Some years ago, a group of us studied a widely familiar phenomenon: Gender training. We unpacked its histories and practices in Tamil Nadu - interviewing socalled trainers, the groups that undertook this exercise, reviewed various manuals and how-to documents on the subject, and so on. One of the outcomes of this project was that some of us took to examining the corpus of words and phrases that gender trainers used. Some of these were already in circulation in the developmental sector, where women’s groups, working on employment related issues or on rights issues to do with agriculture and women’s work were active. Some were clearly new, being neologisms - they were translations of phrases and words from the English. Being present at some of the training sites, we thought back on how these terms were received by those who had come to be ‘trained’: often a word or phrase, say, on women and the third world debt, would remain a category, a template that set off discussion on a range of things to do with everyday indebtedness, its details, and in the descriptive accounts that women provided were words and notions that had a certain associative richness - and in that sense, these held conceptual promise.
Recalling these workshops, we decided to look at words to do with the women’s question and feminism that had evolved in the Tamil linguistic and social contexts since the early 20th century: when we did, what clearly was a preliminary mapping, we noted the continuities and disjuncture’s with references to different sets of words, and wondered at their historical journeys.
I recall this work today, after a decade and more because it seems to me that in the constant movement between the different geographies of feminist thought - the metropolis and the periphery, the academia and movements, English and other languages - lies the possibility of mapping histories of feminism in India in ways that do justice to the richly different worlds we created. And I would like to make a case today for such a mapping in and through an analysis of what we did with words, as feminists who were active in Tamil Nadu during a specific period, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s.
And here I would like to reference two existing texts that have addressed the question of words, language and feminism: J. Devika’s 2008 essay, Being In-Translation in a post colony: Translating Feminism in Kerala State and Mary John’s 2014 essay Feminist Vocabularies in Time and Space: Perspectives from India .
… faithful translation is not the only way through which agendas and ideas from western feminism pass into and operate within public discourse in the local language … I would like to stress the less noticed, less institutionalized ways in which feminist ideas emerge in public discourse… bearing the indelible stamp of local possibilities and concerns…
- J Devika
I am interested rather in what happens when a given theory or conceptual vocabulary is put to use in a particular context, without valorizing origin over destination. There has been far too much obsession, for instance, with the Westerners of theory, as though this fact alone made it suspect, rather than paying attention to the entangled contexts and complex relations that in fact characterize all theoretical endeavors. Concepts may well have multiple contexts of origin and complex careers of use and transformation. It is the work that concepts actually do in their grip on the world that should matter most, rather than their ostensible purity in relation to a singular original Source.
- Mary John
The late 1960s and 1970s were impossible decades in that they witnessed intense political mobilization across the country: agricultural laborer’s, peasants, students, housewives, as we called them back then, factory workers, the urban precariat… another contemporary term - and equally these were decades that witnessed intense state repression… and today, most histories of Indian women’s movements in the post-independence period, place the making of a distinctive feminism in this historical moment. In Tamil Nadu too, this was the case, but there were other historical lines of influence which shaped our sense of the women’s question in the 1970s and after: Gandhian politics, an early left interest in organizing ‘harijan’ women as they were called, which foregrounded social as well as economic inequality; arguments to do with the relationship between faith and justice, which unfolded in church groups and their affiliates…I am not going to unpack these various moments as we received them in the 1970s and into the 1990s. I have indexed them here, because each of these ways of coming to the women’s question has left behind a strong lexical and political residue in our feminist vocabularies, shaping our sense of what it meant to identify with feminism.
In what follows I look at three instances of what we did with words, when we did feminism, and each of these unfolded in three distinctive sites: in the domain of pedagogy; the feminist magazine; feminist utterances, especially speech and song.
Gabriele Dietrich - some of you know her, I assume - is a Berliner who came to India in the 1960s. She had come of political age in post-war Germany and decided to leave the country in the wake of the cold war, the building of the Berlin Wall. Schooled in theology and familiar with the various social movements of her time, especially feminist politics, she chose to work with theology and faith-related organizations in India - with M M Thomas, well known Indian Christian theologian from Kerala, known for his ecumenical approach to matters of faith, and who was keen on pursuing dialogue with politically progressive groups, including of the left and the far left. A special premium was granted to intellectual labor, research and reading, in the work he undertook, particularly learning from the ground so to speak. Gabriele worked with him for a while and then went on to teach at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, Madurai, in the Centre for Social Analysis.
Social Analysis had emerged as an important approach to what we might call consciousness-raising in and through a systematic interrogation of the world around - not just the dissection of particular issues, but the placing of these issues within a broad framework, so that a problem was rendered visible in its contingent as well as structural aspects. Social Analysis took its cues from Francois Houtart’s understanding of Christian mission, and the manner in which he negotiated the theologically determined status of human imperfection, in and through a politics of friendship and neighborliness with the oppressed. Social Analysis translated this dictum - which led to the church working with the working classes in parts of Latin America - into advocating and enlarging on the theme of what liberation theology characterized as “an option for the poor”.
