Feminism in India

‘Feminism’ on My Mind

The lockdown helped me see through deep-rooted problems at home and understand the true meaning of feminism – beyond the theories and concepts.

As a school girl in a middle class home, I never had access to ‘freedom’ – a personal phone, as I like to call it. It was entirely out of question, among other restrictions, but this changed as soon as I got into college.

I went on to study English literature at Delhi University in a progressive city with very progressive classmates. However, unlike my fellow classmates, college was more about the freedom it offered – freedom to move out of my house, to have my own personal phone, to be independent. As a result, it took me two semesters to understand why I opted for the course and six to understand its importance.

As soon as I got a phone, I developed a strong urge to connect with as many people as possible, even though I’m not great at making conversation. Nevertheless, I kept trying but all my efforts went in vain. Eventually, I quit and found solace in my introverted self.

Side by side, I was struggling with the new theories, philosophies and concepts taught in class. I also had to study an additional subject along with my core papers. I opted for philosophy. The subject introduced me to an age-old, repeatedly used, often misinterpreted word: feminism. During the course of the semester, I realised that there was much more to the word than what I had read on Instagram and other social media platforms.

Feminist literature

However, as this was an additional paper, I didn’t take it that seriously. I crammed the theories for exams, and somehow managed to get good scores. But I came across the word again during one of my lectures on one of my core papers – feminist literature.

Feminist literature? It made no sense to me. “Why do we need a genre dedicated to a particular gender?” I wondered. “Won’t that further sideline the women?”

Our professor asked what feminist literature included – the works of female writers or works about female characters?

It was a tricky yet a simple question, a kind which we were often asked in our classes. The answer was the former, but why? And that was when we realised that during the previous four semesters – literature from 16th to 18th century – female writers were barely included.

That was when I started grasping the concept a little better.

Although reading and learning about the female authors and poets whose works were being neglected for centuries paved a way for me to value the concept, it was still not enough to understand the importance of feminism in my personal life.

Also read: On Reading Nivedita Menon’s ‘Seeing Like a Feminist’ in a Patriarchal Home

So what was enough? Maybe the fact that while reading about romanticism, we only had one female writer, Mary Shelley, among seven other male poets, and even then, she was better known as a wife of one of those male poets. Or was it the movie that introduced me to Ruth Ginsberg and how she couldn’t be a lawyer despite having a double degree? Or the National Gallery in London with only 20 installations by female artists amongst a grand total of 2,300?

I don’t know what exactly made me aware of the word or helped me develop a connection with the history of the movement, but I do know I was becoming a person who was aware of her rights and could see gender-based discrimination in everyday activities.

During my monthly visits to home, I had already started questioning my mother’s requests all day to do chores, but I didn’t have any problem doing them. Basically, I would find these things problematic but I would also forget them as soon as I would come back to my free space, my PG and college life.

But now during quarantine, since I have been stuck at home for the last three months – the longest I have been in the past three years – I have been able to see through the deep-rooted problems at home. While I was enjoying my so-called liberated life in university, I forgot how my mother, my father and other family members were still tied to the traditional, rather oppressive, idea of gender roles.

At home

Quarantine started at home, as it had in any other ‘privileged’ household, with a cooking marathon of sorts. The social media universe made it look like a fun activity for the family to bond and enjoy this time together while keeping each other safe. However, in reality, it was time to live life the patriarchal way.

While the male members of my house were enjoying new dishes and experiments everyday, I found my mother, aunts, sister and myself toiling in the kitchen for long hours. When after a month of this routine I argued with my mother to ask my brother to help with the household work, she agreed and asked him to.

Also read: The Colour Pink, Feminism and How I Came to Love Cooking

But he, like every other entitled male, said: “Main thodi krunga ye kaam (I am not supposed to do this work)” and my mother agreed, yet again.

This is when I finally realised that although the feminist movement started centuries ago – and we do have come a long way since then – we would need another century of consistent efforts to accomplish what we started to reach for.

It is not about just one household and this one incident, but thousands of similar incidents at different households. It is not just about me or you, who are privileged enough to pursue the career of their own choice – it is also about those who are not privileged, who are not aware. It may take another century to let any woman to just be aware of these things and yet another to change it, but that does not mean we have to stop.

Feminism is not just a word or a concept. It is more than just a word – it is a way of life.

Feminism: The Vilifying of a Collective Dream

We need the movement for a better tomorrow – not just for women, but for everyone.

There seems to be a new trend brewing, one which vilifies an entire movement for the wrongs committed by few.

Feminism has suffered the utmost damage because of the same. The movement continues to face backlash as social media and popular narratives tarnish its underlying agenda and goals.

A wife files a false dowry case against her husband. Accuse feminism. A prominent female figure makes a controversial statement against men. Feminism is the culprit. See a few girls publicly smoke or drink instead of contesting for UPSC examinations. Ah, feminism again.

Feminism aims for gender equality in society by creating awareness about various forms of oppression and discrimination based on sexes, and addressing them. But there have been constant efforts to dilute its core ideology.

