Tag: gail omvedt

‘My Mother, Gail Omvedt, Was a Romantic and Humanist’

Her writings and her social movement work were grounded in her understanding of the double oppression of caste and patriarchy faced by Dalit women. She was a sharp analyst of society; of its oppressors and its rebels.

जाने वो कैसे लोग थे जिनके, प्यार को प्यार मिला (Wonder who those people were, who found love in response to love)

बिछड़ गया हर साथी देकर, पल दो पल का साथ (I have lost every companion, after spending some moments together)

किसको फ़ुरसत है जो थामे, दीवानों का हाथ (Who has the time, to hold the hands of crazed lovers)

Gail Omvedt is my cherished mother. She has recently passed on. Pyaasa was one of her favourite films. When I was a kid, she used to play “Jaane Woh Kaise” on her guitar, singing in her broken Hindi. This was in the rotation of songs she played, along with those of Joni Mitchell, as well as her contemporary and fellow Minnesotan, Bob Dylan:

“How many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”

She loved militant and spiritual poetry and music – because it engaged with both the questions and challenges of the present time, but also brought forward eternal questions. Questions about rising up against exploitation and systemic oppression, with love and with dreams of a liberatory future. To the wider public, she was a leading scholar and activist in linking anti-caste and feminist commitments, towards a better world for all human beings.

My brilliant mother, Gail Omvedt, was a militant lover, a dreamer, a romantic.

She was romantic about the militancy of youth resistance to the status quo. Romantic about women rising up to break patriarchal chains. Romantic about masses rising up against tyranny and oppression. Romantic about the rebellion of inter-caste lovers. Romantic about the militant spirituality of anti-caste poets.

She dreamt about creating a better world here and now, what the great bhakti poet Ravidas had conceived as Begumpura, a land without sorrow. For my mom, this should not be just some imaginary utopia, far beyond reach – but a real Begumpura, borne out of today’s world. With these dreams, she forever practiced hope as an eternal discipline.

I consider myself an extremely lucky person to have been raised by three fierce, feminist fighters — Gail Omvedt, Bharat Patankar and my grandmother Indutai Patankar. From a very young age, the living traditions of Tukaram, Savitribhai Phule, B.R. Ambedkar along with Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and Karl Marx was our everyday culture.

Also read: India Will Remember Gail Omvedt Forever

Mom always made sure that I heard and read stories of people from all walks of life and different corners of the world, who fought for a different world free from sorrow and exploitation. From when I was a little kid growing up in the village of Kasegaon, I witnessed her deep dedication to building bottom-up mass social movements among ordinary people for anti-caste, feminist and left-wing transformation. My earliest memories are of sitting on her shoulders during marches through rural and Adivasi areas across western India. We sang movement songs and helped sell pamphlets with other kids during these mass gatherings.

Formative years

Gail herself came from a legacy of Leftist and social justice change-makers. Her grandfather was August Omtvedt. From the 1910s to the 1950s, he was involved in local government, and also served many years as a State Senator in the Minnesota state legislatures. This was a time of socialist and farmer-labour politics in the state, striking examples of successful third-party movement formations in the US. August was known as a “champion of the little people,” with a “burning ambition to make his community what he hoped it could be.” This history and the progressive upbringing by her parents, inculcated in Gail a strong ambition to contribute to the betterment of society from the bottom up.

During her college days in the 1960s, Gail found herself swept up in the mass-based anti-war and Black civil rights movements. She threw herself into the struggle, participating in militant protests as a feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist in California. For my mom, women’s liberation and Black liberation were connected and were also universal concerns. She knew that militarism and racism were at the core of what structured the United States.

A young Gail Omvedt. Photo: Special arrangement.

As a true Left-wing internationalist, she also knew that these structures had their parallels in other parts of the world. Elite-led nationalism, Brahmanical patriarchy and caste-based gender violence were at the structural core of Indian society. Gail’s activism as a young person was grounded in standing shoulder to shoulder with Black communities and in solidarity with the Vietnamese people, bearing the brunt of the deadly US war machine.

Pioneering work 

So, after coming to live in India, Gail knew that she must join the struggle – led by women, Dalit and the most historically marginalised communities – to eradicate patriarchal, capitalist and Brahmanical structures.

Gail believed that to achieve true liberation for women in India, both caste and patriarchy must be abolished. In one interview, she noted, “Caste can only survive if women’s sexuality is controlled! To keep the jati identity, you have to keep marriages within the jati… For that to happen, girls have to be guarded and married off when they’re pre-puberty, so there’s no danger to the caste.”

Gail’s writings and her social movement work were grounded in her understanding of the double oppression of caste and patriarchy faced by Dalit women – an analysis often overlooked by many dominant-caste, urban feminists. Her razor-sharp analyses also consistently pointed out that as the most historically marginalised people, Dalit and Bahujan women’s leadership in these struggles must be at the heart of achieving true liberation for all.

Gail Omvedt and Bharat Patankar. Photo: Special arrangement

From We Will Smash this Prison to Seeking Begumpura, Gail’s writing and work explored the realities of anti-caste resistance, rooted both in material realities and also the spiritual necessities of people from oppressed castes and genders. She brought forward the stories of everyday struggles of Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi communities as workers, as peasants, as women in rural and urban localities — as they fought against violence and for access to land, livelihood, water and natural resources. She foregrounded the cultural, spiritual and collective resistance of anti-caste men and women both historically and in the present, to show a path forward for achieving women’s liberation and caste annihilation.

Also read: In Merging Scholarship and Activism, Gail Omvedt Made Academic Research Accessible for All

In today’s India, Hindutva nationalism has spread deep into Indian society and is the main agenda of the ruling government. From her earliest writings, Gail questioned the constructions and connections of elite-led nationalism and Brahmanist-led Hinduism. For her, chauvinist nationalism, which violently excluded Muslims as “others” and “outsiders”, stems from the Brahmanist agenda which consolidated the false identification of India with Hinduism. The same Brahmanism has excluded, exploited and violently suppressed Dalit-Bahujan majority communities for centuries.

In the 2010 preface to her book Dalit Visions, Gail states: “In destroying the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, the forces of Hindutva issued a declaration of caste war, not simply an assault against the Muslim community… The “Dharma Sansad” was being posed as higher than the people’s parliament. This was a declaration of war against Dalits, Adivasis, women, the Bahujan samaj, the toiling and productive castes and classes who have always been held inferior by varnashrama dharma. That war has to be fought, at the level of culture and symbolism and not simply that of politics and economics; and not simply with the weapons of ‘secularism’ but over every inch of the terrain of Indian history and identity that the Hindu-nationalists have staked claim to.”

