"At Home in the World: women's activism in Hyderabad"

social movementsan anthropological reader

edited byjune nash

17

At Home in the World:Women's Activism in

Hyderabad, India

Deepa S. Reddy

The Indian women's movement has beenshaped over time by several political and in-tellectual influences, from nineteenth-centurysocial reform, to Maoist/Marxist revolutionin the 1940s and 1950s, to the rise of identitypolitics and religious nationalism in the1980s and 1990s. During the differentperiods of its evolution, what pre-Independ-ence social reformers called the "women'squestion" has inevitably been posed in rela-tion to several overlapping concerns. In thecontext of the struggle for Independence,for example, addressing the problem of thestatus of women was simultaneously a meansof responding to the colonialist charge thatIndian women were deified but downtrodden(Chatterjee 1989, Sinha 2000). Later gener-ations of Indian women activists have, as weshall see, consistently read Western feministand other writings, but have always tailoredtheir praxis to the specific needs of localcommunities. In other words, gender-focusedactivism has always, albeit to varying degreesand in varied ways, straddled the boundariesbetween the internal and the external, thetraditional and the modern, the local andthe global.

It is hardly a coincidence, then, that Indianfeminists responded as early as the 1970s – afull two decades prior to the formal liberal-ization of the Indian economy – to issueswhich are generally associated, in whole orin part, with the twin forces of industrializa-tion and globalization: growing commercial-ization, the wholesale import of agencymodels of development, the rising prices ofbasic commodities, import and export pol-icies, ecological devastation, and so on. Atthe time, feminists debated how much eachof these were properly "women's issues, " but

through these very debates arrived at anunderstanding of what Susie Tharu wouldlater describe as the centrality of gender to"our social architecture " (Tharu 1990:63).

By the time of the Union Carbide leak inBhopal, the pressing issue for Indian femi-nism was less one of definition and moreone of organizing priorities: as critical as itwas to lend support to groups represen

ting

the victims of the gas leak, the practical im-

plications of becoming involved in all such

people's agitations were so overwhelming

that activists began to feel the need foraradically transformed praxis. No less critic

WOMEN'S ACTIVISM IN HYDERABAD, INDIA

ally toward the end of that decade, the dra-

matic decline of communism in EasternEurope and the rise of Hindu religious na-tionalism in India together forced a rethink-

ing of the ways in which the women'smovement had conceptualized such categor-ies as "class " and even "women." No longer,it seemed, was it possible to think of womenas a unified group, nor even to understandsocial difference primarily in terms of eco-

nomic disparity. The result of thus comingto terms with both the practical limitationsof activism as well as significant challenges toits established theoretical models was agreater emphasis on Women's Studies re-search and writing, and a far less direct in-volvement in grassroots activism. From thispoint onward, the activist organization itselfbecomes more research-oriented, concernedwith keeping in step with national and inter-national academic programs in Women'sStudies, and fashioning itself as a node thatlinks grassroots organizations to the widerworlds of research, inter/national funds, in-tellectual exchanges and, indeed, global ac-tivist networks. In other words, the newlyemergent activist non-governmental organ-ization (NGO) begins to function within,and indeed to take advantage of, the veryglobalized terrain whose underside it con-tinues to study, analyze, and sharply critique.

This critique, however, although no lessstringent than in the past, now has a some-what altered place in activist discourse. Thechanging fortunes of Marxist/class analysis

i n combination with the multiculturalistturn of Indian feminism makes it that muchharder for activists to organize over specificis

sues: even questions regarding the mostbasic rights are sometimes complicated bygroups who emphasize instead the right to

cultural difference. Having grown themselves

Increasingly conscious of their privileged

social positioning, activists now tend toleave the specific ;articulation of social issuesand goals to the communities in question, bethese rural, caste-based, or minority. One of

the sharpest criticisms of globalization is that

its i mpact is differential, enabling some while

greatly disenfranchising others. The emergentactivist NGO certainly offers the establishedcritiques, keeps a close watch on new en-croachments and analyses their ramifications.In general, however, it is far more cautiousabout intervening, instead allowing localcommunities to define their needs, oftentimesfacilitating their access to – but still advocat-ing their rights within – rapidly expandingglobal marketplaces.

Using an example from Hyderabad, I tracethe history of evolving praxis that hasbrought Indian feminist activism to this pre-sent juncture, and has led to the establish-ment of the modern, institutional activistNGO. Betty Wells's distinction between`"globalization as the context in which organ-izing occurs and as the focus of organizing"(2002:142) is especially relevant to this dis-cussion, for the organizations that I describeare among those that draw upon global re-sources and networks even as they focus onglobalization as an object of critique. In this,they are also involved in establishing mech-anisms to ensure women and local commu-nities the access to information, funds, andsupport on various levels, thereby enablingtheir greater political participation as theyenter – willingly or otherwise – increasinglyglobal landscapes.

Pre-Emergency Activism: POW

Although nineteenth-century articulations ofthe "women's question" provided an initial.model for social reform, it was predomin-antly Maoist/Marxist ideology that firstgave the modern women's movement its mo-tivation, ideology, and format. Nearly twentyyears after Indian Independence, and despitesweeping land reforms, feudalism had stillnot been dismantled, and slackening eco-nomic growth was fueling the cynical viewthat the only ones to reap the rewards ofsu'arai (self-rule) were capitalists,. landlordsand, of course, politicians. At the same time,the volatile spirits of revolution seemed toinfuse the Indian atmosphere. Hyderabad

306 DEEPA S. REDDY

had already witnessed the Telangana ArmedStruggle against feudal zamindars and theRazakars, the notorious old guard of theNizan's army, between 1948 and 1 9 5 1 . 1 I nWest Bengal, an uprising of workers in thetea gardens of the northern countryside nearNaxalbari would lend its name to severalother communist uprisings m other parts ofthe country: to this day, "Naxalism" remainssynonymous with communist revolution tosome, and with terrorist activity to others.In eastern Andhra Pradesh, the SrikakulamGirijan (tribal) str uggle oi . the late I960s,organized by the (then undivided) Commun-ist Party of India (CPI), demanded an endto practices of extortion and land-grabbingby landlords and forest officials, markingperhaps the beginnings of the Naxalitemovement in the state. Young radicals inMaharashtra's Dhule district formed agroup called the Sharamik Sangatana (or"Toilers' Union"), and organized tribalswho had been dispossessed by Gujar land-lords to recover their lands. Four thousandacres of land were retur ned to tribal controlas a result of this agitation in the early) 1970s.Again in Maharashtra, a rise in commodityprices brought on by conditions of droughtand famine led to the formation of the UnitedWomen's Anti-Price-Rise Front under theauspices of the CPM (Communist Party–Marxist) and the Socialist Party. Eventuallyspreading to neighboring Gujarat, the agita-tion came to be known as the Nav Nirmanmovement, and was influenced greatly by JaiPrakash Narayan's concept of "total revolu-tion": "fighting to reform as well as to limitState power, arguing that rajniti (State rule oflaw) had become corrupt... and the time forlokniti (people's rule of law) had come"(Kumar 1993:103). Naravan's ideas alsohad a huge impact on students and organizerselsewhere in the country: at a time when,almost routinely, the state seemed to respondto popular movements with force and vio-lence, Naravan ' s own "Citizens for Denmoc-racy" movement strongly opposed what hesaw as an increasingly dictatorial politicalsystem, by that time under Indira Gandhi.

Activist work in Hyderabad was centered

around the campus of Osmania University,inspired to a great extent by pers

pectivesand st r

ategies developed elsewhere in thecountry. Some students had even left t

heircolleges to participate in the Srikakulam Gir-ij an struggle, just as their Bengali co

unter-parts did to go to Naxalbari. TheProgressive Democratic Students' Union(PDSU) – a group with connections to theCPI – was especially active on campus, forexample, organizing students around theAnti-Price-Rise issue in 1973. A

ssociatedwith the PDSU were a group of six women,who had their first experience of participat-ing in a wider struggle in the A

nti-Price-Riseagitation, and who were beginning to feel theneed for a separate group to address women'sissues. As women they "discovered they hadto face different barriers to their participa-tion from the )men) – families who tried tohold them back, the weight of socially incul-cated femininity which made it difficult forthem to have self-confidence, the completelack of understanding of the men in themovement about all these problems"( Omvedt 1980:50, specifically of the groupin Hyderabad). In 1974, these women activ-ists began discussing the need for a separatewomen's organization. As K. Lalita, herself amember of that group, writes: "the principleresponse of male students was that it wasanti Marxist to have a separate women's or-ganization; that women are not a class bythemselves; that only an economic revolutionwould ultimately and automatically emanci-pate women" (Lalita 1988:58). In theirclasses these women students were readingeverything from Marx and Marxist literatureon the one hand to Kate Millets, Betty Frie-dan, Simone de Beauvoir, and GermaineGreer on the other. ' Their approach wasoverwhelmingly leftist, but they saw no con-t r adiction between the need for class revolu-tion and the need to organize as women. Thegroup that was formed in September, 1974,calling itself the Progressive Organization ofWomen (POW), in fact both separated andconnected the oppressions of class and


gender in its draft manifesto: "The majorityof Indian women are slaves of slaves....