The menace of women’s oppression is so deeply ingrained in our social conscience that feminism is seen as providing preferential treatment to women. Hence, an independent woman who doesn’t conform to stereotypical gender roles is believed to be an anomaly by certain men, for they think that feminism will obliterate the social fabric of Indian patriarchal society. As a result, most efforts aimed at women empowerment are maligned and looked down upon.

Just two years ago, a group of people performed ‘pishachini mukti puja‘ to protect us from the foreseen dangers of feminism. A year later, in another such puja held in Karnataka, the participants said, “It is only about seeking female dominance and oppressing men.”

Earlier this year, in Madhya Pradesh, a BJP leader said, “Heroine ko toh apna dance karna chahiye Mumbai mein baith ke. JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) mein kyun jana chahiye tha usko, mere samajh nahi aa raha.”

He was referring to referring to Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone, who reached the campus during a protest and offered solidarity by standing silently with injured JNUSU student leader Aishe Ghosh.

In addition to being sexist, these statements lay bare the kind of retaliation that women regularly face when they speak their mind or dare to act out of their own will. On top of that, shallow tales on the misuse of feminism are shared on social media to further denounce the movement.

The truth is: Forget misuse, feminism as a term is rarely used in India.

Also read: The Male Gaze and Unreported Stories of Everyday Abuse

Here’s an example. A few months ago, one of my female colleagues was sexually harassed in an autorickshaw in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. She told me that her fellow passenger was poking her breast. She didn’t retort and instead, moved over to avoid being poked. Despite being a well-educated and independent woman, who under usual circumstances never shies away from voicing her opinion, she couldn’t muster the courage to retaliate.

Since childhood, society teaches women to avoid confrontations saying, “lets’ not create a scene” or “it will malign your image” and so on.

After that incident, I asked my other women friends if they too had similar stories to share. Whether it was a flash by a stranger or inappropriate advances during bus rides, they admitted to ‘shaking it off’.

As a result, it should not come as a surprise that around 75% of women who suffer domestic violence do not report it, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). To add to that, around 99% cases of sexual violence go unreported. You read that right – 99%. If cases are fairly reported, India, as a country, will top all the charts listing crimes against women.

Millions of women go through various forms of cruelty on everyday basis, and suffer in silence. Domestic violence, dowry, eve-teasing, stalking, honour killings, child marriage, coerced prostitution, forced abortion, cyberbullying, sexual molestation, slut-shaming, female infanticide, insult to modesty and trafficking are just a few examples. And then, there is a moral police to enforces “proper behaviour” in public space.

The problem is deep-seated and systematic oppression has been engrained in our culture and everyday practices.

And that’s why we need feminism more than ever. For a better tomorrow – not just for women, but for everyone. A tomorrow where women can voice their opinion without restrictions and participate in the workforce without facing any hurdles. A tomorrow where women make their own life choices and have the freedom to make mistakes. That’s what feminism aspires to achieve.

And it should be our collective dream too.

Awanish Pandey obtained his PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 2019 and is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University-IMEC.

Excerpt: Feminism, Gender Politics and Resistance in Indian Democracy

In an excerpt from the book ‘Indian Democracy Origins, Trajectories, Contestations’, two feminist sociologists – Raka Ray and Srila Roy – discuss the trajectory of feminist politics in India over the last several decades.

An excerpt from Indian Democracy Origins, Trajectories, Contestations edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Anand Vaidya, published by Pluto Press.

Srila: I have been especially interested in drawing out some of the implications of these processes of NGOisation and transnationalisation for activism and for activists on the ground. For one, activists began to work with the state in ways that a previous generation of feminists might have been averse to. They became directly implicated in the expansion of state logic and governance.

In addition, we see the inclusion of activists into fields of governance – both state and non-state – or, into the bio-political management of a particular population group. So suddenly, women’s groups and more recently, LGBT groups have started to be directly involved in the management of populations defined as “vulnerable”, namely, women, LGBT-Queer, and more recently those defined as ‘transgender’.

NGOisation, in particular, also meant that feminist and queer activism entered a competitive ‘market of activism’ where activists and organisations had to now compete for limited pockets of domestic and transnational funds and social capital. The ability to demonstrate expertise of a certain kind – whether to do with gender or sexuality – made a huge difference to who got funded and ultimately, how feminism itself was reconfigured as expert know-how.

Besides institutionalisation and NGOisation, we have witnessed some other kinds of exciting developments in Indian feminism, especially in the 2000s. Here I am thinking of the rise of particular campaigns and movements around women’s issues, sexual violence and gender justice, of which the anti-rape protests at the end of 2012 in Delhi were, of course, emblematic.

At the start of the decade – and leading up to the Delhi protests – were a number of spontaneous public protests and vigils led by middle-class youth in urban areas (especially, Delhi) in response to high-profile cases of violence against elite women. These protests were comprised of people – ‘ordinary citizens’ – who were not necessarily affiliated to the IWM or to left or progressive groups.

