Patricia Mukhim
International Women’s Day is approaching and as usual pious eulogies will fall from the skies about the role that women can and should play or have played and what is being done to promote their causes. We have heard this and more bunkum for the past several years in our State; in the country and the world. But while great strides have been made globally to create spaces for empowering women, in India we see a patriarchal, muscular state trying to put women in their place by levelling charges of sedition et al merely because they support a cause they believe in. Disha Ravi and others like her are paying the price for speaking out or tweeting on issues they feel strongly about. And this is what’s expected from young, educated, articulate women who own an issue and fight for it with all the resources at their command. An empowered woman does not have to be told what to do. She knows there are several issues afflicting not just women but society as a whole. She takes ownership of the issue and gets out to become visible and to create solidarity around the cause. She does not cower before ‘insolent might.’ But it takes a very long time for women to reach that inflexion point. And having reached there they cannot go back no matter how agonising and painful the journey ahead is.
Let’s come closer home to Meghalaya. The other day I was at a place called Mustoh very close to Shella. A group of women who do some of the most exquisite embroidery work that’s indigenous to the place, came together to ostensibly share their thoughts. The women were all quite frail looking and had an unhealthy pallor. I enquired if they suffered from any endemic ailments such as malaria. They said they suffered more from dysentery and diarrhoea. I asked if they boiled their water. They said they did. A couple of male friends were present with me that day and I realised that our women are not used to baring their thoughts especially about their health concerns before men. When it came to speaking about the embroidery though, they were more interactive. But that does not solve our problems.
Later that day I was at another meeting where some village elders of Shella were present. I asked them why every meeting had only men speaking and attending. “Where are the women?” I asked them. Their response was classic. They said women were all tending to their homes or looking after their shops in the market. I asked if they didn’t have a women’s organisation to speak out on the concerns of women before a listening group. The elders said, “We ‘allow’ our women also to take part in meetings but what can we do if they don’t come?” And that is precisely the problem with the matrilineal society in Meghalaya! Women are good for the home but not for the public space. Women cannot be trusted to speak sense at the best of times because they have never been allowed to speak in public forums. Speaking is not easy. But it is also the first step towards empowerment; towards claiming one’s rights and creating a space for oneself in the high tables reserved for men; as if men have natural leadership attributes and own all the wisdom in the world. Just imagine how enlightened governance would be if the voices of women were integrated into policy making.
The present MDA cabinet is poorer because there is no women’s perspective to policy-making in the government. No wonder you perceive a certain masculinity in the development agenda. It’s all about roads, bridges and infrastructure. These are the ‘hard’ elements of development. The softer aspects such as health, education, human development seem to be missing. There are too many foundation stones for roads anyway. The fact that teachers are unpaid and have to hold placards to demand their rights speaks poorly of the Government. Most of those teachers happen to be women. I wonder how they keep body and soul together considering that Meghalaya is infamous for its indecently high numbers of women-headed households – perhaps the highest in the country.
Meghalaya is also very poor in terms of data availability. One does not get quick data especially on maternal and infant mortality or of women’s health indicators and must rely on the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data. If this is the attention paid to women’s health and her vulnerabilities such as cancers of the breast, endometrial (uterus), cervix, ovaries etc., which are women-specific then women’s empowerment is a word we have not even imbibed, much less integrated and mainstreamed into our policy-making.
And yes, coming to Meghalaya and its much touted matrilineal society, as one who lives it, I can say with certainty that the age old adage that women who speak up and engage with the world around them are equivalent to hens that crow and hence a bad omen, still holds true. The quintessential Khasi matriarch must fit a certain mould in order to be respected. She has to be a domesticated woman without strong opinions or better still no opinion on any issue and if she does have an opinion then it must only be aired within the four walls or among friends. Thankfully, social media has opened up vistas for women that they never had in the past. Now we see young and not so young women airing their views on a range of issues. That’s called empowerment. But they are still so few. The large majority of Khasi women are silenced by poverty and poor self esteem. The only time they will find voice is when they speak to each other in a non-threatening space. True there are NGOs that have trained women leaders to speak up with poise and calm but we still have a long way to go.
The best training that NGOs can give women is to simply allow them to speak on any issue. They can be trained to use their analytical minds to focus on an issue and find out everything they can about it so that they build their confidence. Let’s remember that words have power. When we form words we have already felt them deep inside our hearts. Words are emotions verbalized. If we don’t speak up we are crushing our spirits. Even if a woman cannot read; she can speak words of wisdom because the very fact that she nurtures and cares for her family is an education in itself.
On International Women’s Day let us all women – across all ages claim the right to speak our minds wherever we may be called to. Let’s use our pens and computers to speak up and speak out what we believe in without any fear of reprisal or criticism because we only live once. So let’s live free!