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Saturday, August 10, 2013
Vol. 7 No. 32
LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE
HOW FREE ARE INDIAN WOMEN?
FEAR AND LOATHING IN NEW DELHI Is the Capital safer than it was in December? Perhaps, but new studies reveal the most unsafe place for a woman is her home >Pages 1819
This year we commemorate Independence Day by attempting to answer the above question. Read the triumphant tales and discouraging truths
MY ‘MONKEY DARLING’ For most Indian women, disfigured breasts after surgery mean a sexless life, when what they need is some romance and humour >Page 10
AN AGENT OF CHANGE Supreme Court lawyer Karuna Nundy on her work on women’s issues and the Justice JS Verma committee report >Page 11
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SHAKILA This artist’s journey is about liberation from harsh circumstances >Pages 1213
The girls from Yuwa, an NGO that runs a football and education programme in Jharkhand, at their training ground.
THE KRANTI GIRLS How a former US air force lieutenant found a new philanthrophy model for Kamathipura’s teenaged girls >Pages 2021
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LOUNGE First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream. LOUNGE EDITOR
PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS
SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM
R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)
NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 2013° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
Why an issue about women? ARIJIT SEN/HINDUSTAN TIMES
(EXECUTIVE EDITOR)
has dipped further and more of the same crimes against women ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY have been registered. Irom NABEEL MOHIDEEN Sharmila is eating through her MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN nose to stay alive. The 41-year-old SHUCHI BANSAL Manipuri woman who has been on SIDIN VADUKUT a fast since 2000 for the repeal of SUNDEEP KHANNA PANKAJ MISHRA the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, in the North-East, faces ©2013 HT Media Ltd a trial later this month for attempt All Rights Reserved to commit suicide. This Act has allowed unspeakable brutality by the army upon women in the seven North-East states—most of it unreported and unchronicled. In this Independence Day issue, we wanted to ask: What are our freedoms? How free does the Constitution make us? Does being able to wear a bikini or create Fight club: Manipur’s Irom Sharmila faces a trial this month. brilliant art make us free? The essays and reportage reveal some singularly ape, gang rape, acid attack, harassment, triumphant stories and some discouraging truths. dowry deaths, female infanticide, It has been two centuries since the two Bengali abandonment, eve teasing—routine men began the dialogue about the Indian woman’s incidents in 2013. In 2012, the nightmares were emancipation. Women played important roles in stingingly close to us in cities. In February that our freedom struggle. The movement was carried year, Park Street, Kolkata, irrefutably one of forward by the Prarthana Samaj in Maharashtra India’s most liberated downtown spaces, became and Gujarat by visionaries such as Narayan Ganesh the crucible for a brutal gang rape. The woman THE INDEPENDENCE Chandavarkar, Madhav Govind Ranade and was a single mom, and she decided to party late DAY ISSUE Mahipatram Rupram Nilkanth, among others. into the night. She could barely walk inside her Feminism found modern voices in the works of home the following months. She became a Vina Mazumdar who died recently, Devaki Jain, silhouette flashed on news television— “the Vandana Shiva, Urvashi Butalia and others. Park Street Rape Victim”. Chief minister We live in an age without overarching idealistic Mamata Banerjee labelled her rape a THE INDEPENDENCE umbrellas. In the globalized world, like everyone “sajano ghatana” (a manufactured event). DAY ISSUE else, women are consumers and citizens. But the This year, she revealed her identity at a THE gap between the seeming equality of all citizens INDEPENDENCE protest march against a girl’s death DAY ISSUE and real freedoms is huge. Women are still a following a gang rape on the outskirts of ‘minority’, in every sense of the word. Kolkata. This is the West Bengal of Raja We need more feminists. American theorist and Rammohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. women’s studies professor, Cheris Kramarae, In the early 19th century, these two men signalled creator of the muted group theory which says the beginning of the women’s movement in India communication was created by men and allows by writing and organizationally rallying against INDEPENDENCE them to have an advantage over women, once said, Sati, polygamy, child marriage and for women’s DAY ISSUE “Feminism is the radical notion that women are education, women’s property inheritance rights human beings.” and widow remarriage. This issue celebrates that thought. Meet some In December 2012, the gang rape on a Delhi amazing human beings. bus led to mob uproar and hysteria. It told us again that we are not safe on our roads, in buses and in restaurants. That we are eternal hostages. Sanjukta Sharma Issue editor Acid attacks on women continue, the sex ratio
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Numbers don’t lie
This is what official figures throw up about the state of Indian women
48.5% of the Indian population
Nearly of women get married before the age of 18
Suffer from anaemia
The sex ratio
HIV-infected women (2009)
I
212
(deaths per 100,000 births)
School dropout rate (2009-10)
3
27.25%
Classes I-V Classes I-VIII Classes I-X
891
(till 2011)
4
The number of sanctioned day-care centres (till 2011) 5
42,968
Molestation cases (Sec. 354 IPC)
44.39% 51.97%
323
The number of sanctioned working women’s hostels
38,711
(2011)
(2009)
Rape cases
Dowry deaths
8,383
(Sec. 376 IPC)
8,618 (2011)
24,206 (2011)
21,397
(2009)
(2009)
Kidnapping and abduction cases
The number of women police personnel (2011)
(Sec. 363 to 373 IPC)
83,829
35,565
(2011)
(2011)
25,741
The number of female inmates in district jails across India
61,174 (2009)
2,614
6,456
Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of inmates
(2011)
Women’s representation in the Parliament
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···························· t’s easier to list the number of sports movies in Bollywood than enumerate the times a movie has featured a woman pumping her fist as “The End” credit rolls. Yes, women have always had and continue to have it tougher than men, but must their achievements always be tinged by tragedy? Where is the woman’s movie that ends in a roar rather than a whimper? Gulzar’s melodrama Aandhi, in which Suchitra Sen’s character courted controversy for its perceived similarity to Indira Gandhi, is noteworthy more for R.D. Burman’s musical score than for insights into a female politician’s struggles. Arthouse films like Subah, featuring Smita Patil, and Main Zinda Hoon, starring Deepti Naval, make it amply clear that women pay a huge personal price for overstepping their boundaries. It’s either singlehood or the madhouse for them. Rattle your rolling pins, then, for Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala
Highest number in Andhra Pradesh
All-India figure
Maternal mortality rate (2009)
6
Give a high five for Hindi films with victorious viragos as lead characters (1987). Set in pre-independence in sun-baked Gujarat, Mirch Masala tracks the gender war that breaks out when a lecherous government official, played with obvious relish by Naseeruddin Shah, casts his eye on Patil’s married woman. Her husband is away, so the official figures that she is fair game, but when she resists his advances by giving him the slap he deserves, he rallies his troops and gathers outside the spice manufacturing factory where she has taken refuge. The collective act of resistance by the other women, and Patil’s unequivocal satisfaction at the outcome, is a moment far superior to Lagaan’s raggedy team winning a cricket match against the British. Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982) gives the woman a rare opportunity to ask tough questions. Said to have been inspired by his own colourful personal life, Arth stars Shabana Azmi as the housewife who confronts her husband’s infidelity first by making a fool of herself, then leaning on another man for support, and finally breaking out of her funk. Her question to her philandering
1901 2001 2011
2
(2009)
Screen goddesses B Y N ANDINI R AMNATH
972 933 940
198,504
926,197
1
(females per 1,000 males)
56.2% 57.9% Pregnant women Married women
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THE INDEPENDENCE nandini.r@livemint.com
50%
Women constitute
7
1952
22
Centre stage: Smita Patil in Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala. husband in the climax— whether he would have forgiven her had she behaved in the same way—and his honest reply is proof that once upon a time in Bollywood, Bhatt made movies about real people and their alltoo-human foibles. If Azmi and Patil were the poster girls for female independence in off-the-beaten-track movies, Sridevi was the dealbreaker for commercial cinema, who notched up a still unbeaten record of stealing scenes and whole movies from under the noses of her male co-stars. ChaalBaaz, Pankaj Parashar’s wa ck y up d a t e of S eet a Aur Geeta, has Sunny Deol, Rajinikanth, Anupam Kher, Rohini Hattangadi and Shakti Kapoor, but the movie belongs to two Sridevis, one demure and the other daredevil. Nagesh Kukunoor’s Dor (2006) is another rare woman-oriented
movie that is almost entirely about two female characters. It’s the story of a Rajasthani widow whose husband is accidentally killed in Saudi Arabia, and who has the power to pardon the man held for her spouse’s death. Will she acquiesce to the wife who has come begging for her husband’s life, or will she wallow in her widowhood? Shyam Benegal’s triptych of films on Muslim women, made between 1994 and 2001, provide fascinating insights into the negotiations made by women in a world lorded over by insensitive bureaucrats (Mammo), exploitative patrons (Sardari Begum), and cruel fathers (Zubeidaa). None of the films has the soaring ending that will qualify as a feminist triumph. But that is the point—women’s victories are often small, personal, incremental and come at a price that is worth paying.
Lok Sabha
16 Rajya Sabha
In 1999, in the 13th Lok Sabha, In 2009, in the 15th Lok Sabha, out of the 543 Parliament seats, out of the 545 Parliament seats,
49
59
were held by women
were held by women
Women in the judiciary
8
2011 judge out of 29 1 Woman
judges in the Bombay 7 Women High Court out of 54
Compiled by Seema Chowdhry & Sanjukta Sharma Write to lounge@livemint.com Data courtesy National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development 1 Census of India 2011; 2 National AIDS Control Organization; 3 Ministry of human resource development, department of school education and literacy, annual report 2009-10; 4 Ministry of women and child development, annual report 2011-12; 5 Ministry of home affairs, National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India 2011; 6 Ministry of home affairs, National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics India 2011; 7 Election Commission of India; 8 Ministry of statistics and programme implementation, Central Statistical Organization, Women and Men in India 2011 ISSUE GRAPHICS
BY
AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT
ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: DIWAKAR PRASAD/HINDUSTAN TIMES CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Does your device stand out?”, 3 August, the Lava Xolo Play T1000 is available for R15,999.
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SALIL TRIPATHI We continue to see women as vulnerable, as people who can’t be trusted to take decisions that would keep them safe
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hink of a society which makes a rule saying that Dalits cannot work in the same industries where uppercaste men can work. Or if it lays down a law that says Muslims cannot work between 8pm and 6am. Or, it frames a regulation that Sikhs staying at student hostels must sign in their guests, and can invite non-Sikh friends to their rooms only on one day in a year. Besides, they must get home by 8.30pm. Or, it warns devout Jain men not to wear special white clothes when they go to the derasar (Jain temple) for their own safety. You would be quite right to feel incensed and call such a society unjust, its laws and rules outrageous and discriminatory, infringing on the freedom of particular groups—Dalit, Muslim, Sikh or Jain—and demand that such practices must end. Yet, these rules seem perfectly reasonable, are termed appropriate and even considered legitimate when they are imposed on women. The rules are, after all, in their own interest, to protect them. The arc of freedom gets severely circumscribed when the freedoms being described are women’s freedoms. Like all other freedoms in India, women are free, but then there are limits, for their own good, to protect them from harm. Work? Under section 27 of The Factories Act of 1948, women cannot be employed in any part of a factory for pressing cotton in which a cotton opener is at work, unless certain conditions are met; under section 66 as amended in The Factories (Amendment) Bill, 2005, women can work in factories before 6am and after 7pm only after certain conditions are met, such as the employer ensuring safety and security of the women employees, and getting approval from the relevant state government and workers’ organizations—a well-intentioned requirement that won’t benefit women who work for small, non-unionized companies; under section 22, a woman is not allowed “to clean, lubricate, or adjust” any part of moving machinery; and under section 87, the state can ban employing women in occupations it considers dangerous.
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Residence? Women’s hostels in India set down severe rules that curb the freedoms of the women who live there, about when they can come and go, who can visit them, and by what time they must return. Women staying as paying guests in urban India find all sorts of conditions imposed upon them, limiting their freedoms. The freedom to wander simply doesn’t exist. As Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade’s book, Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, puts it so eloquently, women in Indian cities simply do not have an equal claim on public spaces. No matter what she wears, a woman who wants to go alone for a walk in a public park is advised against it, particularly after sundown. It is for her protection, after all. To be sure, such caution is not without reason. To understand the baseline, consider the statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau: In 2012, as many as 38,262 women and girls were abducted—nearly four per hour—and the conviction rate was a paltry 21.2%, meaning nearly 30,000 women and girls remain unaccounted for. Assaults on women? The figure is higher: 45,351 cases, or one case every 12 minutes. The conviction rate is about a quarter of the total, which means 34,467 cases remain unresolved or cases against the perpetrators have not been proved. These incidents have taken place, quite literally, anywhere and everywhere—as the shocking incident in Delhi last December showed, in a public bus, but also on staircases, in private homes, in public spaces, behind bushes, in offices after all others have left. The women who have been victims have been of all ages, wearing saris and salwarkameezes, jeans and skirts. This doesn’t mean that the streets and parks outside are the only dangerous places and the home is safe. An astonishing 106,527 cases of cruelty by
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husbands or relatives were reported in 2012, with a rather poor conviction rate of 15%. Given how difficult it is for a woman to walk into a police station and get a complaint registered against the husband or in-laws (or even their own families), this figure is undoubtedly an understatement, suggesting a far deeper malaise. So we continue to see women—our mothers, sisters, wives, partners, daughters, daughters-in-law, friends—and other women in our lives and around us as people vulnerable, to be protected—who can’t be trusted to take decisions that would keep them safe, who, it seems, as in that song from The Sound of Music, are in constant need of someone “older and wiser” telling them what to do— because they are forever 16, and “we” are 17. With just such a patriarchal view, Maharashtra decided to ban dance bars, where “dancing girls” performed. The Bombay Police Act, under which the ban was imposed, has a peculiar section—33B—which allowed dancing at any hotel rated three-star or above. Meant to protect women, in reality it created two classes—women who danced at bars frequented by the working class lost their livelihood; but women fortunate
enough to get such jobs at upper-class hotels could continue to do so. According to one estimate, some 75,000 women found themselves unemployed. Terming the law unconstitutional, Justice S.S. Nijjar of the Supreme Court wrote: “Our judicial conscience would not permit us to presume that the class to which an individual or the audience belongs, brings with him as a necessary concomitant a particular kind of morality or decency. We are unable to accept the presumption that the enjoyment of (the) same kind of entertainment by the upper class leads only to mere enjoyment and in the case of poor classes, it would lead to immorality, decadence and depravity. Morality and depravity cannot be pigeonholed by degrees depending upon the classes of the audience.” Generalizations are always difficult, and all the more so in India, where there are exceptions to every rule, and those exceptions run into large numbers. So now think of the outliers. Indians proudly recount Pratibha Patil as President, Indira Gandhi as prime minister, Mamata Banerjee, Jayalalithaa, Mayawati, Rabri Devi, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, and
earlier, Sucheta Kripalani, Anwara Taimur and Shashikala Kakodkar as chief ministers of states, Fathima Beevi as a judge in the Supreme Court, followed by many others, Punita Arora as a lieutenant-general, Harita Kaur Deol as a fighter pilot, Nirupama Rao as an ambassador, Chanda Kochhar, Naina Lal Kidwai and Meera Sanyal as bankers, Vinita Bali and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw as corporate executives, or Zia Mody as a lawyer. It is truly an impressive list, and it is tempting to conclude that Indian women are free to pursue their dreams. But not always, and not so fast. Betwa Sharma of The New York Times writes a moving profile of Akbari Begum Khan, who works as a cook for several middle-class homes in New Delhi. She has a bright 16-year-old daughter, Nazia, who wants to become a lawyer, but they find the fee—`77,000 a year for five years—daunting. Khan makes `6,000 a month, paying half of that in rent. She walks to work, because she cannot afford public transport. One of Khan’s employers agrees that Nazia is smart, but she has advised Khan that it would be wiser for Nazia to take a more practical course, like training as a beautician. She tells the journalist: “Her ambition for her daughter is wonderful to see, but I also think her children will have a better future with more practical dreams.” Practical. Pragmatic. Realistic. Sensible. The essence of freedom is being able to think what you want, and be what you wish to be. Circumscribe that, and you dream narrower dreams. Then, the sky isn’t the limit, the ceiling is. The door doesn’t open to an opportunity; rather, it shuts firmly, reminding you that it is for your own safety. You learn to swallow your words, because others are shouting, and nobody is listening. Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint Salil Tripathi writes the fortnightly column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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URVASHI BUTALIA Many men still believe the frontier of purity lies inside the woman’s body. Where does that leave the idea of women having control over their own bodies?