Gabriele viewed Social Analysis as both curriculum and method. It was a systematic study that drew from the Social Sciences, and it favored a multidisciplinary approach. Importantly it took Women’s Studies seriously, given that this domain of knowledge had rendered visible women’s substantial role in both production and reproduction, and in the spheres of social interaction and culture. As important, this manner of grasping the social totality was geared towards identifying the possibilities for practice that would change existing inequalities and injustice, in any given instance. Such practice would not only be specific and empirical but integrate the contingent response with long term labor and organizing for social transformation.
She had herself undertaken such an analysis in her early years in India, along with a group of researchers from the TTS - this was a study conducted between 1972-74 in East Thanjavur, in Tamil Nadu, known for agrarian discontent at the time, and the site of the Kilvenmani massacre of Dalits. Done in order to understand the role of religion in development, and as part of a larger program of research undertaken by the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society to ascertain the play of religious consciousness in people’s political lives, the study foregrounded the options for the Dalit working classes in the region, and the manner in which they acted on these options - and here Gabriele pointed to the special role played by Dalit women.
...it was conspicuous that among the Harijans women were a very active factor in social and political life. Most of the wives also used to work as coolies during peak seasons and though they were paid the usual lower wage and were more intensely subjected to the hazards of unemployment, their contribution to the family income obviously enhanced not only their self-esteem but also their general status at least in the chert community. There was an obvious difference between the behavior of the Harijan women and caste Hindu women. ‘The caste-division was such that usually even rather poor caste Hindus would have a small piece of land and could try to keep their womenfolk confined to the house.
While she took note of the educational and political influence of the CPI (M) led agricultural workers’ union, she also pointed to the specific ways in which the Gandhians, working for the Sarvodaya movement, had gained the ear of the women.
The Sarvodaya workers especially, had pushed women to the forefront of their non-violent agitations. The running of Balwadis had relieved the families from child care problems to some extent and women used to go on picketing to prevent the landlord’s goondas from harvesting contested fields, and to occupy land. The Gandhian emphasis on education of women was propagated among the Sarvodaya workers; there were a number of women among these workers.
The conclusions that she drew from this study are interesting: we have her being rueful about the tradeoffs between productive work of the kind that the Gandhians undertook and the politics that informed it - which was that of the Bhoodan movement and which entreated landlords to part with land to the landless. This appeared rather anomalous to her in a political landscape that was riven along class-caste lines - and where the CPI(M) was fighting for better tenancy rights, wages and more generally for a policy that ensured land to the tiller. In all this, religious consciousness did not appear to be central to people’s sense of struggle or politics; rather, it played a role in affirming the class-caste interests of the landlords, in that they were self-consciously religious in ways that the working poor were not. To the latter, both Christian and Hindu, religion segued into everyday life and punctuated the tedium of the hours, with seasonal observances and annual festivals. But it did not quite stand in the way of them advancing secular and political demands.
The method that Gabriele employed in this study - a mixture of scholarship, ethnography the play of what Gail Omvedt described as the conscious element, being the scholar’s interest in what she was studying and which foregrounded in her understanding - may be taken to be a prototype that she employed, when she taught Social Analysis subsequently.
At the time, it was viewed not only as formal study, but a mode of political learning considered necessary for community workers and social and political activists active in what was at that time termed the ‘development’ sector. And it came to be ‘taught’ widely by those who had learned Social Analysis perhaps at the TTS, or one or the other of the Church-related institutions that offered development education, comprising courses that lasted anything from a month to three months.
Here, I would like to focus on the feminist twist given to these courses and the struggle with language - this was not only over words, but about the remaking of consciousness as such, and in the uneven relationship between conceptual thought and individual experience, rich but unstable feminisms emerged, both at the level of understanding and practice.
The first generation of women who conducted Social Analysis workshops brought an explicitly feminist focus to their understanding (here I draw from what I know about the work of an early teacher, Lucy Xavier) - the 1980s had made available to Lucy, as it did to other curious and discontented women looking to make sense of what seemed patently wrong about the relationship between the sexes, words and concepts to process their experiences. These were in circulation through magazines, newsletters, the popular press even. And most of these were English words and they connoted new meanings, ways of thinking about the domain of family, sexuality, reproduction - all of which were deemed private, to be kept under wraps, and as unspeakable. It is not that women did not therefore speak of these matters, they did, to each other and amongst friends and close kin. Feminist words offered the possibility of anecdote and gossip becoming something else, matters of social and political importance. Conjugality could be discussed in terms of shared and problematic social practice. The female body could be examined and understood in ways that answered women's anxieties and sexual matters - with pleasure and pain becoming objects of personal and shared knowledge.
