Throughout history, we find that a number of forces, situations and occurrences that have influenced women’s lives.  Women have resisted, supported, subverted, and responded to these happenings. These are in areas as varied as religion (and reforms within them), political developments (conquests, invasions, colonisation) and economics (industrialisation).

The women’s movement has been active in a wide range of issues and it is near impossible to capture all of them. In this chapter we look at a few of these. One is a movement almost entirely authored spontaneously by women, another is a government programme into which women have tried to integrate their concerns. The third is a basic need that women struggle for and the last is an area that shapes and is being shaped by the women’s movement. These few only serve as illustrations to give us an idea of the wide canvas that the movement covers.

Anti-Arrack Movement
Anti-arrack agitations have punctuated the history of the women’s movement in India. Liquor shops were picketed during the freedom movement. Gandhi saw alcohol as a “social evil”, and fought to include prohibition in the directive principles of State policy.

Prohibition has often represented moralistic indignation against “bad habits” or has assumed an urban “middle-class” right wing notion of the “uncultured” peasant and the raucous, drinking working class.

In the nineties, though, a remarkable anti-arrack stir was launched in many parts of the country. Poor women in the countryside protested against the arrack shops, as they saw that it brings with it, increased economic hardship as well as domestic violence by the drunken men. The women of Nellore launched a major agitation against the liquor that was being sold in cheap plastic sachets, making it convenient for men to just pick up these sachets, and drink on their long-winded way home.(1)

Women armed with brooms and sticks burnt arrack packets, attacked arrack-carrying jeeps, arrack-sellers, and even the men who drank arrack. These actions were often the outcome of literacy campaigns  and activities of the sangha development programmes initiated by left-oriented action groups and NGOs. These struggles spread like wildfire from village to village and district to district. Other States like Madhya Pradesh, Maharastra and Orissa also witnessed these agitations. In fact in Mizoram, the Mizo Women’s Council had been involved in anti-arrack agitation for over a decade.

In Andhra Pradesh, the movement was so popular that many political parties and power centres started claiming authorship of the movement. In fact, N. T. Rama Rao (Telugu Desam Party) swept back to power in Andhra Pradesh on an anti-arrack platform. The efforts of women saw the ban on the sale of arrack. Total prohibition was imposed and the situation in the countryside did improve. There were however reports that the sale of more expensive Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) was on the increase, and that the ban had pushed the trade underground. Soon the government, “persuaded” by the liquor lobby, cited revenue and administrative grounds, to re-introduce alcohol.

Despite this apparent defeat, the anti-arrack agitation proved that given an opportunity, women would spontaneously organise around injustices that touched their lives. It also indicated how a non-structured agitation, without any single leadership, could spread quickly and capture the imagination of ordinary women. They were able to challenge the powerful nexus between the politician and the liquor lobby and also the mafia. At the same time, it also demonstrated how such a strong widespread defiance could be dissipated or whittled down.(2) Nevertheless through this process some anti-patriarchal sentiments were expressed and many women became more politically conscious.
 
Joint Forest Management
Traditionally, women have been the primary custodians and users of the forest. Over time, communal values and land systems have degenerated and women’s role in caring for, minding, and utilising these assets has been eroded. The social forestry programmes sought to develop the forest by increasing cash returns. Mono-culture, single purpose forests alienated the traditional communities, especially women from these forests. The forest laws, a colonial legacy, have made the original inhabitants of forests trespassers and criminals. Women’s claims on the land, too, were delegitimised.

The National Forest Policy of 1988 for the first time recognised that the forests could not be protected or developed without the involvement of the local community and providing the traditional benefits to the local communities. The Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme was then designed to protect the environment, and conserve forests while meeting the basic needs of tribal and rural populations - fuel, fodder, minor forest produce and small timber. It also formally included gender and equity as its main concerns. Thus on paper at least the JFM was to be more in tune with the needs of the people. It came in for sharp criticism on many fronts including its perspective of looking at the forests as just “resources” that ought to be “managed” – a very modernistic and narrow view of nature.

Even to implement this programme of the JFM, the obstacles were many. There was resistance among the forest department officials (predominantly male) who had had a free run of the forests, and often indulged in illegal felling, illegal sale of forest produce, and harassed tribals and women who frequented the forests and collected wood.(3)

There was also resistance from the men of the village, and sometimes even from some women, when they found that the programme does not take care of their particular needs. “There is also a wide variation in gender roles in the task of collecting forest produce... As a general rule, the women of harijan families in most villages collect fodder from forest areas. The women of some communities do not go to forest areas at all, while those of others go more often than men.” (4)

But it is still imperative that all sections of women, irrespective of the nature of their use of the forests, must be made equal partners in the JFM process. There should also be equality between men and women, especially in the decision making process. Further, JFM should widen its scope from the current “management of forest resources” to “joint ownership”, so that women don’t get just a toe-hold into the existing programme, but, along with the men, script it.