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ome 35 years ago, the British immigration THE INDEPENDENCEauthorities began to carry out what came to be known as DAY ISSUE virginity tests on Indian women entering the UK as potential brides—on “fiancée visas”. Likely suspects were whisked away at the airport, held in closed rooms and examined—presumably for THE INDEPENDENCE intact DAYhymens. ISSUE The assumption was that if the woman was found to be a virgin, it was likely that she was coming in to be married for no Indian man would marry a woman who wasn’t a virgin. If, on the other hand, she was not, they’d have legitimate grounds to turn her away. When a local newspaper exposed this, telling the story of a teacher who had been subjected to such tests, there was widespread outrage, both in the UK and India. The immigration authorities claimed that they had sought— and gained—the teacher’s consent for once “the nature” of such an examination was explained to her, she agreed. She could, of course, have done little else: Stuck at an airport in a different country, surrounded by men in uniform, fearing she would be sent back…it takes little to guess how voluntary that “consent” was. Protest and outrage eventually led to the tests being withdrawn, but not before it had become abundantly clear how well the immigration authorities in the UK had figured out the psychology and pathology of Indian men. This was in 1979. Cut to the present day: June 2013 in Hardu village in Madhya Pradesh and the chief minister’s Mukhyamantri Kanyadan Yojana to conduct mass marriages among poor, tribal and Dalit men and women, is being implemented. Some 450 women are to be married, and the authorities decide to first conduct virginity tests on them. The aim is the same: to find out which ones are “legitimate” (read virgin) brides and which are not. Prospective husbands are made to wait while two health workers carry out these tests. If the newspapers are to be believed, the majority of the women are found to be “pure” and their marriages go ahead. Nine-10 are found to be pregnant and are denied the benefits of the scheme, the assumption perhaps being that
if they are pregnant the chances are that they are already married but trying to illegally access the benefits of the scheme. Why, one might ask, is virginity such an obsession in India? What is it about that small and useless piece of membrane that makes it the marker that stands between the “pure” female body and the “impure” or polluted one? As with all complicated questions, there are no easy answers to these ones too, so as people do these days, I decided to turn first to the Internet to see if I could find one. I came across a lively debate on virginity in which one of the participants pointed out that it wasn’t really virginity that was an issue but the fact that women were considered as property because “the social and cultural reasons of giving importance to virginity are very deep. Since olden times every culture on earth considers women as ‘property’. So, women’s virginity is also her man’s property.” The fact that men see women as their “property” isn’t anything new, and indeed this sense of belonging to men is often internalized by women themselves. This sense of entitlement is what enables men to demand that women dress in certain ways, that their behaviour conform to the norms defined by men. And it is also this that enables men to place the value they do on virginity—for so long as the woman is untouched, the sense of belonging can somehow hold until she is safely confined within the bounds of marriage. Women who transgress these boundaries, or choose to stay outside of them, are automatically suspect, and men therefore feel they have the right to discipline them— the ways of such discipline being almost inevitably violent. The Moroccan sociologist, Fatna Sabbah, offers an explanation for this: She points out that men’s need to control women’s bodies is built on a deep fear of their sexuality— which is perhaps why the desiring woman, the sexually active woman, becomes the opposite of the virgin woman and the latter gets valorized. This isn’t, of course, something that one can only blame on men: Women themselves are often party to extolling virginity. Witness the following statement from the debate on the Net: “Are you stupid?” asked one young woman in response to a question about whether virginity was important. “I’m 20 and a virgin. I’m from north India. I’m still going to remain virgin until I get married to the special one. Seriously, stop spreading your Western bullshit here.” Is this Western bullshit though? I’m not sure. It’s true
the valorization of female virginity isn’t something that is special to India and all over the world young women will claim they want to guard it— notice the terms that are used, “jewel”, “precious thing”, something that must not be “lost” and so on—for that special man. It’s also true though that all over the world, and India is no exception, attitudes to virginity have begun to change, if only in very minuscule ways. Speak to young people anywhere, sometimes it doesn’t even matter what class they come from, or even if they are urban or rural, and a different reality begins to emerge. A young domestic worker I know, straight out of the rural hinterland of Uttar Pradesh, set no store at all by this thing called virginity. “Why do people make such a fuss about this, didi?” she asked me. “After all, it’s what’s in the mind that is much more important.” Involved in a long sexual relationship with a young man, she later went on to marry someone else, and no questions were asked. I suspect this experience may be more common than we like to believe. And as the young woman said, who can control what goes on in the mind? This doesn’t take away from the painful and harsh reality that men feel the need to control—and therefore abuse and violate—women’s bodies. Nor does it take away from the fact that women’s bodies—not only in India but everywhere —are simultaneously sites of exploitation and violence where battles are fought over notions of honour as defined by men. This was abundantly clear during the Partition—a moment that we would do well to recall on Independence Day now, 66 years later. At the time, men on both sides of the newly-created border fought over what they saw as their “ownership” of women’s bodies, many of them battling to save them from rape by men of the “other” community, others leading their wives, mothers and sisters to their deaths—sometimes killing them themselves—in order to protect their own honour and retain the women’s “purity”. Has anything changed since then? It’s difficult to say, particularly in India, where change is so impossible to quantify. But given the complex nature of our lives, any answer has to be a mixed one. Many men still believe the frontier of purity lies inside the woman’s body, but for others, the process of change has begun, just as it has for those women who have begun to believe that virginity is not only an overrated concept, but one that should be thrown out of the door sooner rather than later, so that they can take control of their bodies themselves.
Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint Urvashi Butalia co-founded India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, in 1984. She continues to publish and promote books for, on and about women in South Asia as the publisher of Zubaan. She has edited several collections, and is the author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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NIVEDITA MENON When a bikini is ‘culturally insensitive’ and a private swimming pool in a school is not
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ear N, Something has been troubling me. In our school, a lot of people from the nearby village work as THE INDEPENDENCE gardeners, DAY ISSUE housekeepers, maids and watchmen. Now, we have a swimming pool and there’s an underlying rule that any type of two-piece swimming suit is banned because it is “culturally insensitive”. What this means is that girls can’t wear bikinis—if my stomach was showing I’d be asked to change or be given a lot of angry glares. However, boys can still walk around shirtless and it is fine. Do you think it is fair for a woman to be made to cover her body? I mean, first of all—what’s the difference between a male and female chest? Isn’t it just the media and society who have sexualized the top half of a woman’s body? And secondly, if women wear saris in the villages which do show the stomach and part of their chest, then why is there such a huge issue with it over here? On the one hand, I don’t think it is fair for me to have to constantly think about whether what I am wearing is “culturally sensitive”, but on the other hand, am I being completely ignorant in saying that everyone should be as comfortable with my body as me? Dear X, That’s a really complicated issue you have there! At the simplest level, there is the feminist issue you raise of being comfortable with your body, and of personal autonomy. But even at this level, the complication is that while revealing the female body is a problem in some contexts, covering it is problematic in other contexts, for example, the Muslim head scarf. You know about the controversy in France, where you are not permitted to wear a head scarf to school. Now, wearing the head scarf/veil can be a sign of autonomy if the woman chooses to do it as a sign of her submission to God, or it could reflect cultural policing by the community. But this is true too, of the bikini. How can wearing a bikini reflect cultural policing? Because not everyone’s physical body is “allowed” to wear the bikini—if you’re fat, or old, or hairy or all of these, it is understood that it would be gross to show your body. Especially so if you’re a woman. Men with hairy paunches have the confidence to show everything. Why do you think? Because they know their worth is not measured by their “beauty”, while a woman has to be attractive whatever her work and accomplishments are. So “policing” does not always take place through overt force or violence, but often through a subtler transformation of what is considered to be normal and acceptable (just as with the head scarf). You wouldn’t wear a bikini, for example, without waxing your legs. Or if you didn’t know that you have a lovely lithe body! True, male chests are not sexualized in the same way that female breasts are, but if you want to challenge that,
then you need to build up a feminist community and an understanding that would take on the idea of both beauty and sexuality, simultaneously. I mean, then, that you would have to have an understanding that old droopy female breasts as well as podgy male breasts (which are much, much more common than you may think—it’s just a wellkept secret!), all have the “right to be revealed”. So simply revealing or not revealing one’s body is not an indicator of slavery or freedom. For instance, in Western cultures, it is de rigueur for women to reveal their bodies (to wear skirts rather than pant-suits, to reveal cleavage particularly in formal evening wear) so that if you don’t show your body, you appear to be unsophisticated, dorky or hiding fatal physical flaws. You know this from Hollywood films in which the tomboy in jeans at some point or the other emerges in a short skirt, looking very feminine and suddenly, recognizably “pretty”. But additionally in the context of your school there is another crucial element—what is being described as “cultural” sensitivity is actually about class, isn’t it? The poor working-class people in and around your school have different notions of what is acceptable and what is not. So yes, they wear saris revealing their bellies, but a bikini revealing a belly is simply not the same thing. But, from that perspective, showing legs as such is equally problematic, so any swimsuit should be a problem from that point of view. After all, almost everything people of our class do (especially of the class that is largely represented in your school) is bound to be completely out of the range of comprehension and aspiration of the people who cook for you and clean up after you, right? No amount of “cultural sensitivity” is going to lessen the degree of alienation between “people like us” and “people like them”. I mean, come on, a private swimming pool in a school—isn’t that culturally insensitive enough? As if bikinis are the point at which “insensitivity” sets in. Now you, X, I think, would be quite sensitive to the class angle, which many of your schoolmates might not be. I mean that I think you would be aware of the weight of privilege you bear. In India, the body of the bikini-clad woman represents that privilege and the distance between “us” and “them” starkly, as does the body of the suit-clad man. Bottom line—it’s worth fighting for the right to wear a bikini as long as you don’t believe that this proves your autonomy in some simple way; as long as you question in real, everyday life the cultural policing involved in rules for appropriate display of the female body; as long as you respect the specific people who work for you and around you in school—the actual individuals, not some amorphous “culture” they represent. Ultimately, if you respect them and demonstrate your respect, if you teach their children, as I know many of you do, if you do your best to make the humiliating work they have to do less unbearable in whatever way you can, I don’t think they would care what you wear. But perhaps by then, you may not care so much about proving a point through wearing a bikini either.
Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint Nivedita Menon teaches at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her most recent book is Seeing Like a Feminist. Write to lounge@livemint.com
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A dipped mortality rate and economic prosperity are not enough to correct the historical disadvantages women face in India
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he fight for gender rights in modern India has a long and rich history that goes back to the glorious days of our freedom struggle. Many of our earliest freedom fighters were also the greatest champions of women’s empowerment. Since then, the debate on gender inequality appeared to have lost steam until about a year ago. After actor Aamir Khan’s unexpected success in sparking a debate on India’s skewed sex ratio through a reality show and the widespread outcry over the Delhi gang rape late last year, the voices for women’s freedom have gained ascendancy. But issues concerning women are still not priority in a democracy that has had universal adult franchise since its birth. One answer to this is that there aren’t simply enough women as men. The overall sex ratio has seen a steady fall over the 20th century. Women in most parts of the world outlive men. The
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natural female survival advantage is so high that females outnumber men in Western nations. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, the sex ratio is close to unity. For most of independent India’s history, our THE INDEPENDENCE society has been an exception to such norms. Gender inequities in health and nutrition combined with high rates of female infanticide or sex-selective abortions led to relatively high death rates for females in India. Of late, it is the latter factor of sexselective abortion, which is most worrying. While there has been a modest reversal in the trend of declining sex ratios over the past two decades, the latest census results of 2011 reveal an alarming drop in the child sex ratio to 914 girls per 1,000 boys, from 927 girls per 1,000 boys in 2001. In the early 1990s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen famously coined the term, “missing women” to refer to the victims of gender bias in developing Asian economies such as India and China. The World Bank puts the number of missing women every year at four million, with the two Asian giants accounting for the bulk of them. The phenomenon of “missing women” is one aspect of gender inequality. But for each missing woman, there are many more who fail to get an education or secure a job that they would have obtained had they been men. Women who do have a job typically earn less, and are much less likely to rise to leadership positions. The absence of women from work, and from key leadership positions means there are fewer advocates of gender rights in positions of power. Economic prosperity has improved life chances of everyone, irrespective of gender, over the past two decades. India has also made rapid strides in narrowing the gender gap in educational attainments over the same period. But this has scarcely changed how society values women. Thus, while improved access to health care and a decline in the maternal mortality rates have pulled up the survival rates of older women, raising the sex ratio, the use of sexdetermination tests and sexselective abortions have had the opposite effect. As a result, in the average overall sex ratio, India stands much below the global average. The child sex ratio is even lower. The low sex ratio at birth and the underlying “son preference”, even in urbanized and well-off sections, reflect the profound impact of patriarchy in modern India. Seen in the context of three other indicators, it points to a very unappealing picture about the social status of women in India. First, most Indian women are undernourished: a majority of women are anaemic and the proportion of women with low body mass index (BMI) is among the highest in the world. Second, the past few years has seen a
rapid shrinking of the women workforce. The female labour force participation rate fell from 29.4% in 2004-05 to 22.5% in 2011-12, according to the National Sample Survey Office survey data, DAY ISSUE placing India near the bottom of the global league tables. The global average of female labour force participation rate is around 50%. Third, the past decade also saw a sharp increase in crimes against women. The fall in the proportion of working women, at least in rural areas, is partly because more women are studying than before. Higher educational attainments and awareness levels may also be driving more women to report crimes than earlier although it is difficult to disentangle the effect of such a reporting bias from the actual increase in crimes. There are also many instances of women defying gender stereotypes to enter roles hitherto enjoyed only by men, and that may in part be provoking a violent backlash in some parts of the country. Gender disparities impose heavy economic and social costs on the nation. Some of the costs are quite obvious. As Jayan Jose Thomas, labour economist and assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, points out in his writings, the absence of women from work causes our labour participation rates to be much below than what is usual for an economy of India’s size, and limits the economy from reaping a demographic dividend. Given that a majority of urban
educated women are out of the workforce, the sheer waste of talent is without parallel. Then there are the not-soobvious costs. Research by development economists such as Jean Drèze, Reetika Khera and others show that districts with the greatest gender skews also tend to be most prone to crime. Malnutrition is another hidden cost of the low social status of women. Nearly half of India’s malnutrition burden, for instance, is directly attributable to undernourished mothers who give birth to low birth weight babies. Such children not only face the risk of early stunting, the consequences of which can be irreversible, but also face the risk of obesity-related disorders much later in life. The total costs of malnutrition can be as high as 8-11% of the gross domestic product (GDP) each year for a country such as India because of productivity losses, according to experts. Gender inequities of different kinds tend to feed into each other, generating a vicious loop. For instance, women hesitate to join the workforce because of existing social mores, and the lack of women workers tends to reinforce those mores. The extraordinarily low social status of women also allows impunity for sexual offences, and rising crimes against women act as a deterrent to women’s autonomy and mobility. It does not appear to be a coincidence that the proportion of working women, the proportion of females to males in the
population, the proportion of normal weight births, and the proportion of well-nourished women and children are all significantly higher in subSaharan Africa than in India. As Sen puts it, women’s “agency” to improve their lot is sorely lacking in India. Given the complex roots of gender inequality, there are no easy solutions. Nonetheless, a mix of gender-friendly and genderneutral policies can help accelerate social change. A June special issue of Finance and Development journal on gender inequality published by the International Monetary Fund illustrates how reservations for women in local bodies in West Bengal changed local perception about women leaders and helped drive up parents’ aspirations for their daughters. Gender-neutral policies such as public provisioning of potable water can help women save time on water-related chores in rural areas and in urban slums, and allow them greater freedom to take part in the workplace. We need more debate and more outrage to confront one of the greatest civilizational challenges India faces. Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint Pramit Bhattacharya is a staff writer at Mint. Write to pramit.b@livemint.com
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The uterus does not weep
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Gynaecological health, a taboo in many families, is only about a woman’s ability to get pregnant
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ne of the first successful books Urvashi Butalia’s feminist publishing imprint Zubaan produced is Shareer ki Jaankari. Designed like a graphic novel, it was created by some 75 women from villages in Rajasthan who were part of a women’s development programme. Elaborate panels in the book describe the reproductive organs and their relation to the menstrual cycle. “We published it because it is the kind of book every feminist publisher dreams about, a book that comes from a grass-roots experience,” says Butalia. Shareer ki Jaankari is fun biology. The first feedback the book got in villages it was meant for was that it was unrealistic to have a book with so many drawings of naked women, that too, some with red drops dripping from their vagina. So the writers created little flaps over the vaginas. The book’s direct, non-fussy and humorous communication about a woman’s reproductive life is refreshing. We are a culture conditioned to keep the uterus clandestine— out of the bounds of conversation as long as there is no baby inside it. Buying sanitary napkins in kirana stores and pharmacies in India is as surreptitious as buying condoms. Women mutter the brand they want. The guy behind the counter is quick and avoids eye contact with the woman. He would usually wrap it with opaque plastic and hand it over. Packet in hand you are supposed to slink away. It is a small, routine experience that we have stopped noticing. Prejudices against a menstruating woman is ancient history, in cultures all over the world. While Africans and Jews consider it evil or exotic, we have made a bleeding girl taboo, dirty or shameful, depending on where we are. Only last year, a team from a Bangalore organization, Janawadi Mahila Sanghatane (JMS), found after a study conducted with members of the Kadu Golla community in Chitradurga district of Karnataka, that it keeps menstruating young girls and women outside the geographical periphery of their villages. Meenakshi Bali, a professor who represented the organization, told The Hindu: “In many villages we saw more than 10 women aged between 14 and 40 huddled outside in the open field during our visit.” When they asked, the women said it was a monthly routine. Bali also told the reporter that before this the Karnataka government had spent `200 lakh to build bhavans or homes in the area for women to stay during menstruation and after childbirth. Brahmin families in many parts of India, especially in rural areas, still ask their daughters and daughters-in-law to sleep separately, eat separately, not enter the kitchen or touch
objects used by other members of the family while they are menstruating. In some states, a girl is dressed like a bride to celebrate her first period. If an unmarried daughter has a gynaecological disorder, something that modern medicine can fix, families prefer not to speak about it or address it because it is considered detrimental to her marital prospects. Menstrual pain is ignored until it becomes unbearable and is obviously symptomatic of a bigger health hazard. For this essay, I spoke to three women, aged between 25 and 41, who suffer from common gynaecological ailments like uterine fibroids and endometriosis. Requesting anonymity, they said their families as well as doctors believe getting pregnant is a big step towards recovery. “It is understood that I should be having a baby soon,” one of them said. In the early 2000s, I consulted a famous gynaecologist in Mumbai for the treatment of acute endometriosis, a condition that affects 89 million women in the reproductive age group worldwide and around 25 million in India. Besides the prescription, she cautiously advised, “Your uterus is weeping. You should get married and get pregnant. The rest will get taken care of.” After years of consulting doctors who offered different versions of the same advice, some of them referring me to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) specialists as a cure to a painful inflammatory condition, I was lucky to find a doctor who is a specialist. Mumbai’s Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital recently collaborated with HealthCare Global Enterprises Ltd (HCG) to form the BNH HCG Cancer Centre for women, equipped with the latest technology for detecting very early stages of women’s cancers, and counselling and screening about gynaecological health. Nagraj Huilgol, chief radiation oncologist, who is one of a team of doctors running this clinic, says, “After a cancer surgery or before, a woman and her family needs counselling because taboos around women’s diseases are enormous, especially if the woman is young.” An advocate against prophylactic mastectomy which, he says, is catching up in the US after actor Angelina Jolie opted for it, Huilgol believes there is still not enough information available for young women to take charge of their gynaecological health—anywhere in the world. The lack of information, combined with a culture that perpetrates unscientific, warped views of gynaecology puts young women at risk of pain and fullblown debilitation. We inch closer to being versions of Maragret Atwood’s Offred, the hapless and immensely pathetic protagonist in her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Offred is a two-legged womb who exists to reproduce, in a dark, theocratic republic. Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint Sanjukta Sharma is deputy editor of Mint Lounge. Write to sanjukta.s@livemint.com
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PRIYA RAMANI Who do you think of when you think of a working woman?
