The subject that I have been asked to speak on is ‘Gender and Human Rights Issues in Audio and Visual Communication’. I have been a filmmaker and actress for the past many years. However, I never seem to have made the grade of fitting comfortably with the official media. In the past 26 years I have never been entrusted with a series on Doordarshan, and been contracted with one film for Films Division. I have also fallen foul of the keepers of our morality, the Central Board of Film Certification for producing and directing films and have had to take recourse to the courts in order to get a clean chit for the film, An Indian Story on the Bhagalpur blindings and Bhopal: Beyond Genocide, a film on the Bhopal gas tragedy. My views are therefore of a marginalised filmmaker, who has not got along with the powers that be, in spite of trying to do so.

Let me begin by going into the meaning of the word ‘communication’ as we understand it today. The word communication means to “Share or exchange information or ideas”. Communications are essentially of two kinds; inter personal and mass communications.

Inter personal communication is a system by which two people or parties participate in a dialogue. It is a dialogue where these parties can air their views; debate an issue and either arrive at a conclusion acceptable to both, or agree to disagree. By its very structure, mass communication is a one-way street. It is a system where the message is transferred through an intermediary technology, be it radio, film, television, or any other electronic media and print. There is no space for a ‘dialogue’. In fact, the word ‘mass communication’ has always been an anathema for me. Where is the space for discourse, dialogue or the exchange of ideas? The communicator states his views while the audience is a passive recipient of the message.

It is argued that in certain kinds of programmes, the “people’s views are incorporated” into the structure of the programming itself. I beg to differ. Once we have participated in a discussion group, or given an interview, we are reduced to a ‘sound bite’. It is left into the hands of the editor, the discretion of the TV channel or the filmmaker as to what is used and what is not. Our voice and image then becomes a product, and before being interviewed, we sign a piece of paper or a contract, which states that we no longer have a copyright on our image. We agree to become a product.

It is strange that in this world where we are constantly bombarded by different kinds of communications, the oldest and the most effective form of communication is still the “word of mouth”. When we enter into a dialogue or receive information from a person directly, it seems more trust worthy because it includes the credibility of the person giving the message. While true dialogue in a mass communication is not possible, certain forms mimic this inter personal exchange, which is one of the reasons why “product endorsement” ads are so popular and effective. Whether it is Sachin Tendulkar or Shah Rukh Khan endorsing a car, or Amitabh Bachchan endorsing Cadbury’s chocolate.

If we stop to think about it, we know that it must be years since Shah Rukh Khan would have sat in anything but a Mercedes, and therefore is disqualified to endorse a Santro zip drive car. Sachin Tendulkar’s pleadings with the customs department to allow the Ferrari presented to him, into India duty free are now common knowledge. The face of Amitabh Bachchan endorsing a Cadbury chocolate after being discovered to contain fungal growth has saved the company from incurring huge losses. And yet we listen to them, because we trust them. This trust is manipulated, to fit the agendas of various agencies.

I remember as a child, during the Sino-Indian war, in 1962, we were feverishly made to knit socks and sweaters for “our jawans who faced the enemy in the highest slopes of the Himalayas.” Prime Minister Pandit Nehru and the then defence Minister Krishna Menon gave a call to donate gold, as we had to buy arms and equipment. And people gave.

A year or two after the war, I read a book written by Brigadier Kaul, called The Himalayan Blunder, and I realised that we had been lied to. It was not the great battles that our soldiers had fought, that had made the Chinese withdraw. In fact, the Chinese army had swept across the then NEFA (North East Frontier Agency), a stretch of about 15,000 square kilometres of Indian territory, had almost severed our links with the North-eastern states of our country, and once they had proved their point, had unilaterally withdrawn to the line that they had claimed was Chinese territory. That in fact, had been a complete rout of the Indian forces.

It had taken me a long time to reconcile with the fact that the government had lied, Films Division, the government news agency that showed newsreels had lied, that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had lied, and that my favourite listening station, All India Radio had lied.

Much, much later, I realised that these were normal tools and stock in trade of most governments across the world.

The recent election victory of George Bush bears testimony. The last US election had stirred the passions of the US citizens enough to make this election a kind of a “make or break” election, which would have brought the whole debate on whether the USA had the moral right to interfere in the internal matters of any country like Iraq, and whether President Bush’s whole policy of “War on Terrorism” post 9/11 was valid or not. Many voters had taken sides, but many of them were still not sure whom to vote for. At the height of the presidential campaign, soon after the presidential debate on US television, where it was felt that Senator Kerry had done well, and just before the USA went to the polls, Al Jazeera, the news agency released a televised statement by Osama Bin Laden, where he threatened to bleed the US to its knees, much as they had done with the USSR. Maybe Bush would have won anyway, but that one telecast sealed the fate of the elections. All the undecided voters were effectively stampeded into the Bush camp.

Technology invades our home space to bring images and values, which are in keeping with the interests of the government and business houses. One has lost count of the number of times our children have asked for “this toy” or “that food” because of what they have seen on TV. Through the use of mass communication and by flooding markets with consumer goods, our definition of “a good life” has been changed in the most fundamental way. It is therefore important to recognise the non-democratic nature of this resource. It takes away from us the very “right to communicate”, as there is no method to counter or put an alternative take on the message that comes into our homes.

These messages operate at two levels: the stated and the un-stated, or the subliminal. While watching a film or a TV serial or even an advertisement we tend to accept or reject the content of the message in accordance with our own experiences. My contention is that it is at the “unstated or subliminal” level, that our filters do not operate efficiently.

Clip 1: Dettol ad

While watching this ad we are not only told that we have to buy a product, but something more. The house has all the mod cons, a posh sofa, a nice sideboard and a fancy bathroom. Not only is the model wearing good clothes, is good looking and fair, she also has a handsome husband, a darling child, dressed in the latest clothes. After using the soap, she triumphantly says that her family is hygienic and safe. The ad has not only sold the soap, but a way of life, which is out of reach for most of the country.

Films, Television, radio, mobiles, computers and the Internet today provide a plethora of communications. I would like to deal with film, television and radio and their portrayals of gender and human rights in India.

We produce more than 800 feature films a year, or roughly speaking, 17 films per week in about 20 languages. These films therefore have a far-reaching impact on the socio-cultural fabric of the country.

Films can be broadly classified into two categories: fiction and documentaries. Feature films in India fall into two loosely defined terms “mainstream cinema” and “parallel cinema”, though there are many films that fall between the two forms.

Mainstream Cinema

In an attempt to reach a larger audience, “mainstream cinema uses the lowest common denominator of a very popular ethos for depicting characters and stories that have little to do with reality. They are formula films with many songs, dances and stunts.”1 Commercial films make no bones about the fact that they are in the business to make money. Whatever sells, goes.

For the mainstream cinema, I limit my analysis to the Bombay-based Hindi films as a case in point. Over the years some of the formulas have changed, and as the country goes through economic crisis, through the criminalisation of politics and the police, these trends are reflected in commercial films as well. However, what has happened consistently over the years is the marginalisation of women in commercial cinema and the steady degeneration in the depiction of human rights.

I will deal with this section at some length, mainly because this is the kind of cinema that most people in the country are exposed to.

In the years immediately after Independence, films seemed to share the Nehruvian dream of India. The body of work of filmmakers like Raj Kapoor, Mehboob, V. Shantaram, Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy were in some form grounded in reality. However romantic the interpretation, Shree 420, Do Bigha Zameen, Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani, Pyaasa and Sujata amongst many others, were films that dealt with poverty, exploitation of the poor and untouchabilty.

These films were essentially love stories with the socio-economic problems as a backdrop. While the hero demolished all the baddies, he was aided and assisted by a group of friends/villagers and or the police. The films had a hero, a heroine, a villain, a vamp, usually a self-sacrificing mother and a worried father. They almost invariably had a comedian who had a parallel story to tell.

The rise of heroes like Shashi Kapoor, Dharmendra, Jitendra and Shammi Kapoor, saw the storyline move towards pure romance. It was the gyrations of these heroes that won the hearts of many heroines and fans (myself included). The influence of the West was seen in the introduction the vamp performing with bare legs, bare arms and a cleavage in the nightclub, a la Helen. The introduction of the vamp in this avatar also introduced the “dancer”, who often would be introduced in the movie only for one song-and-dance number.

The introduction of the multi-starrers undermined the space of the heroines even further. One of the early hits, Waqt, starring three heroes, their parents, two heroines, their parents and one villain took the “lost and found” formula to new heights. But as the film told the tale of how three brothers and their parents were separated, and their final reconciliation 20 years later, there was no time left to tell the story of the heroines. Their role was reduced to a few songs and one or two romantic scenes. The vamp also fell by the wayside. The heroine did the job of titillating the audience, doing hot dance numbers and baring herself.

Clip 2: Sridevi in Chaalbaaz

It was the rise of Amitabh Bachchan as the angry young man, which changed the face of Hindi films. In films like Zanjeer and Amar Akbar Anthony, the heroes now portrayed the “honest cop”, the aggressive but honest ordinary man. The hero went from being a saviour to an aggressive, macho man. Male bonding became a strong theme in films like Anand, Qurbani, Muqaddar ka Sikander and Sholay. The hero can now be funny and aggressive in turns. The comedian disappeared and this mantle fell on the hero. As the story completely focused on the men, the heroines were reduced to becoming the love interest. Violence became a mainstay; policemen took on the mantle of the villains who were ably assisted in their villainy by corrupt politicians. The other favourite villain was the “enemy across the border”, which is routinely used to whip up nationalist fervour and further the male macho image. I show a clip from the film, Deewar as a case in point.

Clip 3: Deewar

The climax of most films even today, centres on a fight between the good guys and bad guys, with helpless and passive heroines, mothers, sisters, etc., chained to pillar, hung over molten vats of wax or dangerous chemicals, waiting to be rescued.

The film Roti, Kapda aur Makaan by Manoj Kumar introduced a new trend – the rape. In the film the heroine is raped on a sack full of atta or flour, to show her helplessness. For the coming four-five years, every film had to have a “hot” dance number, but a rape scene also became mandatory. It culminated with Insaaf ka Taraazu, in which the villain rapes the younger sister, and the older sister then seeks revenge. The avenging woman also became a successful theme. In order to reconcile this avenging woman with the traditional docile heroine, the image of the heroine was split into two. Films like Seeta aur Geeta, Chaalbaaz and Dushman were instant successes.

Clip 4: Sridevi in Chaalbaaz

The mother had fallen by the wayside, and the films became completely male dominated, with the macho, superman image of the hero. He was no longer dependent on the help of friends or villagers to take care of the villain.

Many films used the theme of corruption, as one of the mainstays of the storyline. Films like Satya, Hu Tu Tu, Ardha Satya, Shool, Gangajal and Company showed violence in police custody as a routine matter. Police encounter was also shown as a necessary evil. But the film Ab Taak Chhappan went as far as to glorify police encounter and the “encounter specialist”, sub-inspector Daya Pandey.

Lately a new breed of films has emerged. They are geared for the niche urban, metro market and the overseas market. Bombay Boys, Hyderabad Blues, Kya Kehna, Damini and Lajja are films with budgets within the 4-8 crore range, which made no attempt to cater to the larger Indian audience.

The other breed of films currently popular, are the ones where the clothes have become skimpier. The “hot” film which lived on the edge of the mainstream commercial cinema has now moved to the centre-stage in this budget range. The film Raaz directed by Vikram Bhatt starring Bipasha Basu was a precursor to Paap, Jism and Julie. Hollywood films inspired most of these films. Prominent of this genre is Murder directed by Anurag Basu starring Mallika Sherawat.

