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What Reading Kamla Bhasin Taught a Professor of English Literature (and Her Students)
The passing of Kamla Bhasin, gender activist, advocate of social justice in South Asia – scholar, poet, friend, and comrade – has left a gaping hole in the lives of thousands of people whom she touched with her work, her life, her love. To her we owe so much.
My first introduction to Kamla Bhasin was as a student in an elite women’s college in Delhi University. I came to study here in the early ’90s from a small town where my experience of patriarchy and patriarchal thinking was in many ways different from those of my mates’, who belonged to more privileged metropolitan backgrounds. But more about that later.
Learning of Kamla
Ensconced in the safe environment of a women’s college where issues of gender were discussed and debated with great freedom and openness, I felt liberated, heard, belonged. These were also the decades when the study of gender was becoming central in literature and social science departments and there was a happy consonance between what we studied and our own experiences of gender discrimination as young women.
Though most of the courses we studied in literature departments then had no representation from south Asia, as students we began to read about feminist movements around the world and in India. We got a new vocabulary, we protested, we marched, and we bristled. Within the safe walls of our college we felt empowered. Most of us left college with a certain confidence that comes with privilege.
Those were also years when the “uncomfortable” issues of class and caste and their intersections with gender remained largely stifled in classroom discussions. Though in the world outside, in the period after the Mandal Commission protests and the demolition of Babri Masjid, new voices, both radical and conservative, were becoming louder. The world was changing.
This was the time that I first heard of Kamla Bhasin. In 1991 at the Women’s Studies Conference at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, a woman activist beat a little drum and chanted a slogan. This was Kamla Bhasin, screaming “Azaadi” against patriarchy surrounded by a group of women. That story remained with me. Decades later we all heard that chant again, powerfully echoed by students and women all over the country who refused to give up. Refused not to be counted.
Because of happenstance and some volition I found myself teaching in a women’s college where most of the students were either first or second generation learners or came from relatively under-privileged contexts. And it was in the classroom, as a teacher, that my real education began.
Learning from Kamla
By the early 2000s the student demographic in public universities was beginning to shift. There were more non-savarna students now than ever before. The students began to challenge the ossified pedagogical practices that had dominated classroom teaching so far. My own disquiet as a young student who had come to Delhi from a small town was resurrected.
There was a demand in the classroom, sometimes explicit, at other times smouldering, to inflect mainstream academic discussions on gender with non-metropolitan registers, connect them with South-Asian histories and social realities, recognise differences, call out privilege. It was some years later that the English Department in our college offered a course on women’s empowerment in India and I had the good fortune of teaching Bhasin’s Understanding Gender. Teaching this text has been rewarding in more ways than I can enumerate.
I recall an incident when I had asked the class studying this course if they would call themselves feminists. While some students (mostly savarna) responded with alacrity and said that they did, many had reservations about the “label”. There was much talk about what feminism was, if it meant being anti-men, anti-marriage, and anti- family; if it meant women should have more power than men, if it meant equal economic opportunities, if it meant being non-religious, if it meant women in cities are more enlightened than those in rural areas, if it meant gender justice was more important than fighting caste oppression, if it meant reservations for women in buses and the Parliament, if it meant rejecting motherhood.
While these questions were fiercely interrogated in class, the students began to read Bhasin’s work. Written in a style that spoke to all, they gradually found their questions being addressed one by one. We also had the privilege of inviting Bhasin to the college several times to speak to our students. Hearing her talk about her work in rural Rajasthan, her monumental contribution to women’s education, her rejection of developmental projects that did not address issues of entrenched patriarchy, her social justice initiatives – Sangat and Jagori, the challenges in her personal life, her commitment to collaborative political work, had students enthralled and inspired. She spoke with kindness and fire, lightness and depth, critically and with conviction. And always as a friend.