They are slaves to the men who are them-selves slaves to this exploitative economicsystem. It is thus necessary that we womentake a direct, leading role in organizing themasses of women in their struggles for abetter life and a changed system" (quoted inOmvedt 1980:50).'

And so, out of the specific difficulties ofbeing involved in a radical mass movement,emerged what was perhaps the first autono-mous women's organization of the modernIndian women's movement. As a loosely de-fined adjunct to the PDSU, the group hadalready begun work on women's issues, andthis continued with greater momentum forabout a year after POW was formally estab-lished. The group organized against dowryand "eve-teasing" the harassment ofwomen in public places), and embarked ona militant anti-obscenity campaign. Theyagain participated with the PDSU in a secondseries of Anti-Price-Rise protests, marchingalongside women from Hyderabad slums,banging empty thalis (stainless-steel plates)with spoons as they went. Holding all alongthat a strong women's movement could notdevelop without a solid working-class base,the POW began a Bastee (slum) ServicesCommittee to involve laboring women andaddress their specific needs. In several dis-tricts of the Telangana region, smaller POWorganizing committees were soon formed,

and at least one of these is still functioningland was recently involved in the anti-arrackagitation that brought prohibition to Andhra

Pradesh in I992).

The Emergency

In the meantime, however, a crisis was slowlybuilding at the center of Indira Gandhi's gov-

ernment. Student strikes and mass protests

were rocking Gujarat and Bihar. Jai PrakashN

arayan and Moraji Dcsai (Mrs. Gandhi'son

e-time colleague) had joined forces underthe new Janata Morcha (People ' s Front), in

protest at government corruption and Mrs.Gandhi's purported ineptitude. Then in June,1975 the Congress lost a crucial by-electionin Gujarat (Desai's State), and at around thesame time the Allahabad High Court foundMrs. Gandhi guilty of electoral malpracticeduring her previous Lok Sabha campaign.Rather than be forced to resign, on the adviceof her younger son Sanjay, Mrs. Gandhi per-suaded President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed todeclare a national Emergency.

Politically, this meant that almost every op-position leader was either jailed or kept underhouse arrest, along with several prominentjournalists, lawyers, and educators. The presswas severely censored. To address the country'spoor economy, Mrs. Gandhi then announced a"twenty-point program" directed at reducinginflation and punishing tax-evaders, smug-glers, and other "real" criminals. Wages werefrozen, and pressure applied in governmententerprises to increase discipline and efficiency.Sanjay Gandhi – who held no public office atthe time – was charged with the responsibilityof monitoring newspaper leads and editorials,and he initiated a birth-control program thatrequired sterilization for all families with twoor more children. 4 On the economic front,things began to look up: prices came down,and production indexes were rising dramatic-ally. Perhaps because of these economic gains,or perhaps because Mrs. Gandhi knew shewould eventually be forced to seek electoralmandate for her policies, she called an electionin 1977. Both she and her son Sanjay lost theirbids for Lok Sahha seats, and a Janata Partygovernment was formed with Desai once againat the helm.

In India today, most people seem to re-member the Emergency as the period whenall the trains ran on time. Some men remem-ber getting ready to be sterilized, as per therequirements of Sanjay Gandhi's birth-con-trol program, but few among the middleclass recall fear, despair, or facing any morethan the usual levels of difficulty. Even polit-icians in opposition regard their time in jailas a not-too-trying rite of passage that marksthem now as veterans of sorts, linked by the

307

308 DEEPA S. REDDY

experience of incarceration to other national-ist leaders jailed arhitrarily by the British. Forstudent leaders, protestors, and other activ-ists associated with leftist parties, however,the 20 months under Emergency rule wereamithing butnorntal. The CPI—M/L (Marxist—Leninist) was one of 26 political parties andgroups banned by the government underEmergency policy. Since nearly all membersof the POW were by that time card-holdingmembers of the Mlle Party, they too becamethe targets of police suspicion. Charged withbeing a front for a much larger undergroundorganization, POW members were intimi-dated, and at least three had been arrestedfor no apparent reason by the beginning of1976 under the MISA (Maintenance of In-ternal Security Act). jumping bail or anticipat-ing arrest, several POW and PDSU activistswent underground with the support of theParty, leaving homes and families overnightand disappearing for nearly two years tosafe-houses or traveling to the North, wherethey could not be easily recognized or found.

Post-Emergency Activism: StreeShakti Sanghatana

It would be well-nigh impossible for me todescribe here the impact of the Emergencyarrests on the women activists involved with-out myself adding (perhaps unnecessary)flavor to the description. Suffice it to say,therefore, that the experiences of the Emer-gence changed lives and altered relationshipsto such an extent that the POW could neveragain come together as an organization. Butthe fact that the POW did in fact have a post-Emergency successor — a group called StreeShakti Sanghatana, or Stree Shakti for short —brings me to a larger question that needs tohe posed at this juncture: what was theimpact of the Emergency on the future ofsocial activism? There is a fair amount ofliterature on the Emergency itself: on theconstitutional/legal aspects, the political re-percussions, Sanjay Gandhi's birth-controlprogram, and even on police tactics and

treatment of prisoners during that periodbut nothing – quite surprisingly – on activ-ism. even though activists as a group wereamong those most affected by Emer

gencycrackdowns. Since I do not have room hereto address such a question in detail, how

ever,I otter only a few preliminary th

oughts as ameans of tr acing the links between the pre_Emergency PO \X' and the post

-EmergencyScree Shakti.

The most substantial and significant fall-out of the Emergency was a virtual bu rgeon-ing of civil liberties work all over the country.Most civil rights/civil liberties org anizationsfunctioning in India today have their originsduring or around that period. ' From theAPCDRC ` (a precursor of the APCLC 7 ),formed in response to state repression of theSrikakulam struggle, to the PUCL/PUDR, 8

convened in Delhi at the height of the Emer-gency by Naravan and other members of theopposition; from people's groups fromAssam to Kerala, the most stunning effect ofthe Emergency seemed to be a deepeningconsciousness of civil and democratic rights.In May 19 -77, the Janata governmentappointed Retired Chief Justice J. C. Shahas the head of a committee to investigateexcesses and malpractice carried on during(or just prior to) the Emergency. In the previ-ous month, Naravan (functioning as Presi-dent of his "Citizens for Democracy" group)had already appointed a committee to inves-tigate `"encounter" deaths in Andhra Pradeshthat occurred during the same time. The Tar-kunde Committee, as it came to be known(after its chair, V. M. Tarkunde), comprisednine lawyers, journalists, and civil rights ac-tivists, four of whom were from Hyderabad. 9

Amongst these was K. C. Kannabiran, alawyer with an interest in civil liberties,already well known at the time for hiswork on "extra-judicial" killings in the Sri-kakulam struggle, and poised to begin plead-ing a series of sedition and conspiracy caseslodged against revolutionary activists andwriters of the Left. Above all else, and espe-cially to the growing community of civilrights activists represented by such figures

WOMEN'S ACTIVISM IN HYDERABAD, INDIA 309

as Kannabiran, the Emergency provided irre-futable evidence of the repressive nature ofthe state apparatus. Although the PDSUIPOW combine had directed some of itsanger against the government and "rubngclasses" — an approach very much in keepingwith its leftist leanings — the events of theEmergency shifted the focus from corruptionand government hypocrisy to outright repres-sion. The context, in the months after elec-tions were called, was one of concentratedcivil liberties activism. And the focus of allactivist attention was the state, now under-stood to be an inherently repressive body. Sosubversive were activist attitudes toward thestate, that when a judge asked K. G. Kanna-biran how Naxalites could lay claim to theircivil rights when they rejected the Constitu-tion, the lawyer replied: "in such circum-stances it is not their beliefs which are ontrial, but ours" (quoted in Kakarala1993:301, my emphasis). Around thesame time as the Tarkunde Committeebegan functioning, other activists who hadbeen jailed or had gone underground werebeginning work once again, and many ofthem with the APCLC. And so from thiswork and these associations, sometimesthrough husbands or through friends, an-other group of women came together in1978 to form Strec Shakti Sanghatana. 10

The context of civil liberties activismfrom which the group emerged stampedStree Shakti as a post-Emergency formationin this important sense. Its activism,although gender-based, would remain almostexclusively state-focused for some years toc ome.