The sexual relationship between the two lovers became the excuse to expose Mallika Sherawat’s body. Most of the film does little else. But the interesting part of the film is that the husband accepts that it was his neglect of his wife that drove her to have an extramarital affair. The couple came closer together because of the murder and the affair. At the end of the film, the husband and wife get back together.

Alongside the commercial Indian films, is a whole body of work by filmmakers who have made films on a theme of their interest, without having the market as the primary focus. The larger body of this work has been in regional languages, and therefore rooted in reality, closer to the ethos of their area. While most good films have something to say about women, I choose to identify themes in some films, which have dealt with the issue of gender and human rights.

Women as breadwinners could be the description of two films. Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar and Meghe Dhaka Tara by Ritwick Ghatak.

The ruthless condemnation of a woman who succumbs to her sexual needs could be the description of three notable films. Ghatashraddha by Girish Kasaravalli, Rihayee by Aruna Raje and Astitva by Mahesh Manjrekar.

Bonding between women could be the theme for films like Doghi by Sumitra Bhave, Paramitar Ek Din by Aparna Sen and Dahan by Rituparno Ghosh. These are stories of women trapped by their circumstances, who turn to each other for support.

While all these films have looked at women with sympathy and concern, the women are defined by their relationship in a patriarchal hierarchy. They are wives, daughters, daughters-in-law, sisters and mothers.

The only film that I have found, that looks at a woman who steps out of a traditional role to find an identity and a space for herself, is in the film Umbartha or the Threshold by Jabbar Patel. Smita Patil plays a middle-class housewife, Sudha, who is restless in the role of just being a wife. Her husband is a lawyer, who talks about his strategy to blacken a rape victim’s name in order to free his client. Restless and unhappy, she steps out of her house to work as a superintendent of a woman’s home. She finds this role more satisfying than being a mere housewife, but pays a heavy toll, as her husband turns to another woman for comfort.

Poverty, hunger, feudalism, exploitation and the resultant loss of dignity have been themes of most of the parallel cinema films. The Naxalbari movement in West Bengal and other Marxist interventions spawned a new consciousness and many films dealing with different aspects of human rights abuse. Notewothy are Chorus by Mrinal Sen, 1084 ki Maa by Govind Nihalani based on a novel written by Mahasveta Devi, Peeravi by Shaji Karun, Mukha Mukham by Adoor Gopalakrishnan to name a few.

The word ‘documentary’ was coined by Dr John Grierson to describe films “which provided a factual account, using films, photographs, sound recordings of real events”.2 However, the power of the moving image was recognised very early, and films were used for propaganda purposes. The Indian government has long recognised this use of audiovisual media.

The Films Division, Doordarshan, All India Radio and the Directorate of Audio Visual Publicity (DAVP) are important bodies with access to a large amount of funding and manpower. The government also exercises control on the exhibition of these materials. Every film, video and play is censored before it can be shown. While the censoring is supposed to ensure that no obscene and offensive content is exhibited, these departments also work as political watchdogs for the government. Many a film has had to resort to the court to be able to get a censor certificate.

Various government departments, television stations and business houses commission filmmakers to produce films and videos for their own use. The coming of the video technology has slashed the cost of filmmaking. Today, there are many more independent filmmakers producing a host of films and videos on a variety of subjects.

The work of S. Sukhdev, Anand Patwardhan, Tapan Bose, Anwar Kamwar, Anwar Jamal, Sumitra Bhave, Sehjo Singh, Madhurhsree Dutta and Anjali Montero among many others is noteworthy. It is in these films that one sees the images of people fighting back, women defining a space for themselves and the beginnings of a new kind of communications.

Women’s fight for justice and equality has been a theme of many a documentary. The work of grass-roots based organisations has given people a new strength to fight the feudal system. I would like to show a clip from the film The Shame Is Not Mine by Arun Chaddha. In the film, Neema is a victim of rape. She fights the feudal lords, the bureaucracy and the police in her fight for justice. Her house is torched, and she has to flee the village. Her husband supports her every inch of the way and chooses to live with her, away from home, rather than abandon her.

Clip 5: The Shame is Not Mine

The next clip is from a film The Final Solution by Rakesh Sharma, a film on the recent Godhra riots in Gujarat. The film has an interview with a boy describing the riots, and the film also ends with this interview. I have kept the interview in this clip. Women are depicted both as the victims and the perpetrators or supporters of the riots.

Clip 6:The Final Solution

Television in India was initially the monopoly of the government, devoted to public service broadcasting. The official television network, Doordarshan, is one of the largest terrestrial networks in the world. Its network of 1402 terrestrial transmitters covers more than 90.4 per cent of India’s population. An estimated 42.3 per cent of our population have TV sets in their homes. 76.1 per cent of urban households have access to television and cable TV. 28.5 per cent of the rural households have television sets.3 Initially Doordarshan did not allow advertising, but in 1976 it decided to accept ads. As the Doordarshan website says, “revenue earning can only be a by-product of its mission and objectives, but it does not undermine the importance of revenue earning. Revenue earning may not be an end in itself, but it is a powerful means to its ultimate end.”4 (But why blame Doordarshan alone? It is the nature of the beast.) In the 1990s the government gave in to market pressure and many private and foreign television channels like CNN, BBC, Zee, Sony, Asia Television Network, Star TV, Sun TV, etc., became players in the field.

Most television channels have five kinds of programming: entertainment, sports, current affairs, news and ads. Usually every programme has commercial breaks. An approximate 13-17 per cent of the total airtime is devoted to advertisements. The content of the current affairs and news reflect the leanings of the channel, especially the USA-based CNN, BBC and Doordarshan.

The entertainment section contains fictionalised work like soaps, thrillers, murder, etc. The largest following in India has been of two forms, the soap and the mythological stories like Ramayan, Mahabharat, etc. Both these forms tend to show women in the most orthodox and retrogressive roles. The costume and the decors of the mythological tales do not adhere to any known historical period. Watch a television soap, and not only are we confronted with a good bahu perpetually helping others, listening to her mother-in-law, confronting a scheming sister-in-law and weeping at least one bucketful of tears. While empathising or rejecting the story and the character, we tend to forget the fact that this “good bahu” and the serial pass on other messages.

Being a good bahu, she never ever raises her voice, never ever argues with her mother-in-law, never ever goes out to work, never ever wipes the floor, never ever wash the dishes and only cooks a kheer when she observes the fast of Karva Chauth; fasting all day to ensure the long life of her husband. And she manages to do all this without a hair being out of place, wearing about 3 kilos of gold and 2 kilos of sindoor. The serial never questions patriarchy, promotes the most backward image of women, and it is always the working woman who has extramarital affairs. Some of the other serials like Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahi, Dekho Magar Pyar Se and Saans have tried to move away from the saas bahu formula and carve a slightly different niche for themselves. Yet they still fall within the ambit of the “family drama”.

Government monopoly of our radio waves has been jealously guarded since 1930, when the government took over two privately owned transmitters, and began broadcasting under the name of All India Radio. AIR, also known as Akashvani, today covers 91.37 per cent of the area, serving 99.13 per cent of the people in India. AIR broadcasts programmes in 24 Languages and 146 dialects in home services.5 While the AIR covers a whole variety of programmes, it is a department of the Government of India, and is one of its most effective propaganda tools.

Though AIR opened its doors for commercialisation in 1967 with the introduction of Vividh Bharati, and by the introduction of FM services in the mid-1990s, it did not give licences to any independent radio stations.

In 1998 India became a signatory to the Milan Declaration on Communication and Human Rights, which calls for the international recognition of community broadcasting as an extension of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the freedom of expression. It was as late as December 2002 that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India decided to grant licences to “to educational institutions with certain guidelines”.6 Community radio has been used extensively all over the world to ensure that members of the community have access to information that affects their lives, that they get an opportunity to express themselves socially, politically and culturally. In the last two years, five community radio stations have been granted a licence.

Today, information is power. Those who have access to information and means to restrict its dissemination, hold the key to power. A case in point is the recent Tsunami disaster. It is now clear that had India been a member of the Tsunami Early Warning System the death toll would not have been as high as it is. We had no access to this information and have paid a heavy price for it.

A few years ago, genetically modified seeds of cotton were introduced into the market with ads in television, radio spots and publicity in the print media. The corporations selling these seeds did not tell the farmers of the high cost of using these seeds, as the plants needed a lot of pesticides and artificial fertilisers for optimum results. Nor were the farmers aware that these seeds could not be replanted. The farmers borrowed heavily from the banks, and when the crop failed, many farmers committed suicide as they were unable to pay back their loans.

And yet these very mass media have the potential to disseminate a much larger spectrum of programmes by allowing showing us images and sounds from diverse economic and political strata, cultures, histories and ethnicities. They could act as a source of information needed for our daily lives. But this will be achieved if the people have a control on what should be produced, and what should be aired.

Some groups and NGOs have made a beginning in this direction. I would like to site two groups who are using videos as a tool of communication. SEWA, in Gujarat has been working to organise women in different income generating activities. It has trained a team of rural women in the production of videos and audio programmes. These women produce programmes to meet the in-house training requirement of SEWA. They also now undertake productions for other groups on a contractual basis.

The Deccan Development Society based in Hyderabad has handed over video cameras to rural women and trained them in editing and other aspects of video production. These women produce programmes on issues of concern to them. Their film on genetically modified seeds, called Why the Farmers of Andhra Pradesh do not like BT Cotton, is a simple but effective video.

I show you a clip on these filmmakers from a film called Ten Women and a Camera. I also have a very short clip of Video SEWA.

Clip 7

The use of radio as a tool to address the information needs of a community have met with great success. To the best of my knowledge, in the past two years, licences for five community radio stations have been granted.

The Kutchh Mahila Vikas Sangathan, an NGO based in Bhuj, Gujarat, has been producing and broadcasting radio programmes since 1995, through All India Radio. With provision of 33 per cent reservation for women in the panchayat bodies, there was a great demand for training materials. The literacy levels are very low in Kutch and in some places it is nil. Kutchh has a large nomadic population. A survey conducted in 1998-99 indicated that radio was the most used medium as radio transistors were easy to carry.

Kutchh Mahila Vikas Sangathan in collaboration with other organisations produced Kutchh Lokji Vani in 1999. This programme was broadcast by All India Radio in the sponsored category. The broadcast resumed in July 2002. In the rehabilitation drive after the earthquake, corruption took place at all levels. The programme brought these issues to light. It also bolstered the spirit of the Kutchhi people and encouraged them not to wait for handouts but to reassert their Kutchhi spirit and begin to stand on their feet.

The programme has been modified, but it is still being aired with great success. The Kutchhi language has no written form, and the Gujarati language has acquired hegemony over all public discourse. “This highly localised programming in a local language affirms local cultural identities, it generates debate on local concerns, needs and priorities. Above all this programme is participatory in contrast to the alienated spectatorship on the part of the audience in mainstream media.“7

1 ‘Indian Cinema and Women’ by Vijaya Mulay, in Kosmorama, Copenhagen. annual issue 2000

2 Oxford English Dictionary

3 NRS-2001, as displayed on the Doordarshan website

4 Doordarshan website, Commercial Revenue section

5 All India Radio Website: HIstory

6 Consultation Paper No. 15/2004, Telecom Regulatory Authority of

India, GOI

7 ‘Radio Initiative in the District of Kutchh’, paper by Kutchh Mahila

Vikas Sangathan

“We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other people’s knowledge, other people’s experience, and other people’s wisdom. We tell their stories.” Bill Moyers, host of the weekly public affairs series, NOW with Bill Moyers, on the US-based PBS television network, speaking at the Harvard Medical School after receiving the annual Global Environment Citizen Award presented by the Center for Health and the Global Environment

The question before us today is: who are the people whose stories we tell?

