boxes, setting up the stands, arguing with shoppers on prices…all women, all the time, at the Tuenzang market.

I hope and pray that the strength and public presence of women in this region continues to grow and show others how, even poor societies functioning under tremendous pressures from outside forces can function with remarkably lesser patriarchy and macho male oppression.

- by Sriram Ananthanarayanan

Sriram Ananthanarayanan is an independent researcher and journalist focussing on issues surrounding labour, gender and social disenfranchisement in regions of conflict. He is soon going to pursue full-time doctoral studies on the same.