Freedom Milometer

Some day, no doubt, students of gender studies will reach a consensus on precisely when feminist thought first began to make a difference to the lives of India's women. Was it when an indigent villager, Gaura Devi, clung to a tree to save it from the axes of the contractors' men, and the historic protest movement Chipko was born? Or should we credit the 1975 report on the status of India's women, or Mathura's rape trial for having forced the nation to rethink democratic ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality vis-a-vis the nation's women?

Trying to remember our way into the past may not help pinpoint the exact moment of change, but it can certainly help us measure the depths. Language is the first indicator of this to a writer. Have you paused to notice how easily and in how many contexts we have begun using terms such as gender politics, reproductive rights, sexual harassment, sex workers, male supremacist and female infanticide? The mainstreaming of words such as these (and their counterparts in other Indian languages), is not just indicative of an expanding vocabulary. It also captures a transformation of popular perception and, often, reality as well.

I don't think my own generation of midnight's daughters was exactly averse to discussing marriage, sex and career as students, but I'll admit we were mostly pretty naive and perhaps even conventional. Our colleges hadn't heard of a subject called Women's Studies and sexual harassment, even of the most gross kind, was routinely described as eve-teasing. True, even today one will hardly ever find a campus where young women are not worrying about one aspect or another of balancing their private and professional lives. Many still see themselves as half-beings, destined to marry a bloke 'found' by the family, before planning a long-term future of any kind. But that should not blind us to the fact that power today is being redefined in girls' heads, and you may be sure it will surface in time. Given the dependencies of their early life, Indian women, unlike their men, radicalise with age, when they acquire an air of authority as wives and mothers. Most Indian men, on the contrary, seem to de-radicalise and become more and more conventional with years. The staff rooms in girls' colleges, the boardrooms of companies and banks, the state sachivalayas and Parliament in Delhi, all are chock-a-block today with greying matrons who have quietly begun challenging the conventional male ideas that have shaped the politics of their workplaces and their own lives. Many of them are today the successful professionals their families had hoped they'd marry some day.

And it's not only the metro matrons who are different today. Even ordinary women, who are joining the paid workforce in both the formal and informal sectors in large numbers, are changing the way people have defined work, home and the hierarchy of wages. Families and employers are making the profound discovery that house work is not what a woman must do alone, nor is it unproductive labour. Also that each child has two parents, both of whom must be responsible for raising it. A host of necessary official and legal changes have followed this. Of late, ordinary women in suburbs and villages have also begun uniting against child abuse and sexual molestation of young women by local dadas. Their gory revenge-seeking does not make a pretty picture but it has begun to shake the system that can neither deny their charges nor overlook their justified rage against an emasculated law and order system.

Some years ago, an appalled nation had similarly been forced to take note of the Mathura rape case. It showed how in India rape remained a crime where the onus of proving that she had been abused lay upon the victim.Also that custodial rape of a deemed 'woman of easy virtue' was often not considered a punishable offence either by the police or a section of the judiciary. The collective efforts of various women's groups that came together to address this situation resulted in several amendments. Amendments to the anti-dowry laws have also followed in the wake of determined efforts by women's groups, often pushed to action by the mother of a bride burned or killed for dowry. While a backlash of sorts was being created by vested interests against the stringent provisions of the fabled Section 498 A (that made dowry-related harassment a cognisable, non-bailable offence), a girl called Nisha challenged the crude dowry demands of her husband-to-be and had his entire family put behind bars. The great public support for her brave act revealed how the public mindset was changing.

Nature too seems to have decided at this point to do its bit for women. A huge swell in the numbers of the officially young, the threat of a surge in unsafe sex and the global spread of the hiv/aids virus have brought the taboo subject of sexual mores out of closets. In the age of Gen X, gay pride and hormone replacement therapy and Viagra, neither the gender gap nor the age gap can be quoted to push women back into a shy and taciturn subservience.

Call it the Sands of Time Effect, the course of a karmic cycle or whatever, men who couldn't stop sniggering at the proposal for 33 per cent reservation for women in the legislature stand chastened. In the age of coalition politics, the importance of women's vote and the gender gap is too large an issue for parties to heckle or to ignore.

Ultimately, if one were pinned down to the question, 'have things changed for the better for all Indian women?', the only honest answer would be, 'Yes and no'. In one's own lifetime, the numbers of men and women one interacts with is limited, and often what is happening is so overwhelming that it may eclipse its own significance. But like any other organic struggle for self-rule and self-respect, the women's movement has undeniably created a warm layer of encouragement for women of all ages, castes and communities. They may not have reached the ideal stage in power-sharing yet but they have certainly made the power bloc ashamed of itself for being too selfish, too undemocratic.