Ila Pathak

Although the Ahmedabad Women's Action Group was formally established in 1981, we have been fighting many battles on the media front from as early as 1976.

Among our activities have been in-depth analyses of images of women in Hindi and Gujarati films; a continuous monitoring of advertisements, published in the form of a study entitled Commercial Ads: The Great Health Robbery of Women and Children, and along with this, a travelling exhibition in Gujarat of ads chosen from various magazines juxtaposed with commentary, as part of a consciousness-raising campaign; the presentation of papers at various professional and business fora, such as the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) and the Council for Fair Business Practices (Bombay); and presenting a list of demands (based on various studies) to the Advertising Standards Authority of India and all advertising agencies. In addition, we have an on-going programme for monitoring print media, particularly in the area of reportage on women in the daily press.

Significant results have been achieved in our activities in the following areas:

Text Books

In February 1983 the Gujarat State Textbook Production Board organised a seminar to evaluate the image of women as it emerged from text books. AWAG presented a study of Class X, SSC text books drawing the attention of the Board to the fact that the books have a clear sexist bias. Women are presented as emotional and sentimental on the one hand and sacrificing and resigned to their fate on the other. Sati* and johar* are glorified. In the examples given in the mathematics text book, women are hardly mentioned; reference percentages vis-a-vis men are 5.8 per cent. Social science text books hardly take any note of women at all. Our protest received very positive response from the Board and, the following week, the Board invited some women experts to go through text book manuscripts already in press and to suggest modifications and deletions of passages that were injurious to the image of women.

*Self-immolation by a widow on her husband's funeral pyre.

The Textbook Production Board has also made our suggestions a part of the standing recommendations to their writers of text books. While the Board itself was positive in its approach to our suggestions, academicians found our charges unreasonable and described the issues raised by us as nonissues.

Stage Plays

AWAG has also been protesting against the insulting portrayal of women in stage plays. An analysis was done and submitted to the State Licensing Board, which was pressed to withdraw the licences of specific plays. We strongly protested against the play Aaje Dhandho Bandh Chhe (Closed for Business) and staged a demonstration against it at show time. We did not stop the sale of tickets but our stand, the press publicity it received, and the open dialogue that it triggered off sounded the death-knell of the play. When it was served an official show-cause notice, many columnists in the dailies and Gujarati weeklies took note of our efforts. It is interesting to note that our critics asked us to dissuade the girls who acted in such plays from participating in them. Our reply has always been that neither the actresses nor the models devise or write their parts, so the fault lies elsewhere.

The State Licensing Board has since invited us to its meetings, but the newly constituted Board prefers to ignore us: the present Chairman refuses to take cognisance of any of our communications.

Recently AWAG completed a study of all Gujarati stage plays performed during the last season in Ahmedabad. The study entitled, 'Woman: On Stage and Backstage' points out that women are consistently kept out of decision-making and are not entrusted with any responsible work. They figure up front, acting out the roles devised for them by men.

TV Shows

Ahmedabad has a Space Applications Centre (SAC) that produces educative, informative and developmental programmes. They have run a couple of series on women, the first of which presented a number of problems and posed questions. No possible pointers to developmental avenues were indicated however. When the second series was aired we were disturbed to see that many negative images were being reinforced, and in order to communicate our concern we initiated a dialogue with the producer of the series. We discussed the need for introducing positive images and developmental issues, and were happy with the outcome of this intervention.

Newspaper Columns

Two of us are writing regular columns — one in Gujarati every week in Jansatta entitled: Trajvanu Triju Pallu (Justice Plus) and the other in English every fortnight in Indian Express entitled: Feminist Notes. Both these columns are geared to raising awareness among the readers as also to disseminate ideas.