For the Social Analysis teacher, who had made these feminist words her own, the challenge was this: how would she render these words meaningful in Tamil? This was a matter of both translation and pedagogy: for even if one were to coin new words, or endow existing words with new meanings, these words conveyed ideas and concepts. In that sense, they helped explain and account for a phenomenon that one had taken for granted, helped to defamiliarize the habitual and denaturalize what appeared given and deemed. But, to explain why and how a phenomenon might be viewed critically was one thing, to render it useful and consequential for those who experienced domestic violence, or disliked marital sex was another. It was in this context that narrations of experience, testimonies of those who had endured systematic misogyny and violence acquired significance in the Social Analysis classroom - for one, listening became an important aspect of knowing; and secondly, women came to hear each other out, to heed each other’s words.
Yet there were challenges: for the teacher had to ensure that women’s words were not lost in the tidy concepts that appeared attractive, holding as they did a diagnostic value in that they clarified and helped on make sense of what otherwise appeared both inchoate and given. she wished to convey to those that were being ‘taught’. On the other hand, it was important that the rich mess of experiences and expressions did not remain only stories, but were transformed into critical social parables. It is not surprising that Lucy Xavier, whose workshops were a byword amongst development workers, well into the late 1990s, collected and maintained feminist word lists - it was as if she had to ensure words remained in place, that meanings were rendered stable. And she, no doubt, wondered what these words did.
For the new ones had to breathe and live alongside older and other words… and that meant that a word was not a monad, but a relational thing and to replace or substitute for an existing word meant that the associative life of the word in question had to be reexamined as well. Take the term for rape, for instance. In Tamil there exists an antique word for it - vallaangu - which connotes force. But this was not in use, rather karpazhippu - that is, an act that destroyed chastity. The focus was not so much on the act, but its perceived outcome. And the understanding was that this latter was horrendous and so must be avoided at all costs - and the onus, therefore, was on the woman to uphold her chastity.
To replace this word was a challenge, for it required us to both dispel the associative meanings of the term and to redefine it, in a connotative sense, as signifying an act of violence. So, we took to using the Hindi word, balaathkar in its Tamilised form - which existed, in any case in the language, but was seldom used in the context of sexual violence. Some, especially men, used the term, forced sexual intercourse, as a substitute, but we did not favour it - to us, rape was not only about intercourse.
An additional challenge was to persuade people to view balaathkar as unacceptable and ethically unacceptable, and not just a criminal act. In English, we had come up with a phrase that conveyed this - rape as a violation of bodily integrity and. To convey this in Tamil, a phrase had to be coined - and that was done - but it also meant that bodily integrity as concept was accorded its own inner life: for one, not all women were held to possess bodily integrity in caste society, since some bodies were held to be more violable than others and could be violated with impunity. The challenge then was to speak of rape in ways that captured the social as well as individual experience of violation and hurt. While conceptually, we did not do so well, not being able to go beyond twice oppressed and thrice oppressed, a line from a feminist song of the time managed to convey the cruel irony of caste-related rape: ‘though gripped by untouchability, we are women whose bodies are touched violently’. And more was said on the subject in group discussions, protests - and these latter in fact were the most eloquent on how one might reclaim the working class, ‘untouchable’ and ‘lower caste’ body. In the name of an embodied sisterhood or in the name of a caste-annihilating politics, which Dalit women shared with Dalit men? While the second option appeared important to Dalit women, there were some amongst them, who declared it was equally important for them to remain within a feminist universe as well.
Bodily integrity appeared a problem from another point of view as well: For many of us, the body appeared as a series of fragments, and how might one then speak of integrity? In study sessions on female sexual health, and bodily wellbeing, the notion of integrity came to be realized in and through the sharing of experiences, a mapping of erogenous zones, discussions of contraception… Some of you might recall how such a discussion unfolds in Rajasthan, in Deepa Dhanraj’s film, Something Like a War. The caste-ridden female body and the fragmented female body were deemed integral through words that evolved in the doing - through the advancement of an anti-caste politics, that came with a distinctive vocabulary and through a knowledge of the body, gleaned by touching it, knowing it through speaking what was not spoken of…
Even as new words and ideas were put into circulation, they did not always remain in place, for their charge could be neutralized, they could be used un-mindfully… until they came under pressure, which happened when a word or phrase was supplemented, overhauled with an additional and new meaning. This happened, for example, to the term to do with domestic violence in Tamil.
When first used it appeared not just a novelty, but a critical naming and rejection of what was considered acceptable - the rightful possession of the wife by husband, to do what he will with it; and an expression, however punitive, of care and authority. So to name these ways of being a husband as violent proved startling and disruptive - it had men asking, does that mean, I can’t beat my wife… even if she is my wife? And policemen wondering how wife beating could be termed criminal.