Also Read: How to Make Our Cities Safer for Women

They exemplified a new trend in urban India of ‘middle-class activism’. The anti-rape protests in Delhi took this trend to a crescendo, given the explosion of protest-action around rape and gender justice, undertaken by people who were not affiliated to political parties, who were not part of the IWM, and who might not have even called themselves ‘feminists’. What was so interesting about that moment was the wide dispersal of feminist ideas and the ability of ‘feminism’ to hail all sorts of people and publics to differing and even oppositional effects.

Two opposing camps have been retroactively read into that moment of protest. One, which has been called – and of which Kavita Krishnan became the ‘poster-child’ – the azadi or the freedom camp, that called for greater freedom for women in the face of the tendency to curtail their freedoms in the name of ‘safety’.

The opposing camp appeared invested in discourses of protectionism and victimisation in asking for greater protection by the state including via the death penalty and even castration of rapists. The legal scholar Pratiksha Baxi has described the latter as a “retributive public” and traced the Indian state’s eventual deployment of the death penalty to address the problem of sexual violence to the demands of this public.

What I want to underscore about this moment is the explosion of a feminist common sense which went hand in hand with a crisis about what, in fact, feminism was. What was feminism if you could ask for the death penalty in its name?

At the same time, however, in the course of the 2000s, we saw more explicitly and self-consciously feminist campaigns and struggles, especially around the issue of women’s public safety. Here I am referring to campaigns that both preceded the Delhi-rape, and became more visible after, like Pinjra Tod, Why Loiter, Blank Noise, and an Indian version of the international Slutwalk marches in 2011, and the 2009 Pink Chaddi (or Pink Panty) campaign, which encouraged Indian women to mail underwear to members of a right-wing group that had attacked women drinking in a bar for being ‘un-Indian’.

Common to many of these campaigns was their strongly middle class and metropolitan characters. While activists in the IWM had always been middle-class, the anticolonial and socialist roots of the movement meant that class was privileged over all other social variables. The mainstream IWM very consciously spoke on behalf of the subaltern – the rural, impoverished or ‘underdeveloped’ woman – and was often quite defensive, if not erasing of its own middle-class status and subjectivity.

By contrast, the young women who were part of these ‘new feminisms’ were not defensive about being middle class and metropolitan – or borrowing from the West. They were unapologetically mobilising around issues that had particular relevance to them – such as women’s public safety – but they also argued that addressing these issues would have wider implications across class.

Also Read: Brands Must Stop Pushing Consumerism Under the Garb of Women Empowerment

Raka: I want to take up the question of the troubling effects of transnational NGOisation and the campaigns you referred to earlier. The funders or the parental organisations of these NGOs often work through a series of campaigns such as 1 Billion Rising, or 16 Days of Activism to End Gender Based Violence, or even global celebrations of International Women’s Day.

Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Anand Vaidya
Indian Democracy Origins, Trajectories, Contestations
Pluto Press, 2019

The way these campaigns work is that they give local groups a limited supply of money but also a supply of themes and memes, which the local NGOs are then supposed to localise. However, the themes themselves actually come from the US, or the UK, or wherever the funder is located, and local NGOs are supposed to indigenise these themes.

This leads me to think that while feminist theorising in many parts of the world, from the US to South Africa to India, has come a really long way, in that we are far more nuanced about how caste or race and religion and gender identity work together, for example – these campaigns are not similarly nuanced. They continue to be universalist.

In the One Billion Rising campaign (the brainchild of American playwright and activist Eve Ensler), for example, women all over the world are supposed to rise up together in a dance against violence against women. This presupposes many things: similar causes and effects of violence across the globe as well as similar costs of occupying public space.

The primary understanding of violence is domestic and interpersonal, not carceral, custodial or caused by the armed forces of a nation. It is as if none of the theorising, that has happened to understand different structural manifestations of violence, has any relationship to the way in which violence against women is constructed in these global campaigns. So, while groups at the local level try to interject more nuances about, say, caste, I think that there is a huge disjuncture between the very sophisticated feminist analysis that understands that caste and religion, class and gender are co-constituted and these global campaigns, which, by and large, do not.

In addition, in thinking about the level of the global, we have to understand that global organisations increasingly work with (and here I refer not just to organisations around gender but organisations that work around education, health etc.) what I call a “modular approach.”

Also Read: The Gap Between the Feminist Understanding of Sexual Violence and the Law

Feminist scholar Gowri Vijaykumar who has done some wonderful work on HIV/AIDS and sex worker activism in India, shows how the Gates Foundation looked at the success of Sonagachi in Kolkata, and then tried to package that success into a module and ship it around — to Bangalore in India, and to Nairobi in Kenya. But with every move, they left further behind that which actually made Sonagachi initially successful in Kolkata, which was the intense participation and political engagement of sex workers.

When the model was moved to Bangalore, political engagement formed a negligible part of it, and by the time the model got to Nairobi, it was centred on the enumeration and classification of sex practices in order to guarantee safe sex, and the idea, that sex workers had the knowledge to contribute to their own health, was now irrelevant. I think that we are in a world where these modular forms of intervention are becoming more and more popular around sex work and around violence, and I think that’s worrying.

