Practicing Courage: Stories from 2021 Acumen India Spring Cohort
Unheard Stories of Moral Practices is a five-part series, over the course of a month, showcasing the hard-edged skills, challenges, and values practiced by the 2021 Acumen India Fellows from the Spring Cohort.
You cannot learn courage by doing something you already know, and our fellows,
Sonal Giani, the co-founder of Umang and Yaariyan, Ankit Kumar, co-founder & CEO of Shoegaro, and Khatija Rahman, Director & Trustee of A R Rahman Foundation, have shown courage in the presence of oppressive systems and stood their ground when the world around them expected them to conform to the norm.
On 11th December 2013, the Supreme court of India reversed the previous reading down of section 377 by the Delhi High Court, crushing the hopes of hundreds of LGBTQIA+ Indians fighting for their right to be recognized and accepted legally. Sonal witnessed the hearing from the Humsafar Trust’s Mumbai office. She appeared on several news channels alongside various religious leaders who applauded the court’s decision and demeaned Sonal’s sexuality and identity while labeling her and everyone she was fighting for as immoral. While everyone around her from the community was devastated, she didn’t shed a tear because the fight had just started.
It was mid-2018, Ankit was helping individual artisans in footwear factories to set up their own shops and brands online through his online marketing consultancy. Ankit, who comes from the Kayastha caste, had started his business with a friend against the will of his family. As part of the Hindu caste system, people from his community are not meant to run businesses. He was expected to take a job as the caste system dictated. When a factory owner asked him to stop helping artisans from lower, “invisible” castes, Ankit was empowered to leave and start Shoegaro. Shoegaro provides a reliable platform to connect artisans making handmade shoes with demand centers across India.
After days of back and forth with the organizers of a themed ball event for all the Bollywood celebrities, Khatija had finally decided to attend the event on her own terms in 2018. Khatija is a practicing Muslim.
As the daughter of a national award and Oscar-winning musician, Khatija was expected to show up to the ball dressed a certain way. However, wanting to be in her own skin, she did not want to follow the dress code. She attended the ball in a beautiful saree and her face veil. Amid glares from all corners, Khatija stood on the podium to address the awkwardness she had to endure because of her choice to cover.
The stories of Sonal, Ankit, and Khatija don’t end here. Despite being confronted by a status quo that pressured them to keep with tradition, remain silent, and never dare to think differently, these Fellows met urgency and uncertainty with courageous action.
Not once, not twice, but time and again, circumstances demanded of Sonal to shun her emotions. She wasn’t allowed to be angry or even shed a tear after the apex court of India spoke with ignorance and disregard for its people seeking justice and basic dignity, furthering the systematic exclusion of the LGBTQIA+ community. The court denied the community of its day-to-day reality, dehumanized and subsequently criminalized their existence.
The court said that it was a minority community, that there weren’t enough reported cases of abuse of power and violence, and therefore their ‘so-called rights’ didn’t exist to fight for. There was widespread despair and hopelessness in the LGBTQIA+ community, but Sonal knew that no revolution ever was completed overnight.
Sonal was familiar with the law and understood the framing of Article 377 better than most of her counterparts. The colonial law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, is listed under ‘Unnatural Offences,’ which criminalized every human who didn’t have sex for the sole purpose of reproducing, including heterosexuals. Due to which there were more cases under Sec 377 from heterosexual partners who didn’t want to engage in certain sexual acts. While the police and other people in positions of power threatened and abused anyone who dared to step out of gender binary boxes and express love differently than a cisgender heterosexual man and woman.
While handling crisis cases at the Humsafar Trust, Sonal led the awareness and advocacy arm of the organization. She educated herself and the 51 community-based organizations in 5 states she was collaborating with on their constitutional rights and stood with them in courts and police stations as they navigated the flawed system.
After five years of organizing, educating, amplifying, and challenging the system in its own way, on 6th December 2018, the Supreme Court, in response to a combination of 6 petitions including the one by the Humsafar Trust, finally overturned the verdict.
When asked what it means to be courageous, Sonal said, “Courage takes practice.” She doesn’t believe being courageous comes naturally to her, instead “It is a cultivated quality and an aftereffect of having knowledge.”
Courage is so much more than spontaneous reactions to traumatic events. It is sometimes a calculated step, a midnight protest, or know you can’t beat the system but trying anyway.
Belonging to the Kayastha caste, Ankit Kumar was advised by his parents, extended family, neighbors, and the owner of the factory he worked with, to find work within the constraints of his caste.
The Kayastha caste is a part of the Hindu caste system. It is believed to have originated from Chitragupt, Lord Yama’s (the god of death) accountant, created to track all the good and bad deeds committed by humans. The Kayastha caste is believed to consist of the educated class of Hindus, and are destined to do jobs as their source of income.
In a country like India that takes pride in its heritage, the caste system is a deep-rooted social evil that invisibilizes people at the bottom of the caste hierarchy and persecutes the ones who speak of the oppression.
However, known to live life against the tide, Ankit defied the historical tradition, duty, and the unjust, and inhumane caste system, and founded multiple startups before Shoegaro. On his quest to eradicate the roadblocks of the caste system, Ankit actively assists and guides artisans to create, manage and profit from their own brands of handmade footwear under Shoegaro.
Similarly, Khatija, a singer hailing from a musical background, has had to prove herself every step of the way because of her choice to cover herself. As the Director of A R Rahman Foundation, Khatija is pushing against the unrealistic standards of visual presentation that judge and label women based on their clothes.
As a young face in the entertainment industry, who stands apart from the crowd, Khatija aims to create pathways for women without them having to compromise on their values and choice.
Courage isn’t always about making a grand gesture or a life and death decision. Courage as we know it often stems from actions that seem impossible at first, layered in deep fear, threatening big and small aspects of our life and the world we hold dear to ourselves.
No one escapes life without hardships, but to wake up each day and to choose to do something new, something unknown is how you practice courage each day, and it is how you ignite a moral revolution, one day at a time.
Join our Fellows, and the Acumen community in consciously practising courage and creating systems that reward the courageous. Register for the Path of Moral Leadership course with Acumen Founder and CEO, Jacqueline Novogratz to learn the hard-edged skills necessary to build a better world.
To know more about our 2021 Spring cohort, and their work, head over to their bios.
Shaziya Shaikh is a Communications Intern with Acumen Academy India. She is a writer, creative facilitator, and a young intersectional feminist.