I understand that we are here to deliberate on ways and means to develop gender sensitive media activities, including an alternative approach to media representations of violence that neither sensationalise nor trivialise women’s negotiations in conflict situations, as well as to try and align several forms of work on peace, gender justice and rights.

I don’t think I would be too far off the mark in stating that the violence that has been uppermost in our minds over the past fortnight is that unleashed by the sea in the form of the tsunami that followed the earthquake off the Indonesian coast on 26 December. Since the theme of the workshop encompasses issues such as displacement, relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation, and since the tsunami tragedy involves all these and more, I don’t suppose I would be straying too far off the path laid out for me if I make my points about gender in media coverage using the post-tsunami situation as the main reference point this morning.

I must confess at the outset that I haven’t had the time so far to do a systematic and detailed analysis of the media’s coverage of the recent disaster, which is being described as unprecedented in scale and impact, as well as intercontinental reach and devastation. In that sense, the disaster presents a sobering, alternative view of globalisation and emphasises the fact that we, the inhabitants of planet earth, are inextricably inter-connected and inter-dependent, despite all our differences. And that, I believe, is in itself a lesson relevant to our quest for gender justice, human rights and peace. Let us jointly think about what we have seen and read over the past couple of weeks and, especially, try to recall the images and voices of women in this context.

These are, of course, early days and journalists reporting from the affected areas on the widespread devastation are naturally scrambling to do the best they can to bring to the rest of us some glimpses of what has happened and is happening – so that we can at least try to imagine and understand the enormity of the disaster, and do whatever we can, wherever we are located, to help in the aftermath of such large-scale death and destruction. So any discussion on media coverage of the tsunami tragedy at this point is not meant to criticise as much as to learn.

Critiques of the post-tsunami media coverage so far have focused primarily on the use of extremely graphic images of the dead and injured, especially on television, in contrast to the discretion exercised by the international media in the wake of the 9/11 disaster in the US – which suggests the operation of double standards in the media with regard to the privacy and dignity of human beings in the so-called First and Third Worlds.

There have also been other manifestations of the apparently incorrigible Western bias of international TV channels. A number of questions have also been raised about the domestic media’s coverage of the disaster, too. But let us focus here on the images and/or voices of women in the media in relation to the tsunami tragedy.

The question I would like to raise at this point is: is it relevant to talk about gender justice, awareness, sensitivity, etc., in the context of such a disaster, which has obviously affected all those who happened to be in the path of the tidal waves – men, women and children? Can there possibly be a gender angle to the tsunami story? Is it possible to talk of a gender perspective while covering the post-tsunami situation?

From my own limited experience and, more importantly, what I have learnt through reading, as well as from listening to the experiences and observations of people who have been involved in post-disaster relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts in various parts of the country and the world, the answer to those questions is a very definite “yes.”

I think it is important in this context to take note of what journalist Praful Bidwai wrote recently (The News, Pakistan, 30 December 2004): “…Natural disasters are natural only in their causation. Their effects are socially determined and transmitted through mechanisms and arrangements which are the creation of societies and governments. Natural disasters are not socially neutral in their impact. Rather, they pick on the poor and the weak, rather than the privileged.”

This reality is already evident in the post-tsunami scenario. For example, The New Indian Express today (8 January 2005) has a front-page story about Dalits, Muslims and other disadvantaged communities being further marginalised in the course of relief operations, as well as a page 7 report on the special vulnerability of the elderly in the aftermath of humanitarian crises such as the one triggered by the tsunami, with HelpAge India pointing out that senior citizens face special difficulties in accessing relief.

Since social disparities do play a role in determining the impact of all kinds of catastrophes – and their after-effects – on different sections of the population, gender cannot but be relevant even in the context of natural disasters. In view of the gender-based inequality and inequity that marks our society, women are clearly disadvantaged in multiple ways. It naturally follows that women from the economically and socially deprived communities that usually bear the brunt of both natural and man-made disasters are especially vulnerable in the aftermath of calamities and conflicts – unless special care is taken to ensure that their needs and concerns are taken care of.

I believe the media have a vital role to play in highlighting the impact of events such as the tsunami disaster, as well as their fallout, on diverse sections of the affected people, especially those at most risk, which certainly includes women. In order to do this effectively, media professionals must recognise that gender, along with other socio-economic variables such as class and caste, race or ethnicity, age, physical and mental health status, etc., influence people’s experience of the events themselves, as well as their access to subsequent help in coping with the consequences and rebuilding their lives.

If disasters are not socially neutral in their impact, policies and programmes for relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation cannot afford to be socially neutral either. If the government and other agencies involved in post-disaster or, indeed, post-conflict work have not yet learnt this well-documented lesson, it is up to the media to remind them – and the public – of the special needs, problems and vulnerabilities of various groups, including women, in the aftermath of such events.

Otherwise why cover disaster or conflict at all? To my mind, if the media are not to play a meaningful, constructive role of this kind, there is no justification for the kind of carpet coverage extended to such events, especially by the 24-hour news channels.

There have been a few, scattered glimpses in the media of women’s special vulnerabilities during the first fortnight after the tsunami struck. For example, I remember reading one story about women having been hampered in their bid to escape the waves by their saris. And another one about women being raped, molested and harassed in unprotected refugee camps. The latter was a Reuters report, based on a statement by the Women and Media Collective in Sri Lanka, published in The Times of India on 4 January 2005. And I believe it underlines an important point for gender-sensitive media coverage: the need to expand the range of news sources to be tapped even in crisis situations that appear, on the surface, to have nothing to do with gender.

There has also been a hint of potential gender-related stories in some other recent reports. Take, for example, the tactics employed by some family members in Tamil Nadu to corner the funds expected as compensation for deaths (e.g., the splitting up of siblings by paternal and maternal grandparents in order to claim separate compensation amounts for the deaths of the children’s parents). This does not bode well for women. As we know from countless earlier examples of post-conflict and post-disaster situations, including the post-Kargil scenario, the most vulnerable in society – especially women and children – often tend to lose out in this process. To ensure gender justice in the post-tsunami situation, concerned journalists need to follow up on the process of disbursing compensation.

Similarly, as I watched stories about the children orphaned by the disaster, and heard about the possibility of the Tamil Nadu government relaxing adoption-related rules and regulations to facilitate their adoption, I wondered how the authorities planned to ensure that no predatory adults exploit the vulnerability of these children, especially – though not only – the girls. This is another story that needs to be pursued sensitively with a gender lens.

I suspect that if and when sex-disaggregated data on the dead is made available, there will be some gender-related stories there, too.

I had my first exposure to the importance of being gender conscious while covering conflicts and/or disasters 20 years ago. I was part of a four-member team of the Women and Media Group, Bombay, which went to Ahmedabad in 1985 to look specifically at the role of women in and the impact on women of the caste and communal clashes in the city in the first half of that year. I think some of the insights we gained in the process are still relevant and could be applied to the post-tsunami situation. The key lesson we learnt through that experience was the importance of taking women seriously as sources of news and information.

For example, our report was the first to highlight the severe economic impact of the disturbances on large numbers of ordinary people in the city, especially those involved in the unorganised or informal sector of work. We stumbled upon this story because we spent a lot of our time talking to women, particularly poor women, many of them home-based workers and street vendors. In the 1980s, an estimated 29 to 33 per cent of the women organised by the Ahmedabad-based Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), for example, were the sole supporters of their families; a substantial percentage of the rest earned more than the male members of their families. And, of course, it is widely known that women’s earnings generally go directly towards meeting the basic needs of their families, while a substantial proportion of many men’s earnings is often spent on personal habits such as drinking, smoking and gambling. So women’s loss of income during the five months of trouble proved disastrous for a large number of families.

This grim reality was hardly reflected in the media at the time, partly because of their tendency to rely on the “authorities,” “leaders” of various groups and sundry “experts” for information on and analysis of crisis situations. I think it is important to note that things have not changed much in the intervening years in this respect – the mandatory, usually superficial and ill-informed, “quotes” and “sound bites” from the so-called man/woman-on-the-street that have become media staples these days hardly count.

The media’s neglect of this significant side effect of the disturbances had a serious negative fallout in practical terms. Apparently ignorant about the importance of women’s economic activity, the government’s relief and rehabilitation efforts did not take into account the loss of livelihood suffered by thousands of women working in the informal sector. So they and their families did not receive the kind of assistance they needed to survive in the short term, and rebuild their lives in the long term.

Media coverage of the impact of the tsunami disaster on people’s livelihoods, seems to have focused so far primarily on the fishermen, their boats, nets, and so on. While restoration of fishing is no doubt an obvious and important issue that needs to be urgently tackled, too little attention is apparently being paid to other economic activities in the coastal areas, including those involving women. This gap could have serious repercussions in terms of the reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts, both official and otherwise.

While gender is often seen as a narrow, niche issue, the fact is that gender awareness can actually lead to a better, more holistic understanding of any situation. Taking the time and trouble to talk to women and women’s groups – even in crisis situations – can not only yield insights into the larger picture but also point the way to special stories that are not only interesting but significant.

For instance, perhaps the most significant of our discoveries in Ahmedabad two decades ago was the debilitating impact of curfew on the lives of ordinary citizens, particularly the poor, who cannot afford to stock up on provisions. During the troubles in the city at that time, curfew was imposed round the clock, often for as long as seven to ten days at a stretch, at times even touching the maximum permissible limit of 500 hours. Curfew not only meant a total stoppage of work, since nobody was allowed out of their homes, but it forced large families to survive for days on the meagre provisions they happened to have at home when curfew was announced – often in the dead of night. On women fell the task of managing the difficult situation of feeding hungry families with nothing but onions and gram or wheat flour, of pacifying wailing children with black tea…

The media naturally missed this story because they had not talked to women, especially poor women, in the affected areas. If they had bothered to record and highlight the everyday hardships encountered by innocent citizens as a result of the disturbances, particularly the resultant curfew, perhaps the authorities could have been persuaded to devise practical ways to alleviate their sufferings. But media reports – then and now – tend to dismiss matters such as the imposition or relaxation of curfew in a single, bland sentence, if at all, on the basis of information provided by the authorities, giving no hint of what it means for the people concerned. We uncovered this aspect of the problem mainly because we had spent time talking to women in poor, violence-torn localities for whom, in the words of Ela Bhat of SEWA, “Curfew is a kind of violence.”

What could be the equivalent of this in the post-tsunami situation? The question of what kind of relief measures and/or materials would be most useful – since women are likely to be the ones trying to ensure that their families are fed and clothed? The question of how and how long the temporary relief camps should operate, what assistance people need when they are in a position to return to their villages, what role the affected people themselves – including women – can and should play in rebuilding their homes and lives, what precautions need to be taken to ensure that reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts take the needs of women and other disadvantaged groups into account, how to make sure that the situation of women and other traditionally deprived sections of society is better, not worse, in the post-tsunami scenario?

Lessons learnt in Maharashtra after the major earthquake there in 1993, which have subsequently been put to use in some areas affected by subsequent earthquakes in Turkey as well as Gujarat, may be useful in this context, especially at this time when the reconstruction of houses and villages is about to begin in tsunami-affected areas. A visit to Latur and Osmanabad districts at the time of the 10th anniversary of the Marathwada quake revealed how critical the active involvement of women in reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts can be.

