एक छोटे देहात में मेरा जन्म हुआ | मैं किसान परिवार से हूँ | मेरे पिताजी ने कृषी विश्वविद्यालय से शिक्षा प्राप्त की थी, अपनी विद्यार्थीदशा में गांधीजी के आंदोलन में वे शामील भी हुए थे | उनपर गांधी तथा नेहरूजी के विचारों का प्रभाव था | विशेष तौर से गांधीजी का इसलिये अपनी उंची […]
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My first job was with a women’s research organization in Delhi. I had just returned from my studies in England, where my involvement in activism was supporting the anti-apartheid struggle. As part of a training programme, I heard Dr Sharda Jain speak about her work with the Women’s Development Programme in Rajasthan. The way Shardaji […]
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The Way We Were: Building and re-building feminist health activism My involvement with the women’s movement began in 1989. The campaign against population control policies, anti-fertility vaccines and unethical clinical trials of hormonal contraceptives in the late 1980s and 1990s marked a watershed. Being associated with strong feminist organizations, I could actively participate in these […]
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When I was 16 years of age I had many questions running in my mind so a took a step forward to find the answer for those questions related to human rights especially women’s rights, dalits, minorities and the marginalized. I started by singing revolutionary songs and giving speeches at gate meetings, rallies, sit-ins, protests […]
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Having had over three decades of experience of researching, teaching, writing and editing on gender issues, and having curated a visual documentary on women between 1875 and 1947, in this brief note I will only focus on my initial research that radically changed my middle-class perceptions. In 1975, it was not destiny that brought me […]
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Looking back, I can see that my getting involved with the Women’s Movement was kind of inevitable. Growing up in Delhi in the 1970s was not easy. The city can be rough for a young woman moving out of her home. It was an everyday struggle just to keep my physical integrity, and yet be […]
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My Journey with the Women’s Movement My involvement with the women’s movement began at the National Conference of Autonomous Women’s Groups in Calicut, in 1991. It was a massive culture shock to get so much of the movement in one go! But it gave me the opportunity to get acquainted with a range of issues, […]
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Too long a period to recollect from, more than thirty years in the movement. Our young enthusiasm started us on trying to be different from the big leaders and looking for means to communicate our ideas through pictures, songs, plays, stories exhibitions etc., suited me very well because I was never a great orator. I […]
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My involvement in the women’s movement began in the latter half of the 70s, coinciding with my first ‘fieldwork’ amongst rural women in a few remote villages of Andhra Pradesh as well as the tumultuous years preceding and following the Emergency. The phrase ‘personal is political’ held true then as the trajectory of my own […]
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Women Empowering Media: Some Memories and Reflections First a little bit about me and my engagement with development and feminist activism. I was born in 1946 in a small village in Punjab, now in Pakistan. My mother had gone there for a wedding. I often wonder if this chance birth in Pakistan has anything to […]
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Do I remember when exactly I became conscious about feminism, or the women’s movement in India? Not really. In fact, in hindsight, I think it was almost accidental. As if a stray news item or a chance meeting had awaken me to the stirrings within the ranks of women like me across India. What I […]
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The late seventies and the subsequent decade of the eighties were some of the most exciting and turbulent years for the women’s movement across the country,and Maharashtra was no exception. Studying for my graduation at Fergusson College in Pune, I found myself in the company of a group of Marxist friends, who introduced me to […]
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I was born in a large joint family of more than a hundred members, with illiterate parents, who were marginal farmers. Like many women in the early fifties, I faced hurdles in my life, and completed High School, majoring in Sanskrit. I used to walk about 10 km a day to go to school. I […]
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Coming from a family with one foot in old Delhi and another in a UP town ruled, till independence, by a small princely family, I had exposure to contradictory influences in my growing up years. Schooling in a Convent school drilled a strong set of dos and don’ts, while the feudal connection brought exposure to […]
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How I came to be involved. It was in 1972 that I started writing on the women’s question. I had translated Evelyn Reed’s book, Problems of Women’s Liberation from English into Gujarati and was active in a student’s group, Study and Struggle Alliance, and a trade union of textile workers in Vadodara. I became active […]
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It was the early-1970s—time of global turmoil. There was the black movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the workers’ and students’ movements in Europe, and so on. Back home, there was the very severe drought in Maharashtra and other parts of the country. An atmosphere of dissent and a lot of activism was building around all […]
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Struggles of the Single and Widowed Women in Sangli District My association with the women’s movement in Maharashtra has largely been as a part-time activist and continues to be so even today. Straddling the worlds of both the NGO and the women’s movement has been a rather daunting task, which is also one of the […]
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As I climbed up the hill to the women’s movement conference being held at St. Andrew’s College in Calicut in 1991, echoes of “Shit problem, don’t stay here!” rang out all around. An older woman with a knee problem came limping down the hill and firmly took my suitcase with a welcoming smile: “I’m taking […]
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Dust clouds rising up to the sky, making the light from overhead lamps a hazy red is my most vivid image of the uprising against the Internal Emergency of 1975–77. Thousands and thousands of people coming to meetings, raising the dust, shouting slogans, unafraid of the police barricades is what I remember. I still relive […]