The impact of the Emergency is evidentalso from the changed relationship of thew

omen's organization to the M/I. Party andto the broader left community. Activists seemto have been well aware that parry connec-tions were what landed the POW in so muchtrouble during the Emergency. .\s K. Lahti'

w rites:

without taking into consideration the pre-paredness of the women Icadres) to partiei-

pate in political struggle, the POW) exposeditself to repression by regularly associatingwith left-wing student organizations, whichgave [the agents of state power] an excuseto intimidate the POW members....Ulti-mately by going underground and becoming"illegal," the main organizers of POW at-tracted even more repression...when theorganization was still too weak to withstandthis assault. This was the reason for its dis-integration during and after the Emergency.(1988:67)

So if a break with party politics had not beencrucial in pre-Emergency days, it was crucialnow, for an activism based on women's issuescould not function according to party dic-tates or under what had amounted before toparty supervision. Members of Stree Shaktiwere clearly aware that the Party, in spite ofits claims to the contrary, had not been in-ternally democratic: it had marginalizedwomen and gender-specific concerns, andprivileged those occupying leadership pos-itions over the general cadre. In an effort todistance itself from party work and partyformations, then, Stree Shakti decided delib-erately to avoid mass organization, whichwould inevitably "absorb and neutralize"the very concerns that the group sought toaddress. Members opted instead to keep thegroup small, with "a loose structure where allwomen could work according to their cap-acities": a necessary move equally because allmembers had their own jobs and careers(many as teachers and educators) to balancealongside activism (Kannabiran 1986:602).Further, to avoid any other form of externalcontrol, the group decided not to seek fundsfrom outside sources. This meant that for theseven-odd years that Stree Shakti was active,funds for its upkeep came mostly f r om groupmembers, with a small component comingfrom donations (on which also there was acap of 100 rupees). Stree Shakti membersthen cotuciously attempted to ensure thatthe group functioned as democratically aspossible, leaving no one out of the decision-making processes. ' The group had two

310 DEEPA S. REDDY

halves, as it were: one English-speaking,vocal, and articulate, and the other Telugu-speaking and somewhat less vociferous.Again, anxious not to allow language bar-riers to become either impediments to groupparticipation or the implements of domin-ance, all conversations that took place inEnglish were scrupulously translated intoTelugu, and eventually discussions naturallytook place in a mixture of both languages. ''

Yet the break with the Party was not, andindeed could not have been, a clean one:parry politics may have been rejected as ex-clusionary and undemocratic, but Marxistideology remained the source of inspirationand sustenance for activism. As two StreeShakti members would later write, "ourproximity to the Left provided us with ana-lytical tools and a broader political perspec-tive that many of us felt was invaluable forour growth ...ewe) looked towards the pro-gressive Left sections for support, and wereextremely anxious to emphasize the Marxistcomponent in our Marxist-feminist ap-proach..." (Kannabiran and Shatruguna1986:25, 24). As a result, Stree Shakti activ-ists eventually found themselves under con-siderable pressure to support any and allissues "publicly articulated in a mannerwith which we fully concur" – he these agrar-ian or environmental movements, or otherpeople's struggles (such as those emerging inBhopal after the Union Carbide leak), thatmay or may not have had anything specific-ally to do with women or gender issues (26).Refusing to become involved in such widermovements meant being branded anti-Marx-ist or bourgeois. "Attempts to co-opt us," theactivists would complain, "have alternatedwith attempts to decry us" (26). The emanci-patory potential of Leftist ideology m prac-tice was clearly a limiting factor, and thetension between Marxism and feminismcould only complicate other matters: "whenwomen with rightist assumptions came intothe group in its early stages, we weretroubled not only by their disruptive influ-ence on the group but also about the imagewe would present to the public – our public

being, of course, the Left" (25, Kannabiran

1986:602). for years after its formation ,then, Stree Shakti would feel the twin pres-

sures of its ambiguous relationship to theLeft: on the one hand bring watched, moni-tored, and urged at times to return to the"correct path" and on the other justifyingitself, its actions, and its perspectives tofriends and associates in leftist groups (cf.Kannabiran 1986: 601-2). ''

Campaigns

Beyond its relationship to the intellectual andpolitical Left, Stree Shakti saw its role fairlysi mply, "in the field of propaganda and con-scientization," to publicize and politicizewomen's issues (Kannabiran and Shatruguna1986:24). 1 )1 As Sara Evans writes of incipientfeminist activism in 1967 Chicago, "In typ-ical new left style their first impulse was toget the word out, expose the situation –women's oppression – and call on women tomobilize" (1979:199). But which issues werewomen's issues? Clearly rape was one. In1975 a verdict was handed down in theMathura rape case: the two policemen ac-cused of raping the 14-year-old Mathurawere acquitted because the rape was deter-mined to be "consensual intercourse." StreeShakti did not come together specifically torally around this case, as did several othergroups: Vimochana (Bangalore), forexample, and the Forum Against Rape( which would later call itself the ForumAgainst the Oppression of Women, Mum-bai). But when the group began functioningin 1978, case upon case of police rape orother forms of custodial rape were comingto light, and the group almost naturally con-verged on those, m part because they wereworking with other groups to lobby foramendments in rape law, '' but more I thinkbecause it enabled a critical focus on thestate. In the group's own words,

here the "battle lines" were already soclearly drawn. llnl other cases of rape and


gang rape, we found it difficult to articulatethe question of rape and its implicationspublicly. Our background and our politicalconnections made it almost mandatory tofocus on police violence... Police or custo-dial rape was an issue that had already beenarticulated for us in a political context,whereas ordinary rape seemed an issuefraught with misunderstandings with whichwe were not yet ready to deal. (V. Kanna-biran 1986: 605, emphasis added)

Other issues clearly identified as gender-based were family violence, dowry death,°'and contraception. On family violence, StreeShakti wrote and produced a film with dir-ector Deepa Dhanraj, entitled Idi katha maa-tramena? Is this only a story?), and aroundthe same time also developed a play on thesubject for street performance. The group'sinvolvement in cases of dowry death led tothe formation of the Dowry Death Investi-gation Committee, an adjunct group estab-lished largely in an attempt to allow otherwomen not directly part of Stree Shakti oruncomfortable with the group's political per-spectives to contribute their strengths andtheir energies to the effort. In reality, how-ever, women not directly part of the StreeShakti core group were always involved inone campaign or another; the group's func-tional looseness easily allowed such outsideparticipation.

But it the inclusion of different perspec-tives within Stree Shakti allowed the groupto adopt a wider range of strategies andtackle a wider range of issues, it did notultimately alter the largely state-focusednature of the group's activism. This is not tosay that Stree Shakti deliberately drew all itsbattle lines in opposition to the state; ratherthat the state invariably appeared among thefinal objects of feminist critique. In cases ofdowry death, for example, much attentionwas focused to be sure on the family as thesite of violence against women. But thesewere equally cases of murder dressed up tolook like accidents or suicide, attractingtherefore very little police attention and fore-

closing any real possibility of prosecuting thevictim's family for the crime. If the state wasnot this time the direct perpetrator of vio-lence, its personnel and machinery were cer-tainly complicit with those responsible forthe deaths of the women involved. To takeup a case of dowry death, then, was to collideheadlong with both the patriarchal familyand the patriarchal state. Interestingly, asimilar perspective emerged from the cam-paign against the use of the injectable contra-ceptive Net-Oen (Norethisterone Enanthate).What began as a journey to Patancheru (justoutside Hyderabad) to stop a scheduled drugtrial among rural women would end with anunderstanding of contraception and familyplanning as tools of state population-controlprograms. It became clear that governmentinitiatives were driven less by a concern forwomen's rights, and more by dire predictionsof exploding population in the Subcontinent(and, interestingly, in other select places inthe world, such as China and even PuertoRico); that they were less concerned withassisting in individual family planning deci-sions than with implementing aggressivepopulation-control measures, at least partlyin response to international pressures. AsSusie Tharu would later comment, the cam-paign led the group to the argument that"there is no contraceptive that is a feministcontraceptive."' )")ontraceptive."

i;

Assisted by the Delhi-basedSaheb, Stree Shakti, five medical doctors anda freelance journalist with an interest inwomen's health joined forces to file a writin the Supreme Court to prevent furtherNet-Oen testing in India. Their effortsyielded tangible results: further testing ofNet-Den and Depo Provera (both injectahles)was banned. 1

s

Such perspectives as I am describing mayappear commonsensical to us now, but theywere anything but self-evident at the time.And they would become indelible in feministpraxis. If the state was no longer easily iden-tified as the enemy, it remained still oneamong many powerfully inimical forceswith which women (and women's groups)had to contend. In the context of the