In the most badly affected villages in the area, where post-earthquake reconstruction was undertaken by external agencies, with little or no involvement of local people or institutions, the after-effects of the disaster are still sadly evident. One of the most striking features of villages that received the most attention and aid in the wake of the earthquake is the apathy and dependency of their residents ten years on. Another disturbing trend is the apparently widespread disintegration of social and family ties. Psychological distress and alcoholism are also prevalent. And this is apart from familiar, material issues such as inappropriate housing, ill-conceived public structures, malfunctioning public services, etc.

This is in sharp contrast to the situation in the 1300 “less affected” villages, where the Repair and Strengthening component of the Maharashtra Emergency Earthquake Rehabilitation Programme (MEERP) evolved quite differently. There the conventional, centralised and top-down approach was abandoned for a more community-based and owner-driven initiative, with the assistance of Swayam Shikshan Prayog (literally “self-education for empowerment”), a Mumbai-based non-governmental organisation entrusted with the task of ensuring community participation and monitoring.

SSP, which had until then been working on issues of community development with a special focus on women and economic survival, mobilised and energised women and women’s collectives in the area to become actively involved in the reconstruction and rehabilitation process. Women leaders from affected villages were provided with basic training in earthquake-resistant construction technology and motivated to become Samvad Sahayaks (or communication assistants) charged with disseminating information to and encouraging fellow villagers, especially women, to participate in rebuilding their homes and institutions and, in the process, to take charge of their own lives. Many of them obviously went on to do just that – and then some more, turning disaster into opportunity.

These women’s collectives and self-help groups subsequently formed a Sakhi Federation to strengthen their efforts to improve community life through the empowerment of women. Members of the Federation travelled to Gujarat in 2001 to link up with women affected by the earthquake there, share their experiences with them, and help them, too, to rebuild their lives in a holistic and empowering manner. I have just heard from SSP that Federation members from both Maharashtra and Gujarat will be going to coastal Tamil Nadu to enable women there to learn from their experiences as they begin the process of reconstruction and rehabilitation.

The post-Latur experience highlights the immense value of involving communities, particularly women, in the design and implementation of post-disaster plans and programmes, as well as in more long-term efforts towards appropriate, holistic development. Indeed, according to Prema Gopalan, director of SSP, “The key lesson from Latur is to listen to grass-roots women’s groups and give them a central role in matters that affect their lives.”

This view is echoed in a statement issued by Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of UNIFEM, on 5 January, which called attention to the importance of women’s networks for emotional, social and economic recovery, and stated, “As the international community organises to provide much needed assistance, it must prioritise the mobilisation and support of women’s networks that are crucial for emotional, social, and economic recovering. In short, women must be at the heart of the relief efforts and the re-building of shattered communities…”

Further, said the statement, “The responses to this devastation must simultaneously address the urgency of the present and the inequalities and injustices of the past.

The special protection needs of women and girls require attention, and the voices and perspectives of women and women’s support networks need to be given visibility in national strategies for relief and reconstruction, by aid organisations, and by the media. By responding in this way, we can turn the crisis into an opportunity for laying the foundations of a future where all people can live with dignity, security and justice.”

In all the post-tsunami coverage so far I have detected only a faint glimmer of such a possibility: one among the flurry of reports on actor Vivek Oberoi’s relief efforts did mention that his Foundation would be working through Self Help Groups (SHGs) – which are invariably women’s groups – as they move on to reconstruction and rehabilitation. The question is whether the women involved will be given a central role in planning, decision making and implementation, based on their own assessment of their communities’ needs and priorities. That is a line of inquiry that needs to be pursued in the interest of gender just reporting in the wake of the tsunami disaster.

Let us now move on to man-made disasters (and I use the term advisedly), such as communal violence, terrorism and war.

One aspect of our findings in Ahmedabad in 1985 – the sexual nature of some of the incidents then, the wide publicity given to those allegedly targeting Hindu women, and the scant media attention given to those where Muslim women were at the receiving end – could perhaps have informed subsequent coverage of communal violence in Gujarat in 1993 as well as 2002.

It is an established fact that the mainstream, nationwide media, which must be commended for widely, boldly and critically covering the intense and prolonged communal conflagration in Gujarat in 2002, were surprisingly slow to report the rapes and other forms of sexual violence that characterised the carnage. Media coverage of these crimes against women appear, by and large, to have been catalysed by the two independent reports – by an independent fact-finding team of women (and one man) and by the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) – that blew the whistle on what academic Anuradha M. Chenoy refers to as a “gendered pogrom” in her essay, ‘The Politics of Gender in the Politics of Hate’.

One of these reports, titled The Survivors Speak, released in April 2002, included a section on ‘Sexual violence and the media’, which is quite revealing. According to the report, “In many ways women have been the central characters in the Gujarat carnage, and their bodies the battleground. The Gujarati vernacular press has been the agent provocateur… Ironically, while false stories about the rape of Hindu women have done the rounds, there has been virtual silence in the media, including in the English language papers, about the real stories of sexual violence against Muslim women… When members of the fact-finding team spoke to senior journalists in Ahmedabad, their explanation was that rape stories are provocative, and that in the early days of the violence, they had to play a socially responsible role, and not incite more violence. But in the weeks that followed, the press has continued to do self-censorship about rape stories.”

According to the authors, “…yet again, Muslim women are being victimised twice over. They have suffered the most unimaginable forms of sexual abuse during the Gujarat carnage. And yet, there is no one willing to tell their stories to the world. Women’s bodies have been employed as weapons in this war – either through grotesque image-making or as the site through which to dishonour men, and yet women are being asked to bear all this silently. Women do not want more communal violence. But peace cannot be bought at the expense of the truth, or at the expense of women’s right to tell the world what they have suffered in Gujarat.”

Again, these two reports uncovered the unhappy truth about the gender-specific violence that accompanied the general violence because they sought out and spoke to women about their experiences and observations.

As far as I know, not enough introspection has been done by the media about their tardiness in reporting these gender-related crimes even while they were covering other aspects of the communal violence with due promptness and seriousness. I think such introspection is vital if media coverage of conflicts – and disasters – is to promote gender justice.

Turning to gender and media coverage of war, let me quote from the last two paragraphs of an article based on my introductory lecture to students at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai in October 2001 (during the post-9/11 attacks on Afghanistan), titled, ‘Women, War and the Media’.

“The gender angle to war coverage cannot be seen exclusively in terms of reports on violations of women’s right to physical security, including rape, sexual harassment and sexual exploitation – widespread and serious as these tend to be. It needs to also take into account women’s heightened experience of violence and trauma during periods of conflict – both physical and psychological, both within the home and outside it. It needs to spotlight the ways in which “culture” and “tradition” are often used during times of political tension and strife to curtail women’s human rights. It needs to take note of the additional social and economic burdens placed on women’s shoulders at such times, when they often find themselves solely responsible for their families (including the very old, the very young and the sick) under circumstances where even food and shelter are not always available. And it certainly needs to focus attention on women’s political rights, including their right to participate in decision-making and governance.

“If women hold up half the sky during peace time, they hold up even more of it during war time. This is surely a fact that the media has a responsibility to recognise and report. One way to begin is to acknowledge women as legitimate and vital sources of information as well as insight even in the context of war, the ultimate manifestation of machismo.”

I believe there are lessons in both the above examples for media coverage of the post-tsunami situation.

If more proof were needed of the importance and professional wisdom of taking women, their experiences and opinions on board while covering conflicts or disasters, they can be found in the essays included in the book, Terror, Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out (A. Joseph and K. Sharma, Kali for Women/Zed Books, 2003), which highlight women’s perspectives on terrorism, war and peace. In my opinion some of the most sensitive, enlightening, holistic analyses of the global scenario in the lead up to and aftermath of 9/11 were written by women whose understanding of global events and issues, including politics and economics, is informed by a gender perspective. And, as the book tries to show, women in many parts of the world wrecked by conflicts of various kinds have been commenting on them over the years.

In the introduction to the book we argue that women who have been thinking about and working on issues of gender are ideally placed to critique the fallout of 9/11 in terms of challenging the renewed faith in violence; the resurgence of narrow definitions of nationalism, national interest and national security; the “clash of civilisations” theory that divides the world into “us” and “them;” the revival of racial, ethnic and religious prejudice, and the divisive geo-political worldview that follows from these; and the close links between economic globalisation and deprivation, militarism and terrorism — all of which we see as integral to the mindset that we refer to as the 9/11 syndrome.

You only have to read the essays and articles brought together in the book to appreciate what a wealth of knowledge and understanding is available with gender-conscious women across the world and how media coverage of conflicts of various kinds could be greatly enriched by the insights such women, who are present in practically every country, could provide. The writings in the book clearly establish the relevance of gender to media staples like war and terror. They also point towards the advantages that can accrue to journalists who are aware of and therefore able to draw upon the information and ideas generated by women scholars and activists on the many complex political, economic, social and cultural aspects of these unfortunate realities of our times.

The main point I have been attempting to make here is that gender-just or gender-sensitive or gender-conscious media coverage is not just about ensuring gender balance or giving women voice or highlighting women’s special concerns and problems, which are, of course, important in themselves. It is about recognising that women have information, knowledge and opinions about every event and issue covered by the media, and that to not tap that valuable resource is to impoverish media coverage and diminish our understanding of current affairs.

In the end I can only say that I firmly believe that the media – and media professionals – stand to gain by recognising that there is a gender dimension to virtually every event, process, institution and/or individual experience covered by the media. And that gender awareness is currently inspiring some of the most interesting and innovative work emerging from different fields of knowledge, creativity and action. Journalism that takes these established realities on board will undoubtedly lead to better media coverage of the world and its people, in all their variety.

Let me end with another quote, which I think underlines, once again, the tremendous fount of wisdom and knowledge that the media often forgets to draw upon:

Peace is not an event, it’s a process.

Neidonuo Angami,

Naga Mothers’ Front

• Talk and listen to women: not only to ensure gender balance in media coverage (which is important in itself) but also because they can be vital sources of news, information, analysis, stories; not talking and listening to women may result in missing at least half the picture and many important stories.
• Do not see women and report on them solely as victims.
• Do not view women and write about them solely in terms of traditional gender roles (mothers, wives, housewives…).
• Recognise women as active citizens, as responsible members of their communities and families, who play vital roles in ensuring community/family survival and well-being.
• Be aware of and look into the special concerns, problems, vulnerabilities of women and girls (and boys) in crisis situations, especially in the context of gender-based inequality and inequity.
• Find out about women’s pre-crisis economic activities and examine the impact of the crisis on those and, thereby, on their lives and those of their families/communities.
• Remember that women are not an undifferentiated, homogenous category; ensure that women from socially and economically disadvantaged groups – and their needs, concerns and aspirations – are fairly and adequately represented; caste, class, religion/race/ethnicity, age, marital status, health status, etc., need to be taken into account.
• Ask the authorities and others involved in relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction what they are doing to assess and address women’s needs, concerns, vulnerabilities and priorities.
• Evaluate relief, reconstruction and relief measures with a gender lens.
• Remember that gender is not only about women – and that men, too, are disadvantaged in many ways by patriarchy and rigid gender roles.

Drawing on my experience as a counselor for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault and drawing from my research on the representation of sexual assault in the courtroom, particularly the Supreme Court, I would argue that the question in the tile of this essay must be inverted. It is, when one looks closely, not really a question of how women victims communicate with the media, but rather how the media (as part of a larger, hegemonic, patriarchal, misogynist, public domain) communicates women’s experience of violence and violation.