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ven Arnab Goswami is discussing working women on prime time, thanks to Durga Shakti Nagpal. The propheticallynamed civil servant who tried to curb the sand mining mafia in Uttar Pradesh, and triggered a war between on-off pals the Samajwadi Party and the Congress party, inspired television’s most vitriolic and pompous anchor to thunder: “What do you mean you ‘allowed’ her to work?” He was responding to a Samajwadi Party spokesman who said Goswami was ignoring the fact that Nagpal had been allowed to work unhindered against the mafia for the past four months. Goddess Durga against the establishment is an image of ecofeminism that has resonated since the Chipko movement of the 1970s. It has been replayed often enough in recent times as more women (RTI activists, ecowarriors, Teesta Setalvad) work to take on the plunderers of new India. My all-time favourite parable is that of Cheryl D’Souza, the rich landowner who refused to sell her 240 acres of land after her husband died and who gave the women of Caurem, Goa, the courage to fight the state’s mining mafia. The Outlook reporter who interviewed her in 2011 said D’Souza always carried a “jail kit” comprising contact lens solution, nice-smelling soap and toothbrush in her handbag. Probably the most famous working woman image is that of the multitasking Mumbai superstar on the Virar fast who juggles family commitments, her professional life and the long commute to and from work, not a pleat out of place. From shopping to chopping, is there any task she can’t complete on that train? Contrarian surveys aside, any woman who has worked in this city will always rate it highest for its relative safety, access to public transport and its culture of working women. Her counterpart in rural India is the cultivator and agricultural
labourer who contributes her share to farm production but is still waiting to be acknowledged as a farmer. Recently released data from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) answered that evergreen question: Are more Indian women working? It found that the presence of women, both in the labour force and workforce, had fallen in rural areas, while their urban counterparts had registered a growth. Overall, the presence of working women dropped from around one in three workers in 2004-05 to around one in five by the end of 2011-12. If fewer women are looking for jobs, even fewer are being employed —their proportion in the workforce dropped by an almost identical proportion in the same period. Then there’s the nearly 40% female employees of the IT and BPO sector that have largely driven the debate of night shifts and after-dark safety this past decade. An entire generation of parents changed the way they think about daughters going out to work in the dark once they saw that pay-cheque. And don’t forget those highpowered ladies in the banking and financial sectors, sometimes still referred to as the ICICI women as that was the bank that first promoted so many women to key leadership positions in the 1990s (in 2006, Fortune magazine featured six such powerful women working in ICICI). Of course, access to a leadership position doesn’t come easily. In the introduction to the Indian edition of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, banker Naina Lal Kidwai says she had to fight
many battles, including one to go to Harvard Business School (HBS). “The fact that I was the first Indian woman to graduate from HBS in 1982 was a gratifying personal achievement but a sad social comment. Indian men had been going there for 30 years already.” There’s the woman whose life is built around flexitime—she’s mastered the art of doing more work in less time—and the entrepreneur who has circumvented an unfriendly workplace by setting up a business and working on her own terms. Anecdotal evidence in our cities clearly shows that more women than ever are doing their own innovative thing. There’s the domestic worker who still fights for minimum wages, and basic rights such as annual leave, a weekly off and a workplace that’s free of abuse. These are the women who hover awkwardly above our tables at restaurants while we experiment with ceviche and sushi and in whose care we entrust our children. They allow women like us to go to office every day. My lucky daughter has no nanny, just a stay-at-home dad and there is mostly one way people react when they ask him what he does and he replies: “I’m bringing up my daughter.” They say “Yes but what do you DO?” Of course, relatives cheer every one of his daily child-rearing duties like he’s just run an ultramarathon. “He works so
hard,” they say, always within earshot of the working woman. There’s the 23-year-old braveheart daughter of the family who can barely afford her physiotherapy education. She is gang-raped and dies just before she can fulfil her dream of being a full-fledged working woman. Conversely, there’s the impeccably educated, privileged, bright 23-year-old, who you believe could easily do your job in a year or two—but then she decides to get married (or have a baby) and quits her professional life overnight. Or the friend whose boss told her the company had asked all senior executives to do some succession planning. He was going to name her as his successor. Please don’t, she said in a panic. I’m planning a baby; I don’t want such a big responsibility. You think I’m being overly cynical? One recent study by the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), a New Yorkbased think-tank founded by Sylvia Ann Hewitt, found that our working women can compete with the best jugglers across the world, except when it comes to pulling back because of family and then we lag far behind. More women quit their job citing parents (80%) than children (75%), the study found. Yes we earn 60% as much as our male counterparts. We often cite lack of mentors in the workplace. We are still barely represented in leadership
positions such as on the boards of Indian leading companies. In 2013, most of these companies are still not familiar with the concept of a crèche. We may have survived the female foetus stage, but many of us are easy casualties of the fights we must fight later in life. We have been known to lose the Battle for Higher Education or the Battle to Work after Marriage and the Battle for Life After Babies. It’s clear our weapons need to be upgraded. I spent two days deciding whether I believed that Indian working women don’t do enough or whether they do too much. Eventually, I decided they do both. They do so much, and they need to do so much more. Apurva Purohit, the CEO of Radio City and author of the just out Lady, You’re Not a Man!, says women need to cut back on their “Suffering Sita” act. “As we move into a more equal and confident era, let us look for some better roles to play—roles which are positive and more fun for us. Like the sexy fortysomething, the tough but classy boss, the spirited and enthusiastic executive or the coolly intelligent colleague,” she says in her book. I agree. Durga in the workplace can certainly move faster and further. Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint Priya Ramani is editor of Mint Lounge. Write to priya.r@livemint.com
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My ‘monkey darling’ THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE
THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE For most Indian women, disfigured breasts after surgery mean a sexless life, when what they need is some romance and humour THINKSTOCK
B Y S HEFALEE V ASUDEV shefalee.v@livemint.com
···························· he stitches have healed just fine but don’t press it,” said the oncologist to a 36-year-old female after a breast surgery to remove a malignant breast tumour. Her next thought was “if it can’t be pressed, how will I have sex?” She never asked that question though because according to her, it was a bit “shameless”. Her sex life, which had been dragging since the diagnosis, soon became non-existent. Her right breast looked scooped out with a turned-in and misshaped nipple. The awkwardness around it and her fear of loathing by the man who she had loved since college caused the relationship to sag interminably. When she asked her elder sister, the response was angry. “Here we are worried about your survival and you want to know how you will have sex with half a breast?” retorted the know-itall big sister. Then there is the case of a 42-year-old lady, a university lecturer. Due to a spreading cancer, she had a bilateral mastectomy three months back as well as breast reconstructive surgery—often done now as part of the same operation that removes a cancerous tumour. Now, instead of what her husband called “Fat Girls”, it is an area of botched-up tissue and skin dotted with deep red scars and blue-black bruises covering gel-filled mounds. She has no nipples. Nipple reconstruction is done later, usually a few months after creating the breast mounds. It is a truism that breast cancer awareness is spreading, at least in urban areas. It is also correct that cancer excisions, partial, single or bilateral mastectomies and reconstructions, done in top hospitals with modern surgical tools and expertise do not necessarily leave the patient “maimed”. This volatile word is used by plastic surgeon Shahin Nooreyezdan of Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, Delhi, when he says “we no longer maim patients the way we did in the past—these are very sophisticated surgeries now”. At the same time he admits that scarring is indeed permanent and no reconstruction can restore a breast to normalcy. There are many before and after surgery pictures and videos on the Net but watch this one set against Adele’s lyrics Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead, to imagine the scarring a breast cancer patient could face— http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FFEq0tviKYE& feature=endscreen Doctors say few patients, almost none, bring up how disfigurement, even when life-saving, becomes the third person in an intimate relationship. Those who do ask even indirectly suffer from the guilt of being “morally indiscreet”. Sex and selfesteem are big casualties in every
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PRIME NUMBERS
BREAST CANCER IN INDIA Out of 100 breast cancer patients
20-30 yrs
4% 2% 30-40 yrs
16% 7%
25 years back Now Above 50 yrs
69%
28%
(40-50 yrs)
SOURCE: POPULATION BASED CANCER REGISTRY
cancer patient’s life. It is not just one surgery after all. Chemotherapy brings a tide of other cosmetic defeats and radiation can cause blisters in the breast area. “Boobs, boobs, boobs, a girl must have boobs,” sang a blithe music group at a Las Vegas night show while girls with real and fake boobs danced in exaggerated joy. The audience, women included, had a glint in their eyes. Most women anywhere in the world have a secret breast story. Besides biologically shaping feminine identity, breasts form the core of our self-image. Naming them once a boyfriend or husband comes along adds to the erotically charged heartbeats they create in our private lives. In India however, most such stories are not shared. So when a breast dies, mourning it is a lonely ritual for the patient. Besides, cancer doesn’t just affect those who have husbands. It demolishes every type of woman without discrimination—single or married, sex workers or housewives, with or without a sex life—thus needing personalized counselling. According to the last three-year report (2006-2008) by the Population Based Cancer Registry (PBCR) set up by the Indian Council of Medical Research, breast cancer in cities in
India accounts for 25-32% of female cancers. According to Breast Cancer India, a Mumbai-based organization, this implies that one-fourth (fast turning into one-third) of all female cancers are of the breast. While an update of this study is still to come, leaving us with figures already four years old, surgical oncologist Sumeet Shah who heads Breast Cancer India, suggests further analysis to understand what’s actually going on. “Around 48% of women with breast cancer are in the 25 to 50 years age group. The younger the patient—with many more years before menopause—usually, the more aggressive the cancer,” adds Dr Shah. According to the PBCR data, 50% breast cancer patients in India present themselves at stages 3 and 4, effecting survival rates. Among the frequently asked questions at forums (much like an Alcoholics Anonymous group) like those organized by Breast Cancer India, sexuality questions never come out starkly. “Among the first things I offer and impress upon my patients is a breast conserving surgery (where feasible); however, many patients insist on removal of breast and a majority of them do not want reconstructive surgery,” says Dr Shah, adding that a number of women even in their 30s just
write off their sex lives. Dr Shah, who worked at Mumbai's Tata Memorial Hospital till three years ago, admits that body image issues left hanging in the air urgently need to be addressed. Deepali Kapoor, psychooncologist and part of the Breast Cancer Foundation at Delhi’s Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, counsels both husband and wife after cancer surgeries. She points out that a majority of Indian oncologists being male, women shy away from asking body-related questions. “Most sidestep these issues even before female surgeons, so it is only over a period of counselling a patient that we can help with sexuality issues,” she adds. Dr Kapoor begins by exploring the nature of relationship between a man and his wife and if there is indeed a sex life that needs to be saved. She compares the worry around scarred breasts with questions of death, equally avoided by patients. Women in smaller towns or rural areas have no recourse at all. Most live with sexual rejection, if they live at all. Earlier this year designer duo Shivan & Narresh in collaboration with the Women’s Cancer Initiative of Mumbai's Tata Memorial Hospital launched the Mastectomy Blouse For All for breast cancer survivors. “It has an in-built prosthetic breast and is proposed for Indian women—many of whom living in villages aren’t even exposed to the idea of bras—to be able to wear the Indian sari without loss of self-esteem,” says the design note. The blouse is available at their flagship stores in Mumbai and Delhi and comes in UK sizes 8-16. These are a relevant step but as Dr Shah says, “Support needs to go beyond padded bras and mastectomy aids.” Nobody has quick solution though small armies of volunteers holding the flag of awareness at urban as well as grassroots levels are doing their bit. What women need, says a senior psychoanalyst, is a romantic or poetic acceptance of the harsh reality and some wry humour. Here is an instance. It is a part of short story on the breast after cancer titled Monkey Darling in author Shinie Antony's book Séance On a Sunday Afternoon. “L throws back her shoulders. Out comes the phantom breast to play. The one that doesn’t rhyme with anything, can’t be heard or seen, doesn’t pat her heartbeat like it used to… Damn she must name it. Monkey darling. It comes to her late at night, between a toss and a turn, when one side of her body heavy with flesh rolls down the empty other side. To cart around and get used to a 34-D for years and years only to lose it! L sits up slowly in the bed and peers down. What can you say about mammary made of moonlight and mist and memory and mangled skin? Monkey darling, she sings tenderly. My own monkey darling.”