I do know there many other nodes from which activism is coming forth and that there are plenty of organisations that do not embrace this mode. I am concerned, however, that this sort of depoliticising model that aims for clinical efficiency has become too dominant globally, even as I know that there are other organisations that are still based on mass mobilisation.

Srila: I agree but I want to caution against overstating the argument about the global configuring the local. Again, the Delhi protests are a really good example of the way in which a local event – the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey – traveled much farther than most events of this sort and produced ‘transnational knowledge’ around violence against women. The anti-rape protests were evoked in different contexts, like the US or even in South Africa, not just as a commentary on India being the ‘rape capital’ of the world but also as India becoming a model of how to resist sexual violence.

My point is that it is not enough to say that the North sets the agenda in terms of gender justice and the South simply replicates the same. Empirically, we can see this quite easily from the time of the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the culmination of a series of UN sponsored conferences that began in 1975. Southern NGOs and organisations started to determine the agenda; they set, in other words, the agenda in terms of which issues could count on a global scale, such as violence against women.

Also Read: Dismantling Sexism in Delhi University, One Ugly Custom at a Time

I think your assessment holds, however, for the ways in which these Southern organisations eventually do their work at an everyday level. Here, I have observed in relation to my own work with Kolkata-based NGOs how they often reduce gender to something very narrow or reified, or to something that can be replicated in various contexts. I suppose my only point is that I do not think these kinds of dynamics are only driven by the North than by all these multiple forces working at multiple scales.

With regard to “NGOisation”, I want to make a final point about how this term is not employed to refer to something empirical alone; it is, in fact, morally loaded. ‘NGOisation’ makes a normative claim about what NGOs are doing to feminist and other kinds of politics and struggles (generally, as depoliticising or coopting them).

Such a normative framework makes some kinds of empirical changes legible but it also invisiblises others. Often, what is invisibilised is just how heterogeneous NGO practices are on the ground. NGOs – particularly women’s or feminist NGOs that are working on gender issues – are also huge employers of young, middle to lower middle-class women.

Very often – as I have observed in my own work – it is these women who become inadvertently politicised especially in the face of the lack of politicisation on university campuses or strong left-wing movements since the 1970s-1980s. So, the emancipatory possibilities of feminist NGOs can, perhaps, be seen in terms of these women as opposed to the intended ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘clients’ of NGO work.

Discovering the First Generation of Feminists in Kerala

There is a whole forgotten generation of defiant Malayali women from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

What do we understand when we identify ourselves as feminist?

The Wire’s Histories of Feminisms project is an attempt to emphasise that there is no linear or one way of understanding and experiencing feminism. Through a series of articles, The Wire draws your attention to some of the different narratives and debates that, over the decades, have come to define feminism. For instance, we recall the first generation of feminists in Kerala, the first women lawyers who surmounted formidable challenges to claim their rightful place in the legal system. We shine a light on women authors who pushed the boundaries of feminism in literature, bring before you the perspectives and experiences of feminist Dalit and Muslim women. We talk about how protagonists of many radical movements and uprisings in public memory are usually male.

Side by side, we bring you important debates around 19th-century cultural nationalism and gender reform, the discussions around sexual violence, the law and the MeToo movement.

“She is headstrong, mannish, and full of the perfervid spirit that espouses lost causes.”
∼ M.E. Watts, Dewan of Travancore, to C.W.E. Cotton, Agent of the Governor of Madras, about Lakshmikkutty Amma, 1929.

As I read this description shared by one exasperated British civil servant to another at the eve of yet another eruption of the national movement in India, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling that it lives on in contemporary Kerala. I can close my eyes and easily imagine, for example, the present minister of the Devaswom Department in Kerala, Kadakampally Surendran, use precisely these words in a conversation with the president of the Kerala State Devaswom Board, A. Padmakumar, to describe the headstrong women who insisted on attempting the Sabarimala pilgrimage despite Hindutva threats.

Feminism is still marginal, beleaguered and reviled in Malayali society like it was in Lakshmikkutty Amma’s times, but it continues to apply relentless pressure on the authorities, then and now.

This young woman, Watts thought, may be overexcited by politics in Europe (where she had gone after studying in London), but now she was returning to Thiruvananthapuram, the best place to cool her zeal. However, far from calming down, she became part of the national movement and came to be known later as Lakshmi N. Menon, well-known as a diplomat and minister close to Jawaharlal Nehru.

Even as her generation of ‘mannish women’ – which included the redoubtable Anna Chandy, Lalithambika Antharjanam, Parvati Ayyappan, Parvati Nenminimangalam, Dakshayani Velayudhan, K. Saraswathi Amma, M. Haleema Beevi and others – made strides in the world and trouble for patriarchy, modern and traditional, the constant devaluation of their presence and voice continued, through caricatures by literary men (like Sanjayan) and purveyors of popular literature (like P.K. Rajaraja Varma, the creator of the caricature Kunji Amma).