Where women survivors are concerned, the communication, once the decision in favour of disclosure is made, is simple. It is a statement of what happened in the language that they know. That the language itself is coded against plain and direct disclosure, that word conflate honour and sexual experience in ways that make it impossible to disentangle one from the other are problems that cripple women’s access to justice even today. In that sense nothing has changed since Mathura. But even so, women speak. The problem is that they do not speak in capsules. They do not tell all in one sitting at one time. They do not begin with the most painful, most injurious experiences. Neither their pain, nor their experience can be “captured” on camera in a single shot. In the course of the telling they peel off layer after layer and it is all of that that is the story. As a counselor, I find myself living through each story and then coming out beaten into silence by the pain and the courage. It takes a long time to be able to retell the stories – those that can be retold, that is. Most of the stories of violence that have been told to me by those who have survived it have been spread over months, sometimes even a year or more, sometimes “incidentally”, when the stated purpose of seeking help is to prevent eviction or dispossession. In some, women have “made their peace” with extreme abuse, reckoning that the environment outside might be even more hostile to them and perhaps even more violent. After twenty years of daily sexual abuse and marital rape, when Priyamvada decided not to go ahead with the divorce proceedings and stated in writing that “nothing had happened”, telling us even while handing over the letter, that one must not lose faith in the possibility of even the worst criminal turning good, we were pained. At what cost do women find peace, and what kind of peace do they find.

Sometimes, women have died without making their peace, insisting that their bodies should not be handed over to the family that deserted them in their lifetime. When Varalakshmi knew she would die alone and uncared for in some small hospital in the edge of town, having battled destitution and desertion after leading a relatively comfortable life, having coped with children and husband pressing charges of insanity when the demand for livelihood support was persistent and based on real estimates of a reasonable, healthy life, rather than agreeing to the humiliation of a nominal dole, she was categorical in her assertion to the doctor that her body must not be handed over to her husband and children. When they heard this, the husband and children went to court and procured an order in their favour, because the judge felt the woman’s soul must rest in peace and she should not lie unclaimed to be disposed of by the municipality. But she was unclaimed for in life. She had no home, no family, the only support was the counseling center where she would every few weeks spend hours. There are others like Gloria who having been raped and abused by the husband for six years, escape leaving behind a three-month-old child. Eight years later, they decide to revisit the past and press for divorce and custody of the child, on grounds of cruelty. Where is the space in our fields of vision to account for the fact that it might actually take a woman eight long years to be able to revisit the site of violence and decide to act on that experience. When Fatima killed her step father because he attempted to rape her, she was assaulted in police custody and then imprisoned. The accretion of violence and the remedy women have against violence being more violence, negation and denial, is a telling comment on the society we live in. How will these stories be told in the media? How long will the media wait to hear a story? What would be retained and what edited out as inconsequential or irrelevant? A correspondent in a TV channel said to me that there would be no problem interviewing a ten-year-old victim of rape by the father, because they would put a shroud on her. To which I said, I have two daughters and I am asking you this question: How would you react if this was your daughter and I offered to put a shroud on her because I wanted an authentic story? Clearly, in her view I was being offensive and unreasonable.

The argument I made was simple. The media can report the case and then find other ways of focusing on the issue in question, or even investigating it, rather than asking a child who was completely traumatised to speak in front of a camera with a shroud on her head. There is an impatience in the mainstream media. The impatience, I would argue has to do with the structure of the public domain itself. As it is the public domain is structured in ways that actively exclude certain classes of people and it is a space where dominant hegemonies are all pervasive. In that context therefore, all those classes that are not participant/perpetrators are kept out of visibility, the only exceptions being made when the visibility is in terms of the dominant discourse – and the media then renders the experience in the space/time/method that is predetermined. In attempting alternative representations, therefore, what one is actually doing is cutting against the edifice of hegemonic patriarchy, something that is in its very doing unlikely to find favour. And one can explain this using different examples. However, while one remedy is attempting alternative representations, the corollary to it is altering existing patterns of representation in the public domain. In looking at questions of human rights and gender therefore, one also needs to shift between fields of representation because it is skewed patterns in one filed that obstruct the giving of voice in another. It is at this intersection between the two different fields of representation that the second part of this essay is located. How does one address questions of access, diversity and formal representation in the public domain? And I would like to tie up this question with the other critical concern of the media, namely the right to information. It is useful to look at questions of representation in the context of the access to the right to information.

How would women, across class, whose access to the public is severely curtailed by practices of violence and dual exclusion, even begin to access the right to information? In a situation where even women of privileged classes across caste and community are excluded from formal politics and governance through brazen practices of misogyny that are widespread and legitimate (even our Parliament is not an exception), how would we begin to think of the right to information also as a question of physical access to public spaces where information can be obtained and accountability and transparency sought? I will look at two key issues that women across class must have remedy against, one in the private sphere of the family and the other in the public sphere of work.

The delivery of justice for women has been virtually absent. Dealing with cases of domestic violence and sexual assault on a day-to-day basis, it is clear to us that there has not been any abatement in violence against women. Attempting to find life supports for women who suddenly find themselves hurled onto the streets after a decade or more of marriage, bigamy has always figured as a problem that dispossesses women. Yet, when the Andhra Pradesh legislature silently passed the amendments making 498A and bigamy compoundable, the justifications given were that men are suffering untold misery and violence in marriages and the law minister at that time even went on record saying that the bigamy amendment would help rural women enter second marriages unhindered. Where is the record of the debate that led to the passing of these amendments? What were the statistical records that this move was based on? Why was there no public debate prior to the passing of these amendments? It is true that women find it very difficult to sustain charges of domestic assault and often withdraw their cases. But that is not because the charges are false but because they find it easier to cope with a hostile home environment than to cope with a hostile and misogynist public space, of which the criminal justice system and the legal profession is often part. It is that hostility that is responsible for the failure of 498A, not the treachery of women, as people (read men) are quick to assert. What alternative mechanism will we have in place to provide effective remedies to women against the increasing violence in their homes?

In 1997, the Supreme Court in response to the assault on Bhanwari Devi delivered the Visakha judgment to curb sexual harassment in the workplace. As part of this process, all state governments were instructed to set up complaints committees according to specified guidelines, and were asked to report back on action taken. Universities and employers, private or public are also expected to follow this procedure. Seven years later, neither government departments nor centres of learning have cared to put these mechanisms in place according to the specifications. Nominal committees have been set up in some places, but our information shows that none of these committees even in premier universities and centres of higher education in the country conform to the guidelines in any sense. In government departments, there is a complete lack of commitment to addressing this issue in any serious fashion. Yet, sexual harassment remains the single most serious problem faced by women in the workplace, posing a constant threat to security of person and affecting efficiency and work performance adversely, irrespective of position. There are instances of women officers of the prestigious diplomatic services being harassed, assaulted even, but preferring not to report the incidents in the interest of career prospects, bearing the scars of the trauma for years later. Beginning with missions abroad down to the smallest workplace in a corner of the country, Vishakha must apply so as to create a secure environment for women in public spaces. We need also mechanisms in place to provide women of the working classes, in the unorganised sector, for instance or in the free trade zones, which are notorious for routinely violating women’s right to dignity and security in employment. While the setting up of these committees and ensuring their effective functioning might not eliminate the problem, the process is an indispensable part of the basic human right to bodily integrity and security of person, not a question of choice.

These are only two issues, and rather arbitrarily selected. Action Aid, in its cross-country study on the impact of violence on basic education of girls found that entrenched practices of violence severely limited the participation of girls in the schooling system. And this is not the only impact of violence against girls. Our work for over a decade with women writers across the country shows that education and class privilege do not alter the fact that women are hindered in their participation in the public domain, the censorship civil society unleashes on them being far more virulent than the official censorship on grounds of sedition, and the safeguards to their freedom of expression being non-existent, unlike official censorship. And if the right to information is part of the freedom of expression, how will we as women structure it so as to make it accessible to all women?

The second aspect of unhindered access concerns the access to the public domain by persons with disabilities. If, as has been stated earlier in this essay, information assumes access, the progressive curtailment of access abridges the ability to seek and use information at all levels. The most serious problem in dealing with the issue of differently-abled people is the absence of any formal mechanism to record numbers and the unavailability of these numbers in the public domain. What we need at this point is an official National Disability Census that will create the information base necessary to address the issues in this sector effectively. In this context, it is necessary also to evolve a Disability Index that will then become the reference point for all employers and institutions to measure the degree to which they conform to the anti discrimination commitment of the state on disability issues. Providing information on the Disability Index must be made mandatory and communicated across languages, so that in the absence of requisite numbers or transparency it will become possible for persons with disabilities to seek remedial action through the formal justice delivery system.

In the context of universal primary education, how is the network of government schools equipped to make access routinely available to children with disabilities? With the exception of those mentally challenged children who require special education, all other children could with the provision of teaching aids and creation of physical access participate in the normal formal schooling system with ease. This would require in the first instance, a disability census and the creation of infrastructure to fulfil the responsibility of providing access.

Questions of basic survival and adequate protection for persons with disabilities, especially women in rural areas remain largely unaddressed. While this is part of the larger environment in which routine and systematic violence against women is endemic, it is necessary to address the specific needs and interests of women with disabilities within a broad human rights framework. The meaning of equality under the Constitution has been addressed in terms of education, employment opportunities, and creation of access to public transport. While each of these is important, they also limit the scope of the issue in the very articulation. Figures of children with disabilities being able to access normal schooling are inadequate and do not cover the field, the census being a very urgent need. The Persons with Disabilities Act does not touch upon the need for affirmative action to be made mandatory and binding on all employers, but merely ensures the creation of special facilities and protection of promotional avenues once employment has been obtained. Ironically, even while protecting the right to employment in whatever limited fashion, there has been no systematic review of rules of public employment in each sector, nor any attempt to amend or repeal provisions that violate the state’s commitment to end discrimination against persons with disabilities. The AP Judicial Services Rules have a sub clause in clause 12 that persons with bodily defect or infirmity are ineligible. While even the mere use of the terms “bodily defect or infirmity” are objectionable and violate the fundamental right to dignity of persons with disabilities, in terms of procedures for selection, the exact applicability of these terms is not defined and the decision of whether or not to apply the provision is entirely a matter of interpretation. Visually challenged lawyers have been barred from entering the judicial services under this rule.

The ambulift cases have been a significant milestone in mainstreaming disability rights in judicial discourse, by raising the critical question of access to public transportation by persons with disabilities. However, the applicability of the decision has been limited in characteristic fashion to air travel alone, while the majority of persons with disabilities use the cheaper modes of public transport routinely and on an everyday basis. The provision of seats and concessional travel is one small part of the solution. Facilitating easier and more dignified access, which is really the issue the Abidi cases raise, remains unaddressed, thereby curtailing mobility of persons with disabilities in serious ways. Issues of access and mobility undoubtedly are critical elements of the right to information for persons with disabilities.

Questions of democratic governance within communities that have mobilised themselves around issues are addressed systematically and checks and balances put into place to steer clear of any potential for the concentration of power or its unethical use. However, while it is relatively easier to raise questions of accountability and transparency with respect to public resources and their distribution and access to marginalised communities, often, the core issues of equity within communities remain largely unaddressed even within the democratic spaces of movements, various unacknowledged forms of exclusion serving to limit the public domain to a largely homogenous “oppressed class”. It is relatively easy to pose the question of the right to information with respect to governments because there is a tradition of adversarial discourse between the state and citizen, with each end keeping the other in check. The questions are more difficult to pose with respect to oppositional struggles. The field of struggle and mass mobilisation is particularly significant because it is representative of diversity in ways that the state and normative social spaces (the dominant public) are not. Issues of caste, adivasi rights, political and civil rights, questions of identity and the rights that emanate from identity politics, rights related to trade unionism and the freedom of association, rights of GLBT communities, labour rights, issue related to child rights, homelessness and so many more have broken homogenous hegemonies in civil society, rupturing boundaries and writing in processes of inclusion in the public in radically new ways. The space of struggle itself, however has ironically been relatively resistant to the same processes of inclusion internally, so that while representation and accountability are posited as problems without, homogeneity of interest blurs questions of diversity within. This is not of course to say that diversity or the lack of it is not a problem within movements. Dalits, women and minority activists have consistently critiqued the lack of inclusive diverse processes within movements. Whole new movements have grown out of this critique. Yet, problems of hierarchy, of representation, of leadership, and autonomy continue to bind worlds of resistance within unnecessarily narrow confines, and tend to nurture adversarial politics between movements that address each other’s concerns inadequately. Susheela’s question really acquires immediate relevance in this context. Representation and voice are critical elements of the right to information and must reflect democracy within.