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An agent of change THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE
Supreme Court lawyer Karuna Nundy on her work on THE women’ s issues, the INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE Justice JS Verma committee report, and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013 B Y S OMAK G HOSHAL somak.g@livemint.com
··································· y freedom, and yours, are bound to each other and to those around us. I was looking for a vocation that takes that large truth into account, one that fit me, so a lot of due diligence had to be done first,” says Karuna Nundy, a Supreme Court advocate, of her journey to law. Her first degree, in economics at St Stephen’s College, New Delhi, didn’t inspire. “Delhi University set us a limited, neoclassical syllabus,” Nundy says, “without enough relevance or accuracy in the real world.” After a short stint as a TV journalist, she applied to law, film and journalism schools and chose to study the first at Cambridge University, UK. “Law school was a homecoming,” she says. “Law negotiates all sorts of relationships of power, money and coercion—between individuals, between people and companies, companies and companies, and between people and governments. It deals with fairness, independence and inter-dependence quite concretely.” Nundy followed up her law degree with a fellowship at Columbia University, New York, US. She then qualified as a New York lawyer, worked at international tribunals and with the United Nations, before returning to India more than a decade ago. Since then, she has been involved in major commercial and human rights litigation and legal policy, including justice for
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An equal world: Lawyer Karuna Nundy at her office in Hauz Khas, New Delhi.
the victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy. She has contributed to the discourse on gender justice in India, not least by helping to frame inputs for the new anti-rape laws after the gang rape and death of a 23-yearold girl in Delhi last December. In this interview, Nundy speaks about her continuing engagement with law and democracy. Edited excerpts: Is there a Bill of rights for women? We have a good Constitution, a great Constitution even. This January we had the (Justice J.S.) Verma Committee—a statesanctioned committee, of a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, chief justice of a high court, and an eminent jurist—consult more than 80,000 recommendations and testimonies. They’ve reclaimed constitutional equality for women in the report and more specifically in the Bill of rights (www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/ Justice%20verma%20committee/ js%20verma%20committe%20report.pdf). Every Indian woman and man needs to come back to that Bill of rights when in doubt as to what to ask of the state, of employers, where to draw boundaries between the self and others. Our Supreme Court has made it clear that the right to life means the right to a good life, with basic standards. So the right to life, security and bodily integrity under the Bill of rights includes freedom from all violence and exploitation in public or private, but also the “right to be respected as an independent person and PRADEEP GAUR/MINT
to the free development of personality”. It is the “right to express and experience complete sexual autonomy”. The right to equality and non-discrimination includes non-discrimination by private actors. This is important because it bars discrimination in employment. It also bars actions by anyone—family member or otherwise—that prevents women from inheriting family property, and “systematic inequality in access to opportunities” by women as a result of a gender-based division of labour. Can you tell us about some of the major legal work you have been engaged with, and the challenges? Constitutional cases can be hard and the failures teach you a lot as well. One of my early cases involved women from one of the paramilitary forces, who wanted a class-action suit on sexual harassment filed against their employers. The lead petitioner was a hero of sorts who had won awards for bravery and skill. We worked hard on it, and the case was admitted, but then she withdrew because of retaliation within the institution and violence in her marriage. That was an eye-opener. There have been victories as well. We won the case to shut down cancer-causing water outlets for victims of the toxic-waste dump around the Union Carbide factory site in Bhopal. In a separate case, the Supreme Court gave us a comprehensive judgement on better healthcare systems for survivors of the Bhopal gas leak. I have cases on free speech, disability rights and gender that are now before the court. I also represent companies, and have been involved in some landmark contractual, property, tax and corporate governance dispute resolution for Dabur Ayurvet Ltd, Texas Instruments Ltd, Airbus SAS, and other corporates. It’s a mistake to think that the accountability required of Union Carbide and Dow Chemicals is anti-corporate. Most corporate managers I meet believe that limiting rogue corporate behaviour and efficient and fair rule of law is in the interest of most companies, as well as those who work for them in their individual capacity. My international experience includes commercial arbitrations and bilateral investment treaty work as well as constitutional work. I helped draft parts of the interim constitution of Nepal, where we specifically included women’s and children’s rights, conducted workshops with the senate of Pakistan on legislating constitutional rights, and worked with the government of Bhutan on compliance with international treaties. On the recent Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013, we represented various human rights and women’s rights groups before government and parliamentarians. Together we were able to get some important amendments into the Bill, like not needing government sanction to prosecute police and other public officials for sexual assault or dereliction of duty. But look at what stayed out: “Outraging the modesty of a woman” remains an acceptable standard under the criminal law. How do you interpret modesty? Why should modesty be a prerequisite for the criminal law to kick in where somebody’s bodily integrity or dignity is being violated? That’s a question that perhaps could be answered in 1860, but not now, because even patriarchal standards have changed. Do you think there is enough gender justice in the Constitution? Our Constitution was framed predominantly by upper-caste, upper-class men, but the main architect of that Constitution— brilliant Dr B.R. Ambedkar—was in many ways a man who understood gender justice, and had a good handle on substantive and formal equality. So we have Article 14 which speaks about equality of all people before law, but there is also Article 15, which recognizes that the playing field is not level and says that nothing will come in
the way of making special provisions for women and children. India also got voting equality—one vote for each adult citizen regardless of gender or other characteristic—at an earlier stage of economic development than other countries. If we had more women, and genderjust people on that assembly—or even now in Parliament—the constitution would reflect women’s interests more specifically. But the Constitution as it stands is more than good enough to realize the Bill of rights we just spoke of. Do you see any inherent weakness in the Constitution? Well, one issue is that of the first amendment to our Constitution in 1951. In the US, the first amendment refers to the right to free speech. In our case, it restricts the right to free speech, and is used as cover for a lot of laws that send people to the criminal justice system and to jail for saying the wrong thing. Article 19(2) allows restriction of speech if it affects friendly relations with foreign states, public order, and decency or morality. Some of these terms are way too broad. Who decides what “morality” will apply and why should my morality apply to you and yours to me? Yet, in spite of our laws, our media critiques and questions, unlike, say, much of the mainstream media in the US, where there is often a consensus of vapidity or silence on difficult issues. Here we have a whole slew of laws that restrict what you can say, which have only got worse with the amendments to the IT Act in 2008, and the rules of 2009 and 2011. If you say anything annoying and inconvenient on the Internet you can potentially go to jail for three years. But we have a rambunctious social and mainstream media because this and other speech laws are patchily enforced, though it cracks down with full force on political dissenters or those without mobs behind them. Do you feel there is enough awareness of citi zenship among the people? If we’re talking about democratic rights, our citizens show up in large numbers to vote, more so than in many other countries. Democracy doesn’t happen once every five years though—it’s a continuing relationship between the governing and the governed. That relationship should be mutual, iterative, in which the governed indicate what is required and governance responds to that, changes itself and is reconstituted as the governed want it to. The Right to Information Act, for instance, is something that makes this happen—so all these attempts to dilute it are problematic. It enables citizens to look at particular decisions of the government and see if they could have been more fair. It has sharpened litigation in so many ways—for instance, an aerotropolis company I was representing was able to show that the “decision” on the government notesheet was forged. Though citizenship identity is growing, most people have little knowledge of their legal rights. Knowing what your rights are can, by itself, change your bargaining position vis-à-vis a husband, a company, the police or other government departments. Freedom’s not just the ability to be free from violence or fetters, it’s also the agency to achieve basic economic and social wellbeing, and government has an important role to play. There are assembly and general elections coming up—we almost expect politicians to be criminal and corrupt now. MyNeta.info (run by a group that tracks political candidates) tells you if your candidate is a criminal, how much money they’ve declared and levels of education— though more information is needed. But if one took the trouble to look beyond the TV debates, at the long lists of people who bother to stand for election, one might well find a gem or two in enough lists. Add up those, and you and I could have a Parliament, a government we can believe in.
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··································· hakila Sheikh, who usually just goes by her first name, is sweeping the entrance to her house, one of the few two-storeyed pucca buildings in the tiny village of Noorgram, near Baruipur, when we reach. Head covered by the end of her sari, she moves lithely, fussing over us, bringing out chairs, offering us refreshments, and murmuring about whether she ought to change into a nicer outfit. A couple of hours’ drive from the city of Kolkata, Baruipur is a bustling municipality in the district of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal. As you move further away from the squalid town centre, past the narrow strip of arterial road festooned with bright flags of political parties, and into the once-pristine countryside now tarnished by ugly concrete structures, the din of suburban life recedes, and a hush descends. Miles of guava orchards heavy with fruit, perhaps Baruipur’s chief claim to fame, usher you into sleepy Noorgram. It is late afternoon, in the month of Ramzan. The azaan (call to prayer) wafts in from the distance. Men in their Sunday best make their way to the
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neighbouring mosque, casting curious glances at us, as we are greeted by Shakila and her husband, Akbar Sheikh. It’s also mid-July, the eve of the panchayat polls, and the air is tense after yet another episode of violence that had erupted the night before. Once a stronghold of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the area is now ruled by the cadres of the Trinamool Congress, who are accused by some locals of running a reign of terror. Noorgram may be a nondescript speck on the map of India, but it holds a veritable star on the map of international art: Shakila, who has been living there with her husband and three children for nearly 30 years. Shakila’s story is not simply one of her rise from penury to prominence due to her breathtaking talent as an artist, but also of her unshaken resilience while facing the world of circumstances. In Shakila’s case, the remarkable intersection of gender, education and creativity complicates any attempt at reducing her life to a neat set of formulations, endorsing any one kind of politics. She has never heard of feminism but knows what oppression is. She has the gift of art but not any conventional education. Her reputation has changed the fortunes of her family,
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY CIMA GALLERY
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The world according to Shakila From the local vegetable market to the global art market, this artist’s journey is about liberation from harsh circumstances
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but she remains a humble, retiring homemaker. Shakila’s story is among those that exist between heaven and earth, one of those tales that can’t be dreamt of in any philosophy. Born circa 1969—Shakila is not sure what her exact age is—she is by far one of the finest, though relatively unsung, artists in the country, known for her singular talent for collage and works with paper. Scenes from provincial life fill up her canvases, which can be as cosy as a miniature painting or staggering enough to cover a full wall. Tearing bits of newspapers, magazines, film posters and play bills by hand—Shakila never uses scissors—she creates montages, mostly depicting the lived realities of men and women of her milieu. A solitary girl child, abandoned by her mother, floats in a sea of green mulch; goddess Kali appears in all her gruesome glory; while Durga assumes the benign aspect of a mother. Over the years, portability has given way to massive canvases—one of which shows a peeing Ganesh—and largerthan-life installations that diffuse the boundaries between the real and the imagined, possible and impossible. Now represented by the Centre of International Modern Art (Cima) gallery of Kolkata, Shakila’s work has travelled
PRIME NUMBERS
LITERACY RATE 74.04% total literacy rate
65.46% Female literacy rate Rajasthan (lowest)
52.7%
Female literacy rate
West Bengal
71.2%
Female literacy rate
INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT
Kerala
(highest)
92%
Female literacy rate
SOURCE: CENSUS,
Paper girl: Shakila in her studio at her house in Noorgram.
2011.
to the distant corners of the country as well as of the world—France, Germany, Norway—and inspired as much acclaim as awe among beholders. Shakila herself has only ever travelled to Delhi to accept the Sanskriti Award (2000), apart from sporadic journeys to Kolkata. “Shakila’s story has a Pygmalion quality to it,” writes Kolkata-based art critic Rita Datta in an essay about her, “as though it’s all make-believe, a feelgood fable out of popular cinema.” The journey from the local vegetable market to the global art market might sound like a fairy-tale, but the reality is not all sweetness and light. “Do you want to know just about my work? Or should I begin from the beginning?” Shakila says, when I ask her to tell me her story. She starts speaking slowly but surely, with what seems like a practised ease but loses the thread of her narrative frequently. It must have grown on her through repeated telling, but the feelings and memories stirred by it seem to affect her still. Her eyes fill up when she speaks of her mentor, B.R. Panesar, maverick artist and statistician. Now ailing and in his 80s, Panesar, who Shakila calls “Baba”, discovered her when she was six- or seven-years old. “We were very poor,” Shakila says, softly. “I used to sell vegetables at the Taltala market (in Kolkata) with my mother.” There she would often find a middleaged gentleman giving eggs, biscuits and toffees to children in the neighbourhood. “I’d never accept anything from a
stranger, so I wouldn’t take whatever he offered me,” Shakila says. “One day, he asked me who I had come with, and then proceeded to meet my mother and convince her to send me to school.” Although she studied for a few years, it was difficult for a young girl from her background to go to the city every day from the village of Mograhat, in South 24 Parganas, where her folks lived, to attend classes. “I managed to learn some Bengali,” Shakila says. “Then, when I was 12, my mother married me off to him (her husband) without Baba’s knowledge.” In conversation with others, Shakila refers to her husband in the third-person singular, keeping him at a respectable distance, but also making him appear, perhaps without meaning to, like just another character in the story of her life. As Shakila speaks, Akbar quietly goes about arranging plates of food before us. The family may be observing the ritual fast but guests cannot be neglected. Although I am aware, from my interactions with those who know Shakila, that she is Akbar’s second wife, she does not mention it herself. “I went to see Baba a few years after my marriage,” she continues, looking down, “and asked him if there was anything I could do to earn some money. He suggested I make thongas (paper packets) and sell them.” While folding scrap paper into shapes, Shakila remembers being struck by the intense colours. “I was good at drawing when I was young,” she says. “Baba used to give me drawing books and pens to sketch. I made two pictures that were printed in newspapers he had sent them to.” One showed a boy dragging a cow on a leash and the other had someone playing the flute. “Then, one day, Baba asked me, ‘Do you want to come see my exhibition?’ So I went.” That visit to the gallery proved to be a turning point in her life. Shakila spent hours looking at each work in great detail. When Panesar asked her to point out the ones she had liked, she named a few. “Baba approved of my selection,” she recalls. “He said I have a good eye for art.” “On my way home, on the train, I kept thinking of the paintings,” she continues. “Then I thought I could perhaps try making something with bits of coloured paper, since paint is expensive and I didn’t have the money for it.” When she told her husband of her idea and asked him to get her a “piece board” from Panesar, he laughed at her, making her angry and even more determined to make what she wanted. When she finally made her first work in her late teens—two still-life images showing simple arrangements of vegetables and fruits—Panesar and his fellow artists were overwhelmed. Soon, they started giving her canvases and magazines and newspapers from which she could get raw materials. They encouraged her to carry on making collages, and organized her first solo in the early 1990s at the Chitrakoot Art Gallery in Kolkata. “Since then Shakila’s work has evolved tremendously,” says Rakhi Sarkar, director of Cima, which now promotes her art. “It has grown complex and become much darker.” Sarkar, who Shakila calls Didi (elder sister), has been instrumental in sending her work out into the world. “A few years ago, the International Trade Fair in Hannover commissioned her to make work around Grameen Bank and microfinance,” she says. “Shakila
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exceeded our expectations and created not just staggeringly large collages but also life-size figures with papier mâché.” In these unforgettable works, women are seen selling groceries, weaving the loom, or speaking to their sons on cellphones. But perhaps the most moving among Shakila’s installations is Ghuter Deyal, literally a stark wall encrusted with cow-dung cakes by a woman who stands with her back to the visitors in the gallery. There is something lonesome and incredibly melancholic about her, absorbed as she is in her humble chore. The work is emblematic of Shakila’s own position within the art world. Working outside the tradition, with practically no education or training, save for the incremental benefits of having occasionally looked at other people’s art, Shakila is naturally indifferent to the achievements of high modernism. “Baba told me never to copy an image,” she says, “I can only make pictures out of my imagination.” Shakila’s contemporary, artist Sumitro Basak, who was trained at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, notes Panesar’s influence on Shakila’s style. “There is a palpable affinity between some of their collages,” says Basak. “But Shakila’s imagery and symbolism are informed by the unique way she responds to popular culture with her natural intelligence.” Although domestic violence or political killings appear in her work from time to time, she refuses to explain how or why that happens. “I can never explain what they mean,” she says apologetically, “I watch a bit of TV, yes—we bought it when I was given Star Ananda’s Shera Bangali puroshkar (the Best Bengali award) in 2010—and read the newspapers once in a while, but I can’t even think up titles for my own work.” Increasingly, and especially since the police atrocities on agitating farmers in the village of Nandigram in 2007, Shakila’s work has become more inwardlooking. There are also some gestures towards abstraction, though figures and landscape still dominate her imagery. The figure of a man feeding birds—a nod to Panesar, who used to be a compulsive feeder of pigeons—is a recurring motif. But the most striking aspect of her work is how often it grows out of body parts— navel, eyes, skin, breasts—ripped out of glossy magazines and tacky posters and reassembled to create scenarios that are a world apart from the urban glitz. those primary sources represent. Sarkar says around 500 people visit the gallery each day when Shakila’s solo shows are on, plying her with questions that can never be answered convincingly. “How does one account for a prodigy like her?” she says. “I don’t have an explanation. Although I help curate her work, she is very much her own person. No one can ever force her to do anything against her wishes.” Yet, in spite of all the praise and the prices her works fetch (selling between `25,000 and `2.5 lakh), Shakila has never entirely been rid of self-doubt. When she started making images of Hindu deities, her conservative Muslim neighbours were furious. “They said I had become Christian. But I never stopped. I must go on making what I must. People still come by, stand and watch when I am working, but are less critical.” Her husband, she says, has been a pillar of support, in spite of his two marriages and sporadic episodes of misdemeanour, encouraging her to carry on, minding the children while she worked, and even hunting for the right colours she had been looking for
among piles of old and discarded papers. In her community, a spouse like Akbar is an exception. Shakila’s “studio” is a small room in front of her house, cluttered with pulpy Bengali film posters. Stacks of canvases rest against the wall. A bunch of josssticks smoulder away in a corner. When she lived in a mud hut, her husband built a shed outside the house, where she went to work every night, after her two sons and a daughter had gone to bed. She would work by the dim glow of an oil lamp, into the wee hours. “Now my daughter is married, the sons have grown up. I sit down to work whenever I can, as and when the urge seizes me,” she says. These days she is about to begin a new piece—there is only a murky dark green background now—but she doesn’t know what it will be about. Her favourites among her own work are the images of Kali. “When I tear the paper, I feel as if Kali has come to me,” she says. “I feel both sad and happy when I hear someone has bought my work. Sad because I will never be able to see it again—I don’t have a camera to take a photo of it and keep it with me—and happy because it has been liked by someone.”