Nevertheless, as a young student of Kerala history in Thiruvananthapuram in the 1980s, I found no mention at all of this generation of women. We knew only of women who were Congress or communist activists, but of no one who had fought against patriarchy, especially the modern patriarchy that was taking shape in the early 20th century. At best we had heard of Anna Chandy in quiz competitions, as the first woman to become a lawyer and a munsiff.

In other words, it seemed that there was no critique of emergent modernity from women, save for literary authors like Lalitambika Antharjanam, but even her work was mostly presented as denouncing the lingering pre-modern forms of patriarchy. So it was no surprise that the feminism that was emerging in our circles, which had us all excited, seemed to have no antecedent whatsoever. And it also seemed that there could be no other fount that largely US and Europe-centred accounts of feminism to guide us – and the people best equipped to connect us to it were the radical Left men here.

Also read: Building a Feminism That Centres the Voices of the Oppressed

Imagine, then, my joy at stumbling upon a whole generation of defiant Malayali women from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the archives and libraries. This was a forgotten generation – or one erased by both liberal and Leftist historians. They all engaged fiercely with the emergent modern public, seeing in unfolding modernity new forms of patriarchal power. They all spoke on behalf of ‘Women’ as a collectivity – assuming that the members of this collectivity had much in common, but especially a common set of rights and demands to be secured from the modern state. They faced the worst kinds of ridicule and hostility from male peers but persisted.

K. Saraswathi Amma, now acknowledged as one of the finest authors of her generation, was nicknamed ‘Vattu Saraswathi’ (Crazy Saraswathy) in college for speaking unabashedly with male students. As a 24-year-old newly-minted lawyer, Anna Chandy took on her own professor who opposed the entry of women into public service, walking onstage uninvited into a debate in Thiruvananthapuram, and launching into a full-fledged attack on his position, which she presented as a ‘defence’ of the women who he had accused of stealing men’s jobs. He is afraid, she observed, that women will embarrass men by entering ‘lower jobs’ which involve menial labour. But then, she pointed out:

As long as all men are not daffedars, all women will not be peons. Just as the members of the male race range from emperors to sweepers, there will be members of the female race ranging from empresses to sweepers … Besides, when did this infamy provoked by the sight of female daffedars crop up? Indeed, a mind that was never outraged by the sorry sight of many thousands of women carrying loads of paddy to the Chala market for their daily bread, retuning oppressed, cowering at the dirty comments passed by some depraved men, how it has been inflamed by the box-carrying of the female daffedars of an imaginary world!

Born and raised in a society in which women’s issues were largely identified with national development and motherhood, and caught in intellectual circles of the early 1990s in which radical men had turned the use of post-modernism as a weapon to disarm and dismiss feminism into almost a fine art, these texts were startlingly luminous to me. For they showed how patriarchy could be exposed through the deployment of reason, rhetoric and humour.

Also read: The Indian Women Who Fought Their Way Into the Legal Profession

I was elated seeing that the sharpest exposure of the gendered politics of dowry was already made in 1923. Reflecting on why men did not find this an insulting practice, K. Padmavathy Amma noted: “What would you value more, something you buy at a price, or something that comes free? Which thing would you keep with utmost attention and care? Will you not be partial to the bought thing, and stay vigilant to keep it safe and sound? … Just think, who has the burden of taking care of the husband, if you buy him at a price?”

In the 1940s and ’50s, K. Saraswathi Amma attacked the persistence of endogamy in modern marriage, but she also thought that passion was too flimsy a basis for enduring union. Instead, she proposed ‘flirting’ – which she took care to define closely, remarking that it did not mean flippant romantic banter but the persistent interaction between women and men which would allow them to reveal their inner selves to each other and assess the suitability of the other as a spouse – an activity which was as serious as it was light-hearted.

It was also the same generation that fought in the legislatures of the princely states for women’s full entry into government service, including the police force, against the rule that married women could not keep their employment. Even though they entered these bodies as members of their respective caste-communities, most of them made it clear that they would step over such boundaries whenever necessary, and emphasised that their voice was indeed of the women of their communities.

While some of this generation turned towards nationalist and communist politics after the 1930s, the Indian nationalist women’s rejection of separate electorates did not find strong echo here. Their willingness to negotiate with the government of Travancore probably earned them the hostility of both nationalist and communist movements, and this is probably one reason why they were erased so thoroughly out of the historical record by both nationalist and communist historical scholarship.

Also read: How Cultural Nationalism and Women’s Rights Locked Horns in the 19th Century

Indeed, there is much in their writing that one would condemn today, and it is important to acknowledge the extent to which they shared the caste elitism and heteronormativity of the modern order of gender put in place against the pre-modern order of janmabhedam or difference-by-birth. The huge gap that divided them from most avarna and working-class women was never seriously bridged. Nevertheless this does not explain their erasure – because we do know that avarna women’s astounding anti-patriarchal struggles in 19th-century Kerala too, widely called the ‘upper-cloth struggle’, were largely erased or reduced to a gender-neutral resistance against Nair caste power in southern Kerala.