The right to information can only be realised through processes of inclusion and representation. If the space of social existence is undercut by exclusion and resistance to formal numerical representation; or if it is undercut by the persistence of little “private” spaces where democracy and autonomy are legitimately suspended; or even where the lack of representation is explained away by substituting the “representation of interests” for actual physical representation by people belonging to excluded groups, an assumption can safely be made that the access to the right to information exists only in very limited partial ways. Women today continue to hear the argument that they are unable to rise to leadership positions within movements in sufficient numbers because they are hampered by “natural constraints” or are so tied down by tradition that it will take them longer to break free than it has taken the men. Peace processes from the north and northeast to the south continue to exclude women and by that token their voices and interests although in most instances, women have in fact been the architects of peace on a day-to-day basis. The rights of persons with disabilities have only now begun to touch human rights movements, as also questions related to the right to sexual orientation. The space of struggle therefore remains fraught with problems on the critical issue of representation.

The public domain of the state, however, poses an even more serious problem. While information can generally be sought and obtained, albeit with difficulty with respect to most of the executive and the legislature, the judiciary at all levels remains impervious to change. In a situation where we argue that the right to information is justiceable and that it is an intrinsic part of democratic functioning, the same questions of accountability, transparency and representation must bind the judiciary as much as, if not more than, the parties making the claim. The principle is the same. Justice can only be impartial if the diversity of civil society is reflected in the constitution of the judiciary at all levels. While women get into the subordinate judiciary, the figures for women in the judiciary are pyramidical, with the figure for the Supreme Court remaining at a constant 1, forcing a doubt of whether this is entirely a coincidence. Figures for dalits within the judiciary exhibit the same structure, and the debate surrounding the elevation of Justice Balakrishnan is too well known to be repeated here. There are no figures for persons with disabilities within the judiciary because there is a bar on their entry at the lowest level, so the pyramid cannot rise without a base. It is necessary at this point to focus the right to information, transparency and accountability on the judiciary, because both the opacity in functioning and homogeneity in constitution confound the justice claims of people of marginalised groups. Justice must be seen to be done.

The normalisation of violence, particularly against girls and women across caste, caste and community, and the entrenchment of patriarchal authority curtails women’s assumption of full blown, autonomous leadership in movements on the one hand, and serves as a powerful instrument of exclusion from the public domain on the other, with impunity being guaranteed to perpetrators of violence against women – Gujarat demonstrating to us the extent of violation women must bear. The right to representation especially in governance is a basic precondition for democracy. Transparency and accountability in governance cannot be effectively achieved simultaneously with practices of exclusion in governance at different levels. To the extent that they are achieved, they will still reflect the same hierarchies and structures of dominance that are sought to be undermined, since the physical location of political power and legitimate power in the public domain still continue to remain unchanged. The expansion of the public domain through the conscious adoption of systematic processes of formal representation is the only way that diversity and difference will gain any legitimacy in civil society. There are several examples that illustrate that even where there have been gains, the absence of a formal reconstitution of decision-making bodies has resulted in the ineffectiveness of remedies bitterly fought for and won. The absence of any commitment to formal representation also results in a distortion and invisibilising of discrimination in the public domain. And both the invisibility and the distortion are manifest in the representation of women and other marginalised sections in the mainstream media.

[Note: Part of this essay was written for the Seminar issue on the Right to Information – January 2005]

[A discussion on the anthology No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh written on the Partition of India, edited by Ritu Menon, New Delhi, Kali for Women, 2004]

The 449 km Punjab border is lined with 600,000 landmines, laid in place over 10-15 years by the Indian government, in order to contain the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s. At Hussainiwala, fields and trees stretch away into the horizon, shrouded in thick mist. In the near distance on the Indian side there is electrified fencing, concertina barbed wire in great hoops across the land. Between the international border (IB) separating India and Pakistan and the fence are strips of land cultivated by local farmers. Technically within the Indian border but outside the fencing, farmers are guarded by Border Security Force (BSF) personnel while they till their fields. Cattle, ignorant of the danger of landmines, sometimes stray across and are grievously injured. Women, who usually look after the cattle, are no longer allowed to enter those lands between the fencing and the IB, for “security reasons”. For social and other reasons they can no longer relieve themselves in the fields because they are patrolled by the BSF, nor can they carry food to their menfolk when they farm their land. And whenever the Army and the border villages are on high alert, villagers are told to pack up and leave with hardly any notice.

In many very particular ways, women experience the fallout of conflict swiftly and undeniably, as we know from all available accounts of current conflicts across the world. In our part of the world, especially in the recent past and especially in the light of high levels of ethnic violence in the entire South Asian region, the impact is not only undeniable, it is lingering. The fencing of the Punjab border in the west has been followed by that along the Line of Control (LOC), sometimes called the “line of hatred” by local villagers; those who have been trying to study border populations know how difficult it is to sustain the enquiry because people, particularly women, are constantly on the move. In other words, dislocated.

The Partition of India in 1947 recorded one of the most massive peace-time upheavals ever, and it is generally agreed that its reverberations persisted and are still being felt with varying degrees of intensity in the three countries most affected by it. There have been at least four major outbreaks of war along the eastern and western borders of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; literally scores of skirmishes on a more or less regular basis, some of which have flared up but stopped just short of war; and what is called “low-intensity” warfare is an almost constant feature in all our border areas.

Post-independence, the political history of the subcontinent has been fairly richly and systematically documented and analysed, usually from a nationalist perspective. Subaltern and marginal histories are now being studied more closely, but although they have contributed to decentering the historical narrative to some extent, the historical perspective remains predominantly centrist. If we were to look for a de-nationalised, people’s perspective on that epochal event, we would find it elusive and patchy, mostly fictional, mostly male. Rarely, if ever, has there been an attempt to present cross-border accounts that are experiential or that address shared concerns or histories as a consequence of 1947 and 1971; and, to the best of our knowledge, such an offering has not yet been made from a gendered perspective. In that sense this anthology is a first and modest beginning, made with the hope that non-fiction writing by Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women on Partition, both contemporary and current, will open up new ways of looking not only at what happened then, but at how lives have been lived subsequently within three new nations, along porous borders with overlapping, sometimes conflicting and sometimes complementary, claims on identity. In situations of one’s choosing, or not; with or without agency; with or without fortitude.

The weak, they say, have the purest sense of history, because they know anything can happen. The weak and the powerless, one might add. Women, even if not “weak”, have almost always been powerless in the larger meaning of the word, historically speaking, and the question that interests us here is: how does this situation influence their sense of history? It is not a question that is usually asked of women — they are presumed to be outside history because they are outside the public and the political, where history is made. Consequently they have no part in it. At best, if unusually privileged, they may be witness to it, very rarely they may play a minor role in contributing to it; but generally they are the flotsam and jetsam of historical events — present perhaps, but of no great significance. Afterwards, they are called upon to pick up the pieces, clean up the mess, rebuild and resettle, somehow manage, somehow forgive and forget. Above all, forget. Their “natural” inclination is to preserve, to do good works, engage in charitable and welfare activities, continue to do what they do best: nurturing and mothering. Theirs is the precinct of the personal, and once the calamity is behind them, the chaos ordered again, they withdraw from their brief foray into the public.

So what could they have to say about 1947 that hasn’t already been said or fictionalised? And even if they did, how could they imbue the political with a different meaning? What exactly would their accounts tell us?

By demolishing the opposition between the personal and the political, by demonstrating that in women’s experience, the personal is the political, feminism and feminist historiography have validated the importance of the experiential dimension in any analytical endeavour. Neither exclusive of all other factors, nor excluded because subjective or individual, the personal may query the political, may subvert it, may rephrase it, may even rewrite or reconfigure it.

Dadi, in Sara Suleri’s essay, ‘Excellent Things in Women’, embodies such a challenge. She simply ignored independence and Partition. “She had long since dispensed with any loyalties larger than the pitiless give-and-take of people who are forced to live together in the same place,” we are told, “and she resented independence for the distances it made.” With one imperious decision she dismissed the vanity of nation-making, recognising at once what it had undone in the bargain. In her eloquent, deeply moving and deeply political disquisition on “Papa and Pakistan”, Dadi’s granddaughter further exposes the myth of the nation — but exposes also its intrinsically male, spontaneously gendered accoutrements. The media, the military, the rhetoric, the deluding mirage of victory. Her granddaughter concludes, “That most modern thing, a Muslim nation or a Hindu nation,” has no place for women, no place for her.

This no-woman’s land may or may not have borders but it does have boundaries, and they are uncannily similar across national borders. In her strong desire to resist the stereotype, the crude defining of identity and allegiance, Shehla Shibli in her essay, ‘Either, Neither or Both’, simultaneously repudiates and embraces both Hindu and Muslim. Adopts a nation, but does not barter her self, refuses to renounce one for the other. Across the expanse of India, across the eastern border, a mother and daughter, Sumati and Basanti choose — and then keep choosing as borders are drawn, disappear or are redrawn again and again. Their daughter and granddaughter, Meghna Guha-Thakurta, recalls their history in her biographic essay, ‘Two Women, One Family, Divided Nations’. The long duration of division plays out in three generations of women, all of whom choose differently, inter-leaving gender and nation, country and community, and the compulsions of history.

Between times, however, their narratives describe the dailiness of their lives, that forgotten dimension of history in which differences are forgiven and hostilities buried. That “pitiless give-and-take” of people forced to live together blurs the boundaries between them so that choices, when they have to be made, are forced upon them by a violent disruption of the everyday, the settled co-existence. A riot, a war, ethnic cleansing. Master narratives dwell on the momentous and extraordinary, reiterating them until they are normalised and internalised, thus usurping the importance of the ordinary. But marginal voices restore us to the places — and spaces — where the desultory conversations of the day are resumed and, slowly, the respite of routine restored. It is in these interstices of history that real life is resumed.

Yet it was only because Bengal was spared the long and terrifying violence of Punjab that choosing was at all possible, and changing one’s mind allowed. Sumati and Basanti’s intergenerational narrative unfolds a family’s history, as well as national histories on either side of the border, tracking the changing self-perception of the Bangladeshi state from secular and Bangla, to Islamic and Arabised. In an ironic reversal, what is blurred now is that sharp sense of difference between Pakistan and Bangladesh that spurred the 1971 War of Liberation: the dilution of Bengali nationalism in favour of pan-Islamism has kept the border between West and East Bengal porous as succeeding generations of those who initially stayed back, now cross over.

The relative “peace” — by which one merely means the absence of war — of India’s eastern border is in direct contrast to the turmoil in Kashmir in the west. Despite a huge military deployment along the Line of Control, border crossings by militants, extremists, civilians and others occur regularly. When hostilities between India and Pakistan abate civilian traffic increases, with people crossing over for the day to meet relatives in Azad Kashmir (or POK – Pakistan Occupied Kashmir as the Indian government puts it), to watch cricket matches in Lahore, sometimes just to go shopping. But if, as in the recent past, all comings and goings between India and Pakistan by rail, road and air were suspended, then the only goods allowed to cross the border is dry fruit from Afghanistan.