312 DEEPA S. REDDY

continuing Naxalire movement in Andhra

Pradesh, activist groups never really lostsight of the overtly repressive character ofthe Indian state that made its first appearancein lsaxalbari, Srikakulam and then again inthe Emergency. But they would additionallycome to identify the state and stare ideologywith other, more covert, systems of oppres .

sion: patriarchy, religion, and caste. How didsuch perspectives develop? I would arguethat this was parr of a growing trend in femi-nist activism to see all issues as women'sissues on one level or another, and each socialconcern as fundamentally linked to myriadothers. Looking back at the 1978 Anti-Vege-table Export Campaign, for example, it be-comes clear that such an integrativeapproach was not always part of feministpolitics. Failed rains were driving food pricesskywards, and vet vegetable exports to theMiddle East were continuing unabated. Awider forum of activist groups and thewomen's wings of some political parties ral-lied immediately around the issue, but StreeShakti – at first in any case – had reservationsabout joining this campaign. The centralquestion for the group was this: Were vege-table exports a women's issue at all? 'S It isdifficult to say what exactly may have re-solved Stree Shakti's doubts at the time, butin retrospect, activists do not hesitate toname the vegetable export issue as obviouslya concern for women. As vendors runningbusinesses in competition with wealthier in-dividuals or partnerships, and as consumersresponsible for managing household budgetsand buying vegetables for daily meals,women would have been among those mostacutely affected or burdened by vegetableshortages in the country. There was no ques-tion that such apparently unrelated things asinternational exports, national economic pol-icies, and women's daily lives were in realityintimately linked, nor any doubt that for-tunes in the international market were madeat women's expense.

In part, of course, the emergence of inte-grated approaches were products of StreeShakti's Marxist heritage, that at the very

least discerned the mutually constitutive

nature of "economy " and `"society." If Stree

Shakti began with the assumption thatthe oppressions of gender could not be col-lapsed with those of class, the group movedeventually towards a greater underst

andingof gender oppression as the specific pr

oductof the collusions of power on multiple levels,both local and global, and not just as anincidental outcome of Indian tradition. Inthis emerging discourse, the "stare" –increas-ingly now a conceptual category rather thana literal reference to the police – became adevice that enabled an integrated approach,while itself remaining a primary object ofcritique. The character of state-focused activ-ism was markedly different from what it hadoriginally been, although its directionremained very much the same.

The Politics of Personal Struggle

Militant, radical, articulate, and visible, it wasnot long before the name Stree Shakti wassynonymous with women's activism in Hy-derabad. Stree Shakti members now remem-ber with amused incredulity people arriving attheir doorsteps in the early mornings withsome concern or some new case, demandingimmediate attention. Or dashing off for a fewhours to pursue a case, and returning beforethe morning was over to classrooms andcareers. The group would meet after workfor a brief conference and then disperse,often to police stations, investigating orfollowing up one case or another. When theyfinally reached home again at 10 P.M. or later,husbands would he pacing outside, youngchildren waiting within.

Of course the development of a more inte-grated approach in feminist activism did notmean that Stree Shakti could – or would – getinvolved in every issue it came across on thelogic that somehow it must have specific im-plications for women. By the group's ownadmission the area of women's oppressionwas gray and uncharted, and the directionsof Stree Shakti's activist work were never


entirely fixed. I make this last remark not tocriticize, but to draw attention to a set ofunresolved – and indeed perhaps irresolvable–questions that would eventually lead to the

group ' s dissolution in the mid-1980s. Linesalready quoted earlier in this chapter areworth repeating in this context: "How muchlonger can we keep on with wife-beating,dowry death, and rape? Should we set upcrisis centers to help? Should we be a socialservice or a political organization?" Otherquestions about theorizing, reflecting, docu-menting, and deciding how much of a com-ponent each of these should be in politicalactivism were also persistent concerns – nat-urally, for a group of women who were them-selves college-level teachers with researchinterests of their own. The central question– What kind of group should Stree Shakti be?– was one that was never fully answered. Tosome extent, it could not have been: therewere no precedents, after all, no tested andtried models to work with for Indian femi-nism at the time, and much uncertainty aboutthe exact nature of work the group would beinvolved with. Activism just had to be de-vised and learned along the way. Eachmember was to contribute according to hercapacity, in time, money, and effort, and thegroup was to remain a "loose" aggregaterather than a formal institution. But if organ-izational "looseness" enabled a much-neededflexibility, it also effectively was a rejection ofany comprehensive attempt at group defin-ition. And this factor would, in time, begin topose some specific difficulties.

In the absence of formal decisions onagenda, which issues and which campaignswould Stree Shakti decide to take up? Wouldthey get involved with movements as far re-moved from Hyderabad as the NarmadaBachao Andolan (a movement against thedamming of the Narmada River in ,Maha-

rashtra) and the incipient struggles in Bhopal,

the site of the deadly Union Carbide gas leak?How, in any case, would they relate to thoseand other movements in the country, andindeed, in the world? In Hyderabad itself,

o n what basis would they choose one rape

victim or one case of dowry death over an-other? And then, once they became involved,how far would this involvement go – andwhat did they expect to come out of it? Forall their energy and enthusiasm, the groupwas frequently left with little sense ofachievement. In 1978, for example, thegroup got involved with Rameeza Bee's case– possibly one of Hyderabad's most publi-cized police-rape cases – but the constantmedia attention and virtual harassment even-tually led Rameeza to withdraw the case andclaim that the rape never took place. The casewas eventually tried (and the accused police-men acquitted), but Rameeza Bee's modifiedstance came as a blow to the group. Who orwhat were they representing – and at whatcost was their activism forged? There werealso those families who merely wanted thegroup to get jewelry back from estrangedin-laws, or parents who wanted their daugh-ters kidnaped from husbands' homes. Howwas the group to limit the reach of its activ-ism, and where was it to draw the lines? Andthen, after all was said and done, what wouldbe left, what would be the outcome of all thisceaseless activity? "The challenge that anymovement provides to the individual,"Vasanth Kannabiran would write, "is meas-ured perhaps in terms of personal growth.When one begins to feel that there is nolonger any scope for growth in certain kindsof action, then where does one go? If we as agroup continue to act without broadeningour perspective, then what is the price?"(Kannabiran 1986:612).

Stree Shakti's approach to such questionsas emerged from its work is reflected, Ibelieve, in the phrase used to frame its dis-cussions at the time: "the politics of personalstruggle. " Under this heading was placedeverything from activists' individual accountsof struggle and growth with and within thegroup, to speculations on why some womenmay have felt uncomfortable, to broadertheoretical understandings of what consti-tutes the realm of the "personal" and how itshould be the primary locus of women'sactivism. This was the first time Stree Shakti

314 DEEPA S. REDDY

as a group — deeply self-conscious in some

ways from the very outset — sought to re-examine and recast itself in the context ofthe new questions and new difficulties it wasincreasingly having to face. As such, the dis-cussions on the "politics of personal struggle"mark a turning point for the group, the start ofa much longer process of articulating andrearticulating the need for a modified activ-ism. Consider, for example, Susie Tharu'scharacteristically eloquent delineation of the"personal" as it figures in even the most mun-dane of social issues: water. I quote at somelength from a talk she gave at the start of theThird World Women's Film Festival, held inHyderabad in January, 1986:

If we consider the women's question as it hasbeen legitimated today, it has by and largebeen legitimated at levels which exclude thepersonal. Let me explain. Most people –politicians, planners, social workers —would agree that water is a women's issue.They would also agree that price and theavailability of food is a women's issue. Or,let me put it another way, and there is adistinction — that water is an importantissue for women since women are primarilyresponsible for the household economy. Infact I'd say that today to speak aboutwomen and water, to organize women todemand for water, would by and large beregarded a laudable thing. What the worldwould seem to be saying is please work onthe issue of water, on the issue of price rise. Ifyou do that, the chances are that you willstay within the traditional articulation of theproblem. [ W]hat you will not ask is whatdoes a scarcity of water mean in terms of awoman's time, her work, her health, theamount of water she herself gets. Who is itwho will wash her clothes less often, forgo abath, and perhaps even a drink if there is lessto go around? Who is the only one skilledenough to scour the pans when there's ashortage of water, who reorganizes her lifeto make sure she is at the communal tap ontime, who keeps her ears constantly perkedfor the trickle that will start at night? Who isheld responsible for the new tensions in the

family? Whose are the friendships jeopard-ized m the long, tiring queues at the tap?