After studying Bhasin’s work for an entire semester we felt that perhaps we had we had come a little closer to understanding what feminist work involves. For those months the classroom became the world. We learnt to disagree and listen. We began to see ourselves as beneficiaries of and participants in a long and continuing struggle for gender equality that courageous women like Bhasin led.
The course remains very popular with students. A few years ago, as the semester was winding down, this quiet girl who hardly ever spoke in class came up to me one day and said, “Ma’am, main Haryana se hun. College ke baad mere gharwale shayad meri shaadi kardenge. Lekin Bhasin Ma’am ki baatein sun ke aur unki kitaab padhke mujhe lag raha hain main unki baat nahin manungi. Mujhe aur padhna hai. Kuch banna hai. Ma’am, main shayad ab apne aapko feminist keh sakti hun. Thank you, Ma’am”.
(Antara Datta teaches English Literature in Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi. Courtesy: Scroll.in.)
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Kamla Bhasin’s Pedagogy for Feminism Was Novel, Witty and Always Innovative
Aruna Roy
Kamla Bhasin fought her last battle with a virulent form of cancer braving extreme pain with irony, and imminent death with the everyday routine of life. Her greatest contribution to Indian feminism was her determination to be uncompromising with her ideals, and fearless about stating them in a world that behaved so differently.
Her genius lay in how she framed her message: speaking truth to patriarchy, and providing support to the most battered, using language that communicated directly, simply, and energetically with all.
Kamla’s discourse was never boring.
She had an extraordinary ability to distil the essence of what was often presented as a complicated political feminist debate, into simple rhyme, rhythm and song. The confidence, élan and immense abandon with which she communicated the concepts of feminism in multiple idioms to a very diverse group of people was exceptional. Charismatic and without self-consciousness, she used her ability to be uninhibited and frank to bring the unusual into conversation, and startle the mind to drop its defences, to open up to newer possibilities.
She talked of her young days when she was called a “tomboy”, very keen to play hockey, graduating to the days she shocked people by simply riding a motorcycle in Udaipur in the 70s. She did it naturally – not trying to make a statement – but in doing so, inevitably questioning patriarchy and authority by just being herself.
Her instinctive opposition to stereotyping, possibly gave her an innate understanding of the basis of prejudice and bigotry, and the harm it can do individually and collectively. It seemed unlikely, that she would last and shine in an international bureaucracy like the UN, but she used it to engage with feminism beyond its physical and geographical boundaries. Without giving up her roots in Rajasthan, India, South Asia, people from the global south, became her concern.
She was part of a group of women who challenged the concept of awards to single individuals, setting up the “Association of 1000 women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005 with Women Across the Globe”. The document has a quote from Kamla that says, “I am not a wall that divides – I am a crack in that wall,” which is evocative of her ability to see her significant role in the context of the much larger debates on women.
In going beyond these boundaries, Kamla began to enrich the language and politics of secularism in India by forging solidarities; by organising many exchanges, which gave birth to numerous friendships, relationships and the exchange of ideas in the South Asia region.
She looked for, and befriended activists from different social movements, and insisted they meet each other. These solidarities, helped counter inequalities perpetrated by different feudal societies in our region. It also helped counter the bigotry and stigma of religious politics, through an exposure to the rich resource of human diversity that dissolves and transcends “man” made boundaries.
She contributed to the existing vision of feminism and its world view, which went beyond sexuality and gender specificity to see war and hate as patriarchy. This became part of her developing discourse.
When I met her in the last week of her life, she sang the songs she had composed and set to popular and traditional tunes. She spoke about her admiration for peoples movements that represented the voice of the most exploited and under privileged such as the NBA and the MKSS.
She spoke of her wish to sit, lie and chat under the blue skies and trees with people. She always claimed her earthiness with pride, and her simplicity with a deliberately exaggerated apology for skirting the intellectual discourse. She knew she was more than part of it in the content of all that she said.
