By Sukalpa Bhattacharjee
It is generally accepted that women’s movement in India took off in the 1920s, building on the agenda of the 19th century social reform movement. Among achievements of the movement, significant were the constitutional guarantees of equal rights for women and universal adult suffrage in independent India. However, these guarantees did little to bring about social and material change in the lives of most Indian women. Even when a New Women’s movement emerged in the 1970s articulating a new language of mass and popular politics, the patriarchal structure of political and social institutions did not allow for creative agencies of gendered representation and protest. Therefore, the negotiation and conflict between patriarchy and the women’s movement has been a central feature of the Indian nation-state.
I would argue that despite exclusion and invisibility of women in dominant discourses of power and politics women not only experience the politics of “betrayal and resistance” through direct acts of violence on them by the perpetrators but also play active roles in addressing such conflicts. We have several examples of the roles played by women in the conflict situation in India’s North-east, the most unique mode of protest represented by Irom Sharmila Chanu, (born March 14, 1972) known as the “Iron Lady of Manipur” a civil rights activist, and also a poet from Manipur, who has been on hunger strike since 2 November 2000, to repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 (AFSPA).One can draw here a useful comparison between Sharmila’s act of countering the repression of the State by trans-figuring herself in the domain of collective suffering and Apunba Lup’s powerful protest in the public domain. Sharmila’s continued act of fasting and her being forced to eat through her nose by her captors projects the impossibility of a normal civic life Manipur, which is as good as being robbed of one’s appetite and which in a greater sense is only staying alive in flesh and blood to express the phenomenon of socially determined decline of continuous existence. A distinction between the self that passively suffers to tell us story about the evil that rides over and a self that encounters suffering by overcoming consequences of suffering tells us a different story of suffering.
Sharmila’s suffering is an act of becoming one with existence, as it goes beyond what suffering could inflict. Sharmila stays alive in an enactive, receptive and performative mode, which transforms her suffering body into a social body and being beyond the binaries of repression. Many still understand Sharmila’s protest through fasting in an instrumental sense by calling it ‘body as a weapon’, a deadly cliché that needs to be relinquished. Sharmila’s fasting does not represent body in an equipmental sense, it rather overcomes the ‘repressive’ binary between aggressor and victim by turning consequences of repression against itself. Body here plays a multi-dimensional role. By an apparent suffering of the body, Sharmila turns her bodily victimhood against the ‘subjection’ that suffering inflicts. She transcends ‘suffering’ by ‘participating’ in that subjected body, which now not only is her but also has the affect of bearing the suffering of others. Therefore, her imprisoned, incarcerated and monitored body in the hospital-prison is a social body that now belongs to the domain of every other suffering self in which Sharmila can participate.
Therefore, the body of Sharmila is simultaneously a site for writing her protest as well as a site for reaffirming an identity beyond the stereotypical construction of gender roles in society. Her defiance and resistance on the one hand makes a mockery of statist power, while on the other hand she poses a moral threat to the state putting her life at stake. In order to free her body and her being from the coercive rules of the state, she must make her incarcerated and suffering body a site of transcendence for her as well as for others.
The moot problem in the debate about women’s agency and subjection is the play between an open display of effects of power versus a strategy of transcendence from power. The play comes as an event in the subjection by centres of power. This difference is presented in the difference between Sharmila’s mode of protest and the public protest that was staged by women before the Kangla Fort. These two unique modes of protest are manifestations of two forms of subjectivities and politics that women constitute with their own bodies, (the most vulnerable site where social and political violence is inscribed) on the face of a coercive power structure.
Let us remember this “Iron Lady” of our region and rethink her unique satyagraha, which has inspired many men and women worldwide.
(The author teaches English at NEHU Shillong)