Dagger Drawn by Nina Pillai

February 06, 2001

Women’s Voice

The women of Gujarat have borne their grief with stoic pride and dignity, throwing themselves into frenetic activities like running community kitchens, setting up mobile creches for orphans and other rehabilitation work — perhaps diluting some of their own pain and grief in this hour of need. The community kitchen activities of the Gujarati household has always fascinated me. Whether it was to make khandvi, papad or pickles, a cluster of behens would get together and make the intricate art at hand look like child’s play. Their close-knit, warp and weft bonding cris-crosses the earth and ensures the same diligence to familial duty globe over. In the care and nurture section the Gujarati Matriarch follows, none as hers is a truly domestic existence in a devotion to her Lord and the keeping of a faultless home. The tactile resilience and strength she has shown in these earthquake ravaged days make women’s liberation seem a piffling triviality.

A few weeks back, it was touching to see one of the greatest Statesman of modern times, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, bowing respectfully to a rural leader Chinna Pillai, at an awards ceremony in Tamil Nadu. Chinna Pillai is an illiterate, schedule caste social worker, who has climbed from the depths of grinding poverty to rise like a Phoenix from the ashes of indented slavery. This grey-haired, fifty-something-year-old, who worked as a manual slave labourer in paddy fields, collecting cow dung, has through a movement called Kalavijayam (loosely translated as ‘woman victory’) made waves in Tamil Nadu. Chinna is exceptional because she believed in herself and, despite being part of the lowest rung of the human ladder, made vital networking links of self-help groups in the villages that formed the block. China Pillai has set in chain motion a movement that is a credit and savings system, which helped to reduce the crippling debt that a lifetime of work could not repay, thus reducing families to a slavery, that really should have no part in a 21st century democracy like India. The Herculean effort apart, Chinna’s success lies in her basic rudimentary understanding that till you help yourself no one else will. The rest, as they say, is history or her story.

By forming rural collectives, theirs is now a single voice, and though she still staves off starvation with hard work in the fields, hers is the leader’s role by example. Simple cheer, her soul-stirring effort brings to mind how heart rending that indented labour struggle so hard to be masters of their own destiny, in a hostile land that only lets them dream of freedom. In Chinna Pillai story, there is hope for every single woman in our country.

Despite the Women’s Bill not getting passed for the umpteenth time, if we took a leaf out of Chinna’s book, and women were to lobby as representatives of half of the electorate, in self groups, this movement will ensure that a sizeable proportion of representatives in both houses of Parliament were women. The stale opposition to this landmark bill is that it will be the kith, kin and girlfriend of the politician that will get these grace and favour seats, so be it. I take gleeful, cheeky pride in the fact that two new President’s in South East Asia, President Arroyo in the Philippines and President Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, occupy the highest office in the land, not just from the inheritance viewpoint but in the honest hard work they put into the difficult art of public life. President Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka, President Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi as President of the Congress Party are all living proof that these women in public life, all wives or daughters, are a force to reckon with and detractor who put forth the heredity versus environment, or leaders are not born but created by circumstance theory, can take a long walk on a short pier. Woman power is here to stay. In this year of women’s empowerment, let us all raise a collective voice and be heard above the din of the mindless power mongers.