She managed in her simplicity of style and in her forthrightness to cut to the heart of the matter. She also effortlessly gained the respect of academics and feminist theoreticians, at a scale not common amongst activists. For them she became an icon, and a touchstone for claiming feminism with innovative novelty.
She evolved a new pedagogy of empowerment, for women facing oppression and discrimination, to fight the battle with feminist tools. These tools were artfully constructed and ingeniously communicated, so that women could use them effortlessly and with ease. She managed to use this gift to take mainstream slogans that perpetuated stereotypes, and turn them around to emphasise a point. She would say, “you are my sheros”, emphasising that women needed to evolve a new vocabulary based on familiar words.
Nothing would get her down.
It was interesting to see the trajectory from straightforward feminism to understanding gender. Later years saw quite a few men join her courses – always in great demand. She broke down masculinity with the same humour and wit, hitting the target of her argument, seldom leaving broken hearts, but definitely dismantling egos. These sessions always brought in a new method, or another perception.
This is not to say that she had a new format every time she organised a workshop, her used and tested methods, transferred themselves to many generations, making her songs and slogans familiar to three generations of women and male activists. The effortlessness was the outcome of serious thought and application. She was the conductor of the trainer’s orchestra and fine-tuned every note.
Her life has taught us not only to process strengths, but to understand vulnerability. She lived her faith in humanity through a difficult divorce; the heart wrenching, and tragic loss of a daughter, and wrapped her autistic son with compassion and extraordinary tenderness. As I met her a few days before she passed away she said, “There are ‘His Holiness’ and ‘His Highness’; and Chotu is my ‘His Happiness’.”
Her life ended with generosity, extended to a shared universe, with the endowment of the bulk of her estate to the continuation of the commitments which drove her in her lifetime. She said it was also an acknowledgement of the great contribution of her fellow beings who sustained her through her life. The Trust in her name and that of her daughter Meeto, will support the continuation of her work in India and South Asia with women, culture and equality.
Feisty Kamla has fought her last battle, singing and celebrating a life well lived. Her absence will be felt acutely. Her gutsy presence, laughter and song, along with her wonderful strength, shared with innumerable women are her legacy. In a world threatened to be overwhelmed by the propagation of hate, prejudice, and privilege; they will help sustain us with compassion, humour and hope, in our struggles for equality, diversity, and peace.
(Aruna Roy is a socio-political activist with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan. Courtesy: The Wire.)
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Kamla Bhasin: A Life Woven with Love, Cheer and Fun – Even in the Face of Adversity
Kavita Srivastava
Boundaries were meaningless to Kamla Bhasin. Wherever she went, she made an impact. Her spirit was what one would first connect with. Her laughter, her Buland awaaz, her singing, her slogans, her poetry, her style of communication mesmerised many. People were inspired by her, took her as their mentor, became friends with her.
Bhasin, who died on September 25, was a leading spirit of the women’s movement, scripting amazing songs, capturing the various ideas and expressions of the movement – songs that travelled across India and the South Asian region.
The famous “Azadi” slogan was crafted by Bhasin and the renowned Pakistani feminist Nighat Said Khan. Her rendition of it imprinted itself on how other movements now express their own ideas of freedom and their demands, renewing the power of this chant to take on fresh meanings. With pride she would say, see how the slogan has travelled to Jawaharlal Nehru University and Kanhaiya Kumar and the other students have transformed it.
Kamla Bhasin was born in Village Shahidawalli in Gujaranwala district in the Punjab, just before Partition, on April 24, 1946. She was one of six siblings. After Partition, her father got a job as a doctor in Bharatpur, so the family moved to India. After going to school in various small towns and villages of Rajasthan, Bhasin came to Jaipur for her final years of school. She finished her college and university education in the city.
Her college and university friends remember her as a bouncy, sporty person (she was college sports captain) who was always full of fun. Her laughter filled the corridors. Bhasin studied economics and in 1967 went to Germany to do research. She returned to India to work in the area of water, adult literacy and child development in Sewa Mandir in Udaipur.
