Unpacking the histories, contours and multiplicity of India's women's movement(s)--An interview with Uma Chakravarti.

• Author: Yunus, Reva

Introduction

RY: You have consistently discussed structural inequality in your public talks. Could you tell me what kind of theoretical questions related to economic justice were taken up as a result of Indian academics' involvement in the women's movements in the 1970s and the 1980s?

UC: If we go back to the pre-neoliberal phase in India, the women's movement was addressing structural inequality of the old, congealed kind, which had not been engaged with till then. When the women's movement began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of movements were growing across the country. Actually movements had been growing since the Naxalite one in 1967(1) and women had been quite involved in that. Again, post-Emergency (2), there were lots of movements in which women were quite active. For instance, there was the peasant women's movement in Shahada in Maharashtra which had been quite strong. These were movements which were addressing questions of structural inequality and questions pertaining to the most marginalised women, like Adivasi women. So questions of inequality had always been very important for various women's movements; and, at least, it was informed by the fact that there were many layers of inequality in our society. It was not simply a case of our issues ...

RY: Who do you mean by 'our'?

UC: Metropolitan women in this case. For example, Mathura's rape, which was custodial rape in a police station, represented the power of the state against the very disempowered women (Mathura was an Adivasi woman). It was not an accident that it was Mathura who was raped. (3) Or Ramiza Bi. People from the margins get raped in the thana (police station); metropolitan women might get raped elsewhere but not in a thana. Now Mathura's case was taken up by a women's group in Nagpur which was led by Seema Sakhare. This was unlike the dowry movement which was a metropolitan women's movement, and had emerged in Delhi and other urban areas. Similarly, the point of emergence for the LGBT movement was the metropolis, though, today, the issues and members come from across the board.

This understanding of differences among women and women being oppressed in multiple ways--class, caste or something else--was there in the women's movement; but there was more sensitivity to questions of class and work on caste and its relationship with class had not been done.

RY: This work had not been done till the late 1970s?

UC: See there had been a number of women in the Naxalite movement. So when the Emergency was lifted in 1977 and the Naxalite movement began to resurface a lot of the women from that movement were involved in the new, smaller women's movements which were very strongly focused on addressing inequalities inherited from the past. This past was not only the colonial one, but also the pre-colonial one. We were all very familiar with traditional inequalities because of films and so on. The question of dowry violence which was a little bit more middle class and urban, only came second.

RY: So, for example, in urban Madhya Pradesh--which is where I come from--dowry is a contemporary problem across boundaries of religion and caste. Was it like that?

UC: When it first surfaced as an issue, it was a problem of the lower middle and upper classes. It was an urban issue and it was not a Dalit issue. But if you look at pamphlets that were produced during the Mathura campaign, the pamphlets actually talked about sexual violence against particular sections, and basically, those at the margins of society. There was that dimension to the women's movement which did not get picked up somehow.

RY: You mean it did not get picked up politically? Or do you mean theoretically?

UC: Well, in later writing. Somehow the questions around dowry violence led to other kinds of discussions and debates. There were groups of people who got together post the intervention in dowry violence and brought in [the issue of] domestic violence as it operated within marriage. That created space to talk about what was happening inside homes, behind closed doors. Lots of women would come and talk about the fact that they were being beaten up. This discussion of patriarchy as a violent expression of masculine power emerged as a powerful dimension of discussions in those groups. Thus, we could see a connection between violence in the lower middle class against the wife, or the daughter-in-law, over dowry, and domestic violence which was not around dowry but around patriarchal power.

RY: And was this then connected up with other forms of violence like what happened to Mathura and with other structural inequalities?

UC: It was moving [in that direction]. Structural inequality was seen as something that was in the public sphere whereas dowry-related and other domestic violence were happening in the domestic sphere. It is like this: even the better off women do not have access to resources. Early academic work that Bina Agarwal (4) did helps identify this. This lack of access to resources was actually brought up in the Bodhgaya movement too but in a different context. The women agricultural labourers in Bodhgaya (Bihar) argued that all their labour was consumed by the head of the household who seemed to think that the women did nothing. Agricultural labourers had been about to get land in their own names (5) and these women demanded that women agricultural labourers should get it individually in their names. There was also a focus on inequality between classes and castes--cause the Bodhgaya women were predominantly Dalits. Actually this was an interesting moment because these women were looking at structural inequality as well as inequality in the home in economic terms.

There was this famous poster which read, 'Meri biwi kaam nahi karti' (my wife does not work). It is an inversion of Chandralekha's multi-armed goddess--chandralekha was a version of 'Kali'.(6) The poster turned this image around to discuss the domesticated woman at a workshop. There were actually ten arms attached to the body in the image to represent all the work that women do at home. The poster showed the woman cooking, bringing firewood, etcetera and where the uterus is, the poster had this text: 'bacche paida karna bhi kaam hai' (bearing children is also work). Thus all aspects of domestic labour were presented. I am struck by how rich the conceptualisation was and how much it owed itself to the interaction between middle class women and women who laboured outside the home in a variety of capacities. So you were also getting these accounts of women from the (socioeconomically) lowest sections.

The way I see it is that Bina Agarwal's demand that women should have access to resources was one side of it and the Bodhgaya movement was the other side of it. The women's movement was actually able to bring the two together in a very interesting move. That's why I feel that the Bodhgaya movement should actually be better disseminated. It was concerned with the rights of agricultural labourers whereas Bina Agarwal's scholarship was concerned with a larger range of social groups who had access to resources like land.

Bodhgaya was a movement of Dalit labourers, so it did not get the kind of attention and prestige that some other movements did. For example, the Chipko movement (7) was seen as non-class movement where the struggle was over what were seen as community resources; it did not entail class wars and redistribution. Women were seen as nurturing the environment and it was understood that it was their lives that were affected by state policy regarding forests; they had to go into the forest for fuel, etc. and so the burden of their labour went up if forests were destroyed. Chipko was a Gandhian movement as opposed to a militant one. And it was not challenging patriarchy; it was the 'outsider' that was the problem here, not the power that men exercised over women within the family. Similarly, the anti-arrack movement (8) actually took on men who were 'outsiders'; though a fundamental reason women had begun to oppose liqueur sale had been that alcoholism caused husbands to be even more violent. So since the Bodhgaya movement was a movement of Dalit women, was more militant and had more explicitly challenged patriarchy, it was not documented and circulated as much as it deserved to be.

This was a problem with India's women's movement: the divide between metropolitan women and rural women. For example, women's movements in Bihar did engage with the Bodhgaya movement but the metropolitan women's movement do/did not teach it or talk about it. I am being harsh but with good reason. The latter's understanding of class, caste, etc. is somewhat simplistic. Of course, some women in this group have a sharper understanding but the majority does not. Neither the media nor the historians of women's movements have picked up on it. The (dominant) histories tend to focus on just Delhi and Mumbai, for example, Raka Ray's book also does that. The anti-arrack movement was far more successful and yet, fails to get the academic and media attention it deserves.

Similarly, in Hyderabad a large number of women struggled for land distribution in the late 1980s and early 1990s; I have found women who have been jailed several times as a result of their participation in such autonomous women's movements. In the case of the Bodhgaya movement, the theorising came from a student and youth movement called, the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini in Bihar; women like Kiran Shaheen and Manimala who were part of the old JP (Jay Prakash Narayan) movement, theorised what happened in Bodhgaya.

RY: So where did all this lead to, in terms of theorisation of the question of economic justice for women?

UC: It was a simple account of women's labour being appropriated by others. It was feminist economics which may have resonances with ways of thinking in other parts of the world. But the way the Bodhgaya movement created political practice out of...