Women who make a difference

(A talk at the CII Women Leader's Forum, 2009)

Last week a friend’s Facebook status quoted the title of the previous session, “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus”. I wondered what happened to Earth! Weren’t we meant to be from here – both men and women? Well, as you must have guessed, I don’t believe men and women are born different or have intrinsic virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses that belong solely to their biological identities.

However men and women are both born into this world that has preconceived notions about them binding them to their pre-ascribed roles and destinies. The reasons for these ideas and beliefs are historical and are influenced by economics, psychology, politics and sociology and opening that Pandora’s box would keep us here till the next Women’s day! But it suffices to say, that even today, in most circumstances, a woman is born and grows up in an environment conditioned to see her as the second sex. Whether it is family, society, religion or nation, the eyes narrow at her every act of self assertion. And perhaps this rather powerless beginning makes her aware of the marginalized inside her. And thus, a woman develops an affinity for the marginalized in society and tends to understand the position of the powerless more acutely, more instinctively. Being constantly weighed and found wanting compared to men, the woman empathises with the persecuted and understands what it means to be voiceless. Often, her struggles for the oppressed in society are projections of her own struggle in the world, and her attainments therein, an embodiment of her own declaration of freedom and justice. Perhaps that’s why, women tend to make a difference.

In the last 8 years that I have been with the India Foundation for the Arts, I have traveled across the country to meet some really brave women who are making a difference. When Moina, in Birbhum, challenges her partner with her song “You can be the owner of my body but can you claim my mind”, or Rani Begum in Muzaffarpur says “Marriage destroys an artist”, in the film The Other Song about the lives and music of the tawaifs of Benaras, or Charusheela in Nasik, playing Aai in Sunil Shanbag’s production “Cotton 56, Polyster 89” holds together the lives of the men who have been locked out of their jute mills, or Vasudha in Ahmedabad sits with the girls who are victims of the Gujarat carnage helping them express their grief and anger on canvas – all these women are making a difference. They are making a difference with their utterances, with their stances, with their choices, expressions and assertions. There are stories I find everywhere I travel. But the one story I would like to share with you today, I came by long before I started working, while I was still a student.

Rehana bibi lived in a small town in West Bengal. I got to know her because she would be called home sometimes to make biriyani and kababs. She had a typical story - her husband was a house painter who had no fixed job and whatever little he earned would be washed off with his drink in the evening. Rehana got her regular dose of beatings and curses more so for having given birth to three daughters, worked in three or four houses and lived because that was the only way Rehana knew how to live. And that was how I left her in her small town.

I met her years later when I had gone back to sort out some family issues. This time I met a different Rehana. She had come home but not to cook biriyani. She was raising money for her school that she ran at her home. Rehana, the little woman who now looked visibly taller and stronger, laughed as I poured out the questions. Her story was simple, she said. She had had enough of her husband and daughters and their constant complaints and so a few years ago she ran away, she said, with a much younger man who promised her the ‘promised land’. He ditched her a year later when she refused to sleep with his friends for money but not before she was pregnant, a souvenir of his promised land. She came back to her husband because that’s the only place she could come back to only to realize that he had married again, probably sold off one of her daughters and reduced the other two to being slaves of his new wife. He had given her talaaq, he said.

Rehana took back her two daughters, started hunting for the third one, got an abortion, decided to fight it out for alimony in court and began working in a few houses again. The needs of court kacheri led her to night classes, she said, and soon she was not just able to read and write but started teaching her daughters at home. Then she realized she could earn much more if she started a little school for girls and said goodbye to smirking houseladies who had give her cleaning and washing jobs. The school was difficult to start, but she borrowed some money and in two years she had a running school with 14 students, all from her community, girls who had never been to school before. She coaxed the mothers telling them that while she taught them maths and urdu she would also teach them to cook biriyani.

But she realized that the myriad problems of muslim women like her lay in their lack of education, exposure and understanding of the ways of the world. She started training with an NGO to be a counselor. Very soon she was a mix of a family welfare counselor cum human rights activist cum fixer of family problems and the aunt everyone went to, to sort out teenage issues. All this with the court case slugging on and the school running with more students every year. Rehana narrated her story in a rather nonchalant manner while I gaped on, 23, still a student, living off my parents and Rehana not much older than that having lived through many lifetimes already. I was wondering how I should react? What should be my response? Empathy, awe, sympathy, amazement? And then she cleared it all saying, and I am translating here from Bengali, “Didi, good that fellow beat me every night. You have to heat the iron and beat it hard to make steel, no?” How could she understand so simply what we struggled with in the graduation classes of political science and sociology? How could she say it so unassumingly? Rehana is making a difference because she has felt the heat herself and seen her voicelessness projected in the women she goes out to help everyday. She has not found her other daughter nor is the court case over but the women in the mohalla adore her, respect her and love her. As do I. She took the donation and as she was leaving I ask her, So Rehana don’t you wear the burkha anymore?” Rehana shrugged, “Didi, they said it would protect me from harm. Look how far that has got me. So I threw it away.” Rehana is my hero.

The reason I share this story is not just because it inspires me so, but also because sometimes I am filled with a sense of foreboding when I think of the future that lies in front of us, women.

There is a phrase in Bangla “Je jai Lonkai shei hoi Rabon” which loosely translated means “Whoever sits on the throne of Lanka becomes another Ravan”.

I sometimes wonder at the swiftly shifting power balance between men and women today. The economics and politics are changing the social fabric at an accelerating rate and with it the lives of millions of men and women bringing them closer to each other in terms of financial equality, social standing and individual freedom. Will this rapidly closing gap between the power structures of men and women change the essential marginalized nature of women and with it change their perspectives? When the powerless become powerful do they become worse oppressors? One will have to scrutinise the examples of Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration, India Gandhi during Emergency and the recent travesties of Mayawati. I am reminded of Jane Addams who said “I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done, but then we must also remember that we have not had the chance. “

Could it then be quite this way – that it is not really about men and women but about the masculinity and femininity that is there is each one of us men or women? Masculinity being the aggressive, power loving contoller and femininity being the nurturing cohabiter. This is what has happened over time. Women have found their definition of success and fulfillment in either performing the roles of traditional femininity, where the nurturer has remained at home as the mother and wife, thus living up to its patriarchal roles. Or as she has stepped out of her home she has chucked her femininity deeming it useless in the big bad world and taken on her masculinity to define her role outside of her home as head of organisations and nations. Thereby the modern working woman has adopted the very definitions and manifestations of power which were identified with her oppressors.

Will we not be able to define a future for ourselves outside this paradigm, where femininity and its values will construct for us the roles of leaders and change-makers? Will we, for example, be able to define success as cohabitation and not victory over another, or triumph - a tool for forgiveness and not for revenge or power as a facilitating force and not a dominating one? Will we, who have lived with boundaries all our lives and know how loathsome they are, be able to erase political borders drawn by the opportunists and connect nations and people who actually belong together? Sounds, I know, a bit like John Lennon, but I am not the only one dreaming here. I have the aspirations of millions of my sisters with me and I believe if Rehana could do it, so can we. And if we can, then I think women will continue to make a difference.