In Udaipur, she was known as motorcycle-wali: she drove a motobike around the city and in villages for her work, something that people on those parts had not been seen a woman do before. Scooters and mopeds yes, but not on motorbikes. By the mid-1970s, she was married and by 1980 had two children. She and her husband moved to Delhi. From being a smalltown wali, Bhasin soon became a Dilli wali.
Street activism
Bhasin’s street activism began in Delhi as part of a collective led by Saheli (one of the first women’s groups, formed in Delhi in the 1981). It was a period of churning. Protests against dowry deaths brought the women of Delhi out on the streets. Women had also been galvanised by the the Supreme Court verdict in 1979 acquitting the police accused in the 1972 Mathura rape case. Feminists began to work on making the rape law more effective and later on amendments to sections of the Indian Penal Code related to dowry.
In 1984 came the ruthless massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, in which mobs killed more than 3,000 Sikhs. These killings affected Bhasin deeply as she was married to a Sikh. It prompted her participate more intensely in the initiatives around her.
Other key events unfolded: the undermining in 1986 of the Shah Bano verdict related to maintenance for divorced Muslim women; the anti-sati movement in 1987; the Bhanwari Devi gang rape case in 1992 that eventually led to the Vishaka guidelines listing protections against sexual harassment in the workplace. That year also saw the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which brought more violence and killings. The need for street action by people’s movements was never-ending.
From these events emerged one of Bhasin’s earliest songs: Tod, Tod ke Bandhano ko Dekho Behne Aati Hain. Forty years later, it has become the signature protest song for many women. Bhasin was a prolific poet. Over the years, Jagori, the organisation she co-founded in 1984, has published several books of songs by Bhasin and other songs of the women’s movement.
In the 40 years of raising two children, including one with special needs, participating in street action, teaching feminism, gender, patriarchy, masculinity, disabilities, writing books on these subjects and on women and the media, researching women’s Partition narratives, working with the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Bhasin did not tire. Even when she celebrated her 75th birthday on April 24, she was planning campaigns with all of us.
Her contributions are many. She started Jagori Women’s resource and Documentation Centre with old-time friend and colleague Abha Bhaiya and other feminists. Even today, Jagori is a valuable resource for women in North India. The two also set up Jagori Rural in Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district.
Bhasin was among a first generation of Indian feminists who made connections with others in the subcontinent and forged South Asian movements for feminists. The seed of this idea was planted at a training programme in Murree in Pakistan hosted by Nighat Said Khan and the Women’s Action Forum of Pakistan.
Building bridges
At that point, in the ’70s and ’80s, it was not easy to build bridges between Bangladesh and Pakistani women: the events leading up to Bangladesh Liberation had left many in Bangladesh angry with the Pakistani army for its war crimes. The regional platform stood in full support of the Women’s Action Forum when it apologised to the women of Bangladesh for these crimes and their silence. A letter with hundreds of signatures was sent from Pakistan to Bangladesh.
Similar divisions exist between Indian and Pakistani feminists, since the official discourse labelling the other country as the enemy encourages ordinary citizens to start thinking of people across the border in hostile terms. It is a chasm that Bhasin and Nighat Khan managed to bridge.
To the south, Sri Lankan and Indian feminists in the 1980s were critical of the war crimes of both the Sri Lankan army and the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan feminist movement had taken up this issue upfront, along with the ethnic hostility between Sinhalas and Tamils. South Asian feminist collectives worked to ease these differences.
Nepal and India appeared to have an easier relationship, but the Indian state’s patronising policy towards Nepal sometimes created friction.
In the end, it became clear that there could be an easy relationship between feminist groups, without being critical of the each other’s state apparatus.