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Memories, but not mine alone I keep on remembering Bombay in 1992–93 when I think of resistance and women’s groups, particularly Forum (Forum Against Oppression of Women), the group I have been part of for the last sixteen years in a somewhat passionate, if careless, fashion. I remember standing on the bridge at Dadar Railway […]
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Feminist Thoughts from Here and There The thought “Hey, I was history!” zipped through my mind, when a young activist wanted to interview the 1970s feminists. Questions followed: how did you get involved in the women’s movement? What were your experiences? I rummaged through my past to find that defining moment. I found, that unlike […]
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Personal note from Rukmini “We shaped the women’s movement and the movement shaped us.” My sentiment is true of a generation of young women who were active across the country starting from the late seventies. Anti Dowry Campaign My involvement with the women’s movement started off in the late seventies to stop harassment for dowry […]
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I, Sheelu, was born into a Christian family, which gave me a lot of opportunities as a child to get acquainted with poverty, loneliness and so on. As a child, I accompanied my parents to orphanages, old age homes and jails. I was living in Madurai, a city in south Tamil Nadu, which is often […]
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I got married at a young age like many other women around me. I was stuck in an abusive marriage but was unable to stand up for myself. I had vaguely heard about some women’s organizations, it was only after ten years, in 1989, that I came to know about Saheli and I decided to […]
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I got involved in the women’s movement in 1977, without knowing that there was a ‘movement’. Madhu Kishwar and I started an informal women’s study group, which used to meet in my hostel room in Miranda House where I was teaching. A few months later, we started working on Manushi magazine, which appeared in 1979. […]
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Our organisation, Nari Samata Manch, was registered in 1987. But even before that, from 1982, we were informally working as an organisation. Today, when I trace back my intellectual journey after so many years, I realise that I was moving in the direction of this ideology much before 1982. But, at the time, I knew […]
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Moving along The invitation from Zubaan arrived the day after the further, drastic drop in the country’s child sex ratio was revealed by the provisional results of the Census of India 2011, which also recorded the evident spread of the ‘missing girls’ phenomenon to more areas across the nation. Although the gradual but continuous decline […]
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One morning in June 1994, Delhi-ites opened their newspapers to photographs of women – saris hitched up and dupattas flowing – scaling the walls of a building in Lajpat Nagar. I identified my ample posterior in one. So did many others. This was the historic “break-in” of the secretive launch of Depo Provera, the injectable […]
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Travelling down the memory lane, I see through the uncurtained window of a neighbour, a woman being kicked and slapped by him almost every third day. The kicking–slapping sessions used to be absolutely silent, without any sound from either of the two. The silence created an aura and elevated the act almost to the ‘dignity’ […]
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As daughter of the father involved in the Social Movements and a mother involved in the Social Service activities, I was introduced to various Social Movements in my childhood. I inherited the Gandhian spirit, “not to tolerate any injustice” from my father who gave up his career as a journalist to became a Marxist-Trotskyist and […]
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Flashes… 46 years of that thing called life and living. About 20 of them spent under a quaking flyover in Delhi, several times a week. Collectively, singly, joyously, despondently, hungrily, gluttonously.. Two rooms, a small group, all part of a much bigger picture. Memories of being a Saheli (Saheli Women’s Resource Centre according to government […]
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Tryst With the Women’s Movement I was studying in class 8th in Kendriya Vidhyalaya Pattom in Trivandrum, Kerala. The year was 1968. We had just moved from Shimla and being children of a central government officer, we barely stayed two years in one city. A teacher in school, I do not recall his name, was […]
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The Women’s Movement and I When did I get embroiled in the women’s movement? This is not an easy question to answer. The real breakthrough came when my former pupil and then colleague Ranajoy Karlekar, with whom we shared the most challenging dreams of leading a non-hegemonizing democratic social existence, helped the intrepid social activist […]
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Weaving Colourful Memories Within weeks of joining college, I plunged into the deep end of feminism. It was 1979, a vibrant time for the women’s movement in India. I joined a theatre workshop in Miranda House organized by Manushi in Ruth Vanita’s hostel room. Ten to fifteen women, mostly students and teachers, shared experiences of […]
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My Journey I was not born an ambitious person as far as a career is concerned. I fell in love at an early age of 17 and hence my parents were keen that I marry first and then maybe study further. So, I got married at the age of 18, even before I graduated. I […]
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When Zubaan asked to me to write about my involvement with the Indian women’s movement I had to think back in time. I can’t honestly say I was part of the women’s movement in India. I was a witness and still am. I started my career in rural Madhya Pradesh designing science education programmes for […]
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My Journey with the Women’s Movement The decades of the seventies saw a surge of youth energy engaging with issues of poverty, development, exploitation and involving themselves in processes of change. It was the era of the J.P. movement for ‘Sampooran Kranti’, the ‘Naxalite movement’ and it was also a time when the presence of […]
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My involvement with women’s issues started when I was working with the fishing community after completing my Masters in Social Work. I was a community organizer trying to apply learnings of the social work I learnt from textbooks. But life with this marginalized community made me unlearn what I had learnt in schools of social […]
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