This call to building resistance and broad-based alternatives is as relevant today as ever before – as a Brahmanist Hindutva agenda engulfs every institution and the social fabric itself. This call to reclaim every inch of the political, economic, historical, cultural, and identity terrain in India, is a call to all of us— to create an India where the dream of the annihilation of caste, capitalist exploitation and patriarchy can become a living reality for all people.

My mom, Gail Omvedt, the scholar, the mass-movement activist, the great anti-caste intellectual, was a romantic and humanist. She was a sharp analyst of society; of its oppressors and its rebels. She instilled in me the commitment to carry forward the legacy of this work – linking class and gender justice, caste and racial justice, all – to carry this forward, wherever I am, throughout my own lifetime, towards the shared dream of ‘Begumpura’.

Prachi Patankar Omvedt is an activist, grantmaker and writer involved in social movements which link the local and the global, police brutality and war, migration and militarisation, race and caste, women of colour feminism and global gender justice.

The Summer of Sadness: Celebrating the Contributions of Seven Feminist Stalwarts

From mid-July to mid-October, the death of these seven stalwarts dealt a body blow to the feminist movement in India. We owe it to them to document their journeys so they continue to be beacons of light for future generations.

Within a short span of three months – mid-July to mid-October – seven stalwarts passed away, dealing a body blow to the feminist movement in India. While we mourn their death, we must also celebrate their life and pay tribute to the rich legacy they have left behind. This thumbnail sketch provides us with a glimpse into the wide-ranging issues they were involved in. Each was a pioneer who transcended binaries – scholar/activist, urban/rural, governmental/non-governmental, organisations/movements – who forayed into national, regional and global realms and forged feminist solidarities beyond the rigid divides. They stumbled into feminism midway in their career, blossomed in its vibrancy and in turn, enriched the movement by their dynamic contributions. We owe it to them to document their journeys so that they continue to be beacons of light for future generations.

Shashi Sail (November 1946-July 2021) Raipur, Madhya Pradesh

Shashi and her husband, Rajendra Sail, were human rights defenders who worked in Raipur, Chhattisgarh and belonged to the National Council of Churches in India (NCCI). Rajendra Sail was the president of the Chhattisgarh chapter of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) and a close associate of the well-known trade unionist Shankar Guha Niyogi, who was murdered in 1991.

Sashi Sail. Photo: By arrangement

Their work with bonded labour is well known. It is mainly due to the efforts of human rights defenders like them that the Supreme Court in 1984 ordered the release of around 25,000 bonded labourers. They also worked for the release of Adivasis who were arrested for their struggle for land rights and branded as ‘Maoists’. The couple strongly supported the Chattisgarh Mine Workers Association.

Later, Sashi carved out a niche for herself, focussing on the rights of rural and Adivasi women. In 1978, she formed the Chattisgarh Mahila Jagruti Sangathan and organised regular training sessions on socioeconomic and cultural issues concerning Adivasi women.

She also organised domestic workers and unorganised sector workers in the industrial clusters in Raipur and the surrounding semi-urban areas. In 1980, she attended the First National Conference of Women Activists held in Mumbai, along with a group of local activists. This helped her to build linkages with women’s groups at the national level.

In the mid-90s, she became a founding member of the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations (NAWO). She was an inspiring presence and played a key role in the founding of the World March of Women as part of the international feminist movement. She worked for transnational solidarity and built bridges among feminist activists in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The passing away of Rajendra Sail in January 2020 affected Sashi deeply. She became frail and withdrawn, and passed away on July 18, 2021, at the age of 75.

Gail Omvedt (August 1941-August 2021) Sangli, Maharashtra

The next major blow was the passing away of Gail Omvedt, an American born Indian sociologist, on  August 25, 2021 at the age of 80. She had been ailing for quite some years.

Gail came to India in 1971 for her doctoral research on ‘non-Brahmin social movements in Western India’ and focussed on the work of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Savitribai Phule, the renowned social reformers of the 19th century who led the anti-caste struggle in Maharashtra.

She was influenced by the work of Indumati Patankar, a great freedom fighter and women’s rights activist. She married Bharat Patankar, Indutai’s son, and settled in Kasegaon in Sangli district, Maharashtra, where she lived for the next 50 years. She learnt to speak (her own brand of) Marathi and was immersed in local political struggles. Hers was one of the intellectual voices of the Bahujan movement. Along with Bharat, she co-founded the Shramik Mukti Dal, a mass social movement to highlight the causes of farmers, drought-hit villages and dam-displaced Adivasis. Gail and Indutai shared a very close bond and participated together in various campaigns around social issues.

Cynthia Stephen, an activist from Bangaluru, describes Gail’s intellectual legacy as unique and unparalleled. “The manner in which she was able to transcend her colour, class and educational privileges and blend in with the lives of the rural working classes, was most remarkable,” she comments.

Alongside her activism, her academic rigour was unparalleled. She published around 25 books and several articles. According to Kalpana Kannabiran, a leading social scientist, “Reading her writing as it emerged in different contexts over five decades gives us a sense of her deep immersion as an interlocutor of mass struggles and provides us a glimpse into the shifts in her position in relation to the larger debates on specific questions at specific historical moments – feminism, struggles for land and water, ecological struggles, against Hindu majoritarianism, among others.”

Gail Omvedt. Photo: Shramik Mukti Dal

Sonal Shukla (July 1941-September 2021) Mumbai

Sonal Shukla, the Mumbai based feminist, had just turned 80. The end came without warning. Admitted to a hospital with chest pain a day prior, she passed away in the early hours of September 9, 2021.

Sonal was one of the 49 women who attended the meeting in 1979 to form the first feminist group in Mumbai, Forum Against Rape, later renamed, Forum Against Oppression of Women, as a response to the infamous Mathura (1979) judgment in which the Supreme Court acquitted two policemen who had raped a 16-year-old tribal girl in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. This was a turning point.

In 1981, when some of us ventured to start a drop-in centre for battered women, Women’s Centre, Sonal offered a room in her home. The Centre functioned from her place for two years until it could gather resources to buy a place of its own.

In 1987, she started Vacha (a charitable trust), as a library and women’s resource centre. Later Vacha started work with adolescent girls from marginalised communities. She flagged the unique problems faced by them and provided space for them to escape from family and community strangleholds and branch out on their own.

Sonalben, as she was popularly known, was an educationist, trained in Mahatma Gandhi’s educational methods, at the Indian Council of Basic Education and Gandhi Shikshan Bhavan. Her rare mix of activism and scholarship and her ability to write in both Gujarati and English allowed her to explore not only women’s issues but also art and culture – classical music, theatre and Gujarati literature. Professor Vibhuti Patel, the feminist economist and a close associate of Sonal, comments: “Sonalben’s literary stints interwoven with an indefatigable, courageous spirit serve as an inspiration for all the socially conscious citizens.”