She also worked relentlessly towards peace between India and Pakistan, with activists like Syeda Hameed, Tapan Bose, Kuldip Nayar and others. In 1999, the Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia was born called. More than 70 Pakistani women led by the fiery human rights activist Asma Jahangir came to Delhi and Jaipur to interact with women for over a week. What a sight it was. In Jaipur, a few hundred people from the city came with their children to see what Pakistani women looked like.
Bhasin was a regular at the annual Wagah Attari border event, where Kuldip Nayar, Justice Rajinder Sachar, Syeda Hameed and others led activists on August 14 to light candles on the Indian side of the border as Pakistani activists stood on the other side.
Her commitment to peace in this region was amazing. One of her last meetings was about seven hours before she passed away: she joined the online meeting of the Pakistan India Forum for Peace and Development from the ICU bed till she had to leave because a doctor wanted to examine her.
Making music
My own association with her started way back in 1984, when I knew little about the women’s movement or feminism. My work started out with the understanding of rural women’s issues. Our work space was the Rajasthan government’s Women’s Development Programme, which was a conglomerate of grassroots activists, researchers and social workers, some in NGOs, some in research institutions and some in the government.
It was a time when we thought that the urban feminists did not have much to contribute and initially we kept our distance. Then we started singing her songs. Rural women also had their own beautiful feminist songs. Bhasin and the women grew from each others’ expressions. Very soon, Bhasin was making songs that used the melodies of Rajasthani folk tunes.
Bhasin’s persona, her songs, her understanding of feminism, patriarchy, gender, masculinity drew us together and we became friends. We started working together on campaigns collectively. One of our most significant tasks was working together in the executive of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies from 1993 to 1996. Bhasin was the general secretary and I was a member and on the editorial board of the association’s magazine.
In 1995, we brought the association’s biennial conference to Jaipur. We hosted around 1,500 participants. This was after the Bhanwari Devi judgement that year, by which the rapists had been acquitted. Participants were strengthened in their resolve to fight the deep injustice to which Bhanwari had been subjected and to express solidarity with her struggle.
In 2013, Kamla Bhasin started the One Billion Rising campaign with Eve Ensler, the American playwright, to end violence against women globally. The thrust was Strike, Dance, Rise. Massive mobilisation began all over the country. We all rose year after year on V Day, the day for ending violence against women, on Valentine’s day, February 14, hoping to create a world woven with love and not hate. Violence against women could stop if love was brought centre stage.
One of her last plans that I worked with Bhasin was on building a campaign on women’s property rights, in 2018. We aimed to build awareness amongst women that they had the right to ask for their share of family property and not relinquish that right to their brothers. It was a completely decentralised, democratic, and multifaceted campaign, typically Kamla style. Posters, slogans and songs were made by everybody under Bhasin’s leadership.
New directions
Over past three decades, the debate in the women’s movement has moved from our universality and commonality of being women to intersectionality. This has not only transformed the discourse but also many times led to a break in dialogue. Bhasin faced questions from Dalit, trans feminists and other feminists on her views on the concept of intersectionality. For a person who believed in dialogue, this breakdown went against her grain.
In the lives of us feminists, there are no barriers between the personal and the public. It was the same with Bhasin. Our relationship grew stronger over the years, cemented by singing. Our songs changed over the years, from movement songs to other genres too. In the last three months of her illness, when she was between hospital and home, she insisted that I come to meet her. Every meeting involved eating and singing till late into the night, reading lyrics out of the books she had written.
One night over dinner, I asked her what she had been doing during the struggle against the Citizenship Amendment Act. She said that she went to three protest sites. Everywhere she went, she was asked to recite the “Azaadi” chant. Just a few days before she passed away, she said that she wanted to write a book for children on Bilkis Dadi, the octogenarian who had been at the forefront of the protests in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh.
She wanted to talk about cancer and how we need to be healthy. She wanted more expressions about older people. She wanted to make posters of the wonder women who were her peers. One night at 3, a poster arrived on WhatsApp, asking our opinion about whether the sketches were any good. She had six such posters in mind.