What does an economy of water centeredon her show us? Flow do we es timate the

cost of all this and how does it change the

way we pose the question of water, the waywe estimate its value or the criteria for itsallocation? How can this knowledge be builtinto the politics of water? And who does it? Ihave vet to sec something written or saidabout water which reckons with the prob-lem of what water is for women, and whatits political dimensions become whenwomen are included in an analysis of thequestion. (Tharu 1986:2)

Tharu's call for a radical, non-traditional ar-ticulation of women's issues comes at aninteresting moment in the evolution of Indianfeminist praxis. As I have suggested, this is amoment when Stree Shakti is discovering andconfronting the boundaries of its activism,wondering perhaps about what has con-cretely emerged from all the years of freneticactivity. The group's dissatisfaction with itsmethods and approaches, however, was notin fact a reflection on its achievements. Quitethe contrary, "(ojne must acknowledge,"writes Tharu,

that in the last seven or eight years, as aresult of a great deal of effort through cam-paigns about the Rape Bill, about dowrydeaths, about family violence, about mediadepictions of women, and the subtle exclu-sion of women from development programs,perceptions have altered. The "suicides" socommon among young wives, for instance,are no longer simply attributed to theirinability to adjust or to their arrogance. Nolonger is this perceived as merely a personal

problem. Considered in itself, or in termsof its immediate payoff, this is indeed amajor achievement. (Tharu 1986:1–2, myemphasis)

The "major achievement" of which Tharuspeaks, however, comes with a new problem.The very fact that "perceptions have altered

"

means that the "women's question " is now


one that is legitimated by none other than"politicians, planners, and social workers":representatives of government and bureau-cracy who have thus far been, in one formor another, the object of activist critique. Thesuccess of the women's movement in estab-lishing the centrality of women's issues alsothrows activists into a deeply unsettling col-

lusion with the powers that be, compellingthem therefore – for the first of many times tocome – to seek out new sites for an activismwhich must at all costs remain radical.A liberal state and a liberal society haveaccepted, broadly speaking, the brutal realityof dowry death and made it a crime, under-stood the horror of custodial rape and madeit a crime, but have refused to look any far-ther: "you can do anything you like to awoman, this means, so long as you don'tbeat her – or burn her, of course" (fieldnotes3). The liberal articulation of such issues isequally what Tharu calls "traditional" (field-notes 3); so activism undergoes a fundamen-tal transformation when activist use of thelanguage of liberalism has reaped some ofits rewards and found some of its limits,and state use of the language of liberalismpowerfully takes over. "The whole politicsof the family in which questions of dowrydeaths ought to be framed; the politics ofsexuality and power from which the proble-matics of rape take on a rationality, the pol-itics of marriage, which is different from thepolitics of the family, in the light of which wehave to understand wife-heating" (fieldnotes3 ) – these become the complex excludedrealms of the "personal" in which a revivedradical activism must locate itself.

It is at this juncture, then, that Stree Shakticeases its ("traditional") activist work andbecomes a Resource Center for Women'sStudies called "Anveshi," which appropri-ately means "search" or "quest." It wouldbe glamorous, of course, to think of this asa transition defined exclusively by ideologicalshifts and intellectual growth, but clearly itwas also a time when personal life intervenedas never before. On the one hand, were thein

terests of career, and professional growth

and advancement. In some sense, "Anveshi"had already begun functioning years beforethe idea for such a center was actually horn,in the form of a research project on the lifestories of the women who took part in theTelangana Armed Struggle between 1948 and1951. The result was a book – " We WereMaking History..." Life Stories of Womenin the Telangana People's Struggle (1989) –Stree Shakti's best-known work, and an im-portant contribution to the field of women'shistory. ' ° For Stree Shakti, living andworking in urban areas of the same Telan-gana region of Andhra Pradesh, this projectwas in no small measure genealogical. Thegroup would write that the histories of thoseother women "constituted, as it were, the basisof our attempt to recover for ourselves a trad-ition of struggle"; that it represented a meansto "reclaim a past and celebrate a lineage ofresistance and growth, for to be deprived of apast is to inherit an impoverished present anda future sealed off from change" (Stree ShaktiSanghatana 1989:258, 19).

Somewhat ironically, however, working onthe Telangana book – and a second project to"Indianize" and translate into Telugu OurBodies, Our Selves, brought out years beforeby the Boston Women's Health Collective = ' –seems to have kindled more of an interest inwriting about struggle than in shapingstruggle from the ground, more of an interestin women's studies and the behind-the-scenesactivism from the academy than in being partof a movement. So on the one hand were thechanging interests of Stree Shakti members, anew kind of excitement derived from the suc-cess of the Telangana book, and on the other,that consuming exhaustion with activistwork that demanded everything and returneddisproportionately small dividends. Fivewomen with careers of their own could notcontinue this running around, they said; StreeShakti belongs to nobody, so other peopleshould take over. But who would step in totake the reins' The looseness of the grouphad effectively blocked the emergence of aninstitution that could function even after itsheads retired or withdrew. There were no

316 DEEPA S. REDDY

predetermined processes for decision-making, no formal allocation of responsibil-ities, only the informal consensus of fivewomen on which all activity had to turn.And so it was that the group which wassupposed to belong to nobody or to every-body, actually belonged only to thesewomen. Cases continued to come in, andsome they could not in good conscience beturned away, work continued unabated. Thesense of tiredness deepened.

Institutions

It is by now 1986. Punjab has long been thesite of rebellion and terrorism, and in theaftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination,anti-Sikh riots in New Delhi have awokensome among the intelligentsia to the starkrealities of religious/ethnicist tension.Hindu–Muslim conflicts, too, have been es-calating in several parts of the country sincethe start of the decade, but only sporadically,and it seems without the intensity of theDelhi riots. So it will be some months stillbefore religion drops like a stone into thehands of the women's question, before thefurious debates on minority rights and multi-culturalism make it impossible to chart the`" personal" as an area of oppression and rad-ical feminist politics when it has so clearlybecome a protected area of identity and not abastion that can be raided. So far there hasonly been gender, and class. But now femi-nists will have to face all the old questions innew light: How do you theorize the "per-sonal" when it becomes the site of religiousexpression? How do you speak in the lan-guage of liberalism for women's rights whennot just the state but the Hindu nationalistwings of government are talking the sametalk? In sum: how do you understand theindividual and the local when both are in-creasingly produced by the far less individu-alized, in some ways far more global, politicsof community and cultural difference?

With such questions emerging graduallyin the background, the processes of institu-

tion-building begin in Hyderabad. OsmaniaUniversity gives Anveshi a space from whichto function: an old stall house, tuckedinto the western edge of the campus, sur-rounded by a large, lush garden." Anveshi'slibrary is in the process of building upa collection, the Telangana book is publishedin 1989, and no longer arc people findingcopies of old Srree Shakti fliers with phonenumbers printed on top, calling for help. By1990, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, workingwith a team of regional language editorsand several others, finish editing a two-volume anthology of women's writing inten different Indian languages, translatedinto English. Women Writing in India(Volume I: 600 B.C. to the Early 20thCentury, 1991; 'Volume II: The 20th Century,1993) is intended, like the Telangana book,not merely to add the contributions ofwomen to the corpus of Indian literature,but more to "begin a reconceptualizationof what it has meant for women to be writingat the margins of the complex histories ofpatriarchy and empire" (Tharu 1990:62).And then Susie Tharu formally introducesAnveshi to a wider Indian academic audi-ence:

Everyone in Anveshi is broadly speakingworking in the field of education. Amongus are writers, artists, journalists, peopleworking in adult education, scientists, re-searchers and activists drawn from differentinstitutions in Hyderabad.... Most of ushave one foot in Anveshi and another in amainstream educational organization. Butwhen we came together to form this center,we came as people who had been involved in .

the everyday rough and tumble of the move-ment; as people who had experienced itstensions, its contradictions, its unexpectedadvances, and had many demands to makeof scholarship, many questions to ask ofknowledge, many problems to thinkthrough. We came as people who realizedthat the task of groundin g feminist interven-tions in the soil of our particular history andour society, required that we raid the acad-emy." (Tharu 1090:60)