Sonal Shukla. Photo: By arrangement

Personally, I owe Sonal a huge debt. She hand-held me while I transitioned from a middle class Christian battered housewife to a feminist lawyer. She was the driving force for me to resume my education and complete my graduation.

What was striking about Sonal was her razor-sharp wit, sense of aesthetics, ear for classical music, generosity and most of all, her zest for life, which she maintained till the very end.

As in life, she was a trendsetter, even in her death. As per her wishes, her funeral pyre was lit by an adolescent girl from Vacha.

Rati Bartholomew (January 1927-September 23, 2021) New Delhi

The theatre activist and mother of the renowned photographer Pablo Bartholomew passed away on September 23, 2021 at the ripe old age of 94. Partition uprooted the family and they came to Delhi as refugees.

Anuradha Kapur, a former director of the National School of Drama (NSD) and a long term associate of Rati, in an article describes her as distinguished, stylish, elegant and courageous. Her reputation as a theatre person went beyond a single institution. In fact, her name became synonymous with campus theatre, so intimately connected was she with student theatre.

Bartholomew inspired generations of students to transit from university theatre to amateur theatre. She looked keenly at their work and opened up opportunities when they stepped out of their studentship. She was one of the earliest members of Yatrik and the vice president of Dishantar – the two most active theatre groups in Delhi in the 1960s.

From the late 70s onwards, Rati was active in street theatre. She helped shape Theatre Union’s production, Toba Tek Singh (a poignant play by Saadat Hasan Manto, set in the background of Partition) which was performed across many cities.

Tripurari Sharma, another dedicated theatre activist and a student of Rati, describes her as a great teacher, mentor and activist. She comments that Rati’s flair for visualising a play became evident while collaborating on a street play Farak (1989) which examined the property rights of women under different personal laws. While giving form to the ongoing debates, what Rati did was ingenious – she used a simple rope to show a property and the shares going, or not going, to women. The square formed by four persons holding a rope was a house; when they dropped it, the ‘house’ vanished, with the reality of the woman’s situation becoming crystal clear. This simple device conveyed so many issues: lack of women’s property rights, the loss of home and the constant question haunting them – where is my space?

Her sphere of influence was not limited to India but extended across South Asia. She worked with theatre groups in Bangladesh and Pakistan, organising workshops and collaborative productions. During one of her many trips to Pakistan, Rati was able to go to Sargodha and visit the house that she and her family had left behind during Partition.

Rati Bartholomew (January 4, 1927 – September 23, 2021): The hues of time – sepia (1940s), black and white (1960s), and colour (2012, on her 85th birthday). Photo credits from left to right: Rekha Narayan Vora’s archive, estate of Richard Bartholomew, Pablo Bartholomew. All rights reserved.

Kamla Bhasin (April 1946-September 2021) New Delhi

Two days later, on September 25, 2021 Kamla Bhasin passed away. She was diagnosed with an advanced form of liver cancer three months prior to her passing away. Though her close friends knew the end was nearing, when it came, no one was prepared. Her death plunged feminists across South Asia into deep grief.

Kamla was a social scientist and started work as a developmental activist with Seva Mandir, a rural-based NGO in Rajasthan and later worked with the UN. In 1979, when she moved to Delhi, she started participating in street plays around the issue of dowry and violence against women. This was the moment of transformation. In her own words, she was like a feminist fish that took to feminist water. Poetry, songs with catchy tunes and rhymes, prose explaining complex feminist concepts in a simple language, poured out in a never-ending stream. Some of her songs became feminist anthems. Through dozens of simple booklets, she explained gender, feminism, patriarchy, etc. which could be understood by non-English speaking young students and older housewives. These have been translated into several South Asian languages.

In 1984, she co-founded Jagori, a feminist group in Delhi, engaged with training and cultural activities. In 1998 she started Sangat, a South Asian feminist network to campaign for gender justice in the region. She helped build bridges between feminists and secular activists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, striving to dissolve artificial barriers.

Her public talks were lively and full of humour. She had the ability to laugh at herself and could also lay bare her life and its challenges to young students such as the death by suicide of her only daughter Meeto when she was around 26 years, due to clinical depression. In one of her talks she shared, “She was not only my future, but also of my son, severely challenged because of a vaccination when he was barely seven months old, which damaged his brain.” Despite this, she kept the inner fire burning.

After she became ill, she would say to her friends, “The bulawa (summons) has come.” When they assured her that she will overcome this, she would respond, “No, not this time. I will not take it as my defeat. I will just transcend to the other world.” And yet one of her close friends, Ritu Menon, founder of the feminist publishing house Women Unlimited, wrote that on September, 23 while in a deep discussion around a contemporary issue, she dozed off. A few moments later, tightening her grip on Ritu’s hands, she opened her eyes wide and said, “Ritu I don’t want to die.” Thirty-six hours later, she was gone.

Her life and death teach us not only to keep the inner flame burning in the face of adversity but also to deal with the contradictory pulls when it’s time to go.

Kamla Bhasin (1946-2021). Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Thanksy Francis Thekkekara (November 1953-October 2021) Mumbai

Born in November 1953 in a Syrian Christian Family, Thanksy married Francis Thekkekara and is survived by her two daughters and her 101-year-old mother. Despite the high positions she held, Thanksy was the primary caregiver of her mother, and ailing husband until he passed away 1.5 years ago. She was diagnosed with thymic cancer but was active until the very end.

A much-admired IAS officer of the 1978 batch who retired in 2013, she was a highly accomplished person. She had completed her BSc, LLB, MBA and had a doctorate in micro-financing.

She brought pluralistic values, sound knowledge and idealism to all her postings including that of additional chief secretary, Minority Development Department, Government of Maharashtra and state information commissioner, Maharashtra.

Thanksy Thekkekara. Photo: By arrangement

Thekkekara worked for the overall empowerment of women. Her work at Mahila Arthik Vikas Mahamandal (MAVIM) was extremely close to her heart. While she was the VC and MD of MAVIM (2001-2007), she helped to transform it into the Women Development Corporation, committed to bringing change in the life of poor rural women. This helped to expand the work of MAVIM exponentially.

From 2008-2013, Thekkekara was the additional chief secretary of the Minority Development Department. Shaheen Kadri, who was her undersecretary in the department and worked closely with her, describes Thekkekara as a soft-spoken person who had strong convictions and never succumbed to political pressure.

Thekkekara worked closely with professor Abdul Shaban at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai and urged him to focus on empowering the Muslim community and in particular, Muslim women. She co-hosted an annual conference, Diversity and Development, the latest edition of which was held in August 2021. Professor Shaban, who is full of admiration for her, describes her as an able administrator, philanthropist, feminist, community leader and scholar, who relied on this five plank strategy while implementing various programmes.

Concerned about Muslim women who faced several obstacles – both internal and external – she was particularly disturbed about the lack of reservation for them in educational institutes and employment, which they needed the most.