Slices of life: (from top) The Grameen Bank installation (paper and wire frame, set of 100 pieces); Kali (collage on canvas); and A Scene (collage on paper).
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··································· hakila Sheikh, who usually just goes by her first name, is sweeping the entrance to her house, one of the few two-storeyed pucca buildings in the tiny village of Noorgram, near Baruipur, when we reach. Head covered by the end of her sari, she moves lithely, fussing over us, bringing out chairs, offering us refreshments, and murmuring about whether she ought to change into a nicer outfit. A couple of hours’ drive from the city of Kolkata, Baruipur is a bustling municipality in the district of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal. As you move further away from the squalid town centre, past the narrow strip of arterial road festooned with bright flags of political parties, and into the once-pristine countryside now tarnished by ugly concrete structures, the din of suburban life recedes, and a hush descends. Miles of guava orchards heavy with fruit, perhaps Baruipur’s chief claim to fame, usher you into sleepy Noorgram. It is late afternoon, in the month of Ramzan. The azaan (call to prayer) wafts in from the distance. Men in their Sunday best make their way to the
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neighbouring mosque, casting curious glances at us, as we are greeted by Shakila and her husband, Akbar Sheikh. It’s also mid-July, the eve of the panchayat polls, and the air is tense after yet another episode of violence that had erupted the night before. Once a stronghold of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the area is now ruled by the cadres of the Trinamool Congress, who are accused by some locals of running a reign of terror. Noorgram may be a nondescript speck on the map of India, but it holds a veritable star on the map of international art: Shakila, who has been living there with her husband and three children for nearly 30 years. Shakila’s story is not simply one of her rise from penury to prominence due to her breathtaking talent as an artist, but also of her unshaken resilience while facing the world of circumstances. In Shakila’s case, the remarkable intersection of gender, education and creativity complicates any attempt at reducing her life to a neat set of formulations, endorsing any one kind of politics. She has never heard of feminism but knows what oppression is. She has the gift of art but not any conventional education. Her reputation has changed the fortunes of her family,
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY CIMA GALLERY
THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE
The world according to Shakila From the local vegetable market to the global art market, this artist’s journey is about liberation from harsh circumstances
L13
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 2013° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE
FREEDOM OF THE INDEPENDENCE
THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE
but she remains a humble, retiring homemaker. Shakila’s story is among those that exist between heaven and earth, one of those tales that can’t be dreamt of in any philosophy. Born circa 1969—Shakila is not sure what her exact age is—she is by far one of the finest, though relatively unsung, artists in the country, known for her singular talent for collage and works with paper. Scenes from provincial life fill up her canvases, which can be as cosy as a miniature painting or staggering enough to cover a full wall. Tearing bits of newspapers, magazines, film posters and play bills by hand—Shakila never uses scissors—she creates montages, mostly depicting the lived realities of men and women of her milieu. A solitary girl child, abandoned by her mother, floats in a sea of green mulch; goddess Kali appears in all her gruesome glory; while Durga assumes the benign aspect of a mother. Over the years, portability has given way to massive canvases—one of which shows a peeing Ganesh—and largerthan-life installations that diffuse the boundaries between the real and the imagined, possible and impossible. Now represented by the Centre of International Modern Art (Cima) gallery of Kolkata, Shakila’s work has travelled
PRIME NUMBERS
LITERACY RATE 74.04% total literacy rate
65.46% Female literacy rate Rajasthan (lowest)
52.7%
Female literacy rate
West Bengal
71.2%
Female literacy rate
INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT
Kerala
(highest)
92%
Female literacy rate
SOURCE: CENSUS,
Paper girl: Shakila in her studio at her house in Noorgram.
2011.
to the distant corners of the country as well as of the world—France, Germany, Norway—and inspired as much acclaim as awe among beholders. Shakila herself has only ever travelled to Delhi to accept the Sanskriti Award (2000), apart from sporadic journeys to Kolkata. “Shakila’s story has a Pygmalion quality to it,” writes Kolkata-based art critic Rita Datta in an essay about her, “as though it’s all make-believe, a feelgood fable out of popular cinema.” The journey from the local vegetable market to the global art market might sound like a fairy-tale, but the reality is not all sweetness and light. “Do you want to know just about my work? Or should I begin from the beginning?” Shakila says, when I ask her to tell me her story. She starts speaking slowly but surely, with what seems like a practised ease but loses the thread of her narrative frequently. It must have grown on her through repeated telling, but the feelings and memories stirred by it seem to affect her still. Her eyes fill up when she speaks of her mentor, B.R. Panesar, maverick artist and statistician. Now ailing and in his 80s, Panesar, who Shakila calls “Baba”, discovered her when she was six- or seven-years old. “We were very poor,” Shakila says, softly. “I used to sell vegetables at the Taltala market (in Kolkata) with my mother.” There she would often find a middleaged gentleman giving eggs, biscuits and toffees to children in the neighbourhood. “I’d never accept anything from a
stranger, so I wouldn’t take whatever he offered me,” Shakila says. “One day, he asked me who I had come with, and then proceeded to meet my mother and convince her to send me to school.” Although she studied for a few years, it was difficult for a young girl from her background to go to the city every day from the village of Mograhat, in South 24 Parganas, where her folks lived, to attend classes. “I managed to learn some Bengali,” Shakila says. “Then, when I was 12, my mother married me off to him (her husband) without Baba’s knowledge.” In conversation with others, Shakila refers to her husband in the third-person singular, keeping him at a respectable distance, but also making him appear, perhaps without meaning to, like just another character in the story of her life. As Shakila speaks, Akbar quietly goes about arranging plates of food before us. The family may be observing the ritual fast but guests cannot be neglected. Although I am aware, from my interactions with those who know Shakila, that she is Akbar’s second wife, she does not mention it herself. “I went to see Baba a few years after my marriage,” she continues, looking down, “and asked him if there was anything I could do to earn some money. He suggested I make thongas (paper packets) and sell them.” While folding scrap paper into shapes, Shakila remembers being struck by the intense colours. “I was good at drawing when I was young,” she says. “Baba used to give me drawing books and pens to sketch. I made two pictures that were printed in newspapers he had sent them to.” One showed a boy dragging a cow on a leash and the other had someone playing the flute. “Then, one day, Baba asked me, ‘Do you want to come see my exhibition?’ So I went.” That visit to the gallery proved to be a turning point in her life. Shakila spent hours looking at each work in great detail. When Panesar asked her to point out the ones she had liked, she named a few. “Baba approved of my selection,” she recalls. “He said I have a good eye for art.” “On my way home, on the train, I kept thinking of the paintings,” she continues. “Then I thought I could perhaps try making something with bits of coloured paper, since paint is expensive and I didn’t have the money for it.” When she told her husband of her idea and asked him to get her a “piece board” from Panesar, he laughed at her, making her angry and even more determined to make what she wanted. When she finally made her first work in her late teens—two still-life images showing simple arrangements of vegetables and fruits—Panesar and his fellow artists were overwhelmed. Soon, they started giving her canvases and magazines and newspapers from which she could get raw materials. They encouraged her to carry on making collages, and organized her first solo in the early 1990s at the Chitrakoot Art Gallery in Kolkata. “Since then Shakila’s work has evolved tremendously,” says Rakhi Sarkar, director of Cima, which now promotes her art. “It has grown complex and become much darker.” Sarkar, who Shakila calls Didi (elder sister), has been instrumental in sending her work out into the world. “A few years ago, the International Trade Fair in Hannover commissioned her to make work around Grameen Bank and microfinance,” she says. “Shakila
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exceeded our expectations and created not just staggeringly large collages but also life-size figures with papier mâché.” In these unforgettable works, women are seen selling groceries, weaving the loom, or speaking to their sons on cellphones. But perhaps the most moving among Shakila’s installations is Ghuter Deyal, literally a stark wall encrusted with cow-dung cakes by a woman who stands with her back to the visitors in the gallery. There is something lonesome and incredibly melancholic about her, absorbed as she is in her humble chore. The work is emblematic of Shakila’s own position within the art world. Working outside the tradition, with practically no education or training, save for the incremental benefits of having occasionally looked at other people’s art, Shakila is naturally indifferent to the achievements of high modernism. “Baba told me never to copy an image,” she says, “I can only make pictures out of my imagination.” Shakila’s contemporary, artist Sumitro Basak, who was trained at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, notes Panesar’s influence on Shakila’s style. “There is a palpable affinity between some of their collages,” says Basak. “But Shakila’s imagery and symbolism are informed by the unique way she responds to popular culture with her natural intelligence.” Although domestic violence or political killings appear in her work from time to time, she refuses to explain how or why that happens. “I can never explain what they mean,” she says apologetically, “I watch a bit of TV, yes—we bought it when I was given Star Ananda’s Shera Bangali puroshkar (the Best Bengali award) in 2010—and read the newspapers once in a while, but I can’t even think up titles for my own work.” Increasingly, and especially since the police atrocities on agitating farmers in the village of Nandigram in 2007, Shakila’s work has become more inwardlooking. There are also some gestures towards abstraction, though figures and landscape still dominate her imagery. The figure of a man feeding birds—a nod to Panesar, who used to be a compulsive feeder of pigeons—is a recurring motif. But the most striking aspect of her work is how often it grows out of body parts— navel, eyes, skin, breasts—ripped out of glossy magazines and tacky posters and reassembled to create scenarios that are a world apart from the urban glitz. those primary sources represent. Sarkar says around 500 people visit the gallery each day when Shakila’s solo shows are on, plying her with questions that can never be answered convincingly. “How does one account for a prodigy like her?” she says. “I don’t have an explanation. Although I help curate her work, she is very much her own person. No one can ever force her to do anything against her wishes.” Yet, in spite of all the praise and the prices her works fetch (selling between `25,000 and `2.5 lakh), Shakila has never entirely been rid of self-doubt. When she started making images of Hindu deities, her conservative Muslim neighbours were furious. “They said I had become Christian. But I never stopped. I must go on making what I must. People still come by, stand and watch when I am working, but are less critical.” Her husband, she says, has been a pillar of support, in spite of his two marriages and sporadic episodes of misdemeanour, encouraging her to carry on, minding the children while she worked, and even hunting for the right colours she had been looking for
among piles of old and discarded papers. In her community, a spouse like Akbar is an exception. Shakila’s “studio” is a small room in front of her house, cluttered with pulpy Bengali film posters. Stacks of canvases rest against the wall. A bunch of josssticks smoulder away in a corner. When she lived in a mud hut, her husband built a shed outside the house, where she went to work every night, after her two sons and a daughter had gone to bed. She would work by the dim glow of an oil lamp, into the wee hours. “Now my daughter is married, the sons have grown up. I sit down to work whenever I can, as and when the urge seizes me,” she says. These days she is about to begin a new piece—there is only a murky dark green background now—but she doesn’t know what it will be about. Her favourites among her own work are the images of Kali. “When I tear the paper, I feel as if Kali has come to me,” she says. “I feel both sad and happy when I hear someone has bought my work. Sad because I will never be able to see it again—I don’t have a camera to take a photo of it and keep it with me—and happy because it has been liked by someone.”
Slices of life: (from top) The Grameen Bank installation (paper and wire frame, set of 100 pieces); Kali (collage on canvas); and A Scene (collage on paper).
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INDEPENDENCE A DAY ISSUE of girls from tribal Can the humble football be a weapon against gender THE inequality? group villages near Ranchi prove that it can, and fight for their right to play
B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com
··································· t 4.30 in the afternoon on an overcast day, a large, fallow field on the outskirts of Ranchi turns into a colourful playground. Girls as young as 5, in frayed T-shirts and shorts, teenage girls in bright, festive salwar kameez or frilly skirts, and a handful of girls in full kit—green striped jerseys, black shorts, and boots. They have one thing in common—all of them are kicking footballs. Manisha Tirkey stands out in her black jersey, not only for her strong built, but also equally for her deft feints. An abruptly-dropped shoulder to the right, a quick step over, and she’s running clear with the ball. Not so fast. Kusum Kumari chases. She is tiny, but quick. She tries to slide in to take the ball away, misses, and tumbles in a heap of laughter. By now you’ve probably heard about the football girls of Yuwa, back after making waves at two football tournaments in Spain this July. They made it to the semi-finals of the Donosti Cup that was held from 1-6 July at San Sebastian and is one of the world’s biggest tournaments for school-going children, and won a bronze medal at the Gasteiz Cup, another tournament for school-age children, which was held from 7-13 July at Vitoria-Gasteiz. “Everything there was new for us,” says Kusum, 12. “And we were new for everybody there. Every one wanted to take pictures with us.” Kusum’s house is barely a kilometre from the makeshift training ground, a
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Game on: Girls from vil lages on the outskirts of Ranchi attend Yuwa’s football training pro gramme; and (right) Yuwa team members revel on a beach in San Sebastien, Spain.
small mud hut with a tiled roof in Hutup village. Hutup is the base for Yuwa, a not-for-profit organization that trains over 200 girls and around 50 boys between the ages of 5 and 17 in football, and provides coaching in English and math. It also holds a range of workshops—everything from learning-based fun and games for the younger children to gender and violence discussions for the older girls. Kusum’s house got electricity just over a year back, but that did not stop her from topping her class, being a bit of a math whiz, and a feisty footballer. Her parents are subsistence farmers, her elder brother works as a driver in Ranchi, and her sister, 19, is in college. Kusum joined the Yuwa ranks in 2009, when she saw some of her friends playing football, and her parents were supportive. “My parents were very happy when I went to Spain,” she says. This parental support was not always a given, and still isn’t. When Yuwa began in 2009, most parents were not ready to let their daughters out to play. Who will help them with housework? With the cooking? With working in the fields? Or more disquieting concerns: What if the girls are trafficked? Jharkhand has one of the highest incidences of child-trafficking, and is consistently at the bottom on most human development indices. It’s one of the reasons Franz Gastler, 31, from Minnesota, US, started Yuwa. A Boston University graduate, Gastler came to India in 2007 as a business consultant with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). By the summer of 2008, looking for new challenges, Gas-
tler joined an NGO, Krishi Gram Vikas Kendra, in Jharkhand, which runs education programmes. “I moved into a mud hut in a rural village, and I was completely fascinated by that life,” Gastler says over the phone from San Francisco, US. “One of the first things that struck me was that the boys all go out to play, while the girls work.” While working at the NGO, one of Gastler’s students told him she wanted to play football. That simple request set Yuwa into motion. Gastler, with three of his American friends, pooled in enough money to kick-start the programme in 2009. Convincing parents to let their daughters go and play was the first major hurdle. But once that barrier was crossed, success came almost immediately. In less than a year, 13 of Yuwa’s girls made it to Jharkhand’s age-group state teams, and seven of those made it to the Under-13 state team, whose
ranking shot to 4 from 20th place. Every system in Yuwa is geared towards empowering the girls. Team captains maintain attendance records for the rest of the team, and also manage a small fund for uniforms, shoes, and balls. Coaches are drawn from former trainees who are selected for coaches’ training programmes at the Bhaichung Bhutia Football Schools in New Delhi. Like Kalawati Kumari, 17, a high-school student who started training with Yuwa in 2009 and was selected for Jharkhand’s Under-19 and Under-17 teams. In 2011, she completed coaches’ training programmes at the Tata Football Academy, Jamshedpur, and Bhaichung Bhutia Football Schools. “What I love most is that when these girls come to play, they have no inhibitions,” Kalawati says. “Every day, they give everything they have on the ground—running, diving, laughing, fall-
DIWAKAR PRASAD/HINDUSTAN TIMES
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Angels on AstroTurf Sundargarh, a tribal district in Orissa, has a long history of producing top hockey players. The legacy continues PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
PRADEEP GAUR/MINT
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On the ball: (above) The Yuwa team (in green) in action at the Donosti Cup; and Kusum (left) and Nilmoni Kumari with the trophy they won for finishing third in the Gasteiz Cup.