The period between the dispersal of StreeShakti and the formation of Asmita appearsto have been one of upheaval, both personaland professional, for many of the activistsinvolved. Stree Shakti's absence inevitablycreated a vacuum that needed filling, atleast for some of the women involved, butneither was there any nostalgia for StreeShakti-style activism, nor apparently any pre-determined idea of what alternative modelwould operated more effectively. Some ofthis indeterminacy is signaled by the factthat the activists soon became involved withother forms of activism, other activists, andother organizations: with the Deccan Devel-opment Society (DDS, a rural developmentorganization working with village commu-nities some distance from Hyderabad); theConfederation of Voluntary Associations(COVA, allied with the DDS, which worksto empower the urban poor and promotecommunal harmony in Hyderabad's oldcity); Maithri, a women's organization, toname a few. None of these associationswould prove permanent, however, forreasons which activists are often unwillingor hesitant to address, and although theDDS and DDS-COVA continue to functionwith somewhat distanced relationships toone-time Stree Shakti activists, Maithri nolonger exists. 23

Some six years later, however, even as as-sociations with other organizations andmodels of activism were still evolving, an-other group of women would begin Asmitain Hyderabad's twin city, Secunderabad.Only two of this group — Vasanth Kanna-biran and Kalpana Kannahiran — had anylinks to Stree Shakti. 24 They style this organ-ization as a "Resource Center for Women"and so also distance it from Anveshi'sex clusive women's studies research focus. 2y

Asmita seeks to provide, among other things,the resources of an activist group (legal aidand legal counseling, for example, or re-search and documents) without limiting itsfocus on gender to the issues raised by indi-vidual cases. Both Anveshi and Asmita today

claim to draw together women — several

hundred women — from diverse backgrounds,with different interests and different needs,and all with individual reasons to form asso-ciations with women's groups. Both arefunded largely by foreign sources; '`' bothfund research projects; both organize sem-inars at local and national levels, for bothEnglish and Telugu/Urdu-speaking audi-ences; and both conceive of themselves quiteliterally as "spaces" to which women mayturn, whatever their reasons or their needs.

This styling of the women's organizationas a broad and inclusive "space" could wellbe the hallmark of the modern Indian femi-nist NGO, in Hyderabad as indeed elsewherein the country. As such, it also defines themodern Indian feminist NGO as a public

institution: no longer is it assumed that allwomen will feel comfortable meeting in theprivate space of someone's house. Neither aresuch personal(ized) environments sufficientto accommodate larger numbers of women,nor are these spaces regarded as conducive tobroader, possibly more uncomfortable, dia-logue. As such, institutional "space" becomesa prerequisite for theorizing the complexitiesof gender in the modern world, and themeans by which to connect local commu-nities to the wider worlds of research andintellectual discourse, funding, global activistnetworks, and more. The differences lie per-haps in the qualitative nature of the spacesthat institutions seek to create. On a day-to-day basis, Anveshi is part library, part aca-demic department, functioning much like anyother but without the control of any aca-demic institution. Much of its work is con-ducted by subcommittees which discuss,write, and sometimes organize workshopson issues of interest or contemporary rele-vance.`' Its members sometimes take onactive roles in specific initiatives organizedby other NGOs (although here again, theirinterests are frequently research-oriented),but the organization as a whole remains atsome distance from these. Quite literally,Anveshi is a retreat from the turmoil of thecity, from the burdens of university policy,and from the irrepressible pushes and pulls


318 DEEPA S. REDDY

of the movement: a place to read, reflect,discuss, write. Asmita is somewhat more aplace of business, an institutional nodelinking people and groups to each other andto sources of information: lawyers to womenin need of legal counsel; students to mentorsand reference material; women writers andartists to other women with similar interests,and in common facilities available for theiruse. Asmita also functions as an informationbase, most significantly for other NGOs orcommunity groups working in the area, pro-viding everything from booklets about thenuclear tests, liquor consumption, and theWomen's Reservation Bill, to recorded cas-settes of songs about the movement, andposters with catchy slogans on a variety ofthemes. It has worked with educational insti-tutions to strengthen and de-link Women'sStudies teaching from its associations withthe "Home Sciences," in particular by con-ducting a Summer School in Women's Studiesfor research scholars. Both Asmita and Anve-shi are women's "spaces," then, to varyingdegrees and at varying moments retainingthe flavor of the movement or acquiringthat of an academic department.

Predictably, if somewhat ironically, givenStree Shakti's organizational looseness, it isnot Anveshi but Asmita that has becomemore obviously corporatized. In July, 1998Asmita moved into its impressive new officeson the top floors of a residential building inSecunderabad. The new office had been care-fully and meticulously designed to see to theneeds of the various women involved in run-ning Asmita on a day-to-day basis, includingthose of the women with disabilities hired toanswer telephones. Somewhat more visiblethan this logic of design, however, are thetrappings of the corporate office, includinga designated reception area, multi-line phonesystem, the best in office furniture, and sep-arate conference room and work areas formembers of the Asmita Board. With corpo-rate hierarchy built into its office floor plan,diversity built into its institutional ideology,"networking," "professionalism," "account-ability," and "conflict management/reso-

lution" are inc r easingly terms that helpdescribe Asmita's refashioned feminist praxisin the jet-set world of the modern institu-tional NGO. The realities of informal func-tioning, however, have not disa

ppeared:sketches of small groups of women sittingon the floor in tight circles intently engagedin discussion, or of traditionally attiredwomen holding hands or dancing in celebra-tion of "sisterhood" continue to appear fre-quently on office bulletin boards. Combinedwith the corporatized appearance and func-tioning of the organization, then, these indi-cate the multiple levels at which the modernwomen's NGO operates: from bash sangams(community organizations) and MahilaChaitanya Jatras ("festivals" organized toreach the Dalit – a movement of the lowercastes for social justice and political represen-tation – and other women in rural/agricul-tural communities on the one hand, tonational women's studies research confer-ences and ranges of international congresseson gender, education, and NGO-relatedissues, on the other.

The institutionalization of activism not-withstanding, Asmita's apparently openembracing of corporatized structure has pro-voked critical comments. Asmita might haveresponded by saying that an open hierarchy,with clear channels for the expression of dif-ference and predetermined processes of con-flict management, is preferable to a set-up inwhich also authority operates, but does soinvisibly and therefore far more harmfully. 28

The debate is not mine to settle, however, and Ibring it up here only to note that the legacies ofStree Shakti's decisions live on in ongoing de-bates about what kind of institutional struc-ture is best suited to activist work of the kindthat is now necessary.

At Home in the World

What kind of activism is now necessary? Itwould be no exaggeration to say that eventsof the late I980s and early 1990s – the Man

-

dal-Masjid years, so-called after the anti-


Mandal agitations and the BJP's Babri Mas-

jid campaign 2" – not only change the politicallandscape in New Delhi, hut profoundly alter

intellectual perspectives on such issues asmulticulturalism, diversity, "secularism,"and "communalism. " In the process, each ofthese issues becomes a lens through whichgender is refracted time and again in veryspecific ways. For activist groups, thismeans that all the old perspectives will haveto be further broadened to include consider-ations of religion and caste, and that notmerely by adding and mixing. If the Indianwomen's movement developed over the yearsa partial critique of Marxism – "Marxismdoes not have an analysis of women's oppres-sion that anywhere near matches the sophis-tication or the scope of its analysis ofeconomic exploitation," wrote Tharu in1986 (4) – this critique did not at any timeextend to the Marxist paradigm itself, or toassumptions about rationality and the pri-macy of class in conceptualizing social op-pression. Groups like Stree Shakti clearlyhad the tools to connect the worlds of inter-national finance to the daily lives of women,but even their delineations of the "personal"did not significantly include considerationsof caste or religion. Class, and within itgender, were the social unifiers within thisscheme; after all, religion and caste repre-sented only such primeval affiliations aswere bound to fade in modernity. The Man-dal-Masjid years challenged just these as-sumptions with bewildering force, shaping

modern Hindu ethnicism to a large degreeand galvanizing what is known in Indiatoday as the Dalit movement. It became im-possible after these "events" to deal with cat-egories like gender except in relation to othermarkers of social difference. Since the early1990s, then, feminists have grown increas-

ingly concerned with describing howw omen's experiences, roles, access to justice,p olitical participation, educational oppor-tu nities, and more are each modulatedalong religious and caste lines. In otherw

ords, caste and religion had joined genderand complicated it – as fundamental cat-

egories of social analysis. As Tharu notes, "Ithas become increasingly clear to us. .. thatwomen's studies or feminist research is notnecessarily only about women. Its startingpoint is certainly women... [but) the ques-tion of women is not a separate issue. Genderis central to our social architecture" (Tharu1990:63, my emphasis; see also Tharu andNiranjana 1996). So the focus shifts in themid-1990s, not away from gender, of course,but to the "social architecture" within whichgender is inscribed. "As a result of the workwe have done," says Anveshi's most recentbrochure, expressing a sentiment I believemost other academically oriented women'sgroups would equally endorse, "it hasbecome clear to us that women's studies isabout changing the situation of women byalso challenging received notions of caste,class and community. This awareness, in par-ticular, has had an important bearing onmany of our ongoing projects."