Today I find it to be the most potent source of resistance against Hindutva. The Channar women who kept provoking Nairs by insisting on wearing the upper-cloth (which was then a privilege enjoyed by upper-caste people alone) and refusing to be cowed down by even the most horrendous violence – that tenacity which sympathetic missionaries called sthreevaashi or ‘she-resolve’ – alone can stem Hindutva’s tide.

Yet one does connect to the first-generation of feminists, and I have often wondered how. The feminist historian Joan A. Scott’s answer, I think, is a convincing one. As she points out about the differences in time and space, “It was the shared jouissance, not the specific historical details, that provided common ground.” That however, does not mean that one should therefore renounce self-critique and reflexivity. The messy and ambiguous of the past cannot be wished away and must indeed be present to present-day anti-patriarchal politics mind if it is to get beyond those in the present.

J. Devika is a teacher and researcher at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

Why I’m No Longer Scared to Be a ‘Bad Feminist’

It’s funny how women are automatically called headstrong and adamant when they choose to talk about the elephant in the room and take a stand.

I grew up with parents who gave me the complete freedom to discuss everything under the sun, and I was encouraged to have my own opinions. They made sure I value independence, hard work, creativity and responsibility. I was encouraged to dream and aim for the sky. Yet as I grew up, I realised that things were changing.

When I started developing the body of an adolescent girl, the freedom that I had always possessed had now started to develop a lot of conditions. I was subtly asked to hide bras under a towel while choosing clothes before a bath. I was taught to keep my underwear in the innermost pocket of a suitcase. I was taught to refer to periods with all sorts of words and phrases – anything except actually saying the word ‘periods’.

All of this was never taught to me through words, but through actions. My mother and grandmother referred to the menstrual flow of blood as ‘dirt’ coming out of the body. This never stopped my mother from picking up my bras off the floor, throwing away my forgotten pads in the bathroom as I left in a hurry, or washing my stained underwear.

I was told again and again to aim for the highest standards, and gender was never an issue while we discussed professional ambitions. But when it came to the silent and dangerous subjects – responsibilities in the house, clothes, permission to go out, opinions, postures, different festivals – I always received answers like, “some things don’t change,” or “traditions,” or “we’re at a much better place than where we were before!”

As a young teenager, I was left utterly confused and unsatisfied with these answers. I began voicing my questions. Everyone was extremely proud and eager to profess how they advocated gender equality in workplaces and educational spaces. They shied away from real conversations about the body, emotional difficulties, gender equality at home and genuine freedom for women.

When I brought up statistics and the fact that this apparent gender equality at workplaces wasn’t enough, I was often called an “overthinker”. A stubborn, loud, aggressive girl. It’s funny how women are automatically called headstrong and adamant when they choose to talk about the elephant in the room and take a stand.

This was always pointed out to me in an indulgent, sarcastic tone – “God! You’re so headstrong and stubborn. But we’re used to it now and we still love you a lot.” This made me reflect. Every time I hid my bra under the towel, every time I placed the packet of sanitary napkins deep into my backpack, and continued to carry the rest of the medicines in my hand – I felt like a hypocrite. Yet I still continued to do all of this for a long time, and sometimes still do.

My mind was filled with difficult questions which no one was ready to answer. Should I be grateful for the fact that at least I was allowed to express myself, knowing that the freedom of speech is a basic right? Should I be grateful about the fact that I was never sexually assaulted in my own house, knowing that my feminism comes from a place of privilege?

I was scared to ask these questions, I was scared to be a ‘bad feminist’. This continued for a very long time till I found the courage to talk to people, till I found the courage to write. This made me realise that we women are our own best supporters and own worst critics. We are our best resources. Our collective voice is our best support. Feminism is innate in us, and understanding it takes time. We don’t have to go out to look for it. We just have to be our natural selves.

We need to start asking ourselves and the people around us difficult questions. We need to start having open conversations, and stop running away from debate and confrontation. It’s going to take a lot of courage. But we already have it. We just need to find it, and collective support is the best tool we could use to find it. We need to start facilitating safe spaces for our voices.

A simple three-step approach can help us find our collective courage. Start with your questions, your own story – when you do that, you give someone else the power to voice theirs. Second, listen to their story with kindness and empathy. We may not always understand people’s circumstances, but we can try. Third, encourage them to create the same safe space for somebody else. This is a safe space. We’re in this together.

Eshaa Joshi is 18 years old. She is interning with Shaheen Mistri, CEO of Teach for India, on a project called Kids Education Revolution, an attempt to reimagine education in India. She writes poetry too.

Featured image credit: PTI

A Geophysicist From IIT Kharagpur Talks About the Tricks of Her Trade

Sudha’s area of concern is geophysics that directly impacts environmental issues such as groundwater contamination and aquifer detection.