But as it acquired legal visibility through the introduction of section 498A, and came to circulate in the justice system, domestic violence was more often than not, coupled with dowry-related crimes. Complainants of domestic violence learned to their disadvantage that family counselling centers and family courts found it less messy to mark their problems as having to do with dowry than anything else. Yet, complainants persisted, as we found out, by noting that it was not just a question of dowry, rather they were being ‘tortured’. And here, they drew on the English word, which circulated in Tamil popular culture widely, not only as a term that connoted excessive violence, but also referred to sustained acts of taunting, bad behavior and wrongness … When those who endured violence of one kind or another in the family used the term, they made clear that what they wished to speak of was not to be confused with greed, or love of lucre alone.
And it was left to the imaginative teacher of Social Analysis to heed such usage, and draw on it to refine feminist words and worldviews.
This brings me to the second theme I wish to address: how the feminist magazines of the 1970s and 1980s sought to ‘translate’ ideas - and how they stirred the Tamil language into a state of creative dissonance, and also in a pedagogic sense helped to anchor and ‘explain’ this dissonance. I consider here what women’s magazines of the time sought to do. This is not an exhaustive account, and I restrict myself to two ways of ‘doing’: one, to do with the ‘translation’ of a political approach in a magazine that was self-consciously feminist; and the other to do with the pedagogy that underwrote a magazine for women.
A few remarks about these magazines: there were those that were published by established women’s groups, and published from Chennai, Magali Sinthanai (of the Tamil Nadu AIDWA); Pennurimai Kural (of the Pennurimai Iyakkam) and Suryodaya (many of whose contributors, including the editor were associated with the Indian People’s Front). Then there were explicitly feminist magazines published by individuals - Suttum Vizhi Sudar, from Trichy, whose chief editor was Christy Subatra; Pudiya Kural, published from Nagercoil, by Ovia, who was associated with the politics of the Dravidar Kazhagam. Magalir Kural was an outlier - published from Arakkonam, it was edited by two men, but foregrounded feminist themes. Of these only Magalir Sinthanai had an assured readership, while the rest sought to create a constituency of readers, who were interested in the women’s question and feminism, and more generally in what we might call radical progressive politics.
I focus here on Suttum Vizhi Sudar and Magalir Kural, both of which were published from the mid-1980s. SVS was a brainchild of Subatra, who had been radicalised by being in the Young Christian Students’ Movement, and through her subsequent discovery of left politics and ideas. She came to feminism, partly through an assertion of an independent will, and partly through reading, talking to other women, observing women in her familial and work circles… Active in the development sector from the early 1980s, she was involved in consciousness raising in a public context - in village-based women’s groups, which had come to be, as an extension of development activism. In the course of doing all of this, she and a group of women founded SVS in 1986.
Over the years, SVS acquired a resolutely feminist edge, and came to debate concerns that had emerged as pertinent across the country - violence against women, custodial assault, women’s health. In this sense, it drew its content from several sources, Manushi, for one, but also popular English magazines, left newsletters, early feminist publications, put out by Kali for Women, Kamla Bhasin’s work… Subatra ensured that such content was not only ‘translated’ in the literal sense of the term, but was viewed as being of existential importance to Tamil women. She did not want translated content to be viewed as alien - enjoyable, but irrelevant.
The tone of essays varied, depending on the contributors, but almost all contributions worked at language and words - reworking the mannered Tamil of the popular literary press to convey a feminist thought or emotion, anchoring feminist concerns in the world of laboring women, through a creative use of folk idioms, evolving a new resonant and rather forthright language, when it came to discussing violence, conjugal wrongs and women’s labor, which left one in no doubt as to what was at stake for feminists to ‘speak’ thus…
I consider here an article that Subatra wrote for the second issue of the magazine, as an instance of what this magazine set out to do - it represents an unfolding of a new perspective, which happened in the doing as it were. Written in the backdrop of dowry-related violence in the popular press, and in Manushi, it sought to ‘frame’ the question of dowry within a broader critique of marriage as such. The piece starts off, wondering if one ought not to conduct a statistical survey to do with marriages during so-called marriage seasons. And lists the questions that such a survey might address:
a) How many marriages are arranged on an average during such seasons?
b) What is the nature of commerce in each of these arrangements?
c) Before she was sold in the marriage market, how many times was she made an exhibit? How might we compute the loss to her self-respect and confidence?
d) How many were subject to loan burdens, tears, a wounding of self-respect on account of a marriage in their family?
e) How many amongst those who purportedly protect law and order looked away during transactions of dowry?
f) How do we list losses to do with a girl’s education being suddenly ended, her ideals squashed, romances that were destroyed …
g) How many men consented to marriage because they wanted a cook, a wife who would bring forth their children, and who would also gain money in gaining her?
