As I climbed up the hill to the women\u2019s movement conference being held at St. Andrew\u2019s College in Calicut in 1991, echoes of \u201cShit problem, don\u2019t stay here!\u201d 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: \u201cI\u2019m taking this \u2013 you\u2019ve just arrived, you must be tired.\u201d And then, with a wide grin: \u201cShit problem, don\u2019t stay here! Book yourself a room at the guest house nearby.\u201d<\/p>\n
The saathins<\/em> from rural Rajasthan, a spirited contingent of large number, had been using the courtyard of the college for their defecations \u2013 Hum toh khule maidan mein karte hain – why on earth should we use dirty rooms indoors? They are so unhygienic\u2026<\/em> –\u00a0\u00a0 completely trashing, with their firm irrefutable logic, the urban feminists\u2019 desperate pleas that they use the toilets meant for the purpose. No, not even if the latter cleaned up after them with their own hands. No argument, no other logic seemed to work \u2013 it\u2019s the college yard, it\u2019s the public domain of students, the private property of the St Andrew\u2019s Trust \u2013 all failed to convince them. Till somebody quietly asked \u201cAap kya kisi aur ke aangan mein kabhi yeh kar sakoge?\u201d \u201cNahin ji, kaisi baat kar rahein hain, kisi ke aangan mein kabhi koi yeh kar sakta hai?\u201d<\/em> they replied, almost in a chorus. \u201cPar yeh college ka aangan hai,<\/em>\u201d the person pointed out gently.<\/p>\n It had been a question of finding the right idiom to translate concepts across cultures \u2013 and the women\u2019s movement was a place where enough effort was made to make this happen. The political and intellectual challenges of crossing such boundaries of class, caste, region and language, and the joy of actually experiencing the tentative, new found solidarities between women, of working together<\/em> to strengthen them, had got me hooked.<\/p>\n Something else happened in those three days that was almost like an epiphany. It was in a room, barely twenty feet -by -twenty, with women assembled from all over the country, from dalits and grassroots sathins<\/em> to those just returned from the U.S. universities and international assignments.\u00a0 Ajitha, the ex-Naxal woman of legendary daring (at least three movies had already been made on her), had realized that no existing\u00a0 political party would ever take women\u2019s concerns seriously and had demanded that the \u00a0national women\u2019s movement conference be held in Kerala that year\u2026 She was speaking now.\u00a0 Haltingly, gropingly, narrating her pain. Of repeated sexual violation in prison, of more sexual harassment by doctors, of a level of trauma that robbed her of her very capacity to speak, and finally the determined rescue operation by the nuns of a convent who nursed her back to language and spirit. It had taken her seven years to find her tongue again, and she used it that day to create an electrifying solidarity in that crowded room. Not even the repeated breaks for five interpreters to translate her words into five different languages could break that spell. There was a stunned silence when Ajitha finished talking. Then a poor rural woman from Madhya Pradesh cried out \u2013 \u201cI will make my daughter a lawyer so that she can ensure no woman has to go through such suffering again!\u201d And another from Rajasthan exclaimed\u2013 \u201cWe will strengthen our sangathanas<\/em> such that no one can dare do this to a woman when we are there\u2026\u201d And the more \u2018sophisticated\u2019 urban women remained silent, not trusting their voices lest they break down completely. It was the experience of a certain quality of bonding with women whom I had never met before and would probably never meet again; a bonding that connected me to both history and the future, and became one of the rare compelling forces of life.<\/p>\n The agonized yet powerful promises of those women from the villages of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan continued to haunt me as I listened to six and ten year old Muslim children, in Gujarat in 2002,[1]<\/a> telling us what\u00a0 they had seen being done to their mothers in front of their very eyes. And they continued to drum in my head as I heard peasant women, in Nandigram in 2007,[2]<\/a> trying to express both the trauma of having been gang raped by cadres of the ruling political party, as well as their fear and fury \u00a0at having their land appropriated forcefully.<\/p>\n It was in 2007, a few days after over one lakh citizens had spontaneously hit the streets of Kolkata in protest against the party\/state sponsored killings in Nandigram, that I received an email from some students, addressed to those of us who may \u201cconsider them to be an \u2018apolitical\u2019 generation.\u201d \u00a0It carried restless Facebook comments from over forty of them who had been at the march \u2013 extremely disturbed, agitated and angry, yet also charged with the positive energy of the turnout. These students, women and men, went on to form the Citizens\u2019 Initiative and work in Nandigram and Singur over the next three years. One of them, in an earlier Independence Day piece in a Kolkata newspaper, had elaborated the perspective of her generation on political activism. Expressing complete disillusionment with corrupt political parties and self-serving\u00a0 NGO personnel, she had said that their activism and feminism now found expression in their personal work-, in their creative and academic writings, and theatre. The point was worth noting, but what was missing in such choices of \u201cindividualized activism\u201d was the collective vision, without which no historical transformation is possible. It was the thrilling, unifying experience of that momentous march that had awakened them to the historical possibilities of collective action.<\/p>\n For those of us who still have lived stories \u2013 or actual memories \u2013 of the nationalist struggle, the socialist dream, the Dalit movements, or even the idealism of Naxalite activism (that has survived the negative impact of its violence) coursing through our veins, the need for collective action can come almost naturally. But for those of us who do not have these memories, who have seen only the demolition of Babri masjid, the sexual exploitation and butchery of Gujarat, the horrors of Kashmir and Khairlanji, adivaasis<\/em> crushed under the brutal crackdowns of the state and the violence of Maoism, and the rabid waves of fundamentalism raging across a \u2018globalized\u2019 world of consumerism, where is any sustained inspiring vision of collective historical transformation? Can the women\u2019s movement today offer such a shared dream for the future \u2013 as the one offered on that day when Ajitha shared her pain?<\/p>\n
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