How to ensure a better life for the Indian woman

There was Nirmala, for instance. She lives in a rice mill in Thiruvalluvar district in Tamil Nadu, working—or slaving—to pay back the advances her parents have taken from the contractors who provide rice mill owners with cheap Scheduled Tribe labour. When she was asked about her family, she stared at the floor for a moment. Then she looked us in the face and said in her ringing voice: “If they paid my parents properly, I wouldn’t have to work like this.” Then it was Chitra’s turn to speak. Chitra, all of ten years old and part of the labour force for the money-spinning export market of prawns and cashews. Chitra shells cashew nuts all day, a smelly, sticky business. The best of the nuts are exported. But what Chitra remembers of her work is one detail: once, when she was hungry, she ate one of the nuts she had shelled.

She was caught and her disgrace paraded before the hundred other chil-dren employed in the work shed. The little girl must already have a hundred other bad memories; but this is what seemed to rankle the most. The third child onstage, a tiny bewildered-looking girl, works at making flutes. Has she ever played one? Would she like to learn? She looked as if a special punish-ment had been suggested for her. Flutes mean work, her face seemed to say. What does she have to do with its music? Then it was fourteen-year-old Savitri’s turn to speak. Her face was stony as she described her work. In our “modern” India, roads and highways have been developing, just as the government advertisements like to picture it. The advertisements obviously leave out girls (and women) like Savitri. She is one of the Nepali girls employed in a roadside dhaba in Gazipur. They live in one room and work all hours; truck-ers prefer the dhabas that have more girls. “The truckers blow smoke into our faces,” Savitri whis-pered into the microphone. No one in the jury had the heart to probe further. I recount this glimpse of four lives not because it provides unexpected news; but because it quickly and crudely summarises the lives lived by too many of our women—as children, then as adults. Drudgery; no play, no learning; and always, vulnerability—to economic and sexual exploitation, to poor health, to a general powerlessness. And this powerlessness, this poverty of choice, will run through these children’s adult lives—a fate they will share, in varying shades of darkness, with large num-bers of Indian women.

It is doubtful that change is imminent for the Chitras and Nirmalas and Savitris of India, despite legal promises and despite the untiring efforts of activists. But it is equally doubtful if we can talk of progress—of a “modern” India—if their lives cannot be changed. There is, first, the obvious need for both the state and for people to chip away at the dehumanis-ing economics that deprives Indian girls and women of a chance at a decent life; and at the ubiquitous violence, in different forms, that women are vulnerable to, both at home and outside.

But beneath the obvious, there is a more fundamental task of perspec-tive: adopting a simple but big question as the guideline for changing women’s lives. What will make the Indian woman’s life better? One of the little girls in Mysore that day said she would like to be a policeman. I found this a par-ticularly eloquent bit of wishful thinking. Schooled in the most ruthless class-rooms of our society, she knew instinctively that what her life needed was some power; and that it was a policeman (not a policewoman) who would be the right choice as a symbol of power. Out of the mouth of a babe, we have the big idea: what women need is a little power over their lives; power that will give them a little more choice of how they live. This is not an idea that can be left entirely to official committees. The question of change it raises has to be faced, instead, in the messier world at large—where “women’s issues” get reduced to ways of keeping them “chaste” or getting them mar-ried to their rapists; or cunningly trivialised by discussions on the length of tennis players’ skirts or imagining the new “woman of substance” changing one purdah for another, fashionably observing karva chauth. Too often, the purveyors of “culture”, and always, its publicity-hungry guardians, are sim-ply not equipped to deal with the question of a better life for women.

So it is we—Indian women and men—who must pressurise the state to implement its responsibilities to women, to “mainstream” them. Perhaps more difficult, but even more important, we must pressurise each other, guide each other, to pay attention to, the real issues regarding Indian women. We may then take one small step forward towards a better life and a modern India.