The questions breathe irony and anger, anguish and contempt. Importantly, they defamiliarize what is taken for granted. In the past too this had happened. In the 1930s, the Self-respect movement sought to reinterpret marriage in the context of debates over raising the age of consent: refusing it the status of a sacrament, it insisted on its contractual and provisional nature. To mark this shift in understanding, new terms were coined, including: Vaazhkai Oppandam (a Contract for life); Sneha Inbam (Pleasurable comradeship)… So, the survey questions may be viewed in the light of earlier lexical interventions - all of which, we realize today, were at once strategic and normative. While dowry related murders frame SVS’s discussion of marriage, the writer makes clear she wishes to engender a ‘crisis’ in our understanding of the institution, rather she wants us to see it as one that is in crisis. Thus, after offering a definition of marriage,
“Marriage must be viewed as a social institution that is held in place by two citizens who consent to treat each other with respect and to unite in a social contract… it is not a trade in persons, rather it is an agreement between two human beings…”
she goes on to note that to arrive at such an understanding of marriage, one would need to take on all practices, customs, values that mark men as superior and women as lesser including those that justify these every day, from popular magazines to films … as important, marriage ought to be viewed in the context of other inequalities, such that a critical understanding of marriage would automatically lead one to fight these other inequalities as well.
On the one hand she mockingly lists cozy and familiar phrases that celebrate marriage, rendering it essential, auspicious, while on the other hand, she cajoles the reader into going beyond this sort of verbal habitude. Marriage bothered almost all women who wrote on feminist themes, and their critique ranged from restating Engels’ arguments in this regard to pointing to the sheer unfairness of the institution as far as women’s choices were concerned. This piece is different for the deliberate manner in which it addresses potential readers - it entreats, argues, and finally asserts the importance of submitting what it views as trite and anodyne notions of marriage to critique, both at the level of words, and meaning. A feminist critique of marriage is processed not so much through theory as it is through a small teach-in: and this latter is both lively as well as hard hitting. And it is the words that do this: sitting within the language with comfort, but running through them is a ‘new thing’, a way of seeing that is self-conscious, confident and determined to communicate its worth.
Not all feminist magazines sought to displace existing words and meanings thus. They did this in more recognizably ‘progressive’ ways. For instance, in Pennurimai Kural, you have a theoretical discussion of women’s labor, written around the same time, the mid-1980s. Written in the context of a particular strike by women workers in Chennai, it takes the reader through the well-known feminist debates on housework, criticizes some aspects of the wages for housework argument and then returns to the subject of the strike. The language is simple, the explanations cogent, but we don’t witness how an idea unfolds, in the writing, as it were. Rather, what we have here are finished concepts - leavened by empirical details. This manner of doing feminism breathes a certainty that we don’t find either in SVS or in Magalir Kural. There is the freshness of discovery in both.
Published from 1985 Magalir Kural took its cues from the everyday work of the Rural Women’s Liberation Movement (RWLM), founded by Burnad Fatima in 1979. But it did not only ‘report’ on what the movement did, rather it sought to ‘educate’ men and women, on the women’s question, as also on other pressing political concerns of the time, from agrarian revolt to state violence, caste hatred and discrimination to radical literature. Edited by N. Andavan, a male supporter of the RWLM, it sought to re-read a range of issues: while convinced of an Ambedkarite approach to social justice, it yet insistently read caste inequality in and through a class lens. It voiced feminist concerns of the time - violence, marital discord, state collusion with those who harmed women - but made clear that it would address these in the context of under caste and laboring women’s lives.
In order to communicate its concerns, the editor adopted interesting pedagogical approaches. One of these was a regular feature titled Nenjai Thottavai (Matters that Touch the Heart). This was in the form of a letter that one woman wrote to another, and instead of the intimacies that are contained in female exchanges, we have here a discussion of particular social issues. These included instances of discrimination against Dalits, women’s marital woes, tales of custodial sexual assault and violence, local elections and women’s political choices, economic hardship that was a woman’s lot, should she be single… These stories were drawn from across the country, and the letter writer, Alamelu invites her friend Amudha to offer her views on this or that tale, and asks for information from her part of the world… Amudha’s responses are not included in this epistolary exchange, but her views may be inferred from what Alamelu has to say in response. She clearly is the teacher, but Amudha is not so much a younger and inexperienced learner, as she is an ideal comrade.
The language of these letters is chatty, the descriptions of events unfold as stories, and an epistle ends with Alamelu’s reflections. In some cases, she writes of her being a witness to an event or a protest, and from these we realize she is a member of the RWLM… What we have here is a coming together of the concerns of two movements in the region of Arakkonam - the Dalit movement of the late 1970s and after, which was inspired by militant left struggles in Andhra, and elsewhere in the country, and the emergence of autonomous Dalit groups, in AP and Karnakata and the women’s movements. Alamelu is clearly a feminist, but to her freedom and equality are indivisible, and on that account, she is determined to claim all struggles for equality as pertinent to her own struggle as a young woman.