I have explored the theoretical implica-tions of this new awareness for Indian activ-ism elsewhere; in closing, therefore I restrictmyself to a few cursory remarks on the placeof the feminist NGO in a globalizing world.For although it cannot be said that such ap-proaches as this chapter has described are thedirect outcomes of globalization, it is alsotrue that this model of activism thrives in aglohal(izing) context. The recognition, forinstance, that the activist approach to anygiven issue needs to be pitched at multiplelevels – so education needs to be addressedas a social issue at the grassroots level, as apedagogical issue within academic circles, asa policy issue for planners and politicians,and in some combination thereof at inter-national meetings – enables and indeed re-quires activists to traverse both grassrootsand global terrains, translating concepts orrefocusing them as needed. The fact that ac-tivists are usually involved with local studies(on governance, health, and environmentalissues, for instance), while being activemembers of the NAWO (National Associ-ation of Women's Organizations) and CAWS(Indian Association for Women's Studies),

320 DEEPA S. REDDY

and occasional travelers to foreign univer-sities and UN-organized or other meetings,bears testimony to the fluid, multidimen-sional character of Indian feminist activism,its ability to function within a range of more-or-less glohalized frameworks. The furtherrecognition that activists cannot, if only be-cause of their own upper-class/caste position-ing, claim to represent the interests of Dalitsand minorities demands an activism that isdiscussion-, dialogue-, and research-centered,that provides organic intellectuals and localgroups the opportunities for interaction, en-sures that their diverse perspectives are rep-resented in the mainstream presses, academicwritings, international conferences, and soon. As such, much contemporary Indianfeminist activism both helps create and pre-supposes the existence of international net-works of activists, writers, and scholars;draws on the resources of international agen-cies in order to be able to make the case forlocalized social change. Globalization doesnot disappear as an object of activist critique,far from it; as a range of cultural and eco-nomic processes that alter people's lives it isbetter understood for the differential impactit has on different groups of people. It is anirony, then, or even more an indication ofglobalization's varied potential that such cri-tique should be sustained, indeed refined, byan activist praxis that draws upon the manyexchanges of a globalizing world to conductits daily work.

NOTES

A version of this chapter appears in my book,"Hindutva" in the Culture of Ethnicism(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, forth-coming). My grateful thanks to Rowman &Littlefield for allowing me to excerpt sectionsof the hook here.

1 The erstwhile state of Hyderabad wasgoverned, in British times, by the Asafjab dynasty, of which the Nizam Osman

Ali Khan was the last ruler. When thefuture of the princely state was throw

ninto jeopardy by political de velopmen

tsat the national level, a paramilitary wingof the Majlis Ittehaad ul Musli

meen( MIM), known as the Razakars, ass

umedthe responsibility of guarding the b

ound-aries of the state. Though razakar m

eans"volunteer, " the group gained not

oriety inborder regions for creating mini - regimesof terror. Hyderabad joined the IndianUnion only after Operation Polo b roughtthe Indian army into the state in 1948

.With the linguistic reorganization ofstares in 1956, the State of Hyderabadwas trifurcated, and the'felangana region(to which the present-day city of Hydera-bad belongs) joined Andhra Pradesh. TheTelangana Armed Struggle that tookplace between 1948 and 1951 was organ-ized largely by the CPI, and saw the Raza-kars, the landlords, and later, the Indianarmy, each in turn, as enemies of thepeople, each representing the might andpower of a still essentially oppressive,feudal state.

2 Also, as Lalita would later tell me, suchtitles as Sandino's Daughters: Testimoniesof Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, LetMe Speak! The Testimony of Domitila,a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, andCharlotte Perkins Gilman's The YellowWallpaper.

3 The POW's complete draft manifesto isincluded in an Appendix to Omvedt'sbook. There are parallels here that wemay note in passing: feminist conscious-ness in the United States of the 1960s alsodeveloped out of women's experiencesparticipating in new left movements. AsSara Evans writes: "women from thenew left explained the sources of theirnew awareness by pointing to the disc-repancy between the movement 's ega-litarian ideology and the oppressionthey continued to experience within it"(1979:220). Evans points out, however,that "the new left did more than simplyperpetuate the oppression of women,

"

but that `even more importantly, itcreated new arenas – social space – within


which women could develop a new senseof self-worth and independence; it pro-vided new role models...and allowed[women to claim the movement's ideol-ogy for themselves" (220). In the Indiancontext, the task for Hyderabad's activ-ists became one of distancing women'sissues from the paradigmatic control ofMarxist thought — and so this kind ofgenealogical connection that Evanstraces in the American context is alsonot often acknowledged as such, thoughit remains equally relevant.

4 Interestingly, Sanjay Gandhi's was a pro-gram that targeted men (requiring vas-ectomies for men with more than twochildren) rather than women. This factis not often remembered, though virtu-ally all population-control programssince that time have focused predictablyon supplying birth control (hormonalcontraceptives over devices) to women.

5 The first Indian Civil Rights Union wasformed much earlier, of course, in 1936,in the context of anticolonial civil disobedi-ence movements. The modern civil liber-ties movement, however, did not beginuntil around the time of the Emergency.

6 Andhra Pradesh Civil and DemocraticRights Convention.

7 Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Com-mittee.

8 People's Union for Civil Liberties/People's Union for Democratic Rights.

9 V. M. Tarkunde (President); Nabak-rishna Choudari (Orissa); M. V. Rama-murthy (Hyderabad); Kaloji NarayanaRao (Warangal, AP); Balwant Reddy( Hyderabad); K. Pratap Reddy (Hydera-had); K. G. Kannabiran (Hyderabad); B.G. Verghese (Delhi), and Arun Shourie(Delhi).

10 "Stree Shakti Sanghatana" does not lenditself well to translation. Literally, itmeans "Women — Power — Organiza-tion." The core group included K.Lalita, who had been President of thePOW; Veena Shatruguna, a physicianwith the National Institute for Nutritionin Hyderabad; Susie j. Thar], whotaught (and still does) at the Central

321

Institute for English and Foreign Lan-guages; Rama Melkote, a lecturer inpolitical science at Osmania University,and Lalita's one-time teacher; VasanthKannabiran, who taught English atReddy College. Several others wouldjoin the group and participate in its ac-tivities until the dissolution of StreeShakti: Uma Maheshwari, who ap-proached the group first in need ofhelp herself and now works on issuesof women's health; D. Vasantha, aspeech therapist at Osmania University;Vijayakumari, now an architect; Kal-pana Kannabiran, then a student andnow President of Asmita; Gita Ramas-wamy, ex-POW member, who now runsthe Hyderabad Book Trust; Ratnamala,who eventually became President of theAPCLC; Kameshwari Jandhyala, wholater initiated and headed the govern-ment's Andhra Pradesh Mahila Samatain Hyderabad; and scholars Ramara-jyam, Sumati Nair, and Krishna Kumari.Still others would come and go over theyears. Stree Shakti remained more anidea than an active organization untilthe second group of women joined in(my thanks to Asmita for this andother clarifications). All the originalStree Shakti members and several othersassociated with the group over its lifecontinue to live and work (as activists,among other things) in Hyderabad.

11 Perhaps obviously, this attempt at egali-tarianism was not built on the concept of"sisterhood" that once characterizedNorth American white feminist dis-course. Nor was it directly a reply tothat notion, though other Indian activistsalso have lent their voices to that cri-tique. Drawing on the Latino concept ofcornpanera ("companionship," or "partnership"), Maria Lugones (1995) hassuggested a notion of "pluralist friend-ship"' as an alternative model that I be-lieve more closely approximates that onwhich Stree Shakti was formed, althoughnor quite so self-consciously. The"company of women," to borrow SaraSuleri's (nostalgic) words describing an

322 DEEPA S. REDDY

characteristic feature of domestic lifein the Subcontinent, gave Stree Shaktiits twin rationales of looseness andof egalitarianism in the context of polit-ical struggle. "Companera," continuesLugones, "can be and is used in hierarch-ies ...although there is some tensionthere. The term is most at home in anegalitarian political companionshipwhere everyone shares the rights andburdens of political struggle" (134). Butas the "rights and burdens" could neverentirely be evenly distributed in serviceto the egalitarian ideal, the feministmodel of friendship would have to bemodified too in Stree Shakti's case, aswe shall soon see.

