Venus Envy
  Vol V : issue 1

  Cover page
  Kaushik Basu
  Radhika Coomaraswamy
  Taslima Nasreen
  N. S. Madhavan
  Zehra Nigah
  Only in Print

Kaushik Basu

We chatter away late into the night, Ayesha being the tireless translator. Religion here is clearly no bar to intimacy and interaction. The people here, including Dohiben, are mostly Ahirs — a cow-herding caste. But among the Ahirs sit some Harijan women and all of them seem to adore Ayesha, who jokes with them and doubles up with laughter when the villagers return her banter. The Ahirs claim that their ancestors lived in the Mathura region, in Uttar Pradesh, a thousand years ago and, before that, herded cows with Krishna. Indeed, the ornate dress of these poor villagers would probably pose an anthropological puzzle. They wear heavily embroidered skirts inlaid with mirror-work, equally elaborately crafted blouses and head-scarves that fall over the back and shoulders all the way down to the waist. The elderly married women wear thick ivory bangles, given to them at the time of their marriage (the young having been dissuaded by SEWA from such a decadent and expensive ritual). This is not the attire you expect of the very poor and suggest an ancestry of greater opulence. My guess would be that their wealth has vanished over the years but the customs of dress have persisted. Also, wearing ivory is a strange custom in a region devoid of elephants, suggesting that the Ahirs must indeed have immigrated here.

The women, without fail, tell us about how their lives have been transformed by SEWA. The organisation helps them in marketing their embroidery work and building up small savings, gives them low-interest loans and has been instrumental in their breaking away from the confines of caste rules and male domination in the household.

Dohiben's own story is typical. She was married to Ajai Ahir and had five children. When the youngest child was five months old, her husband died and her travails began. They had always been poor but with the main breadwinner gone, life became a perennial struggle to stave off starvation. She would work long hours collecting gum from the babool, but the earnings were so small that she feared that they would perish. So she began to travel all over Gujarat, mainly to Saurashtra, in search of work. Often, she had to be away for several months at a time, leaving the eldest child in charge of the younger ones. Every time she returned after one of those long working trips, she feared she would not see one of the children.

Then she came in contact with Reema Nanavatty, one of the senior members of SEWA and a former General Secretary. Reema, while working in a nearby village, met Dohiben and persuaded her to return to her traditional work as an embroidery artisan and assured her that SEWA would help market her embroidered fabric in Ahmedabad and elsewhere. Soon, Dohiben became a 'member', as the self-employed workers who are part of the SEWA family are called. SEWA now has 7 lakh members all over India, with 5 lakh in Gujarat alone. But being a SEWA member meant that she occasionally had to travel to Ahmedabad. This raised eyebrows. The senior male members of her 'samaj' (I later realised that she was referring to the leaders of her caste group while Ayesha had used it for the Muslim community) decided that such travels could not be allowed — she was to be an outcaste. Dohiben, despite her quiet ways, has a strong personality, and she was outraged in turn. These men who had done nothing for her when she had travelled all over in search of work just to survive and feed her children had the audacity to turn her out when she was finally doing a bit better for herself and interacting with city women.

Senior SEWA officials tried to defuse the crisis by holding long sessions with the men, explaining to them the SEWA philosophy, which is essentially Gandhian. Gradually, the dust settled and the samaj seniors came around, especially when more and more women joined SEWA and more money flowed into the village through better marketing of their products. In Jakotra, where now virtually all women are members of SEWA, the men seem to be a pretty docile bunch, relegated to the background. This was not always the case, I am assured.

As our impromptu meeting disbands, I take a headcount. There are thirty-eight women and I am the only man (Dohiben's younger sons would join us much later). I do not think I have been in a more gender-imbalanced meeting before.

The Ahir homes are small and cramped, but strikingly clean. In one room, pots, pans and clothes are pushed to a corner and a part of the floor is swabbed for us to sit down for dinner. The fare is simple - bajra roti, ghee, a hot potato curry, chhas and gur. As I wonder how to tackle rotis as thick as these, Dohiben admonishes her daughter-in-law for not rolling them thinner. The daughter-in-law, who at all times seems to be holding back a smile, actually smiles at our ineptness. Late into the night, as I lie in bed, I hear the clanking of vessels being cleaned and floors swept.

That night, the home is over-crowded. Cots are pulled in from the courtyard for Uma, Jeemol and myself, and the rest sleep on the floor or on makeshift beds. I insist on mosquito nets (more to keep out snakes than mosquitoes) and the whole village seems to get involved in improvising ways to hang the nets that we have brought from Ahmedabad, since the walls have no hooks and the beds no stands.

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