Interestingly, the sort of feminism that Fatima upheld during this time - the mid-1980s - was as expansive, but the difference was this: she was as interested in the interiority of women’s lives as she was in the structural violence that Dalit women endured. Importantly, this violence was viewed in its layered aspects - it had to do with their caste status, and equally with their being perceived as ‘wives’ merely, and not for the productive and critical beings that they were. As Fatima noted - in a 1983 article, written for Manushi - with regard to how the RWLM organized itself, it had to negotiate multiple impediments. Upper caste landlord vigilantism, local governmental indifference, and disregard for women’s views, the refusal by the police to take Dalit women’s apprehensions about their safety, in the wake of their challenging local structures of power and also familial anger.
Many members were forbidden by their husbands to attend the women’s meetings and were beaten when they went anyway. These women kept coming. They got out of the house by saying they were going to the market. When we touch on issues concerning the role of women in the family, we face a lot of problems. Recently, the husband of a leader of a village women’s movement threatened to divorce her if she continued to involve herself in the struggle.
The women’s determination to stand up to discrimination and injustice at home and outside was what finally convinced the men in their families to concede to their being active in the women’s Sangam. For Fatima, such participation was not only contingent on the problems that women wished to address and solve. She viewed it as a context for experiencing something new, unusual: a sense of discovery that was at once painful and exhilarating, an intimation of what was wrong with the world, and with one’s life, which left one angry, anxious and yet hopeful. And here she drew on Sandra Lee Baratky’s famous 1975 essay, Towards a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness to point to what was at stake in women acquiring “feminist consciousness”. She did this in a long essay she wrote in several installments for Magalir Kural. The following observations from Baratky’s essay were translated as they were, while other parts were summarized and discussed in the context of local realities:
To be a feminist, one has first to become one. For many feminists, this involves the experience of a profound personal transformation… In the course of undergoing the transformation to which I refer, the feminist changes her behavior, she makes new friends; she responds differently to people and events; her habits of consumption change; sometimes she alters her living arrangements or, more dramatically, her whole style of life….
***
Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization. To apprehend oneself as a victim is to be aware of an alien and hostile force outside of oneself which is responsible for the blatantly unjust treatment of women and which enforces a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation. … Victimization is impartial, even though its damage is done to each one of us personally. One is victimized as a woman, as one among many. The realization that others are made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer lies the beginning of a sense of solidarity with other victims. …The consciousness of victimization is immediate and revelatory; it allows us to discover what social reality really is like …
As is evident, Fatima translates both ways: she renders the RWLM legible to fellow Indian feminists in and through her Manushi article. And she renders feminism and feminist consciousness legible to the readers of Magalir Kural. The first essay, in English, is replete with granular detail, the second, in Tamil, is rich in concepts. The Alamelu letters were also texts in translation, but their intent was clearly pedagogic. Whereas Fatima’s essay was a statement of a position that she wished to elucidate, to point to what was at stake for women, who had risked their lives in becoming part of a movement that questioned not only structural violence but interrogated intimate and domestic arrangements.
Magalir Kural - and RWLM - viewed the women’s question in its expansive and everyday aspects. That is, they were determined to keep a larger ideological horizon in focus, while concentrating on what must be done in the here and now. This was done in a matter of fact manner, but the insistence on the big picture is something that one sees across the feminist spectrum: the interconnections, the way the social totality works, and equally, the emancipatory richness that feminism promised, as politics, and as thought… you see this in the hopeful manner that Social Analysis teachers conducted their classes, convinced that systematic and expansive knowledge made for effective social action, in the constant foregrounding of feminist ways of living and thinking that magazines did, at the risk of sounding odd and abstract… you see it in the way feminist magazines featured detailed local news, to do with protests or with instances of inequality, and at the same time carried articles on the family, on the caste order, class relationships, which were often of a conceptual nature.
This brings me my third theme: the manner in which the conceptual and the everyday were brought together in other contexts, beyond the classroom and print. I do this through a consideration of feminist utterances: speech and song.
Scholarship on Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian movement has addressed the famed oratory of its proponents - Barnard Bate’s work comes to mind - but such accounts rarely have taken note of female speech-making, though from the early 20th century, women have been on stage, addressing meetings of one sort or another. For the time that I am concerned with, from the 1970s onwards, a distinctive kind of female utterance came to be, especially in circles that we today identify as feminist. Given that Chrisitan social work and extramural education, both Gandhian and Christian, shaped consciousness in rural Tamil Nadu, it is not surprising that feminist utterances bore the influence of the pulpit and the prayer meeting. Sermons that helped constitute communities of the faithful through specific modes of address and rhetoric were public acts of meaning making and, in that sense, they shaped vocabularies of the faithful - much of this was habitual in that the listener knew how and why words were deployed a certain way and could and did anticipate what a sermon might connote. The audience also came together as one, in the chanting and the singing.