The border town of Uri in Kashmir is a non-Kashmiri speaking tract made up mostly of Gujjars and Paharis. Luv Puri, a reporter recently in Uri, writes that a villager, Haji Assadullah, now 77 years old, has been separated from his family members, including three brothers and three sisters, since November 1947. His relatives live just 20 km away in Azad Kashmir. In Asida village on the Line of Control, every resident has a family member living on the other side. Bibi Jaan (72), a Gujjar woman, was married in this village before 1947 and her maternal village is two km across the LoC. For the last 50 years, she has not seen her two brothers and their families. With tears in her eyes she says: “We are separated by two km but to reach my maternal village, I have to travel hundreds of miles through the Wagah border. My financial condition did not allow me to take this route. I could not see my ailing parents before they died.” She says the time has come to demolish this “line of hatred” and pass on a legacy of love to the next generation.

Ranjit Kaur (or Jeet Masi’s) story about her six-month sojourn in Muzaffarabad, in the mid-1980s, is significant in this context. Here is an ordinary Hindu couple who decide that they want to spend some time with their erstwhile neighbours and acquaintances in the city they were forced to flee in 1947. To have been able to do so more than forty years later means several things. It means that they had kept in touch; that frequent exchange visits had been taking place; that a goodly number of Hindus had converted and stayed back in Azad Kashmir; that the ties that bind communities, even mixed communities, can survive the worst violence. But they can also be severed, as the last decade of dissent in Kashmir illustrates. Now, bridging the communal divide in the Valley is one of the most urgent of peace-building activities; here, too, women have played a very important, though difficult, role.

So little is known about the Hindus and Sikhs who now call themselves Sheikhs and live in Azad Kashmir. Indeed, writing and reporting on both sides of the Kashmir border has generally been so statist and establishmentarian, so focused on militancy or national security or migration or insurgency or freedom fighting as the case may be, that people and their lives, and the necessary accommodations they make, do not form part of the historical record. Jeet Masi’s starkly unadorned account of the experiences of women who were abducted is almost shocking in its matter-of-factness, deceptive in its brevity; because in her telling is encapsulated the entire gamut of experience. Women who could never be traced, those who resisted then finally succumbed, others whose strategies for survival included honourable compromise — or doing violence to their own children. Women like them challenge the very notion of fixed identities, of birth-bound allegiances to religion and community because their only unchanging identity is that of womanhood. Women, as we know, have no country and so they can make no claims on it, not even the normal, fundamental claims of citizenship. As Kamlabehn Patel’s and many other social workers’ accounts make clear, women were bartered like oranges and apples; apportioned between countries according to official classification — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh; minor; legitimate or illegitimate, abducted or not, forcibly converted vs. voluntarily married —with no choice or rights in the matter. Not only do women have no country, they cannot even call their bodies their own.

A refugee’s right of return, the cardinal principle of seeking refuge and granting asylum, was never available to Partition refugees, even though the thousands who fled at a moment’s notice, with no more than the clothes on their backs, were sure they would return when the fury of violence abated. They travelled by road in bullock-carts, in huge fool caravans by truck and train, they travelled without a destination, not knowing when, or if, they would ever arrive. On the way, they could be relieved of whatever they might have carried — cash, jewellery, gold, food; or their wives, sisters, daughters. But still they believed they would return. Years later in the course of our research when we met widows and destituted women at the Karnal Mahila Ashram in Haryana (India), they still spoke of Mianwali or Montgomery or Abbotabad or Sargodha or Multan or Sialkot as home. “Now there is no country,” said Somavanti to us “This is not ours, that is no longer ours.”

Before the Ashram was set up in 1948 to look after and rehabilitate “unattached” women and children, the almost 750,000 refugees who flowed into East Punjab were housed in a refugee camp at Kurukshetra. This was the largest of about 45 camps in Punjab, a huge tented city, initially run by the army under the control of the central government. Spread over an area of about nine square miles, it was divided into four townships, each with its own staff of rationing officers, storekeepers, inspectors, assistants, clerks, typists and record keepers. Mrs K.N. Sawhney was a camp commandant at Kurukshetra during the first few years of its functioning, an unusual job for a young girl at the time. But calamities can also make for opportunities for women, when the breakdown of normalcy and familial protection require them to step outside the boundaries of home and hearth. There were many like Mrs Sawhney. Miss Makhan Singh, Bhag Mehta, Gulab Pandit, Damyanti Sahgal, Purnima Banerji, Dr Sushila Nayyar, Sucheta Kriplani, Bibi Amtus Salaam, Begum Anis Kidwai, Mrs Handoo, Mrs Shobha Nehru, Vimla Dang…

The real work of rehabilitating women fell to women; not just those whose names can be found in government records and ministry reports; not the score or more with whom we spoke but countless others, volunteers who worked in camps, in homes, in seva sadans and women’s service centres as doctors, teachers, trainers, wardens, camp commandants, counsellors and companions in the painful and protracted business of relocating and rebuilding. There were the women of the YWCA, the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), the Women’s Indian Association, women who belonged to the Indian National Army, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the CPI and other political parties, to any number of voluntary organisations; and individual women, many themselves widowed by Partition or unmarried as a consequence of it. Some, like Anis Kidwai persevered in the face of personal tragedy — her husband, the prominent nationalist Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, was shot dead in Mussoorie by unknown assailants. Stunned and grief-stricken, Begum Kidwai was advised by Mahatma Gandhi to sublimate her sorrow in the service of those much worse off than her, which she did for many, many years.

The rehabilitation of refugees from the east followed a rather different course to that in the West, as has been well documented by recent studies. There is no doubt that the scale of violence in Punjab and the massive exodus of people from the west was not matched by similar upheaval and population flows in the east. It is also true that the response of the state and central governments in relief work and in the organisation of rehabilitation and the settlement of claims led to complaints of neglect and discrimination by refugees in Bengal. By the end of 1956, roughly three and a half million refugees had come into West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. Renuka Roy, Congress Member of Parliament from West Bengal, has said that “the unwillingness to accept facts and the reluctance of the Central government to rehabilitate the refugees in the east is one of the major reasons why even today the refugee problem in eastern India has not been solved”. The Liaquat-Nehru Pact of 1950 according to her, was based on the assumption that the influx from East Pakistan was a temporary affair, and that both countries would encourage the return of their citizens, see that their homes and belongings were returned to them and ensure that they could resume living without fear.

The West Bengal government, for its part, disagreed with this assumption and many in the opposition, including the Bharatiya Jan Sangh and the Communist Party of India, argued against it. Despite this, the Pact was approved, but the stalemate on the ground persisted. Manikuntala Sen’s is one of the few accounts we have by a woman of the time actively engaged in rehabilitation in the east, but even more importantly, possibly the only really detailed one on the impact of Direct Action Day in Calcutta in August 1946.

In spite of her horror and revulsion at the premeditated violence of that day, she says she could never be reconciled to the two-nation theory. “My birth-place (Barisal) would become another country, and my heart would break. I knew my mother, brothers, sisters and the extended family would never leave their homes and come to Calcutta as refugees… I was even more upset when I learnt that the Party (CPI) had agreed to the Partition.” But she put aside her unhappiness and plunged into relief work up until her election as a member of the legislative assembly from Kalighat in 1952. She confirms observations made by other scholars of the emergence of refugee women as a political force in West Bengal, as well as the opportunity presented to them by adversity, for stepping out. Phulrenu Guha and Hasna Saha, both from erstwhile East Bengal, too, corroborate Manikuntala Sen’s observations; and Phulrenudi makes the interesting point that the Andaman Islands could have emerged as another “East Bengal” if the West Bengal government had seriously considered it an alternative site for refugee resettlement. What strikes the reader today is the fact that, no matter how dissimilar the experiences of East and West might have been, the women who were involved with rebuilding lives used grit and imagination to overcome the odds — both government-induced and otherwise. They negotiated, subverted, manipulated or bullied, as required, to do the right thing by the women in their charge.

The great preoccupations of the human condition — freedom, nation, religion, home, friend and foe, Self and Other — are shot through with those other great themes —loss, exile, death and destruction, displacement and violence — and they compel us to look anew at those age-old borders and boundaries of nation and religion, community and identity; and at those ancient myths about shame and honour, blood and belonging. For these women who have “written” Partition, all these are open to question.

And, indeed, the difficulty of closure plagues people and nations, both. The unsettled histories of division are embodied in the figure of the refugee, the nowhere people who hover at the edges of nations reflecting, in Tayyab Mahmud’s words, “the desires and anxieties of the state”. The refugee/immigrant, in his analysis, remains an outsider, an alien body, to be normalised, homogenised and assimilated. As a non-citizen, she is to be marginalised in the distribution of legal rights and political protections. As a cultural signifier, she is to be erased. As a violator of borders, she provides the rationale to ever strengthen the territorial divides.

But in the Indian subcontinent the “alien body” is often the “outsider” within, resisting assimilation and homogenisation. Post-Partition, Ismat Chughtai astutely observed that, “Those whose bodies were whole had hearts that were splintered… in the end many souls remained behind in Hindustan while their bodies started off for Pakistan.”

These split personalities of nations and peoples disallow reconciliation, make for a pathology of semi-permanent disease. In the end, the image of those farmers on the Punjab border ploughing their fields between barbed-wire fencing returns to haunt: refugees on their own land.

First they threw me out of my home
Again and again
I was ousted from the city where I took shelter.

They say I will be thrown out of this city too.

In each place I left behind
Grew the fruit I had planted,
Haunted by my absence.

They say my spirit
Spelt destruction.
Now, I have a bag of seeds
All tied up
To lean my back against.

Spinning around me
Is the earth
So spinning,
Some day, my home will
Spin into view again

And I will open my bundle
Never to tie it up again.

— Kshama Kaul

I

Because she is the centre of the central episode of the Mahabharata. She is the voice of ethical enquiry into the nature of Dharma.

This text, which has been described as the veritable encyclopedia of the land called Bharata, is a text of agonising moral dilemmas and ethical enquiries. The questions regarding the nature of the Dharma, its true meaning, and its import in the real life situations, its individual and collective significance haunt the text from beginning to the end. And these are not rhetorical pronouncements but the fractions of the real, felt anguish, literally a matter of life and death. The Sarpa in the Ajgar Parva of the Vana Parva or the Yaksha in the famed Yaksha-Prashna is not going to revive the brothers of Yudhisthira if the later is not able to satisfy the queries of Dharma satisfactorily.

Even the great battle itself is prefaced by a marathon discourse on the nature of Dharma. The conclusion of the war has left the victors in a most distraught mood, forcing the chief amongst them – Yudhisthira – comparing both the victors and losers to a pack of dogs who fought for a piece of flash, and he – Yudhisthira – has no appetite for it now, in his stupendous victory (12/7/10). His remorse knows no bounds, he knows he deserves not the laurels but the curses and tells so much to Gandhari: “I am the brutal killer of your son, I became the cause of the destruction of the whole earth, I deserve nothing but your curse.”(11/15/3)

Mahabharata abounds in graphic descriptions of violence. After all it is a bloody story of fratricidal conflict over the right to rule, and what is left to rule? The poet makes the vanquished antagonist congratulate the protagonist: “bereft of its fertility, of all its gems, all its lords killed, the whole earth is now yours to enjoy!”(8/31/51) The victor is left with the final battle of coming to terms with himself, after all life has to go on, he knows only too well that the essence of Dharma is unfathomable, the ways of the noble souls are the only beacon lights – “Mahajano yena gatah sah panthah”! So, he too has to go on, has to join the final battle. And it is Bhima of all people who reminds him: “Nothing and nobody comes with any help in this battle, you and you alone have to enter into this, and life has a meaning only if you have won this battle.”(12/16/21-22)

Mahabharata is a text not of the glorification, but of interrogation of violence and war. The 9th century Achrya of the poetics Anandawardhan was participating in an ongoing conversation about the intended import of this text, about the nature of its resonance, its third meaning, its chief aesthetic emotion, when he insisted on Shanta and not Vira as the angi Rasa of the Mahabharata.(Dhvanyaloka-4/5).