A Roof of one’s Own
Women are always homeless. Culturally, a girl in her natal home is treated as a temporary resident, and at the marital house she is an outsider. Her rights for shelter in both cases are tenuous, at best. Homelessness, especially for women, is not merely a physical state of being without a shelter. When a woman who is a victim of domestic violence says “I have nowhere to go ” she means it figuratively as much as literally.

This is particularly ironic, as the home has traditionally been considered woman’s domain and the basis of her identity. Yet the face of the displaced, the refugee, the evicted, the disaster victim is generally  female. (5)

The issue of housing has been taken up by many groups working with the marginalised sections in society, the urban and rural poor especially those who live in the slums and bastis. In 1986 groups like Unnayan, Calcutta, CIEDS Collective and KKNSS, Bangalore, SPARC Bombay, Vikas Centre for Development, Ahmedabad etc.  came together with those working on eviction, displacement, land rights and related issues, to form the National Campaign for Housing Rights. The Campaign lobbied on all aspects of the housing issue including making housing a fundamental right. They drew up a draft Bill of housing rights and successfully influenced the National Housing Policy, which was announced in 1992.

The Housing Rights groups and campaigns in India as well as their international counterparts like the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights and the Habitat International Coalition, ensured that all their programmes and policies on housing reflected a gender perspective.(6) They sought to promote joint ownership of the dwellings by the husband and wife. In some cases, especially in land allotment for housing among the weaker section and in cases of regularisation of land, the action groups fought successfully to get “pattas” in the name of women.(7)

The coalitions also proposed that all relocation and major housing proposals be done in consultation with women. SPARC and the Mahila Mandals in Bombay encouraged the women pavement dwellers to do their own participatory survey as well as to design and build houses more suitable to their own needs. Groups also made specific recommendations on the housing needs of victims of domestic violence and single women. In 1992, TARU, a Delhi based action research NGO began to prepare strategic housing action plans and promote the use of appropriate technologies for the different states in India.

The effort is to develop schemes, policies and programmes that are more gender-sensitive, and culturally appropriate. A gender-informed policy must first acknowledge that women have different housing needs from men. Housing is invariably low on the list of government priorities and emphasis is usually on the economic aspects of housing and less on social relations and habitat. To poor rural women in particular, housing touches issues like water and firewood. For most women, decent, safe and appropriate shelter still remains a distant dream despite the Habitat Conference.(8)
 
The Media and the Women’s Question
“... the media, even while giving generous space to women’s issues, subverts the women’s question. This is done subtly as well as blatantly, consciously as well as sub-consciously by : presenting contradictory images; ignoring the women’s dimension in some issues; twisting the question by reinforcing conservative values; misrepresenting feminism; reducing serious issues to a joke; distorting the movement through its definition of what is newsworthy and what is not.” (9)

So as summed up by Vimal Balasubrahmanyan, in Mirror Image, (available at CED: Rs. 60) the media too tends to reflect the dominant views of society. The patriarchal values that operate in other realms are alive and kicking in this so-called “progressive field” as well.

Recognising the role that media play in the socialisation process, and as part of their efforts to bring about wider social change, many women’s groups worked outside and within the media. They aimed to influence media policies and to communicate women’s stories, theories and opinions to a wider audience(10). They contested and drew attention to discriminatory values and images projected by the media. Campaigns were also taken up against advertisements and film posters that were offensive - obscene portrayal or objectification of women. The “Committee on the Portrayal of Women” was established in the early eighties in Delhi. Prolonged battles by many groups resulted in the passing of the “Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act 1986” whose scope though is confined to sexually suggestive presentation and does not cover other distortions in the way women are projected.

Media monitoring groups like Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group, Madhyam, Bangalore, were established to check skews, change perceptions and to ensure that concerns of women got adequate and consistent attention.

On the more creative front, women had also started recording and publishing on their own. Creativity, enhancing expressions and the articulations of women in different forms and sharing was emphasised. Both formal and informal media was used. Organisations like Jagori concentrated on creative expressions and used the idiom of the Mela. While others used more established media: Kali for Women brought out books. Manushi, Stree Sangharsh, Sachetna were among the many feminists journals and magazines brought out by different sections of the movement. Streelekha was set up as the first feminist bookstore in Asia and Women’s film festivals were organised in Bangalore, Hyderabad etc.

Till today understanding, monitoring, and working with the media continues to be an important pre-occupation of many feminists. This work is in fact increasing in importance as we see an explosion of media and information technology and programming.

On the one hand we now have a number of private TV channels which are making increasingly popular programmes out of purely commercial interests. On the other hand, the public autonomous channel Prasar Bharati is witnessing blatant interference at the perspectives level as Board members like Prof. Romila Thapar and Mr. Rajendra Yadav were replaced by a right wing administration.

So the gap between real women - who they are and what they do  and imagined women that the media is by and large taken up with, is still a yawning one. Many more insidious forms of discrimination peddled by the purportedly more “open” contemporary media like the Internet, the many television channels etc. are also something feminists are alert about.