Thekkekara co-authored the book Women’s Self Help Groups Restructuring Socio-Economic Development (2011) with professor Parthasarathy, IIT Mumbai and Veena Poonacha, director, Women’s Studies Dept, SNDT University. She also dabbled in fiction. Her book, Mehbub Gulley: Short Stories from India which was published by Notion Press (November 2019) and received good reviews.

Jessie Tellis-Nayak (March 1925-October 2021) Mangaluru, Karnataka 

Born on March 21, 1925 into a middle-class family in Mangalore, Jessie passed away on October 15, 2021. She was the first in her family to add Nayak to her Portuguese surname, Tellis, to stress her rootedness.

During her time, it was not usual for Christian girls from Mangalore to go abroad to study. The usual choice was marriage or nunnery. She defied the norm and went on to follow her dreams, on her own terms. She secured a master’s and a doctorate in social work from the Catholic University of America, Washington DC, and worked with marginalised people in shanties and participated in protest marches for basic human dignity of Black people. On August 28, 1963, Jessie was at the Lincoln Memorial Hall and heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. This strengthened her resolve to return to India, despite the lucrative positions she was offered in the US.

Jessie joined the Indian Social Institute (ISI), New Delhi in 1965, and started work among tribal communities in various states. Her leadership skills led her to form ‘Vikas Maitri’, an organisation deeply involved in various types of developmental programmes by an all-tribal team of professionals.

When she realised that few women were present at planning and decision-making levels in development bodies, the importance of enabling women to discover their potential, providing them with opportunities, moral support and the skills needed for development work, dawned on her. Thus emerged her decision to concentrate her efforts on women’s development.

In 1975, she became the first director of the Women’s Development Unit at ISI. The Grihini Training Programme initiated by her became known throughout India. Her work in the area of community organisation and women’s welfare was accompanied by the publication of 16 books and several research articles.

In 1982, she returned to Karnataka and formed a group of committed Catholic women with the aim of creating awareness about women’s situation, named Women’s Institute for New Awakening (WINA). It promoted feminist theology, networked with women’s groups, established libraries for women and brought out ‘WINA Vani’, a newsletter to disseminate information. In her articles on the role of women in the church and society, she questioned the very structure and teachings of the patriarchal, hierarchical church and demanded justice for women – a revolutionary concept for her time. Some books that she co-authored are: The Emerging Christian Woman, On Legal Bondage, Women in Church and in Society and Indian Women Forge Ahead.

Jessie Tellis-Nayak. Photo: Instagram/the_og_tellis

In conclusion, let me share that I too belong to this generation of women, whose life was transformed by feminism in the late 70s and early 80s. They were my fellow travellers. I knew each of them, some more than others. I feel their loss at a deeply personal level. There is a gaping void within many of us today. This short piece is to express my appreciation for their contribution.

Flavia Agnes is a Mumbai based feminist activist and legal scholar. She is the co-founder of Majlis, which provides legal services to women. 

Backstory: If You Don’t Count Them, How Will You Report Them? Media Has Failed the OBCs

A fortnightly column from The Wire’s ombudsperson.

The Indian media has consistently failed at least 75% of the country’s population covered by the acronyms SCs, STs and OBCs. For proof of this, consider the wholly inadequate media coverage given to the political contestation over the need to enumerate Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the 2021 census operations. The controversy has in no way prodded journalists to go back to documents like the  ‘Report of the Backward Classes Commission, 1980’, more popularly known as the Mandal Commission Report; or pursue landmark court judgments on the issue; or attempt to understand the sheer anthropological diversity of the OBC community that cuts across religious lines.

There is in just the Mandal Commission Report, which begins with the quote, “There is equality only among equals. To equate unequals is to perpetuate inequality”, a wealth of stories waiting to be discovered, even though two decades have passed since it was formally handed over to then-president Neelam Sanjiva Reddy. In his letter to the president on the occasion, chair of the Commission B.P. Mandal complained about the huge hurdles it had faced in the absence of caste enumeration figures after the 1931 Census… and suggested a reconsideration of the policy of discontinuing such enumeration. After all, as he observed in his introduction, “in traditional Indian society social backwardness was a direct consequence of caste status and, further, that various types of backwardness flowed directly from this crippling handicap”. A recent articlein The Wire, ‘Why a Caste Census Is the Need of the Hour’ (September 5), provides a more recent backdrop to this argument.

Questions arise over the lack of media interest in OBCs who comprise at least 52% India’s numbers. Lack of curiosity is not a failing that should, generally speaking, be laid at the media’s door. Look at the enormous curiosity provoked by Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide a year ago, which had led to an avalanche of “investigations” and went far beyond the film star himself to even unearth rampant drug use in Bollywood. This leads to two further questions: given this, just what are the issues that excite the curiosity of Indian journalists and editors? And are these tropes linked to their own caste-class locations?

An excellent exposition of the problem was The Wire piece that came out a year ago (‘Alienated, Discriminated Against and Few in Number: The Bahujan in the Indian Newsroom’, August 11, 2020). The writer, after conducting an impromptu survey of the Indian newsroom, established not just the very well-noted phenomenon that it is a space dominated utterly by the upper castes, but that it is also emphatically an unequal space where experiences of those outside the dominant locations invariably fail to make their presence felt.

“The newsroom floor is dominated by journalists from English-speaking schools who come from well-off families… The topics of conversation may also seem foreign to Bahujan journalists. The lives of upper caste journalists in these cities revolve around shopping malls, fancy restaurants, coffee shops, bars, clubs, etc. Upper caste journalists also benefit from the cultural capital – in the form of books, art, music, theatre, films, etc – passed down to them from the previous generation.”

All this impacted the stories that finally emerged. One respondent quoted in the piece spoke of his story ideas being rejected; others of how they were left out of important discussions on the news menu of the day.

Bihar CM Nitish Kumar, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, HAM president Jitan Ram Manjhi and other leaders after a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi over caste census in New Delhi, August 23, 2021. Photo: PTI

One can, in light of this, conclude that there are serious structural reasons for the lack of media interest in the story of OBC enumeration. Such epistemic silences are by no means new. Go back to the days when a maelstrom of protests swept through Indian cities after then prime minister, V.P. Singh, announced his government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission report on August 7, 1990. Journalist and political historian V. Krishna Ananth notes that while Singh’s initial announcement attracted no negative response immediately, the dam burst after the self-immolation of Delhi college student Rajiv Goswami, followed by a spate of copycat suicides in other northern Indian cities and towns.