Sudha Agrahari. Credit: Author provided

Kolkata was chillier than I expected in January and it took quite some effort to drag myself out of bed to catch an early morning train to Kharagpur. Kharagpur, where the first of the IITs was established in 1951, is just about two hours away from Kolkata. When I reached, it was still early hours. On my way to the Department of Geology and Geophysics, giant banners informed me that the annual Alumni Meet was underway. That explained the clusters of middle-aged men – looking casually spiffy and successful – wandering around reminiscing with cameras in hand and nostalgic smiles on their faces. I wasn’t too surprised to spot no women among them.

Kolkata. Credit: Author provided

The IITs are notorious for their poor gender ratios – currently standing at about 8% of female students, compared to > 40% in other engineering colleges in India. This disparity has been recognised and there now seems to be some intentions to rectify it, but in the meanwhile, women scientists among the faculty will no doubt serve as a reminder to the students that science can indeed be a space that women belong in. I was looking forward to chatting with one among this small community – Sudha Agrahari, who joined IIT Kharagpur in 2013.

Sudha is a geophysicist, but unlike IISc’s Kusala Rajendran who we interviewed last year, Sudha doesn’t investigate tectonic plate movement; she is more concerned about geophysics that directly impacts environmental issues such as groundwater contamination and aquifer detection.

Groundwater worries

‘Groundwater’ refers to the deposits of water that collects in pores of soil and rocks. The layers of rock where these water deposits are found underground are called aquifers. In order to use groundwater for our daily use and consumption, we dig borewells that connect aquifers to the surface. Sudha specialises in using principles of physics to predict and detect the precise location of aquifers. “Our earth works as a natural filter (that’s why groundwater is fit to drink). It is easier to dig only a few meters to collect water but we may have to go deeper if the shallow aquifers are contaminated,” she said. In coastal areas, this contamination is often by seawater.

Seawater. Credit: Author provided

It’s natural for salty seawater to ‘intrude’ through the sand into pure groundwater – making it unfit for consumption. Coastal areas have to be careful about not digging wells too close to the sea. This is another area where Sudha’s geophysics helps. “We do measurements to say for example: because of sea intrusion, the groundwater up to this point is contaminated. Beyond this, it is safe to use’,” she explained. With this information, inhabitants of the area can decide to stay safe and fulfill their groundwater requirement from deeper, uncontaminated aquifers, or if they have no choice but to use groundwater close to the contaminated area, they can purify the water.

Seawater intrusion is more hazardous if industrial waste is routinely disposed into the sea. According to Sudha, when such a disposal is done by the government, they ensure the wastes pass through a lining of cement so there is less seepage. In due course of time even this cement degrades. Geophysicists can provide advice in these situations too. And they can do this non-invasively, i.e. with no digging.

Sudha recounted her experience researching mountainous areas. “The problem here (in the mountains) is that if a borehole is made, they may get water today, but after a few months or a year, there is no more water. This happens when the water resides [only] in a small pocket.” Thankfully, physics can come to the rescue.

The Art of ERT

The electric and electromagnetic properties of materials allow scientists like Sudha to know what is underground without any digging. “I use a method called electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) to tell how big the aquifer at this location is, whether it is laterally extended, connected to any other aquifer, if there are nearby aquifers… and so on,” said Sudha. These kinds of studies are tremendously useful when borewells or handpumps are being set up in cities and villages.

So how exactly does ERT work? I asked Sudha to take me through the practical steps in setting up an experiment on site. She took a deep breath before launching into a vivid explanation (see circuit diagram). “It’s a huge setup – we use two electrode rods connected to a battery through a cable. We insert the rods into the ground so that it is stable and can stand up. Now we connect another two electrodes to the ground and measure the potential difference in between these two rods. When we start the power supply, current will start flowing in the earth’s subsurface. We also connect here an ammeter to see how much current is flowing.”

Sudha on site with an ERT setup, Credit: Author provided

This is where the fun starts. We know that current flows from the (+) electrode to the (-) electrode and that is what one would expect to see here as well. But it is not the case, Sudha pointed out. “Earth’s subsurface is not uniform. Resistivity changes everywhere…”

What is resistivity?

It is the property that quantifies how strongly a given material opposes the flow of electric current. A low resistivity indicates a material that readily allows the flow of electric current through it. A material with high resistivity opposes it more so the current has to put more effort to cross it and an electric potential drop is recorded.

According, to Sudha, most contamination is conductive in nature, meaning it has low resistivity. Some, like hydrocarbons or biological contaminations, are not – so they show high resistivity. The experiment can detect these irregularities (a potential drop indicates resistivity), which Sudha interprets to further characterise the nature of the contaminations.
The resistivity of any subsurface material on earth varies wildly – from 10^-8 to 10^8 ohmmeters. In coastal areas, groundwater can have a resistivity of 0.1 ohm-meter and in hard rocky areas, it can be around 90 ohm-meters. “But if the groundwater is contaminated with hydrocarbons, then it will show a resistivity of 200 ohm-meters. Canned water we buy has a resistivity of 50-70 ohmmeter. A lot depends on the geology of the subsurface and your expertise, but in crude language, we can say 50-90 ohmmeter groundwater is suitable for drinking.”