DIWAKAR PRASAD/HINDUSTAN TIMES
ing—isn’t it fantastic to be here?” Outside of the ground, the girls have the odds stacked against them. Most families don’t expect them to finish schooling. Fifteen is the common age for marriage, and they are expected to be bound by the strict boundaries of housework and farm work. “Abuse and apathy. Those are the biggest challenges for the girls here,” Gastler says. “They are ignored. Nothing that is intended for them comes to them. They are jeered and taunted for wearing shorts, or playing with boys.” Indeed, when the girls selected for the Spanish tournaments went to the local panchayat office to request for birth certificates (many of them were born at home) so they could get passports made, they were told it could only happen if they paid hefty sums of money. Then they were told to sweep the panchayat offices if they couldn’t afford to pay the bribe. When a couple of girls, after spending days being humiliated in this fashion, reminded the officer that their passport deadlines where fast approaching, they were slapped. “The difference in how they are treated in Jharkhand and how they were treated in Spain is so vast that you can’t begin to compare,” Gastler says. By all accounts, Spain was a riot. The Yuwa girls, with their combative skills on the field, and their effortless charm and infectious joy off it, were treated like royalty. They became the darlings of the local media, went for a tour of Real Madrid’s training ground, met the captain Xabi Prieto of Primera Liga team Real Sociedad, and a photograph of the girls in traditional red-and-white saris during the opening ceremony of the Donosti Cup became an emblem of sorts for the tournament. The canteen staff at the hostel they were staying in even started attending their matches. “We loved it so much,” Kusum says. “It was not difficult to make friends even though we did not speak their
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language. We always had people translating for us. We would play matches in the morning, and then go swim and play in the sea. Then we would practise or play in the evening again, and then go to parties.” The levels of excitement were so high that the girls had to be threatened every night to go to sleep: “Whoever doesn’t sleep on time tonight will not get to play tomorrow”. “But we still kept awake till 2-3 in the morning, just talking about our day, all that we had seen, how we were playing,” Kusum says. “We were too happy to sleep.” The only thing that did not agree with Kusum was the food. “Potatoes in an omelette? Eeeck!” Like Kusum, Supriya Kumari too had never been outside India. In fact, most girls had never been to Ranchi even, barely half an hour from their villages. Supriya saw everything with brand new eyes—her first close-up view of an aeroplane, her first time flying inside one, her first time on an escalator (she had to be dragged away from the unfettered joy of running up and down moving staircases), and her first plunge into the ocean. “We would swim all day, sleep on the beach, swim again,” Supriya says. “We even went on a ship!” Supriya, 13, is from Rukka village, close to Hutup, and has been part of Yuwa for three years. Her parents heard of Yuwa’s football programme and that they teach English and math for free, so they sent her there. Supriya’s father is an accountant in a rice mill in Rukka, and her mother is training to be a teacher. “My parents love the fact that I play,” she says. “My father has always wanted me to do something good, study well, learn new things. He also put my mother through school and college. She has finished her BA now, and is applying for a B.Ed.” Gastler has big plans for the future: a “centre of excellence” for the seriously talented footballers, with better facilities and better nutrition; better education facilities (classrooms are being built on rented land in Hutup, next to the Yuwa office); and a small stadium for the girls to play tournaments. “The quality of their education leaves them woefully unprepared for a good job,” Gastler says. “Their nutrition levels are poor. If these girls grew up where I grew up, they would be applying to Stanford (University), Harvard (University), or Yale (University). Here they fight for the absolute basics.”
B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com
································ hen the Indian team won their bronze playoff match against Eng land at the 2013 International Hockey Fed eration (FIH) Junior World Cup on 4 August, few celebrated as hard as the vil lagers in Sundargarh, a tribal district in Orissa, and with good reason. This was the first time that India had won a medal at the competition, or even gone beyond the quarterfinal stage, and four of the girls in the team came from Sundargarh. Deep Grace Ekka, 19, is one of the four. A sprightly and stronglybuilt defender, Ekka is known in the team for her cheer fulness and her abilities to lift the spirit of her teammates when the chips are down. Sitting in the quiet lobby of a small hotel in New Delhi, Ekka does not hide her restlessness. “Of course I want to be in my village right now,” Ekka says with a laugh. “I am missing out on all the fun. They are cook ing good food. There’s hockey matches being played in the village grounds in cele bration. There’s music and dancing.” Ekka comes from Lulkidi in Sundargarh, and like her teammates from Orissa, she is part of a deep and longrunning hockey tra dition in the tribal belt. “In school, the only game we played was hockey,” Ekka says. “On holidays, we would play hockey all day long in the village.” There was never any other path for Ekka but hockey—her older brother Dinesh is a professional player, and has played for India, her father, a farmer, like most others in her village is mad about the game. “No one ever told me ‘don’t play hockey’,” Ekka says. “My parents told me that they would do anything to make sure I became a player. It would have been trou ble if I didn’t become one.” Ekka was 13 when she was selected to join the residential Sundargarh Sports Hos tel, run by the state government. It is one of the three premier hockey training cen tres in the district, along with Panposh Sports Hostel, near Rourkela, and the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) Hockey Academy in Rourkela. All three have AstroTurfs. Namita Toppo’s village, Rajgampur Jaur agaon, is an hour from Rourkela, and she has a large family—the 19yearold defender is the seventh of nine children. Every one of the Toppo siblings is or has been at least a statelevel athlete. Her elder brother Dileep has played for the jun ior national team and is in contention for the senior team. “You can say that I had no choice either,” Toppo says. “My brother took me for a selection trial to Panposh when I was 11, and that was it.” Toppo’s first year at the hostel was mis erable. She missed her family, and the hours of training was no fun. But when she was picked for the state’s Under13 team, and went out to play a tournament, every thing changed. “Suddenly I wanted to do nothing else but play hockey, play in tournaments, go on tours with my team,” Toppo says. “I felt like I would do anything to keep playing in the team.” It’s a desire that’s never left Toppo. She
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Winners: Ekka (top) and Toppo were part of the squad that won bronze at the 2013 Junior Women’s Hockey World Cup. made it to the junior national team in 2011, and even got a sniff of senior team action last year. All four Sundargarh girls in the junior hockey team are part of the senior team’s core probables list as well. Toppo says hockey is an obsession in Sundargarh, where hundreds of village tournaments are played each year. These are called “khasi” tournaments, because the winning prize is often a goat. In January this year, former India captain Dileep Tir key, who is also from Sundargarh, organ ized the Sundargarh Rural Hockey Olym piad. Sevenhundred teams played in the tournament, which ran for two months. Marriages often involve hockey games between the two families. Every religious festival is marked with a tournament. “When there’s hockey on TV, no one watches anything else,” Toppo says. Hockey sticks are common now, despite the fact that Sundargarh is one of the poorest districts in India. The large number of international players Sundargarh has produced ensures plenty of handme downs. But Toppo says most villagers also make their own sticks, a skill that has been passed down from generations. Since the beginning, Indian hockey’s suc cess has been scripted by players from the tribal areas of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Jaipal Singh Munda, who cap tained India to its first Olympic gold at the 1928 Amsterdam Games, and set into motion an unbeaten Olympic run that lasted almost 30 years and got India six golds, was from a village in the district of Ranchi. Michael Kindo, who was part of the 1972 Olympic bronze and the 1975 World Cup winning squads, is from Simdega dis trict in Jharkhand and now runs the SAIL academy in Rourkela. Ekka and Toppo are the newest flag bearers of this enduring legacy.
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THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE There is a rising trend among women from small towns taking up manufacturing jobs in big cities
B Y A RUNDHATI R AMANATHAN S . B RIDGET L EENA arundhati.r@livemint.com
······································· eaving behind the hot and dry town of Vellore, about 145km from Chennai, was the toughest but most obvious choice for Sangeetha, who lost her father in a road accident when she was 2. She was determined to fend for her mother and younger sister when she finished her studies and not get married like most of her friends did. At the Maraimalai Nagar factory of Ford, the second-largest US automaker, Sangeetha does not look up while assembling parts of the engine on to the Figo, Ford’s best-selling car in India. She finishes her task in under 3 minutes and goes on to the next car, and effortlessly repeats the task. As we catch up with her during a break, the shy 23-year-old explains what thrills her about her job. “I get excited when I see a Figo on the road, after all I made it,” she says, with a glint in her eyes. She has worked on all Ford cars—SUV Endeavour, Fiesta sedan and the recently-launched compact SUV EcoSport—in the last four years she has been with the company. Sangeetha stays in a working women’s hostel about 10km from the factory, and is getting married later this month. “My mother pawned her gold jewellery to pay our fees as she wanted us to get Englishmedium education,” she says. She chose to do a diploma in electrical and electronics engineering, as she had heard that it would be easier to get a well-paying job in the manufacturing industry. Sangeetha is not a lone example of how women from small towns are increasingly opting for careers in manufacturing. They are doing it at the right time, as the auto industry is facing a shortage of skilled labour. The Sriperumbudur-Oragadam belt on the outskirts of Chennai accounts for 40% of the country’s automobile production, and even though Tamil Nadu has about 479 polytechnics and 689 industrial training institutes (ITIs), human resource (HR) heads of auto companies have raised the alarm on the number of employable
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PRIME NUMBERS WOMEN EMPLOYEES IN THE ORGANIZED MANUFACTURING SECTOR
(in thousands)
77.37
Public sector
966.74
Private sector
SOURCE: ANNUAL EMPLOYMENT REVIEW,
2011.
&
skilled labour from these institutions. ITIs are the places from where the auto companies hire their entry-level employees. Vinothini S. and Kaveri C. completed their two-year electrical engineering diploma last month from an ITI in Thirukkuvalai in Nagapatinam, a coastal district of Tamil Nadu. They are among the 19 girls in a class of 38 boys to have secured a job at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd dealerships. The largest car maker has adopted this ITI under public-private partnership in a skill development initiative. The two will work as salespersons at Pillai & Sons dealership’s Ariyalur and Kumbakknom branches, respectively, on a monthly salary of `5,000. Kaveri, 19, after studying in a government school close to her home, used to travel nearly 30km in a public bus to the ITI. “I gained so much confidence pursuing this diploma course over these two years that I am willing to go to a different location for work.” Although her elder sister was married at the age of 17, Kaveri hopes to work, be independent and support her family. While manufacturing has found acceptance among women in small towns, women in cities like Chennai or Coimbatore, who are from a more educated background, prefer to be software engineers than pursue a degree in electronic or mechanical engineering. It is not just the women, but men too prefer software, a “white” collared job, rather than get their hands dirty on a manufacturing shop floor. The software industry offers far higher remuneration than manufacturing, says E. Balagurusamy, former vice-chancellor of Anna University, Chennai. The IT (information technology) sector has one of the highest percentages of women in its workforce, comprising almost 30-35%, with manufacturing accounting for roughly 10%, according to Nagesh Joshi, managing partner, Antal International Network, a Mumbai-based HR consultancy firm. “There are not enough women graduate engineers in engineering colleges opting for mechanical engineering for us to hire,” says V. Kovaichelvan, senior vice-president,
HR, TVS Motor Company Ltd. That is why TVS, for the past three years, has been training women diploma holders to ensure a steady supply of entry-level engineers. “We take fresh diploma engineers as trainees and train them for skills in assembly processes. Our observation has been that the women employees are able to achieve better quality and productivity especially in the assembly processes. With this exposure for the fresh diploma engineers, we are able to get a good pool of engineers with shop floor experience,” says Kovaichelvan. “Availability of skilled labour is grave. It is becoming even grimmer because of lack of quality, especially at the entrylevel position,” says N. V. Balachandar, executive director, HR, Ashok Leyland. Of the 1,600 people on its shopfloor in Pantnagar, Uttarakhand, only 148 are women employees. While firms like TVS Motor, Ashok Leyland and Ford have hired women, it would seem like increasing the number of women employees would be the logical answer to solve the labour crunch. But hiring women in manufacturing has a few challenges. There are companies like Hyundai that do not have any women on their shopfloor, while there are others like Bosch Electrical Drives India Pvt. Ltd, where 90% of the workforce is women. Subramanya Ullal, managing director, Bosch Electrical Drives, says women bring a high-level of skill to the job. Even then, for companies like Ford, it has been a struggle to increase the number of women employees. Of the 3,500 people that Ford has working on its shop floor, only 150 are women. The number has stayed the same since they began operations in 1998 in Chennai, even while the overall workforce has increased, says Tom Chackalackal, executive director, manufacturing, Ford India. Chackalackal says the main reason for this is the constraint that women can work only in the general shifts. This is because The Factories Act, 1948 (Act No.63 of 1948) mandates that women cannot be employed in any part of the factory during the night or to be specific, they can be employed only between 6am and 7pm. NATHAN G/MINT
Geared up: A worker at the Ford factory near Chennai.
For instance, the company has three shifts—the first shift is from 6.45am to 3.25pm; the general shift from 7.20am to 4.50pm; and the second shift from 3.25pm to 12.05am. The challenge of having women only in the day shift means the men do not get the equivalent weekly rotation to be on the day shift. “The men will have to do a shift for two weeks to ensure the women can be on day shift,” explains Chackalackal. However, there is a provision in the Act, wherein if the women are working after 7pm, the company must provide additional security and door to door drops. He says they have evaluated providing women employees the additional security and drops to their doorstep, but that would mean hiring third-party services. “A manufacturing sector cannot afford that kind of complexity in security, where they are dropped in small groups, and we need to wait for confirmation of the drop. We debated this at the top management level, and decided against it, as it is far too risky.” Former labour secretary Prabhat Chaturvedi says companies that are not increasing the proportion of women in their workforce are just trying to evade the additional measures they will have to take. “You have to take what these companies are saying with a pinch of salt. They don’t want to employ women because of the additional costs that will be incurred, and the mindset that they may not be as productive as men,” says Chaturvedi. He also finds that the situation is worse in north India, where women are hardly found on the shopfloor. India is a society that is rooted in its mindsets. Why else will most of the gynaecologists be female and most surgeons male, he asks. It is up to the companies to take the big step to change this mindset and employ more women, Chaturvedi adds. The skew in the number of women in this workforce starts early: 70% of students in manufacturing-related courses at ITIs are male. Even though women have been admitted into ITIs since 1960, they still constitute only 25% of the total 25,000 students in Tamil Nadu who study each year in ITIs, says an official of the Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGET), who did not want to be named. In the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Gender Gap report which examines the difference between men and women in four fundamental categories— economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment—India is the lowest ranked of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies featured in the Index. Out of 135 countries, India ranks 123 in the economic participation index and 121 in education attainment, while China ranks 58 in economic participation, and 85 in education attainment. While India performs above average on the political empowerment of women, the report noted that the country lags behind in the other three categories. The persistent health, education and economic participation gaps will be detrimental to India’s growth, says the report. However, a change is being noticed on the ground. Joshi says the number of women in manufacturing, though low, is steadily rising as companies are increasingly finding the benefit in hiring women as they are more skilled in certain fields. With more ITIs being set up, women from small towns are also now qualified for recruitments. R. Malarvizhi, a 24-year old from a town called Virudhunagar in Tamil Nadu, is not only the first woman in her family to work, but was also the first one to leave town and move to Chennai in 2009 to work at Bosch Electrical Drive after completing her diploma in electronics. In her four years in the city, she has already completed a bachelor’s course in business administration through correspondence and now wants to do an engineering degree followed by an MBA. “Marriage can come later, I need to finish my higher studies,” she says. Malarvizhi sends half of her `10,000 salary to her parents in Virudhunagar. “I have managed to set an example for my relatives and neighbours. Earlier, they thought class 12 education was more than enough for a girl, but now they see me and they urge their girl children too to study more,” she says.
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The ladies’ coach THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE
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pets; about how one was able to get a bargain on bottle gourds and apples today, how another aced a test after studying for 3 hours; and how a third who has just moved to Delhi can’t get over the hardwater problem in her locality. Conversations about finding friends through Facebook and making plans to watch BA Pass over the weekend mingle with the voice-recorded message blaring the station name and other announcements that few regulars heed. ****** The compartment is a place only for women. It’s a space they guard jealously too. Any man who feigns ignorance of the rule denying him entry because he is an out-of-towner or first-time Metro user is promptly shown the door. There’s a fine of `250 for men caught travelling in the women’s coach. As of 30 June, the Delhi Metro has fined 35,482 passengers for “unlawful entry into the coach reserved for ladies”. The objective, of course, is not to collect money but to deter men from getting into that compartment, says Mohinder Yadav, senior public relations officer (operations), DMRC. But the fine has only covered an average of 35 men a day. Many more are prevented from boarding this coach each day by the women themselves, and by the Metro staff on duty. And they are serious about enforcing this rule too. At Connaught Place’s Rajiv Chowk Metro Station, a major line-changing hub, Metro staff routinely prevent men from entering the first compartment of the train going to Gurgaon. It’s the coach closest to the stairway. But men are barred entry. Even if it means they miss the train altogether.