Did the charged media coverage given to Goswami’s unfortunate death possibly propel the suicides that followed? His burning figure made it to the covers of several prominent magazines. The late social activist and author, Gail Omvedt, made a direct link between the newspaper coverage and the ‘self-immolations’, in a chapter that appeared in an anthology edited by Ghanshyam Shah, ‘The Anti-Caste Movement And The Discourse Of Power’ from Caste and Democratic Politics in India’ (Permanent Black). She wrote: “then a wave of ‘self-immolations’ followed, spurred by tremendous newspaper publicity and intellectual support… There was a chorus in the press against V.P. Singh, talk of the ‘Mandalisation of India’, and respectable social scientists who had made their careers analysing the reality of caste in India now rediscovered the economic factor and threatened a ‘brain drain’ of high-caste talent abroad.”

If you look at the media coverage of those days, there was no ambiguity about which side the media was on. Lines from a report appearing in a contemporary news magazine would indicate this: “…Sharad Yadav continued exhorting the backwards to come out into the streets for a numerical showdown with the anti-reservationists. He must have been dismayed when despite pouring rain an anti-Mandal rally was attended by over 50,000 while rainfall washed out a pro-Mandal rally the next day – a pointer to which way the views of the capital’s citizenry veer.”

There was also close detailing of the methods of protest in those news reports, including the manner in which medical students and doctors in Lucknow took to “polishing shoes and cleaning cars and taking out processions in which they ply rickshaws – to make the point that this is what they are likely to end up doing if the Government reserves more jobs.” These forms of protest, incidentally, had a long lease of life, and were repeated years later when organisations like Youth for Equality and the AIIMS Residents Doctors Association went on anti-quota stirs against the proposal to provide 27% reservations for OBCs in elite educational institutions – a move that was aborted by the Supreme Court. The irony is that such forms of protest only illustrated the disdain towards work done by professionals like rickshaw pullers and cobblers, and an assumption that only the lower castes should do such work and that jobs that command high social capital must necessarily be “reserved” (by implication) for the so-called meritorious upper castes. The irony was patent but no news report called it out.

Economist Ashwini Deshpande, in her short account, ‘Affirmative Action In India’ (Oxford) also notes that “public sympathy was fully with the striking students with no evidence of the usual middle-class disdain for and impatience with agitational activities.”

Media, if committed to the need for more and better data to achieve their much professed demand for evidence-based policy-making, should in fact be arguing in favour of OBC enumeration in the current census operations. After all, if you don’t count them, how will you report them? Reporting blind make for blind reports, without the credibility of adequate data. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the Indian media have chosen to continue siding with power structures defined by caste, class and political parameters and, in the process, persist with their historical role of being force multipliers for those who rule the country today.

Big media and farm protests

An editorial in the Times of India, ‘Jai Which Kisan’ (September 7) indicated the deep sympathy the corporate media has for the Modi government in its efforts to get the three farm loans mainstreamed. The editorial terms the passing of the laws as a “laudable ambition of creating a robust private market for agri produce”. It goes on to paint the protestors as “big farmers”, and advises the government to win over “the small and marginal farmers” so that they realise the benefits of reform. The hypocrisy inherent in this argument is obvious: struggling farmers who comprise a wide spectrum of the farming community have been sitting out in the cold and rain for close over a year are painted as the moneyed villains of the piece, while the real beneficiaries of the farm laws – powerful, globally-networked agribusiness – is never mentioned even in passing.

Meanwhile, television channels adopted all manner of innovative ways to minimise the gargantuan scale of the Muzaffarnagar mahapanchayat gathering of farmers on September 5. This included, in one instance, introducing vertical frames of the visuals from the ground – so that the eye could not register the impressive vastness of the crowd. It is precisely such cheap tactics that have raised the hackles of the protesting farmers when it comes to the “godi media”. There was an instance of the Aaj Tak reporter, Chitra Tripathi, being chased away even as “hai, hai, godi media” chants rang out. Such treatment of individual journalists cannot and must not be condoned. After all, each of these microphone holders are only working at the bidding of those who pay their salaries. What would be more useful, but of course more difficult is to adopt ways to discomfit the corporates who control the media, thus disrupting their business model.

Against this backdrop, the photographs of the event that The Wire put out (‘Will Oust Divisive BJP’: Farmers Stand Firm at Muzaffarnagar Mahapanchayat‘, September 6) were important. They were a reminder that there is great value in slow photography as opposed to the frenetic pace of television cameras, providing the viewer a chance to dwell on the faces and ambience of an event that was by any token a significant political marker. ‘Not Just a Farmers’ Stir But a Democratic Pushback Against Uncaring Rule’ (September 9) notes, this “historic mahapanchayat was not just a farmer-related one…apparent from the diversity of attendance it drew and from the content of the speeches made at the happening.” What was also striking were the numerous young faces captured in the photographs of the participants – indicating that this movement is attracting a new generation in western Uttar Pradesh, not all of whom may be farmers themselves.

The Muzaffarnagar mahapanchayat. Photo: PTI

Such features indicate an attempt to think out of the box, and will go some way to broaden The Wire’s appeal. It has just been recognised by the International Press Institute (IPI) for its journalism. IPI’s executive director, Barbara Trionfi, writes, “The Wire is a leading force in India’s digital news transformation and its commitment to quality, independent journalism is an inspiration to IPI members around the world.” She congratulates its staff for “their tremendous work in the service of critical reporting and press freedom”, and assures them that her organisation “will stand with them in the face of increasing political pressure.”

Thank you Barbara Trionfi and IPI, for such a strengthening thought. Siddharth Varadarajan spoke for the organisation when he said that although The Wire has paid a price for its independence in so many ways, “there is nothing like recognition from our peers in India and around the world to make this journey totally worth it.”

Readers write in…

RSS and Taliban?

Khozema Mansure writes from Toronto suggesting a piece comparing the RSS and the Taliban:

“I hope everyone at The Wire is safe. I am taking the liberty of making the following suggestion as it could be of considerable interest to your readers.

Perhaps one of your staff writers or one of your regular contributors like Avay Shukla, or Badri Raina or Prem Shankar Jha, could develop the following points further. Some of these will surely need additional research/insights and there will be yet others which have been overlooked. Of course there are very wide divergences too between the RSS and the Taliban, but the focus here is on the similarities. Comparisons, as will be evident, are from the standpoint of a ‘very curious social sciences inspired bystander’.

*Command and control, clearly defined hierarchy which does not tolerate internal or external dissent   Implicit in their beliefs is a deep and abiding faith in their superiority.

*Both are at crucial turning points in their respective journeys which will significantly impact different sections of vast swathes of humanity in Asia and beyond.

*For good or bad, both are severely riled by their opponents; to the extent that the good work done by both is overlooked/sidestepped on account of the Hindutva and Islamophobia prisms.

*Shorn of all the opprobrium cast on them, the kernel of their basic ideology harkens back to the very sincere and ‘pure spirit’ embodied by the likes of a Mother Teresa or Abdul Sattar Edhi…

*Cutting through the fat, how sobering is the realisation that despite all the noise and din, both organisations (again shorn of their Hindutva and Islamophobia prisms) are essentially about how best society should be organised!