This legacy remained a part of word cultures that shaped Church-inspired secular contexts - including feminist forums. Even those who moved away from everyday religiosity possessed a sense of the language of exhortation and faith they had acquired through repetitive listening. This was of course transformed in important ways, but it retained certain aspects - there was the sense of urgency (women must see that they are enslaved), that words that were being uttered had to be taken seriously now (how can they not heed what was being said, for it pertained to their dire situation); and that words were consequential (to name and understand one’s situation was imperative, if one wanted a different and more self-respecting life). Then there was the call to reflect, examine oneself - the exhortation to acknowledge what we don’t wish to (that we have been complicit unknowingly in what oppresses us) .And finally the call to redemption, in this case, through critical thought and action. Not all who took to the feminist stage spoke thus, but there were quite a few that did - and each brought to their onstage expressions a distinctive resonance. From the assertive tone to the quiet, pastoral voice, from the powerfully made argument to the ironic and sharp expose of women’s ills - there were many ways in which this was done, but each of these ways of speaking communicated feminism’s normative worth - that it was a set of values that one had to imbibe.
There had been other traditions of feminist utterance in Tamil Nadu - especially by women orators of the Dravidar Kazhagam. Persuasive, logical, witty and satiric, they did not seek so much to convene community, rather, they sought to dislodge existing commonsense. The arguments were elegant, incisive, but always finished - there was very little tentativeness in such speech making. On the other hand, in place of the exhortation which was always intensely made and received as dramatically, there was the rational argument that forced one to confront prejudices, and left in the listener a sense of bother and unease. Unlike the pedagogic earnestness of the pulpit, which rendered feminist values normative, the rational speaker suggested that feminism was a necessary and good thing, and located its value within the universe of expansive rationality.
These ways of making feminist meaning made for a certain mobility of ideas and expressions and these could and did often hold an audience spellbound. Even if the context was a workshop or a small gathering, speech making endowed feminists’ ideas with a resonance that was hard to put by or ignore. On the other hand, as sometimes happened, the rhetoric took over and expressions could become tired and tedious. And it was only when speech making was followed by discussions or responses that such tedium suffered a jolt -
Songs worked differently. Political singing has a long history in the state: nationalists, self-respecters, communists all had their songwriters and singers who were heard out. Women singers were sought out as well, but only rarely did songs feature content to do with the women’s question. Self-respect songs did, though many of the song writers were men. These traditions continued, and were added to, over the decade. Within the left, feminist content came into being in the 1980s, in and through cultural work undertaken under the AIDWA’s auspices - And by the mid-1980s far left and Dalit groups also had their songsters. Songs drew on existing folk musical traditions, and sometimes songsters self-consciously remade these, drawing from local protest songs to suit their purpose. Development workers were familiar with much of this, and various Church groups and voluntary agencies put together song collections that were printed and circulated.
Singing was an important part of all gatherings in the development sector, and women’s groups sang what they knew, and which narrated the travails of women, or of the poor. Some singers adapted existing songs to a new feminist purpose, changing words or lines, or adding a refrain. Individual women songwriters were few but those that did write ended up creating startling feminist content. I wish to focus here on songs written by Subatra and Salai Selvam, both at the time were part of the SVS editorial team. Together they created what might be called the first generation of self-conscious feminist songs, which featured broad themes to do with feminism, and sought to ‘awaken’ consciousness. Subatra also wrote songs on her own. Songs were set to popular folk tunes - rather, a catchy tune provided the formal frame for the song. While words were chosen for their punch, their rhythm, the ideas that were to be conveyed directed the choice of words. It helped that both had grown up in singing households and cultures.
Songs were written in response to what appeared to be urgent and important moments and developments. Feticide and infanticide that had come to public attention on account of the work done by development groups which worked amongst women; the situation of the girl child, which appeared grim, given the sex ratio figures had gained public visibility, given feminist outcry on this subject; the invisibility of women’s labor, on which feminists had a lot of say, especially in view of the 1991 census, and the work undertaken to ensure women returned themselves as workers; the democratic deficit of the state, evident in custodial sexual assault; the worsening caste and communal situation in the country, from the Mandal-Masjid years… the occasion shaped the choice of theme, but whatever the immediate provocation for music, the songs were not focused only on the contingent, rather they were framed by a broad politics of liberation, which was made evident in the refrain, or sometimes in the sequence of themes in a given song.
