experiences in organizing peasant women in india

SUJATA GOTHOSKAR KANHERE

The experiences we would like to narrate here are not exhaustive in any sense. Yet they could indicate a definite direction. After all, there is nothing like an experience in itself. What follows would not be more experiences, but a reflection on these experiences. It would include accounts of reflections by working class women who have experienced oppression and struggled against it.

Shahada and Taloda in Dhulia district of Maharashtra are extremely rich and fertile. Seventy-five percent of the land is in the hands of fifteen percent of the population, mainly non-tribal people, outsiders, and twenty-five percent of the land is in the hands of twenty-five percent of the population, mostly tribal people. These are small plots of one to three acres, insufficient for survival. Hence the owners have to work as agricultural labourers. Forty percent of the population, mainly tribal people, have no land of their own, and work only as agricultural labourers. The women from both these last classes have to work in the fields for a wage as well as work in the home without any help.


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In Shahada and Taloda Talukas, a local organisation called the Shramik Sanghatana (Toilers Organisation) took up the issue of the lost lands of the tribal people. A systennatic agitation began. Hardly any women attended the public meetings. Later, the issue of harrassment of labourers, especially women was taken up. Propaganda against the rape of tribal women by the rich peasants, goondas (hooligans) and police as well as agitation against these began. Women sporadically came out to agitate and protest, but no systematic organisation of women evolved.

In 1972, the labourers took up a struggle for higher wages. Women were being paid only 75 paise (3/4 of a rupee) for a whole days work. At places like Pariwardha, women were drawn into the struggle against the strike breakers. At Mod village they participated in morchas for wage demands. Later the women said: "We did not believe that we women could shout slogans about our demands, our wages, our oppression. We never thought we could do it. We were told that our place was at home". At Pariwardha, women were in the forefront in stopping the strike breakers. But they were looked upon as mere appendages. At the time of negotiations, the men said: "We will negotiate about the wages of women. They need not come". This was resented by the women. Women argued: "We will negotiate about our wages. We have participated in the struggle and militantly too". However, the participation of women remained sporadic and isolated in a few pockets

During the 1973 drought, women began to become more active and interested in the struggle. At about the same time  women's shibar (camp) was organised by the Shramik Sanghatana, after discussions with the women active in the struggles. The men's resistance to the women's camp was overcome after a protracted discussion with them in the midst of the women.

Violence against women

In the shibar, women narrated their own intimate experiences. Here in a non-oppressive atmosphere, they could discuss their real problems. They narrated experiences of how the rich peasants and others treated them as sex objects. They resented it. They decided to fight against it, individually and collectively. Then they discussed the question of liquor drinking and the wife beating which ensued from this. This too had to be struggled against collectively - however private it might appear - they decided. Women who and already participated in struggles whether over atrocities or over wages, had experienced their own energy, their capacity and their power

They could not reconcile their resistence to the rich, their struggle against rapes, with their docile acceptance of being beaten by drunkard husbands. Karankheda women asked the other women in the shibar to help them begin their struggle against liquor drinking and wife beating. The whole shibar went to Karankheda. They broke all liquor pots. They threatened husbands with grave consequences if they beat up their wives. With this began a spate of struggles against all forms of oppression of women. Bands of women and the youth would move from village to village threatening drunkard husbands, the goonda elements etc. and convincing other women to join them. "Now we are afraid no more of the police patil", they sang. Now there was a greater dimension to their struggle against casteism, corruption, unemployment, low wages, etc.

The women's movement

The process of development of the women's movement in Shahada in rural Marharashtra, as well as among Bombay slum women,seems to be taking a similar course. A minority of women participated in the general class struggle over class demands of either working conditions or living conditions. The mass of women remained outside these struggles or were only marginally involved. This minority which was active in these struggles, however, faced an increasing contradiction between their newly realized power in the struggle for their conditions of work and living on the one hand, and their subordinate position at home and in society. This, together with the struggles that developed over the questions of wife-beating, rape etc., i.e. over overtly women's questions, drew a majority of women into the struggle against their oppression as women. Their involvement in the class movement also had a totally new dimension and perspective now.

Man - woman relationships

What was the pattern of man-woman relationships during and after these struggles? Had they changed during the process? In the beginning, women and their participation in any struggle were looked upon as a mere appendage to the struggle which was mainly the concern of men. Wife-beating, sexual excesses, expressions of the woman's secondary, subordinate position vis-a-vis the man were considered to be natural, normal or at most a private affair.

But the struggles by the women challenged these dominant ideas among the men as well as among the women. Consultation with the women during struggles and negotiations, helping women activists with their domestic work were early symptoms of a changing attitude toward women. The idea that women are no better than cooks and child-bearers is here in the process of being overthrown. Women are also considered as not only leaders of women but are accepted as leaders of all the labourers in the village. The women's struggle did and does challenge the ideas dominant until then, it helps to create a new and higher sort of relationship between the sexes. This, however, must be by its very nature - as indicated by these experiences - an on-going struggle that challenges not only particular manifestations and expressions of  omen's subordination and oppression, but shakes the very roots of the oppression of women.