*Both have been misconceived and wrongly branded by the popular media as Hindu and terrorist organisations on account of considerations other than what they actually stand for.

*Both have grassroots, disciplined (RSS perhaps more), ideologically-motivated cadres.

*Both have very clear vision and are bold and daring

I continue to be in the awe of the wonderful work The Wire is doing. Keep it up!”

Javed Akhtar. Photo: Ramesh lalwani/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

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Irony overload

Leo Levy from Brussels writes appreciatively about the irony inherent in the image used in the piece carried in the Science section, ‘How Do We Address Information Overload in the Scholarly Literature?’ (August 29): “The image chosen to illustrate the paper about information overload comes from a notorious far-right French intellectual, Renaud Camus (his name is credited under the picture). As  Wikipedia notes, he is the creator of the conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement’, which claims that a global elite is colluding against the white population of Europe to replace them with non-European non-Christian people.

Although and just because Renaud Camus is as shameful as his best equivalents in India, I thought you would appreciate the irony of the choice of the picture! I seize the opportunity to thank you for your work. I have been reading The Wire for a long time and I know the importance of independent news. I valued highly the function of ombudswoman/man when it started to appear in our papers. But as you know, it has now completely disappeared in the European press.

What is information if it does not develop the capacity of the reader to reflect about information? That’s why I consider myself lucky to be able to still read your column (and A.S. Panneerselvan’s in The Hindu).

Taliban and women

Radhika Coomaraswamy, chairperson, and Roshmi Goswami, co-chairperson, South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) (excerpts): “We are deeply concerned about what Taliban rule will mean in practice, especially for women and girls…The Taliban has given assurances that women would enjoy equal rights within the framework of Islam, including being able to work and receive education. They also gave the impression that they have become more moderate and that they are ready to be more inclusive and protect minority rights. Even though it appears to be an encouraging sign, life under the Taliban remains difficult to predict as they remain vague on rules and restrictions, and how Islamic law will be implemented…

We  call on the Taliban leadership to: Assure Afghan citizens, especially women and girls, security and safety and guarantee equality for all citizens; Promote and protect the rights of Afghan women and children and address the needs of victims of sexual and gender-based violence in the conflict; Women must be fully included at all levels of decision making and their voices must be heard; Protect the rights of minorities and the vulnerable in Afghan society; Abide by international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians and facilitate humanitarian access;  Ensure safe passage to all Afghans who wish to leave.

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Remembering Syed Ali Geelani

Ghulam Nabi Fai, secretary general, Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum writes about Syed Ali Geelani, late chairman of the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat (excerpt):

Syed Ali Geelani was an intellectual, deep thinker, visionary, a brilliant and articulate scholar and above all an institution in himself. He was a giant in Kashmir’s turbulent history… In 1990 the winds of change blew across the world, destroying dictatorships and occupations, and the people of Kashmir also renewed their struggle for freedom…It was at this crucial juncture that Geelani Sahib emerged to present a much larger aspect of his leadership. He not only rekindled the issue afresh but also gave it a new vigour and meaning. The people of Kashmir will never forget the selfless contributions and tireless efforts of Geelani Sahib.

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Finally, this observation from a reader of The Wire, Kalyani Menon-Sen: 

The horrors of punctuation, remember ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves”? This headline in today’s Wire — ‘The Impact of COVID-19 on Anti-Human Trafficking Initiatives in West Bengal’ (September 8) — is almost as funny. But still good to see trafficking recognised as an anti-human act.

Write to ombudsperson@cms.thewire.in

In Merging Scholarship and Activism, Gail Omvedt Made Academic Research Accessible for All

On her passing, tributes have poured in from anti-caste activists, scholars and students who have been deeply influenced by her life and work.

Early this month, sociologist and anti-caste crusader Gail Omvedt’s daughter Prachi Patankar began posting a series of “appreciation posts” for her mother on Facebook. Omvedt had just turned 80 on August 2. Prachi invited Omvedt’s old friends, relatives back in the US, her students and fellow activists who are deeply influenced and moved by Omvedt’s five-decade-long contribution to the vibrant anti-caste discourse in the Indian subcontinent to join her.

The anecdotes were unique, each sharing instances of how they had interacted and collaborated with Omvedt at different times in life. Some talked of her childhood, others of her participation in the people’s movement in India. But they all had one common thread: the accessibility that Omvedt offered – both as an individual and a scholarly thinker. Her simple, straightforward and brutally honest scholarship has resonated with many, more particularly Bahujan communities with whom she worked for over five decades.

An academic, human rights activist and a political thinker who produced a vast body of scholarship with an incisive anti-caste, Ambedkarite, Buddhist perspective, Omvedt died on August 25 at her home in Kasegaon in Sangli district of Maharashtra, due to prolonged age-related illnesses. Even as her health began to drastically deteriorate in the past decade, Omvedt remained active – participating in many public rallies, meetings and academic deliberations.

The funeral ceremony will be performed today in the premises of the Krantiveer Babuji Patankar Sanstha, Kasegaon.

A young Gail Omvedt. Photo: Special arrangement

Omvedt, born in Minneapolis on August 2, 1941, first came to India in the early 1960s for a brief period. This short academic journey exposed her to the stark caste and caste disparities and the oppression of Bahujan communities, more particularly the Dalits, in the country. It left a deep impact on her. She returned again a few years later, this time to work on her thesis, ‘Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873-1930’. This time, she stayed on. She met Bharat Patankar, a Marxist, Buddhist, Phuleite from western Maharashtra, married him and settled down in India. A decade later, she relinquished her US citizenship.

Academics fashionably claim to maintain an “objective distance” from the people and subjects they study; Omvedt, however, became one with them. She participated in several anti-caste and peasant movements over the last five decades. She, along with Patankar, co-founded a socio-political platform called the Shramik Mukti Dal (or the Toilers’ Liberation League) which has been actively organising farmers and workers on issues of drought, dam and project eviction, and caste oppression in over 10 districts in Maharashtra. The organisation was the outcome of Omvedt and Patankar’s deep engagement with Marx-Phule-Ambedkarism.

Omvedt was a prolific writer. She authored over 25 books and many dozen academic papers. Between 1975 and ’76, she spent over 10 months working closely with women in different socio-cultural and political movements in Maharashtra and brought out a seminal work, ‘We will smash this prison! Indian women in struggle’.

Some of her important publications are Dalit Vision (1975), We Shall Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle (1979), Land, caste, and politics in Indian states (1982), Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India (1993), a translation of Vasant Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography (2000), Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahminism and Caste (2003), Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals (2008) and Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (2013).

Also read: India Will Remember Gail Omvedt Forever

Omvedt was perhaps the second white American (Eleanor Zelliot, her teacher at the undergraduate school in Carleton College was the first) to have come to India and studied the anti-caste movement here. Omvedt moved across India and taught at several universities and worked with many international human rights organisations.