For instance, a song written in the context of female feticide starts off on an indignant note:
For ten months we bore this child
And so, what if it is a girl
Or a boy
Why greet a boy with all this cheer and dance
And why this sadness, when a girl is born
The ‘We’ draws the listener to the song’s content, and is then used to expostulate on how a woman’s life is drawn into one kind of enslavement or another, how she cannot expect to be sexually safe anywhere, and how she is the victim of a hypocritical sexual morality… from a somewhat commonsensical observation that was guaranteed to appeal to all women, the song moves into the realm of concerns and arguments foregrounded by the feminism of the times. It was as if once women got a sense of their role in child bearing, other things were likely to follow.
A song about women’s labour also deploys a collective voice: It starts off with laboring women describing what they do, of a day:
Everyday
We weed, slave at the hearth
And without demur, bear children.
There appears no relief in sight
From this plight
The next stanza has them wondering about their labor: how is that while they transplanted and harvested, and worked as hard as the men did, their earnings were not the same.
But when I counted my coins, why were they less?
You tell me that!
Through what magic did they manage that?”
They go on to sing of their ‘double burden’, of how it takes two to drag the family cart, but they do this all by themselves, in addition to everyday work. They then call out to other women to join them so that they can work towards a collective solution to change the way things are. While bearing the impress of left songs on labor, this one is yet distinctive for its inclusion of the themes of the double burden and care labor (left songsters at best were sentimental about motherhood and its travails, and of what the laboring mother endured, but did not mark this as a political problem that had to be addressed).
With regard to the overall structure of inequality and violence, which caste and communal disturbances foregrounded in different ways, Subatra invoked the popular feminist dictum, ‘Women hold up half the sky’, to make a case for how the last must be the first.
In Vachati
Ponnur, Chidambaram
And not only in these places -
In the grip of power
Of sexual aggression
A woman’s life is always on fire
For how long will this go on,
A life ground into dust
Hill and valley are rifts
And we indeed are the last rift of them all
Amongst the oppressed
Kicks and beatings are our lot
We are half of humanity
And must have our rights
The words in these songs comprised local speech idioms, folk expressions, and these were tied into abstract concepts, all of which were held together by the tune and rhythm. Repetition of lines, riffing on the refrains, and turning words over to suit one’s context - these songs became mobile because you could do all of these. So much so that like all good political songs, the authors disappeared into the message and music. If a song did theory, in that it called out to women to come into a collective to transform their lives, the singing was part of the practice, so to speak. To sing lustily was to voice matters that could not be said in conversation - I remember how this song which starts off, asserting women’s intelligence and competence, and then wonders why is it, then, that we don’t look around and ask who has kept us down, has proved a catalyst for thought in a number of instances. Women invariably have referenced these lines when they finally decided to speak up, whether of abusive childhood, an instance of caste discrimination, police brutality, conjugal wrongs...
So long as you bend to take
Yet another knock on your head
Those who do the knocking
Are unlikely to stop.
You have your strong hands
Stand up, straight up
Surely a woman is not a thing
A corpse that’s lost all feeling
Apart from songs written in this self-conscious vein were those sung with a heightened degree of consciousness, so that the song acquired a feminist stamp, even when the content was not explicitly so. Like this one, which is about a woman political prisoner, where the emphasis is on her working-class identity - in the singing it transformed into a conscious politics of social motherhood.
In Thorapadi jail
When you were asleep, but not quite
Whose face was it that woke you up
My daughter
Unfaded, like a fresh flower
But no, it's’ not you alone that is my child
The children of all workers
Are mine
Are my kin…
When a working class and Dalit feminist activist, who was with a far left party for a while, sang this song she brought out not only the pathos of separation, the injustice of incarceration, but also a poignancy that came out of lived experience.
Songs were moments that fostered a sense of community, opened up minds and hearts to utopian possibilities, lent a measure of lightness to a difficult day, with intense debates and conversations, and in some instances, pushed up energy levels. They also were messengers that fetched feminism a wide audience, and while not all that heard the songs would persist in the politics that songs expressed, they were nonetheless left with words that did not fade away all that easily.
To conclude: doing feminism in the vernacular aligned what we did along two axes: translation and pedagogy, and the one fed into the other. In turn, these acts bore consequences, in the form of discussions, testimonies, arguments, dissensions… Our feminisms lived in the words we used, and the things we did with words, and the specific outcomes that the words achieved. I have pointed to how this unfolded in 3 instances, but there were many more. For example, it would be useful to follow the fate of a complaint brought to any of our groups: its spoken form, the manner in which it acquired another existence in the written affidavit, the way the affidavit was ‘read’, either in the police station, or by lawyers… and meanwhile, the words that kept us all hopeful of a solution, words said in a spirit of consolation, friendship, to bolster our political good faith… Equally, it would be revealing to capture the lexical details of an acrimonious discussion - to do with caste, for example, and how that unfolded…
But this is for now.
V. Geetha
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