Kamla Bhasin’s was a life of sisterhood. Several friends came from afar to look after her in her last few months. At her cremation, many women friends and movement sisters were the pall bearers. They sang all through till she was consigned to the electric fire.
Cancer finally seized her body but not her spirit. She did say that she may lose the battle but that she would transcend into another world. Those of us who were her friends are convinced that wherever she is now, she is having fun with her daughter Meeto, her friends Nigar Ahmed, Asma Jehangir and Sonal Shukla and her brother Indu – those whom she described in one of her Facebook posts as her own.
Adieu Kamla. You will live on in all our hearts.
(Kavita Srivastava is the president of the Peoples Union of Civil Liberties, Rajasthan. Courtesy: Scroll.in.)
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Kamla Bhasin Combined Great Kindness with Firmness of Resolve
Bharat Dogra
Kamla Bhasin passed away in the early hours today ( September 25 2021) at the age of 75. She will be remembered by many people and several organizations in South Asia (and elsewhere) to whom she reached out at several levels with many-sided contributions.
She made valuable and original contributions to feminist thinking and theory, particularly in the context of South Asia. She has written several widely read and consulted books on this subject. She worked with several community organizations to take this and other work to a large number of people.
After her education in Rajasthan and Germany, she joined Seva Mandir organization in Udaipur. Later she joined the FAO office in Delhi to take forward gender issues at the level of South Asia. She fulfilled this responsibility very well and made full use of the opportunity to establish long-lasting friendships in various countries.
Once in Kathmandu for an RTI related training program, I was impressed by the presentations made by some young Pakistani women. I conveyed my appreciation to an elderly member of their team who was sitting next to me. He replied—In sabko aapki Kamla Bhasin ne sikhaya hai ( all of them have been trained by Kamla Bhasin from your country).
She had friends all over South Asia in very senior positions. Once when she called me to a small meeting of her select friends to take forward a South-Asia level initiative in Delhi , I soon learnt to some discomfort that the person sitting to my left was a former finance minister of Nepal and the one sitting to the right was from an almost equally senior position in Bangladesh! However being so well-connected did not at all affect her natural ability to mix up with ordinary people with ease. She could be sophisticated and rustic at the same time!
She was a great orator. Her keynote speech at an Azad Foundation function some time lasted for perhaps one hour, but there was never a dull moment. She started by asking why should girls be prevented from doing what boys do habitually. Then , right on stage and before the mike, she let out a very shrill whistle. Hundreds of girls whistled back. Others broke into laughter. Boredom was the last thing that could happen when Kamla was speaking.
Her big books are used widely in feminist discourse, but for our family an even more familiar book is the book of poems/songs written on Meeto a small girl child. We have been humming these poems ever since.This small, well illustrated book was inspired by her own baby daughter whom she loved immensely and brought up with great affection. The death of her daughter at a young age was the biggest tragedy of her life which affected her very deeply.
It is a measure of her firm beliefs and resolve that she could recover from this tragedy to continue her many- sided useful activities. Her last years were devoted more to the work of her organization Sangat.
I used to go frequently to meet her husband Baljit Malik at their central Delhi home as we were working together on a project on alternative media. During these visits I came to know Kamla well. At home and office when we met from time to time, she would often ask me about various organizations that were doing good work with the poor and tried to help them. These and later observations impressed me regarding how keen Kamla was to help various good causes.
I also met their daughter and son ( he was disabled by a vaccine reaction at a very young age). Both Kamla and Baljit were very kind to me personally. Their relationship was really very nice in those days and I was very sad when in later days things went wrong and they divorced.
Like myself, a very large number of persons will remember Kamla Bhasin as an inspiring human being and a kind friend who was never a bore. God, be warned, your heaven will soon be full of shrill whistles.
(Bharat Dogra is a journalist and author, has been close to several social movements.)