She headed the Phule-Ambedkar Chair in Pune University, under the Department of Sociology. She also taught at the Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen.

Gail Omvedt and Bharat Patankar’s house in Kasegaon, Sangli. Photo: Somnath Waghmare

Her understanding of the women’s movement – like the Marxism she and her husband practiced – was rooted in her understanding of the radical anti-caste movement envisioned by Dr B.R. Ambedkar and Jotiba Phule. In an interview conducted in 2008 by renowned poet and author Meena Kandasamy, Omvedt, reiterating Ambedkar’s words, had said,

“Caste can only survive if women’s sexuality is controlled! To keep the jati identity you have to keep marriages within the jati. In Marathi it’s said roti-beti-vyavahar, “exchange of bread and girls” has to be within the caste. For that to happen, girls have to be guarded and married off when they’re pre-puberty, so there’s no danger to the caste. The man is not polluted if he has sex with anyone because the semen goes out; the woman is polluted because she takes it in. (This is the way many anthropologists analyse it). So – Manu says, “Women when young must be under the control of their father, when adults under control of their husbands, when old under control of their sons, women must never be independent.””

In December 2019, in an inaugural lecture on feminist discourse organised by the Department of Sociology, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Omvedt spoke about the need to organise the women’s movement around “the rights of women on natural resources like water, wind, sun, forests and sound waves to have ecologically sustainable, renewable-based and decentralised production processes”. “There is enough scientific base available for doing this. A movement for equitable water rights for organic agriculture could be the best beginning for this. Experimenting for a new kind of commune homes initiated by women could be one of the socio-cultural contributions of the feminist movement,” she said. This was perhaps her last public address. The question of deserted women, she felt, is one that has the potential to find theoretical and practical alternatives to the traditional family.

Omvedt was deeply influenced by her mother-in-law Indutai Patankar, a freedom fighter and a Satyashodhak who too worked among people until her death in 2017.

Ambedkarite organisations across political lines revered her as their own. At the first meeting of the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation, organised in Nagpur in 1971, Omvedt was a keynote speaker along with the federation’s founders Kanshiram and D.K. Khaparde.

The first BAMCEF meeting in Nagpur in 1971. Gail Omvedt was invited as a keynote speaker. BAMCEF founders Kanshiram and D.K. Khaparde are seen in the background. Photo: Special arrangement

Prakash Ambedkar, a seasoned political leader and founder of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi in Maharashtra, remembers Omvedt as a sharp intellectual who has been an active part of the Phule-Ambedkarite movement along with the women’s and Adivasi movements. “Gail kept her connect with grassroots all over India and remained strongly involved with all Bahujan movements. Very rarely do you come across an academician who remains equally committed to people’s mobilisation,” he told The Wire.

Also read: Gail Omvedt on the Indian Feminist Movement and the Challenges It Faces

Despite her five decades of highly influential community-oriented work, Omvedt did not get the recognition she deserved. Young documentary filmmaker and PhD scholar Somnath Waghmare, who is presently working on a film on Omvedt and Patankar, feels if the same work was done with a Gandhian and not Phule-Ambedkarite approach, she would have become a darling of both the state and academic circles. “But what matters is her work did not stay trapped in the academic space, she reached the masses. The people she cared and worked for remain her true admirers. And that is her biggest reward,” Waghmare says.

Waghmare, a resident of Kolhapur, has closely worked with the couple. He began filming them two years ago, and Omvedt’s health condition had by then drastically deteriorated. “She remembered mostly things from her childhood and life in the US,” Waghmare said in one of his conversations with this writer.

Gail Omvedt with her family and filmmaker Somnath Waghmare. Photo: Special arrangement

Omvedt did not mince words. She provided a sharp critique, even of some of the strong people’s movements that had wide acceptance. She was critical of the appropriation and erasure of the anti-caste and Adivasi movements which urban, upper-caste activists would claim as their own.

The anti-Narmada movement started in the early ’70s, essentially organised and led by the indigenous residents of the affected villages in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Later, though, it came to be attributed to the activist Medha Patkar-led Narmada Bachao Andolan. Omvedt disapproved of this strongly. In an open letter, written to author Arundhati Roy in early 2000 for supporting the Patkar-led NBA movement, she had said: “I hope you understand. When you are dealing with villages that are nearly 100% Adivasi, why are all the leaders from the urban elite, and how democratic exactly is their relationship to the rural poor they are organising?”

She translated the poem ‘Stage’ by Waharu Sonawane, a young leader from the Adivasi community, to highlight her point.

We did not go on to the stage,
Neither were we called.
We were shown our places,
told to sit.

But they, sitting on the stage,
went on telling us of our sorrows,
our sorrows remained ours,
they never became theirs.

Omvedt dedicated her entire life and scholarship to subaltern thinkers like Ambedkar, Periyar, Phule and Iyothee Thass. She and Patankar have together translated a large amount of historic anti-caste literature and poems from Tukaram to Chokamela to Buddha.

Omvedt, a white woman, married to a Maratha caste man, remained a revered name in Ambedkarite households in the state. On her passing, many anti-caste leaders, scholars and students shared their experiences of having met her, interacted with her and read her.

Omvedt’s reverence in the Ambedkarite community defies the fallacious understanding of the anti-caste movement. The movement, often misunderstood and belittled for being “exclusive” and propagating “identity politics”, has revered Omvedt for her contribution and considered her to be one among them.  Filmmaker and award-winning film critic Rajesh Rajamani says, “Brahmins and Savarnas often accuse Dalits and other Bahujans of ‘gatekeeping’ anti-caste movements. They say even ‘well-meaning’ Brahmins and Savarnas aren’t supposedly trusted and given their due. But the love and tributes pouring in for Dr Gail Omvedt from Ambedkarite and Buddhist circles are proof of not only her radical legacy but also the politics of the anti-caste Bahujan movement.”

India Will Remember Gail Omvedt Forever

Scholars study her books to understand the question of caste and untouchability, and also to change the caste system.

Dr Gail Omvedt (81), one of the greatest scholars on caste studies, passed away on August 24, 2021 evening in her village, Kasegaon, Sangli, Maharashtra.

Omvedt has pioneered caste studies having come as a student from the US and settled down in India in the 1970s. She later married Bharat Patankar, a Marxist scholar and activist; both of them lived in his village over these years. She came to study caste and Mahatma Phule’s movement in Maharashtra as a PhD student, and was moved by the kind of caste and untouchability system she encountered in India. Omvedt settled down in this country to work for the liberation of the oppressed castes.

As an American-born Indian scholar, sociologist and human rights activist, she was well known all over the world for her writing on Dalits/OBCs/Adivasis.