Credit: Author provided

Sudha’s PhD fieldwork took place around the Sivalik hills in the Himalayan region where a moody river troubled the locals. “In the rainy season, it filled up but at most other times it remained dry. There were people dependent on it for irrigation and on the groundwater for drinking water supply. We did several surveys to understand why groundwater is present for the whole year in some aquifers but not in others.” Using ERT, she created a map of the area that colour coded the resistivity of the subsurface and show the network of aquifers that lay underneath. This explained why some areas were better water-stocked than others.

Sudha added that the set-up she had described earlier is the simplest possible one; most of their experiments involve not four but up to 42 electrodes. Add to this the Himalayan terrain and Sudha had a bumpy task ahead of her. “The Himalayas are one of the toughest terrains to do fieldwork. You have to go everywhere by foot, carry huge equipment all the time. Several times we had to return because the land was not suitable.”

Transportation challenges. Credit: Author provided

This was when she realised it would be worthwhile to get expertise in airborne electromagnetic methods. In these methods, helicopters and drones are payloaded with equipment that uses electromagnetic and inductive properties which allow the analysis of the subsurface without any contact. The instrument may be hovering ninety metres above the land. Interest in this technology led Sudha to do her postdoctoral studies in airborne electromagnetic methods at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Choosing a science for humankind

As the daughter of a railway serviceman growing up in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, Sudha’s aptitude for academics was evident even in school. She recalled her crushing disappointment every time she ranked second in exams. “It felt as if I had failed, you know?” she smiled. “I didn’t study in big schools – but my teachers always forced me to go to better schools. And somehow I got scholarships and fellowships to support my studies. This much was very clear to me – that I will go for science.” And physics was her favourite. She did her BSc. from Gorakhpur University and MSc. at IIT Roorkee. She cleared the exams necessary for proceeding with a PhD and then it was finally time to decide what area of physics she would do research in.

Another picture of Sudha. Credit: Author provided

Her primary insistence was to pursue something not just experimental, but also something that is impact driven. “I wanted to do something directly related to mankind. I didn’t want to develop something that goes to some industry before it comes to people; I wanted to be in direct contact with people.”

She decided to accompany a geophysics professor to the field and was elated to find that this was where she was meant to be. “In the field, you talk to people, and you hear about the problems people are facing. And it’s very interesting to see that a farmer – who has had no education in his life – has made a groundwater recharge system, just out of his experience and his need. I get educated so much on the field. Here you are no longer in the science community, and you get to know what the real requirements of common people are.”

It took some getting used to for Sudha, who at the time was used to the confines of a lab. For instance, she had to learn to yell out to her teammates. “You can’t communicate quietly up there in the field. I was not used to shouting, but there’s no choice – the setup itself is 700 metres long… I liked all of this, and decided to jump from physics to geophysics.”

A rock solid relationship

During her PhD, Sudha applied for and won a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship which enabled her to spend three years in Germany getting trained in electromagnetic and modelling techniques. In between, she returned to India to submit her PhD thesis. She got married around this time; her husband is a chemical engineer trained in IIT Kanpur and currently working in Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology in Rae Bareli, nearly 900 kilometres away.

Sudha admits that when she got the offer from IIT Kharagpur, it was not an easy decision for her as her husband was in Belgium at the time. “He was the one who forced me to join – he reminded me that this is a big achievement. But it was very difficult for us – we met only once a year.” They have been married for five years but Sudha is grateful that her husband has never suggested that she leave her job to join him. “Sometimes I get weak, but he supports me.”

Though the couple does not have children yet, Sudha is clear that in any event, children or no children, her future in science is certain. She narrated an incident when a man on her DAAD interview panel questioned her motivations. “He asked me this: Let’s say we give you the fellowship. You will go abroad, do the work, then you will come back get married have children and leave science… I replied ‘yes, you are right. I will go abroad, come back, get married, have children. But I will not leave science.” From then on, Sudha always goes back to these words when faced with tough decisions. ‘‘It has always been very clear to me that I will remain in science whatever happens.

I replied ‘yes, you are right. I will go abroad, come back, get married, have children. But I will not leave science.”

Encountering Feminism on the Field

Sudha’s team on a field site. Credit: Author provided

“Geology has a lot of women these days. It’s not like the past. Now there is no reason at all for girls to be afraid. In fact, sometimes I benefit from being a woman! While working in a rural place Garhwal (in Uttarakhand), suddenly a group of women came holding sickles. You know how they normally say that the male is the earning member? But in those places we saw that it was the women did the the household stuff and the farming work also. These women told us we cannot do our experiments – they were scared we would disturb their land. Somehow, when I told one of the ladies that this was for my PhD work, they gave full permission. She was able to convince all the women – it was important to all of them that women should be educated. Once they got to know that this was for the academics of a girl, they supported us even without knowing us…”

This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet unsung women scientists.