Anandawardhan’s insight is remarkable, it relates with the intention and resonance of the text, it helps us read Mahabharata for what it actually is – a text agonising about the meaning of Dharma and emphasising the futility of violence as a means of conflict resolution.

Mahabharata has been revered as an encyclopedia of Bharata; the text itself declares, “That which is not found here, is not to be found anywhere”(18/5/38). It also enjoyed the unique distinction of being Kavya as well as Shastra. It is not about laying down the ethical norms in an empty space. The norms, the injunctions, the parameters of good conduct are perforce made by the text to engage with the real life dilemmas of the moral choice faced by all the characters. And the characters are human, all too human. Each one of them is faced with the ethical questions, and the poet (or rather a tradition of the poets, in other words the text) records the dilemmas faithfully, using the narrative to put the individual quests in a general perspective of ethical enquiry. In this sense at least, the text is not being hyperbolic in its assertion: “That which is not found here is not to be found anywhere”! Even the figure of Krishna – who is supposed to be the yardstick of the Dharma (Yato Krishna Tato Dharma!) – is not above the ambiguities and hence cannot escape the curse of Gandhari; His own Vrishni clan has to meet the same fate of a brutal fratricidal war. He is God of course; and hence it is only natural that He is not above history, as Ralph Hochhuth reminds us in his classic play The Deputy (which explores the “papal sin” of collaboration with Nazis) – “God does not stand above history. He suffers the fate of natural order. In him, all man’s anguish is contained.”

No wonder than, that the poetic imagination of the Vyasa made the God of Gita suffer the fate of natural order.

And etymologically speaking, Dharma means precisely that: the nature of things, the Natural Order. The point however is, all natural or supposedly natural things are not necessarily ethical. Hence the Dharma has to be rediscovered constantly, not only the natural nature but also the ethical nature of things has to be explored. Not only in abstract theorisations but also in various contexts of the ethical challenges. Such is the fate of the traditional category of Dharma. The narrative of the Mahabharata is about this fate of Dharma. And everyone has his/her share in coming to terms with this fate. And everyone is asking: what after all, is Dharma?

Most poignantly of all – Draupadi! The poignancy derives partly from her situation, partly from her status, but most importantly from the strength of her character. She is the centre of the central episode of the narrative, and in this case for once, the centre holds fast.

II

The central episode of the text is the game of dice. After this, the fate of the natural order is in the irreversible gear. We all know the story, but more important are the questions and answers or may be the rationalisations. Vidura has premonition of something terrible even before the invitations to the game are sent out, but Dhritarashtra assures him: “Don’t you worry, in my presence and in that of Bhishma, nothing untoward will take place,” the words used to convey the assurance are very suggestive indeed -“Anayo Daivvihito” nothing that is not in accordance with the divine plan will take place! So there is no question of moral agency, as it were. Whatever happens can be seen as part of the divine plan. The game episode makes the question of moral choice and responsibility the most urgent one, not only in the imagined time of the author and the text, but also in the experienced time of the audiences of all the times. Duryodhana makes the statement that can be termed as an eternal one in its own way: “One and only one governs all the actions, and the script of governance is in place even before the human being is born. It is that one whose commands I am following”(2/57/8). This is a classic strategy to escape the responsibility, but then he was being true in a way to his own code of honor – the Kashtriya code – the Kashtriya Dharma. And it was the same code of honor, which ensured a place in heavens for him. It was the same code, which would have been violated, had Yudhisthira denied the invitation. Both the ruler of the day and his potential challenger are essentially indulging in the rationalisations of their choice. But then, who is not? The vigor of the episode lies precisely in this – all the great souls of the time with honorable exception of Vidura are indulging in the rationalisations, every one has his own escape and his own way of rationalising the same. There is a woman who is just a symbol of ‘honour’, which has to be put in its place, and hence she has to be made to suffer the ultimate humiliation. Her anguish also is understandably coloured by the nature of virtue as seen in that cultural context. Her question is: how the Kauravas dare treat a lady of the royal household in this fashion? How the Pandvas dared put bet her even when they had lost themselves. We ought to be careful, and not read Draupadi’s utterance as pronouncements of the idea of individuality. Her anguish is after all worded in the meta-narrative of Dharma. And in fact, herein lies its significance. Her anguish transcends her time because it has the capacity to construct a new sentence even while remaining within the framework of the given language and its grammar.

In this central episode we encounter a triangle – Draupadi, Karna and Vikarna (one of the 100 sons of Dhritarashtra). It is Karna who actually orders the disrobing of Draupadi (being more loyal than the king!), it is Karna who bluntly tells her that having had five men, she is no better than a whore, who can be treated in any manner, where is the question of treatment befitting a royal lady? Among the Kauravas it is Vikarna alone who shares Draupadi’s question and asks for a satisfactory answer. The question is: is she “vanquished” in accordance with Dharma? Is she indeed dharmajita? He insists constantly that the question be answered – are we indeed acting in accordance with our own code of honor?

And what is the answer? We know Dhritarashtra’s assurance to Vidura depends on the presence of sagacious Bhishma. What Bhishma has to offer? Two things: one the expected reminder about the subtlety of the nature and ways of Dharma, the more pertinent to the crisis at hand – and an astonishingly blunt statement of the might is right: “The conduct of the powerful is seen by the people as epitomising Dharma, and moreover Yudhisthira is such a virtuous man – epitome of Dharma – Dharmaraja – so whatever he has done must have been in accordance with Dharma!”

“She had laughed at me,” told Duryodhana to Dhritarashtra in order to obtain his permission for his scheme of teaching her a lesson. Interestingly, the poet does not make Draupadi laugh at Duryodhana’s fall in his own description of the incident at the magic palace. Instead it is Bhima in this description who laughs and addresses Duryodhana as Dhartarashtra (son of Dhritarashtra!) – reminding him of his father’s blindness! But the poet knew his characters well! He knew the insulting laughter of a woman is certain to adequately enrage the old king to shed his moral inhibitions and give his son a go-ahead! Men can be given liberty to poke fun at each other – not the women! So, in this instance, she was reported to have laughed, did not actually laugh.

But in some versions of the epic, she did laugh, not at the fall of the son of the blind man – but at the fall of the most sagacious man – Bhishma! When the venerable old man was awaiting his death on his arrow-bed and was discoursing on the nature of various aspects of Dharma for the benefit of inconsolably despondent Yudhisthira, Draupadi could not restrain her laughter, or may be an almost invisible smile! She knew and so perhaps did Bhishma that more subtle than the nature of Dharma is the nature of attachment. And the greatest of the attachment is that with the idea of renunciation. Bhishma had forgone his own claim to power for the benefit of the dynasty – and this had become his own undoing – he was so attached with his renunciation that he almost renounced the role of a truly sagacious person as well. He knew all the Dharma but his attachment to his own great sacrifice foreclosed any possibility of speaking it out at the right moment – at the moment of ethical crisis. And Draupadi smiled – a smile that was her secret as well as that of Bhishma!

But let us come back to Rajsabha – where she is just about to be disrobed – where she has been called a woman who had been had by five men (as if it was her choice!) – A whore, unworthy of any respect! Apart from Vidura it is only Vikarna who is still raising the question – are we conducting ourselves in accordance with Dharma? And it is Karna again who snubs the young lad – “Young man, what you think you are doing? All these great men do you think know nothing? Just shut up, she has been vanquished and brought here perfectly in accordance with Dharma. How dare you say she is not Dharmajita?”(2/60/31). As it happens in many tales, it is indeed left to young lads and kids to pronounce the truth about the nakedness of the king! Admonished by Karna, the young Vikarna is one such kid in our story.

III

She frames her questions in the given language of Dharma as the code of honour – in the language of hierarchy of rights determined by status, not in the language of inalienable human rights irrespective of status and gender, and yet introduces a critical element in precisely the same direction. Maybe because of her unintended exposure to the ideas of what Yudhisthira described as “nastikya” (3/32/1). It is after the ordeal, during their banishment, that she raises the question of anomaly between the supposedly loving nature of God and His strange behaviour which is so much part of our real experience – “No, He does not behave like the parents with people but like an angry other”(3/31/37). Moreover, how can He expect to escape the sins of those evildoers who seem to be his preferred lot? (3/31/41) Chastised by Yudhisthira, she politely confesses that maybe she got such ideas from a Brahmin who was employed by her father to teach ‘Brhaspati Niti’ to her brothers. The Brhaspati Niti – i.e., the heretic ideas of the Charvakas were considered an essential component of the royal training. After all, you cannot ignore the need of facing the real experiences even if you wish to rule strictly in accordance with the set of interpretations, which insist on reality being but an illusion!

In the Rajsabha, she had no help from any quarter; the code of honour going in the name of Dharma foreclosed any intervention from her valiant husbands. She was nothing but a symbol of honour herself. Her body was a blank page on which the scripts of revenge and humiliation, the story of men fighting like a pack of dogs were to be written. She was wondering whether a lady of the royal household deserves this treatment, the irony was: according to Duryodhana, she deserved this treatment precisely because she was a lady from the royal household. She had to be humiliated because she was the woman of enemy. To him and his supporters she did not matter even in her supreme humiliation. She was denied all individuality and agency of her own. She in the imagination of the poet of the Mahabharata could not articulate such a fundamental denial, but in the imagination of a contemporary poet she does precisely that:

“Draupadi, Panchali, Krishna, Yaagyaseni/ all the adjectives/ none of them is a noun/ did it ever strike you/ I have no name/…. I had only raised some questions, I only had some queries/ and you have taken away even my name!”(Suman Kesahri)

And here the Dharma – in the sense of desirable order of things, as distinct from the code of honour of a social class or identity – came to her rescue. It took the form of ‘natural’ happenings beyond any frame of explanation, the miracle! Ill omens containing the warnings of coming disasters were reported from the royal household, Gandhari admonished her husband who in turn finally acted and stopped the shameful act of writing the revenge on her body. Her garment went on increasing by itself, she could not be disrobed. The later versions of the story put the human figure of God – Krishna – as the agent of the miracle that saved her from her ordeal.

Anandawardhan described Mahabharata as a “shastra which has the shadow of a kavya”, to me, however the reverse is truer; it is a kavya which became a shastra because of it courage of interrogating the essential shastra – the shastra of ethics – the Dharma. Because of its integrity of “reporting” the disturbing faithfully, and putting all that in the extremely agonising perspective of persistent moral enquiry. What resonates in the text is not the satisfaction of having made a point, but the desperation of the poet: “With my arms raised I keep on telling them to follow the Dharma, but nobody listens to me!”(18/5/49)

The central episode of the text is the key to his desperation. She knew the secret of such desperations and the factors causing them. She told everyone who bothers to listen, her arms raised – not in exhortation, but in exasperation:

The assembly where there are no sagacious people is not fit to be called an assembly

The sagacious ones who dare not speak out the Dharma are not sagacious

The Dharma, which does not contain the Truth, is no Dharma

And the Truth, which is pierced by deceit, is no truth.

Let us indeed listen to this voice of desperation, this voice of ethical challenge, this voice of Draupadi.