Also read: Gail Omvedt on the Indian Feminist Movement and the Challenges It Faces

She was a prolific writer and published numerous books. Her PhD thesis introduced Mahatma Phule’s Satyashodhak Movement to the world and her major book, Dalits and Democratic Revolution, became a handbook in every young student’s hands in the colleges and universities across India, and also in the South Asian study centres of the world. Scholars study her books to understand the question of caste and untouchability, and also to change the caste system. She was a great Phule-Ambedkarite, who led many movements from the front. The Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasi movements all over India will be indebted to her lifetime of work.

All of us who worked with her in a long journey of Dalit/OBC/Adivasi/women’s liberation movements for the last 40 years, along with her husband Bharat Patankar and daughter Prachi Patanakar, will celebrate her life and work as proud Indians.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is political theorist, social activist. His latest book is The Shudras: Vision For a New Path, co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy.

Gail Omvedt on the Indian Feminist Movement and the Challenges It Faces

Movements pioneered by early feminists should be studied with new theoretical inputs to deal with the challenges to the abolition of gender exploitation.

This is the text of Gail Omvedt’s inaugural lecture on Feminist Discourse, organised by the Department of Sociology, Savitribai Phule Pune University.

Thanks to the organisers of this seminar for inviting me to give the inaugural lecture.

My late mother-in-law [Indumati Patankar], a freedom fighter and feminist activist till her physical capacities allowed her to be so, experienced and faced all the periods through which concepts and practices of feminism have gone through; from the freedom movement against colonialism to the contemporary period of imperialist globalisation.

Her memoirs inform me about surprisingly advanced understanding and practices of feminist consciousness during the period of the freedom movement. It is shown by concepts of staying and sleeping in one room by young men and women without any apprehension, intercaste and interreligious marriages, young women leaving their homes alone to join the freedom movement.

Today, one can not even think of many of these practices and bold concepts involved in those practices. In the early 80s, my mother-in-law used to encourage us for being bold in this relation. Though I was from the background of the feminist movement in the US, in India I needed such kind of encouragement in the given situation. Feminist activists in our rural movement like Nagmani Rao, Gauri Day also still remember the pleasant shock they had about Indutai’s old experiences and bold concepts.

Gail Omvedt (second from left) at the conference. Photo: Special arrangement

The second aspect was of conducting marriages in the Gandhian or Satya shodhak way. Gandhian marriages were based on simplicity, Swadeshi ideology and without dowry of any kind. The satya shodhak marriage ceremony based itself on anticaste ideology, women’s liberation and commitment for social justice. Even in this era of imperialist globalisation, these kind of marriages are less in number than that period. The dominant trend is of the marriages based on ritualistic Brahmanic procedures. As against the component of social justice, these marriages are extremely individualistic and with the show of pomp.

Of course, it is true that autonomous women’s organisations based on feminist ideology were not getting formed in those days, but concepts and practices based on feminism were very much there. It was the beginning of the development of feminist ideology all over the world.

Also Read: Discovering the First Generation of Feminists in Kerala

Mass organisations of women based on feminist ideology started getting formed in India around the mid-1970s. They were autonomous from their sister organisations in which men and women were together. This phenomenon was more in existence in rural areas than in the urban ones. Their agenda was basically composed of feminist issues or issues related to women’s liberation. There were many debates about this new phenomenon, but these organisations were not opposed by sister organisations. Mass of women getting organised like this was giving new energy to the overall toiling people’s movements in those days. It gave rise to the creative contribution by uneducated or less educated women in these movements.

Most of the creative, poetic, emotionally appealing and content-rich songs in simple language belong to this period between the mid-1970s and 80s. Mass national women’s conferences at Kolkata and Patana were organised during this period only. It is a great lacking in today’s period.

Different shades of feminism

In the process of this development, different shades of feminism started emerging within the broad spectrum of the overall feminist movement: Ambedkarite feminists, Marxist feminists, Marx-Phule-Ambedakarite feminists, socialist feminists. These shades are there also in today’s period. These shades are not only related to the various theories but also realities of women’s exploitation related to the caste, class, race, gender, community and religion-based exploitation. Though the central question is related to gender, it exists in real life intertwined with these other forms of exploitations. Without considering this reality, one cannot emerge with theoretical and practical answers for marching towards women’s liberation. There is not sufficient theoretical churning about this with the aim of a united movement. It could be said that there is no in-depth attempt to understand the contemporary character of caste, gender as well as class relations of producing newer and newer life.

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

With the beginning of the process of imperialist globalisation, somehow, the process of decline of mass women’s liberation movements started taking place. One has to seriously study this process because it will come up with the relationship between the decline and emergence of the imperialist globalisation. At the same time, it would reveal the weaknesses of these mass movements in coping with and successfully going ahead in the face of imperialist globalisation.

This period of imperialist globalisation comes with big ‘revolution’ in the information technology and new kind of automation in the industrial field. With this, the character of the industries having a big workforce under one roof has radically changed. Now more than 90% of the workforce is in the category of the unorganised labourers. The percentage of unemployed and semi-employed people has risen to new heights. This has given rise to a new kind of unrest which cannot easily develop in the positive movement, giving alternatives to the various aspects of the established socio-economic formation

A new approach

A new approach could only emerge with the alternatives in the fields of industry, agriculture, natural resources, ecological approaches. In this situation, the system is going ahead with false promises to the people and dictatorial ways of dealing with suffocated unrest without an alternative vision. Women’s liberation is facing a situation in which there are rampant atrocities and women are forced to return to the gender slavery of most regressive nature. There is a special boost given to male domination of the worst kind.

There are many spaces and opportunities which could be used by the feminist movement in the present era. Women’s movements could be organised around the rights of women on natural resources like water, wind, sun, forests and sound waves to have ecologically sustainable, renewable-based and decentralised production processes. There is enough scientific base available for doing this. A movement for equitable water rights for organic agriculture could be the best beginning for this. Experimenting for a new kind of commune homes initiated by women could be one of the socio-cultural contributions of the feminist movement.

The question of deserted women is one which has the potential to find theoretical and practical alternatives to the traditional family. It was taken up by the movement in Sangli-Satara district led by late Krantivirangana Indutai Patankar and the movement led by Nisha Shivurkar in Nagar district. These movements should be thoroughly studied and freshly taken ahead with new theoretical inputs dealing with the question of single women-headed families.

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

The feminist movement is for the abolition of gender exploitation of all kinds and abolition of gender as a socio-economic, cultural reality which is the basis of the exploitation. A lot of theoretical contribution is necessary for understanding this and finding out the programme which becomes the basis of the movement. I hope that the young generation engages itself in this and will come forward to organise a mass feminist movement of advanced nature.

Gail Omvedt is a scholar, sociologist and human rights activist who has written on the anti-caste movement, Dalit politics and women’s struggles in India.