B Y C HANPREET K HURANA chanpreet.k@livemint.com
······································ ressed in a blue off-shoulder dress and pumps, Shreya Jain, 21, is waiting with a bunch of girlfriends for the Metro going towards Badarpur. It is Thursday. “We’re going to Velocity in GK (a pub in Greater Kailash-I),” she tells me. An economics graduate from Delhi University’s Daulat Ram College, she’s now studying to become an actuary. This is the only free day she gets in the week. So, on Thursdays, she takes the Metro from her GTB Nagar home in north Delhi to “Medical” (the All India Institute of Medical Sciences), where a few of her friends wait for her. From here, they travel farther south, to watch movies, eat out and sometimes go to pubs. “If it weren’t for the women’s compartment of the Delhi Metro, I wouldn’t have been able to dress this way,” she says. Inside the compartment, Jain is far from conscious about her clothes and isn’t worried about people staring. But she remembers a time before the women’s compartment was introduced on 2 October 2010. When she first came to Delhi from Chhattisgarh in 2009, she would have to travel in the general compartment. That meant dressing more conservatively, she says. The compartments would be chock-a-block, and there was definitely no way that she and her friends could have planned an outing like this, Jain adds. Ritika Jain, 26, works at a BPO in Noida. She too remembers taking the rush-hour train before the ladies’ compartment segregated the traffic of men and women commuters. She lowers her voice as she tells me that someone had groped her behind. When she turned around, only a venerable-looking old man was standing there. “I couldn’t even say anything; I wasn’t sure who had done it,” she says. Now, even when she’s travelling with a male companion, she makes sure she’s in the ladies’ coach while the man stands in the bridge between the first two cars of the train. It was exactly this sort of thing that
D
DELHI METRO
The women’s-only coach of the Delhi Metro was PRIME NUMBERS started in October 2010
25%
of commuters on the Delhi Metro are women
35,482
The number of men fined for entering the women's compartment, as of 30 June
SOURCE: DELHI METRO RAIL CORPORATION
******
prompted the Delhi Metro to launch the women’s compartment. “We had reserved seats for ladies from the start, but we found that it wasn’t enough,” says Anuj Dayal, executive director— corporate communications of the Delhi Metro Rail Corp. (DMRC). He adds that they had noticed it was getting uncomfortably crowded for women, especially since the Metro had just four coaches to a train back then compared with up to eight cars per tube now. Twenty-five per cent of the 2.2 million commuters who use the Metro daily are women. It made a great deal of sense to give them their own space. Activist Kalpana Viswanath says, “eventually we would like for all spaces to be safe for women” but for now, this temporary solution is welcome indeed. “The compartment is a space for yourself. It is not invaded by the male gaze,” Viswanath says. She is a senior adviser for the Safe Delhi Initiative of Jagori, a women’s non-governmental organization. What’s more, the women’s compartment of the Delhi Metro has since evolved into more than just a medium to get from Point A to Point B. The Metro commute offers travellers anywhere between a blissful few minutes to a cou-
Island of safety: (top) Women read, listen to music and catch up on gossip in the women’s compartment; and peak hours see around 300 women travel ling together in one coach. ple of hours of free time. Women are using that time to do what they want. On the morning commute, many catch up on sleep, still more read books and newspapers, some listen to music on their cellphones and iPods, some play phone games and some pass the time just watching other people. Author Kamla Bhasin, 67, says she loves to watch people on the Metro. There are women clad in all kinds of saris, fashionable dresses, pants, jeans, skirts, shorts, salwar-kameez, and what Bhasin finds most heartening, they’re almost always in “sensible shoes”. Many women spend their time talking—on phones or to friends they’re travelling with. As the peak traffic gathers each day from 8-11am and again from 5-8pm, the decibel level rises. There are nearly 300 women packed in a compartment that has seating for around 50. Most days, there’s a cacophony of sounds. It’s hard to not overhear snip-
Almost 66 years after India gained independence, women in the Capital need to every day negotiate simple freedoms. The Delhi Metro and particularly the women’s compartment has given the Capital’s women a degree of mobility, even though it has its limitations. Viswanath says she uses the Metro all the time, as does her 18-year-old daughter. As convenient and comfortable as it is, she says the women’s compartment is only a “cocoon”. The moment you get out of the Metro, there’s still the rest of the city to negotiate, she says. There are the problems of last-mile connectivity, ill-lit streets and entire streets that are deserted in the commercial districts after office hours. “My daughter calls me when she’s travelling late by Metro. ‘Pick me up from the station, Mom,’ she says. But what about the other women?” Viswanath asks. It’s a problem the DMRC is aware of. They have tried to sign on connecting bus services. But Dayal says it hasn’t worked out for them so far. The new Metro “More Delhi” smart cards hold out a promise. “Metro.Bus.Taxi.Parking”, they will offer all these facilities through just this one “Common Mobility Card”. For now, women must walk, drive, take a rickshaw, a bus, to even get to the stations. ****** At 10pm, the usually bustling lanes of Connaught Place are quiet. You scamper in your hurry to get to the Barakhamba Metro station. Once inside, you feel safe. There are still operatives of the Central Industrial Security Force on duty. They are still alert, and check the bags. The station is well-lit. Then there is the comforting presence of other women on the platform. Women who are taking the late train back from work. Groups of women who are returning from watching a movie. Women who are carrying their bags and their sleeping children in their arms.
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Words of protest: protest: Graffiti on a wall in Delhi in 2013; and (below) a protestor outside Delhi Police headquarters in April.
Fear and loathing in New Delhi Is the Capital safer than it was in December? Statistics show the number of rape cases reported has gone up, and studies reveal the most unsafe place for a woman is her home B Y C ORDELIA J ENKINS cordelia.j@livemint.com
········································ t the Munirka bus stand a little after 8pm on a recent Sunday night, 18 men wait to board vehicles headed towards West Delhi. Among them, a single young woman sits on the flood-lit bench in a salwar-kameez; she has come from a south Delhi mall, where she works, and is waiting for the 764 Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) “green bus” to take her on the second leg of her journey home to Dhaula Kuan. Does this scenario make you slightly nervous? Ought it to? It’s been more than seven months now since another young woman took a lift on a privately-operated bus from the same stop and was brutally gang-raped. The attack, and her subsequent death, shocked the capital city out of its habitual inertia over the threat of sexual violence posed every day to nearly half of its inhabitants. In the days and weeks that followed the December attack, thousands of women and men took to the streets to demand justice for the victim and a change in the prevailing attitudes to women’s rights in their city. But more than seven months later, despite judicial reforms, media scrutiny and the efforts of the police, the question of whether the average woman feels any safer remains largely unanswered. Over the next 10 minutes in Munirka, several public buses come and go, but only three more women join the group where the girl sits. Deepa Joshi, who is 25, has
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taken this route five days a week for three years now. But she maintains strict rules about how and when she will travel. “At night, it’s not safe, there are very few girls,” she says, “I would never travel after 9pm. When I work a late shift, I take an auto home because on the bus, I never see any girls, it’s mostly drunk people.” The daily commute by auto costs `200, as opposed to `60 for the buses, Joshi says, but she remembers the December rape and the vigil that was held at the bus stop after the woman’s death. “It was sad, and my parents get worried now. They call me up and ask where I am.” She pauses, “My timing is fine, that’s why I’m okay.”
Living within the limits Like many women who use public transport out of necessity, Joshi feels safer because she abides by a set of unwritten rules for women in the city. She dresses demurely, makes no eye contact, avoids the more crowded buses and gets home early. In short, she takes all the advice that was handed out to women by the police and politicians in the wake of the December protests. Since December, Delhiites have witnessed a series of efforts aimed at mollifying public fury. In the days that followed, a new government helpline for women, 181, was announced by Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit. It would be
the fourth call option for women (100, 1091 and 1096, the Delhi Police lines, are the alternatives). A month later, when then Delhi Police special commissioner Sudhir Yadav was appointed head of women’s safety cell, he gave out his mobile phone number, 9818099012, to the public for women to call at times of crisis. Yadav has since been transferred to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, but that number is still operational. Khadijah Faruqui, a human rights activist who is a consultant for 181, says she is impressed by its results. “We get 1,500 calls per day,” she says, “about 10% are women checking the line is working or hanging up, but I don’t mind that because it gives them assurance. Late at night, we get a lot of missed calls from women in their own private spaces.” The call centre passes emergency cases on to the police, Faruqui says, but it also arranges for soft interventions (for instance, if a woman is reluctant to leave her husband they may organize counselling or informal meetings with her) in cases of domestic violence, legal aid for women who want divorces, hostel applications and medical costs too, says Faruqui. The exact efficacy and reach of helplines is hard to measure. In 2012, the non-governmental organizations Jagori and Multiple Action Research Group (Marg) in collaboration with UN Women conducted a study of the Delhi police helplines, published this year as part of their Safe Delhi campaign. Among the key findings were several worrying PARVEEN NEGI/ INDIA TODAY GROUP/ trends. Over 50% of the women GETTY IMAGES surveyed (who included sex workers, slum dwellers, expatriates, homeless women, lawyers and doctors) had not even heard of a women’s helpline. Among those who had used it, the study said, “almost all have reported either a very slow response or no response at all”. The survey also found that almost two in three women reported facing incidents of sexual harassment two-five times during the last year. Public transport, buses and roadsides were reported as spaces where women and girls face high levels of sexual harassment. Geetha Nambisan, a member of the Jagori team, says safety depends more on economic and social backgrounds than on location, however: “When we talk about the safety of lowerincome women, it’s ironic that they are not safe even in the middle-class colonies
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On the streets: Women using public transport in Delhi still have concerns.
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that are gated and guarded. Domestic workers are catching buses at 5am in the morning to work in the posh colonies.” Just 1% of the women surveyed said they had reported incidents of sexual harassment to the police. “The burden of ensuring safety remains upon women,” the study noted. “They try to ensure their own safety by not visiting certain places, staying indoors after dark, maintaining a dress code and carrying pepper spray and safety pins, etc.” This observation is echoed at the street level, with many women in Delhi taking the attitude that they must be responsible for their own safety in the absence of help from the authorities. While riding the Metro recently, Bosky Hasija, a third-year undergraduate student at Gargi College, slapped a man who grabbed her and handed him over to the local police. Pujarini Sen, who moved from Kolkata to Delhi last year, says after initial problems of harassment from auto drivers, she’s started calling 100 up to five times a week. “They need to know that there are consequences,” she says. “I’m calmer now than I was when I arrived. One driver dropped me off and, when I argued with him, he laughed and said that these days (after the December rape), we are all really scared of women.” Nambisan says her daughter was told by the organization she worked for not to work after 8pm. “It didn’t last long,” Nambisan says. “What is happening now is that so many more people are talking about the problem, willing to engage with it. It’s always been under the carpet before, it was only women’s groups working on these issues. Today, everyone is talking.”
Changing the institutions
The most substantial consequence of public outrage after 16 December was a January report by a three-member 2011 (CENSUS) commission headed by Justice J.S. Verma, who died Instances of torture in April, recommending and cruelty by 99,135 24,206 Rapes quicker trials and tougher husband and relatives sentences for rape, as well as for stalking, eve teasing, acid attacks and In 2012, out of 706 rapes in Delhi, 680 were carried out by people voyeurism. The report also asked for already known to the victim specific police reforms, including the (NATIONAL CRIME RECORDS BUREAU, 2011) mandatory registration by police officers of all rape complaints, and a review of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, which, it said, has legitimized impunity for systematic or isolated sexual violence in the process of internal security by the rapists are family, armed forces. friends or By the end of March, The Criminal Law acquaintances of (Amendment) Bill, 2013, brought into force the victim many of the Verma committee’s recommendations, but was criticized for failing to alter the prevailing legal position that a woman cannot allege rape against her husband. This month, when the Women aged 15-49 have experienced sentencing of the only juvenile of the six physical violence accused men is imminent, the pressure is (NATIONAL FAMILY HEALTH SURVEY-3) once again mounting. Delhi’s newly-appointed police chief, Bhim Sain Bassi, was quick to take a position on what has become a highly political issue in an interview Age 15-49 Age 25-39 he gave to Reuters on 31 July, the eve of his first day on the job. Women’s safety would be his priority, he said. “Our charter is that women (should) feel safe anywhere in the
Crimes against women
96.32%
33%
40%
city at any hour, whether they are at home, whether they are at the office, whether they are on theINDEPENDENCE way to the office, DAY ISSUE or at any restaurant.” It should be pointed out that Delhi’s reputation as the rape capital of India is a rather unfair one. Though the number of rapes reported is shooting up—there were 706 rapes in Delhi in 2012, compared to 572 in 2011, and 463 for the first four months of 2013 alone—a Delhi Police report points that the incidence of THEout INDEPENDENCE rape per one lakh population has shown a DAY ISSUE steady decline in Delhi since 2005 till 2012. When compared to other Indian cities, Delhi comes lower than Bhopal, Jabalpur, Gwalior, Indore and Faridabad by the same measure. Whether the bad reputation is exaggerated or not, however, it’s clear that THE INDEPENDENCE ISSUE the police can no longer afford DAY to ignore the consequences of the spotlight on rape. “After 16/12 everybody had to think about it, and repeatedly,” says B.S. Jaiswal, the deputy commissioner of police for south Delhi, who took over in May. “Now people are aware of their rights because of the sensitization. All our efforts are taken to chargesheet assault cases within one month, and all molestation/eve-teasing cases within 15 days.” Jaiswal says police efforts are focused on getting more officers on to the streets after dark, especially women, on training the new recruits and on getting people to feel comfortable reporting a crime. “Let’s get them into the police stations. That’s the first step. The police should be approached immediately in such situations.” Perhaps because of these efforts, or merely because the 16 December rape galvanized women into action, the number of cases of reported rape has shot up this year. Jaiswal suggests that a part of the spike might be attributed to false
complaints, lodged by people with other grievances, hoping to force an arrest. The inclusion of a new section (166A) to the Indian Penal Code as part of the amendments this year may have encouraged this spike, by making the nonregistration of a case of violence against women (including rape, sexual assault and domestic violence) by the police punishable with imprisonment or a fine.
Behind closed doors Statistically speaking, however, the problem is not on the streets at all, but in the home; the greatest threat to most women is not from strangers but from their own families, neighbours and friends. Last year, of 706 rapes, 680 were carried out by people already known to the victim. As many as 96.32% of rapists in Delhi are family, friends or acquaintances of the victim—a majority that puts the installation of closed-circuit television cameras and improved street-lighting into perspective. In terms of incestuous rape in Delhi, 41% of victims are under the age of 14. Extra police vans and motorcycle patrols will not help these children. Soumya Suresh of Apne Aap, a Delhibased NGO that works to end sex trafficking and forced prostitution within the minority communities, says that when we talk about women’s safety in Delhi we tend to ignore the poorest and the most vulnerable. “In these communities, the prostitution of daughters and wives is a kind of normalized custom, the community doesn’t consider it wrong,” Suresh says. “We have a mentality as a nation that is so feudal, society believes that all these women are from lower castes and so somewhere it’s okay. But, what about these girls? Aren’t they getting raped as well? They’re abused every way.”
The problem, according to Suresh, is a lack of connected thinking when it comes to notions of women’s safety, and a difference in the standards that are set for freedom and independence in different class and income groups. “I don’t think there’s been much change in mentality,” says Suresh. “Society has created a space for girls: that they should be at home, where they will be safe. We don’t talk about how women compromise and restrict themselves to be safe. If I’m out at midnight or 1am, I have this feeling that no one is going to empathize with me if I am raped. It’s still, ‘You should know your place or I’ll rape you.’” Behind closed doors, the problem is worse, according to a yet-to-be-published review by the philanthropy foundation Dasra, which surveyed 110 organizations on gender-based violence in India and found that violence in the home is grossly under-reported. “According to NFHS-3 (National Family and Health Survey), 33% of all women aged 15-49 have experienced physical violence since age 15—the number is almost 40% for women aged 2539,” said the report. The problem, it seems, is both intergenerational and persistent. And it spans genders too. “More than half of young women and men agree that wife-beating is justified if a woman disrespects her in-laws and if she neglects the house or children,” the report said. “In fact, in all but five states, women are equally or more likely to agree with wife-beating than men.” Joshi feels that she has got tougher with age. “In a DTC bus, I can slap anyone who tries anything; when I was in school it was much worse, but even now I feel a little scared.” Her bus arrives and she hurries towards the open door. The bus is nearly full with passengers—four of them are women.
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How a former US air force lieutenant found a new philanthropy for THE INDEPENDENCEmodel DAY ISSUE Kamathipura’s teenaged girls—and made it work in a short span of time B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com
········································ hweta Katti’s home near Alankar cinema on Grant Road, Mumbai, is in one of the better buildings of Kamathipura. “Ours is considered a good building in the traditional way,” Shweta tells me, air-quoting “good” as we walk to an Irani café-style tea shop in the area. Two of her mom’s friends, one of them a “Kranti mom” (mother of a girl who is rehabilitated by the Mumbai-based NGO Kranti), goad us into taking the detour on our way to Shweta’s home. Shweta is 19, the daughter of Vandana, a beaming woman in her late 40s. Vandana’s mother was a devdasi who immigrated to Kamathipura decades ago. Before she died, she left her daughter the apartment in which we meet. Vandana maintains connections to her roots in Karnataka, nowadays proudly informing her relatives over telephone where Shweta is going, what she is doing. Shweta knows how to speak Kannada. Vandana has two jobs; as a worker at a clothes factory nearby and as a cleaner at, in Shweta’s words, “a biggish brothel”. Both employers pay her daily wages. When she was 10, Shweta discovered that the father who was abusing her sexually and harassing her with taunts about her skin colour and appearance, was not her biological father. Her father was the man who lived next door—and he also happened to be the father of her best friend since she was a toddler. I visited the family in May, when Shweta was accustomed to media attention. She says she was once recognized by a girl her age at the Andheri railway station platform. “She asked me ‘you are the Kamathipura girl going abroad to study, right?’ It was so uncomfortable.”
