Small Victories
The most interesting part of my field visits is undoubtedly my interactions with the many lovely women I meet. One such woman is this 70 year old lady, Rajamma (name changed) I met recently in Vikarabad. Close to 6 feet tall, spine erect, she went around doing all her housework briskly without an iota of fatigue. She mentioned that the death of her husband 10 years ago did scare her about the lonely life ahead but she couldn’t possibly leave her house and go to live in any of her brothers’ homes. Despite her brothers repeatedly asking her to abandon her house in the remote village and shift to Hyderabad, she says she couldn’t convince herself to move out. She plans to stay in that house for as long as she can live independently.
When I initially started to speak with Rajamma, she came across as an uptight, rigid person not willing to divulge much about her life with me. Her apprehensions were obviously understandable. It took quite a bit of effort to win her trust, but as I warmed up to her a little, she slowly started to speak.
Getting married at a tender age of 14 to an alcoholic wasn’t particularly easy for very obvious reasons. When the male members of the family are either drunk or gambling and selling off their agriculture lands to meet their expenses, a woman cannot help but take the entire responsibility of fending for the family. And Rajamma’s story was no different. Almost immediately after she got married, she had to start working in the farm and manage everything. There was not a single task she didn’t do. She even did the weeding using bullock cart, kept accounts of all the expenses and handled the marketing of the produce etc., all by herself single handedly — Most of these tasks even today are done by men in the agricultural households. She very proudly declared that since the land was in her husband’s name and she was working there, she also made sure that her husband paid her the daily wages (whatever he paid others) for the work she did in the farm and she really had to fight hard for it.
Rajamma’s grit really amused me. Almost 50 years ago when women didn’t even face their husbands in the eye, leave alone speaking to them, here was a woman who was fighting for rightful wages for the work she has done. This is particularly important to mention because even today women farmers themselves don’t recognise their contribution to agriculture. When I ask them what they do, many say “Nothing, we just stay at home.” And when I ask them if they “help” their husbands in agriculture, they say yes. The women who go for agriculture labour work are still considered coolies and most of the times are paid much less than what men are paid.
At a personal level, Rajamma’s story is very important for me because she isn’t a feminist woman and didn’t do anything exceptionally revolutionary and neither did she stand as a beacon for women empowerment. It is very easy to miss her story if I am put off by the way she speaks (which I definitely am) or the obstinate opinions she holds. She is a conventional, conservative woman who still believes very strongly in the patriarchal system, doesn’t mind the dowry system, menstruation is still a “dirty” thing for her, disapproves of calling husbands by their names, doesn’t appreciate women taking up jobs because family gets neglected, doesn’t wear a bindi or toe rings etc., because she is a widow and follows many such things which are clearly oppressive towards women and she is also perpetrating few of these things. Yes it is problematic and such patterns of behaviour amongst women are dangerous for a society, but I haven’t been able to taste any success in changing that kind of patriarchal mindset amongst women in my own family and friends circles, so change at a village level is still a long way to go especially since the government also covertly perpetuates the culture of patriarchy.
So yes, to be able to sit through the discomfort of listening to all the patriarchal, sexist, racist and uncomfortable things said and not react right in the first interaction I feel is extremely difficult but necessary because I have noticed that if I start bombarding them with all the progressive gyan the minute I hear them make any such remarks, they go into a shell and stop sharing anything about their lives because then they don’t trust me and go into a shell. To bring them out of that shell then, is a herculean task. In all this, I lose out on the most important stories of their battles and their small victories. So during my conversations with these women, I consciously make it a point to not take any moral high ground and listen to what they have to say, follow the mantra which my Guru taught me as the first lesson of psychological counselling, which is “Listen, Listen, Listen and Shut Up”.