12 While this was true of discussions, how-ever, the tension between languages hasnever entirely disappeared: there hasalways been, to lesser or greater extents,a palpable hierarchy of languages. Pre-dictably, English has retained its pos-ition of dominance and privilege andgiving English speakers — and later alsothose fluent in theoretical vocabulariesof various kinds — an edge, a greatervisibility, and an authority, all of whichare often the sources of much discom-fort and sometimes also of conflict. Inan attempt to bridge these kinds ofgulfs, Asmita regularly oversees thetranslation of English texts and essaysinto Telugu and Urdu (the two mostwidely spoken local languages), andAnveshi has formed the Telugu Mater-ials Production Committee to undertaketranslations of important theoreticalworks from their original English intoTelugu. Asmita also regularly overseesthe translation of important texts andessays written in English into bothTelugu and Urdu. Sometime beforethis, ex-POW member Gita Ramas-wainy also established the HyderabadBook Trust (HBT), explicitly for thepurposes of translating i mportantbooks on a variety of subjects fromother Indian and foreign languages intoTelugu. Although at the time of its for-mation, the HBT explicitly intended to

reach a wider (Communist) Party audi-

ence (as a means of educating the cadreto fight party oppressions), it con tinuesits work today I believe with a b

roaderpurpose, complementing the work doneby the Anveshi Committee and byAsmita, and often working in c onjunc-tion with these organizations.

13 In September, 1998, when a one-timeStree Shakti member was made Presi-dent of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liber-ties Committee — now a group withopenly Naxalite sympathies and withclear M/L. Party backing — some activistsjoked that they had always wonderedwho the "plant" from the Left was,and now they knew. Party connectionsare no longer of much importance toactivist groups, although affiliationsclearly still matter as indications of per-sonal politics.

14 Kannabiran and Shatruguna (1986:24).Different members of Stree Shakti havewritten about the campaigns the grouptook up over the years (see Kannabiran1986, Kannabiran and Kannabiran1997, Kannabiran and Shatruguna1986, Tharu and Melkote 1983). I donot therefore reproduce an exhaustiveaccount of those here, but provide anoverview with an eye to understandingthe evolution of the group's ideologicalperspectives and strategies.

15 Specifically, the amendments beingsought were as follows: "to include spe-cified punishments for rape of a wifeduring separation, rape by a public ser-vant, by a superintendent of a jail, andby hospital staff. The amendmentswould also hold all participants in agang rape liable ... shift the burden ofproof to the accused in cases of custo-dial rape or rape of minors ... Idis-allowj the use of the victim ' s pastsexual history, except where relating tothe accused, in the trial" (Kannabiran1986:605).

16 "Dowry death" refers to the killing ofyoung married women when their natalfamilies do not meet demands for moredowry. Husbands and parents-in-l

aw


ire often i nvolved, and the murders usu-Illy made to look Like kitchen accidentsor suicides. Dowry deaths first came tothe attention of women's groups in cities

iike Delhi, when it was noticed that a

great many "accidental deaths" of

young women were being reported,with no further explanation or investi-gation of the incidents.Interview with Susie Tharu, August 12,1998.Years later, feminists would againbecome involved in a very similar cam-paign – similar arguments for the urgentneed for contraceptives, and similar ar-guments opposing it – when Norplantdevices were introduced in India.Clearly, the battle had to be fought onecompany or one device at a time.

19 And related to this question, also whetherinvolvement in the campaign would onlyreinforce the popular view of women asconsumers. It bears mentioning that thesesorts of concerns were named at leastonce before, during the MaharashtrianAnti-Price-Rise campaigns of the early1970s: why should food and food pricesbe specifically women's concerns, whenboth men and women have to eat? Shouldthis be a women's agitation, or should itnot involve men also? What kind ofimages of women would such move-ments be projecting, if only women wereto get involved?

20 The book was also published in Londonby Zed Books, introducing Stree Shaktito an international audience.

21 The translated hook is titled SavaalaakshaSandebaalu, or One Hundred ThousandDoubts: Women and Health Issues (n.d.).

22 Shortly after I completed fieldwork inHyderabad, Osmania's Chancellor toldAnveshi it could no longer use thisspace, and the group soon moved intoits new home, still not far from the uni-versity, in Barkatpura. Anveshi neverwanted the control of the university,but clearly proximity to the space de-marcated by the university campus was(both practically and ideologically) anadvantage.

23 It is worth mentioning in this contextthat I was turned down for a few inter-views with women who would havebeen able to talk about this period, forhealth-related or other reasons, butheard from friends that this may havebeen because of a reluctance to talk –least of all to an outsider – about thepolitics of the period. Others offeredsketchy accounts or no informationabout these interim years. As a result, Ihave few resources to be able to ad-equately trace the many and complexprocesses that eventually led to the for-mation of Asmita after the dispersal ofStree Shakti.

24 The other members involved in estab-lishing Asmita were: Volga (FeministStudy Circle); Rukmini Rao (DDS);Vijaya Kumari (Stree Shakti); KishoriSharma (an architect, who first providedAsmita with free office space and laterdesigned Asmita's new offices); IndiraJena (Stree Shakti, who would provideAsmita with funding); Leela Masila-moni (English Professor); V. Lalitha(Nava Vikas and Telugu Lecturer),Jamuna, Kalpana Alexander (obstetri-cian and gynecologist) and VasanthKannabiran (Stree Shakti and DDS);Kalpana Kannabiran (Stree Shakti, Mai-thri). My thanks to Asmita for sendingme the complete list.

25 A note about the comparison of Asmitaand Anveshi: activists associated withboth organizations insist that they donot compare themselves or their workin any way; that they are by no meanscompetitors in the field of women's ac-tivism. While I certainly concur that thetwo groups are not competitors (I wouldsuggest their work and approaches arecomplementary), a comparison of thesetwo models of activism is inevitable. Intracing a history of activist praxisin Hyderabad, I trace also the processesby which shared experiences ofurban grassroots activism eventuallyproduced a variety of groups, a varietyof approaches, and indeed a variety ofactivisms. At the same time, and from

324 DEEPA S. REDDY

the point of view of an outsider such asmyself, it is impossible to ignore the factthat Asmita and Anveshi are the onlyurban women's NGOs which functionin local, national and, indeed, also inter-national contexts, facilitate and producewomen's studies research on a regularbasis, and which are far more interestedin conceptualizing women's, caste, andminority issues rather in engaging them-selves in grassroots activism. Most otherorganizations that focus on women'sissues in Hyderabad are directly in-volved in establishing or running educa-tional institutions, micro-credit financeinitiatives, and more. My interest in thekind of institution that produces a par-ticular kind of analysis of women'sissues leads, then, inevitably to Asmitaand Anveshi and so also to a compari-son of the models of their activisms: itdefines both the scope and the limita-tions of the present undertaking.

26 At the time fieldwork for this projectwas conducted (1997-9), Asmita wasfunded largely by the Humanist Institutefor Co-Operation with DevelopingCountries (HIVOS) in the Netherlands(with some of its initiatives being sup-ported by other local and internationalorganizations: for instance, its SummerSchool in Women's Studies by the FordFoundation's Rights and Social Justiceprogram), and Anveshi – for at leasttwo years previously – by the FordFoundation.

27 Some key examples of their work: ongender justice in the context of minorityrights, Anveshi Law Committee (1997)and on the rustication of Dalit studentsfrom the University of Hyderabad,Anveshi Law Committee (2002).

28 I should point out that this is not myconjecture, but a response drawn froma conversation with Kalpana Kanna-biran, President of Asmita, severalweeks after the inauguration of Asmita'snew office. Criticisms of Asmita's insti-tutional glamor aside, the inauguralparty clearly provided an opportunity

to meet and discuss funding with theIndian representative of HIVOS, whowas present.

29 The late 1980s and early 1990s are c om-monly referred to in India as the Man-dal-Masjid years, after two events thatgripped the country, set several newmovements in motion, and altered for-ever the way women's groups wouldlook at the twin issues of religion andcaste. The first was an u nexpectedlydramatic and furious upper-caste re-sponse to the then Prime Minister V. P .Singh's decision to implement the rec-ommendations of the Mandal Commis-sion Report, which called for increasedreservation quotas for certain lower-caste groups. Also around this time,riding a wave of Hindu (upper-caste?)anger after the fallout of the Shah Banoaffair, the then BJP President L. K.Advani began his famous Rath Yatra(journey on a chariot) demanding thedemolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayod-hya, said to have been built on the ruinsof a temple marking the birthplace ofthe Hindu diety Rama. Riots followedin the path of the rath, but the worstrioting happened after the mosque wasdemolished by kar sevaks (volunteers)of the Sangh Parivar in December1992, shattering the cosmopolitanveneers of even cities like Bombay.

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