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In April, newspapers in Mumbai reported that Kranti helped Shweta get admission into New York’s BARD College with a full scholarship to study psychology. There were well-attended fund-raisers to supplant her New York education at the Barking Deer Brewpub at Lower Parel. Before that she was in Newsweek’s “Women in The World: 25 Under-25 Young Women To Watch” feature, alongside Pakistan’s Malala Yousufzai, for “efforts to uplift young girls who are marginalized”. While we chat at her childhood home, she receives a text message saying that someone just donated her a guitar. “I always wanted to play the guitar!” she exclaims. Shweta is a Kranti girl. American citizen Robin Chaurasiya co-founded the NGO in 2010. In collaboration with around 50 NGOs in the city, they are in the process of rehabilitating nine teenage girls who are daughters of Kamathipura sex workers. Shweta is their most illustrious candidate so far—a testimony to the staggering shortterm success of Chaurasiya’s model of succintly. She describes it succintly: “I am not interested in teaching them how to sew. I want to expose them to Mumbai, the city, and to places outside Mumbai where they can meet people of all kinds. I want to introduce them to the Internet and social networking.” Shweta met Chaurasiya in late 2010, and true to her go-getter grain, seized an opportunity of a lifetime. Her mother Vandana says wryly that her daughter left home without wasting any time. The Katti family lives in the heart of Kamathipura. Although their chawl is relatively better in construction and facilities, Kamathipura’s gentrification has not affected them yet. You can see real estate’s invasion into
Mumbai’s red light district only if you look for it. The few complete skyscrapers and a few still rising are like dots in this heaving plexus of flesh trade and new aspirations. Brothels are much fewer in number. According to data available with NGO Prerana, working here for many years, in 2011 there were 583 brothels in the 14 lanes spread within Bellasis Road, Falkland Road and Grant Road area which comprise Kamathipura. In 2012, the number dropped to 535. Many NGOs have offices in this area where some of Shweta’s friends go, to learn stitching or elementary English. Policemen can be seen chatting with sex workers in cul-de-sacs. Like Shweta’s family, her aunties and didis in the neighbourhood are taking to the media spotlight on their building with humour and nonchalance. Onlookers crowd the broken staircases when our photographer clicks Shweta and her mother in the dark corridor running through the second-floor chawl. “School never interested me,” Shweta says. “College is worse.” Her 70% marks in class X from a neighbouring municipal school got her admission into Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) Women’s University for class XI. She bunked classes and wasted her time staying home, visiting NGO offices or roaming around the area. “Some boys were interested in me, but I thought maybe they were doing drugs like most boys here,” says Shweta. Her speech has a calculated insouciance. She is restless, fingers constantly on the mobile phone’s keypad, and snappy. It’s evident the girl is thrilled, and swimming in unknown water. One afternoon in 2009, while Shweta was at one of the NGOs, she met Chaurasiya who had just registered Kranti, an NGO and girls’ home, with three other
women—Katie Pollom, Bani Das and Shabnam Shaikh. “Shweta seemed like someone who had a head on her shoulders,” Chaurasiya recalls. “She knew it was good for her to get out of here. She was smart, spoke decent English and had already read Paulo Coelho when I met her.” Shweta’s dream journey from Kamathipura to BARD College—on 1 August, after a last-minute scram for missing documents, she made the flight to New York—besides being an example of cleverly marketed philanthropy, is a comment on why traditional models of teenage education among marginalized, taboo-ridden communities fail. Young girls of sex workers are doubly at risk of abuse and being forced into sex work. As Chaurasiya says, “They are insecure and not sure where their life is going. They have less attention span. They are confused about sex although they grow up with sex around them. The last things they need is someone telling them they should learn a vocational skill and stay away from boys.” Kranti’s office, and the new home for the nine girls—Shweta, her younger sister Shradha, Laxmi, Rani, Tanya, Pinky, Saira, Asmita and Sheetal, all aged between 13 and 19—is a three-room apartment of a housing society in the northern suburb of Kandivali. Its purple main door opens to a cacophony of chit-chat, laughter and cats’ meows. It’s the day Shweta has an appointment with the visa officer and Chaurasiya, Das and Shaikh are at home waiting to hear from her. The living room and the adjacent study are filled with papers, books and a bamboo shelf chock-ablock with shoes. The girls have painted the purple walls with words and line drawings. One wall is dedicated to ‘The Body’, on which small postcards are stuck next to MANOJ PATIL/MINT
Girl power: power: Robin Chaurasiya holding the resident cat Richie, with (from left) colleague Shabnam Shaikh; girls in their care— Tanya, 16, Laxmi, 18, Rani, 13, Asmita, 15, Sapna, 17 and Shradha, 14—and colleague Bani Das.
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New avenues: (right) Shweta with mother Vandana in the build ing in which her mother and stepfather live in Kamathipura; and the Kranti girls with actor Kunal Kapoor at the farewell party for Shweta.
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CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN According to a report released by the Mumbai Police on 5 August, the number of registered crimes against women in Maharashtra have increased.
2011
2012
Infanticide
11 3 Foeticide
22
12 Procurement of minor girls
31
20 Number of rape cases
1,701 1,839
each other. Each of them have direct, factual definitions of terms such as ”rape”, “lesbian”, “FTM transsexual”. Chaurasiya says the housing society and their landlord can be unusually pesky. The Teach India school nearby where the girls are admitted, are difficult about the girls’ paperwork and admission procedures. The girls are cautious about strangers and journalists, but when comfortable, are not cagey or awkward to talk about their childhood. Predictably, all of them share insecure childhoods with history of some form of abuse. They visit their mothers often and some of them feel fiercely protective about their mothers. “Except Pinky,” Tanya, one of the girls, says. Chaurasiya later tells me that Pinky is dyslexic and can’t speak English well. Her mother is a pimp who habitually tries to force her into sex work. Pinky does not meet her mother often. Chaurasiya says she also has a clinical mental disorder. “But she is a crazily good dancer. She is a natural.” Pinky is now in Minnesota, US, participating in a three-week dance workshop, which is partly funded by Kranti. “Most NGOs or children’s homes don’t want to take responsibility for teenage girls because obviously they are difficult,” Chaurasiya says. Chaurasiya does most of her fundraising online and the annual expense for each girl is $5,000 (around `300,000), which, besides the basic rehabilitation, includes trips to plays, movies and travel expenses to workshops and social welfare conventions. Shweta, Chaurasiya says, was articulate from the day she came to Kranti. She did not complete college but Kranti sent her to attend workshops at NGOs outside of Mumbai. She interned with an NGO in Jharkhand which worked towards some of the problems that tribal women face in the area. She travelled to Himachal Pradesh for another such short stint. The next year, she herself was speaking about her experiences in such workshops and social welfare conventions all over India. “While sending applications to American colleges, I had a profile in mind. Then I did my bit of persuading, by constantly writing to the universities and telling them if she makes it, she will be ‘the first girl from a red light district in India to go for an education in the US’.” Three universities accepted her application, and BARD College gave her a full scholarship. Chaurasiya’s past in the US gives her an edge in reaching out to people. Most of her money comes from there, through donations. She was born and raised in Chicago. She visited Indore and other parts of India every year during school or college breaks. Her father, an engineer, and her housewife mother never dissuaded Chaurasiya and her sister from following their dreams. Chaurasiya qualified for an Air Force ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) scholarship which required her to serve stints in the air force for a stipulated number of years in return for her free college education. She was a communications officer with the US Armed Forces in 2009, when her commanding officer summoned her one day and showed her an email that she had shared with her friends about dating women. “He said something like, ‘I’m throwing this away, I’m not going to do anything about it. If I were you, I would be pretty upset if someone were making such claims about my character.’ According to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ law that banned gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces in the US, I could stay in the air force if I did not talk about being a lesbian,” she says. The officer didn’t ask if Chaurasiya’s gay and at that point, she didn’t tell. After a few months, she decided to come out. She wrote a letter to her commander telling him she’d been dating girls since she was 13, that the stress of
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concealing her orientation in “the military’s homophobic culture” had become unmanageable and so she was unable to fulfil the commitment she had made when she enlisted at the age of 17. Her letter and the media’s interest in her case propelled the momentum of activists within the armed forces already campaigning against the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. She was the face of many protests and demonstrations in Washington—it perhaps helped that she was a brown woman, and a lesbian. During his 2008 presidential election campaign, Barack Obama had already advocated a repealing of the laws barring gays and lesbians from serving in the military, and in 2010, the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act was introduced, to facilitate a legal procedure to end the rule. It was not a case of raging injustice—
Chaurasiya did get the ROTC scholarship and complete her studies, and she had signed the paper that required her to abide by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law. But it illustrated the absurd and arbitrary nature of the American military’s policy towards gay people. She became a South Asian queer icon overnight. “That period taught me about being dogged about what you believe in,” Chaurasiya says. As part of her graduate studies, in between serving the air force, Chaurasiya was on an internship with the Mumbaibased NGO Rescue Foundation that repatriates victims of human trafficking. She came to India with her mother in early 2011 and formed Kranti. Most activists in Mumbai working in the field are sceptical of Kranti’s quick success. “This is classic knee-jerk charity. Suddenly the girls find themselves in a world far
removed from where they come from. Then after a few years they are back to square one,” says an activist working for the rehabilitation of children of Kamathipura’s sex workers. Chaurasiya says she may be here for five years or more. Till then, the Kranti girls live like regular teenagers in the city. Shweta always loved the US. “It was something great in my mind,” she told me. “It was my dream and I can’t believe it happened,” she said before leaving for the US. Shweta wants to return to Kamathipura and work here as a counsellor with sex workers and their children. The Newsweek claim that she is among the world’s young women to watch is possibly PR-driven hyperbole. Chaurasiya’s claim that she tries to make young women agents of change is not.
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An uncomfortable period THE INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE
Aakar Innovations creates a lowcost sanitary napkin THE that can change the lives of INDEPENDENCE DAY ISSUE rural women and remove taboos associated with menstruation B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com
··································· enstruation can make a girl, a woman an outcast. The first time Sombodhi Ghosh, 27, cofounder of Aakar Innovations, experienced this first-hand was while he was living in Chandanapuri village in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra in 2011. “I had engaged a neighbour’s wife to prepare my meals since I could not cook on a chulha,” says Ghosh who holds a BSc in Microbiology from University of Calcutta. One evening, he was told to manage on his own for the next five days. “I asked if the lady who cooked was ill but all I got was a silly, uncomfortable grin for an answer.” Later, someone explained that when women in this part of the world menstruate, they are confined to a room. But when it came to women who had to earn their livelihood, things were different. In Orissa while working with labourers on cashew plantations, Ghosh realized discomfort or staining during periods did not really keep women away from work because that meant losing the `30 daily wage. “It was hard to see their humiliation,” he says. His friend and the founder of Aakar Innovations, Jaydeep Mandal, 27, had been exposed to menstruation and its many taboos (women not being allowed to visit a temple, go for any auspicious festival or function or go near fields with crops) since he had worked in Uttarakhand on a Students in Free Enterprise (now called Enactus) project with students from the University of Sheffield, UK, while completing his MBA in 2010. “The project in Khatima block was to set up a unit that could made low-cost sanitary
M PRIME NUMBERS
WOMEN USING SANITARY NAPKINS IN INDIA
(in millions)
355
Menstruating women
42.6
Use sanitary napkins
SOURCE: ACNIELSEN AND PLAN INDIA SURVEY, 2011.
napkins and give women a chance to earn their livelihood through it. The machine was the one designed by Arunachalam Muruganantham, India’s ‘menstruation’ man. But it was so tough to talk to these women about periods, hygiene, let alone ask them to run a business where the final product was a sanitary napkin to be used during menstruation. We worked with Sonia Suryavanshi (a social activist) on this project and even Sonia di was illequipped to handle questions about the technicalities of menstrual hygiene during these conversations with rural women. It was really when we roped in a local doctor that the project saw some traction,” explains Mandal, who holds an engineering degree in information technology sitting in Aakar Innovations cramped demo unit set up in the back room of a house on Palam-Dabri road, Delhi. Mandal and Ghosh have developed a six-part machine which can work on 1.5KW inverters to produce low-cost sanitary napkins (production cost of each napkin is about `1.50 and is likely to sell at `2 to `2.25), christened Anandi. These napkins are ultra-violet ray sterilized and adhere to the Bureau of Indian Standards. The project has been recommended by The Millennium Alliance (a joint initiative among the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the department of science and technology, government of India, and the United States Agency for International Development) as one of the top three Indian innovations in the family planning and reproductive health sector. It has also been supported by the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, by Professor Anil Gupta and
the National Innovation Foundation and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Earlier this year, Aakar Innovations signed a memorandum of understanding with Gujarat Livelihood Promotion Company (promoted by the Gujarat government) and hopes to see its first few manufacturing units set up in the next couple of months across the state. These last few weeks have been hectic for Ghosh, Mandal and Aakar Social Ventures (a sister concern of Aakar Innovations) executive director Meera Singh, formerly with the Indian Council for Medical Research. Small changes have been made to the design of the napkin, branding and logo have to be finalized, the patent has been filed and the strategy and business model is being firmed up. “We do not intend for this machine to just create lowcost sanitary napkins that will give rural women a chance at affordable hygiene. We want them to have a chance to earn also. Many years ago we had heard a talk by the then President of India, (A.P.J. Abdul) Kalam who had said that grassroots innovations can make an impact only if they have a chance to be commercially viable. We want that for our project,” says Ghosh. A few things that the duo are clear as far as this project is concerned: Women must participate in buying these machines which will cost about `2.5lakh. “We don’t want these machines to be gifted or given to the women for free. If people have no stake in a business, they do not work hard to make it succeed. If our machines do not work, women will not get low-cost sanitary napkins which will lead to no improvement in their health and hygiene and there will be no doing away with the taboos. If we have to educate rural PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT
The big idea: Jaydeep Mandal (left) and Sombodhi Ghosh with their lowcost sanitary napkin manufacturing kit.
women about periods, hygiene and sanitary napkins, we believe they should first be involved in making them,” says Ghosh. A 2011 ACNielsen and Plan India survey Sanitary Protection: Every Woman’s Health Right shows that only 12% of India’s 355 million menstruating women use sanitary napkins. Though in 2010, the Union health ministry had announced a `150-crore scheme to increase access to the use of sanitary napkins to adolescent girls in rural areas, it is yet to take off fully. “Our idea is not new. But we have done a lot of research and tried to understand from the mistakes of other people,” says Mandal. Among the key problems in low-cost sanitary napkins and reason for resistance among rural women to use them is that most are rectangular in shape. Most use a sealing methodology where the seal line comes on the top making the pad uncomfortable. Also, the filling in the pad in most cases is grounded, making absorption quality low. “Besides, the machines that manufacture these napkins need electricity to run which is scarce in most villages,” explains Mandal. Keeping these inputs in mind, the duo worked on a machine that needed minimal electricity and could work on inverters, was easy to operate for women and would make sanitary napkins which are comfortable. “We have an option where we can use biodegradable filling—it will take 90-180 days to decompose in a composite site—but that increases the cost per pad by about 40-50 paise. Frankly, rural women do not care about the biodegradability of a product, but our partners and even we wanted that we should create a product that can protect the environment in the long run,” says Ghosh adding that they have spent close to `20 lakh of their own resources to develop this machine. But some challenges remain. Singh agrees that even if women in rural India were convinced to start using these pads, the fact that most of them do not use undergarments could pose a problem since the pads are of the stick-on variety. “We should look at a way of distributing or providing underwear too.” Not many kirana stores in villages are willing to stock sanitary napkins because there is little demand for them as women are reluctant to be seen purchasing them. The ministry’s scheme to distribute such napkins through accredited social health activists (ASHA) is still in its infancy. Also, in field tests, Ghosh and Mandal found that users wanted the shape (the inverted two-S shape and the wings) to resemble those of pads that the multinational companies manufacture. Anandi pads have incorporated the S-shape. Ghosh and Mandal hope that once their project gets off the ground, it will help adolescents girls not skip school or be forced to drop out (around 23% of adolescent girls in rural India drop out of school after they start menstruating, according to the ACNielsen and Plan India survey). Also, they hope that it will lower the occurrence of ailments like urinary tract infections and prevent reproductive tract infections which are a result of using soiled rags, ash, mud and tree barks to avoid soiling during menstruation. And most importantly, they want this innovation to give women a chance to earn their own money. “We named our sanitary napkins Anandi because our field dipstick study indicated that rural women associate this name with change, a spirit to fight and leave behind taboos, perhaps an influence of a popular TV character. We want our innovation to stand for all this and more,” says Ghosh. “The name is also our way of honouring Anandi Gopal Joshi, the first Indian woman to obtain a medical degree,” adds Mandal.
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