The women’s rights activists Ruchira Gupta and Gloria Steinem kept a diary of their travels throughout India as they met the country’s young feminists, writers and thought leaders (previous posts are here, here and here). In this installation for India Ink, Ms. Gupta and Ms. Steinem visit Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.
Jan. 24, Friday: I inhaled deeply. Spring was already here, and the air was sweet and fresh. This was home, and Gloria was with me. Gloria’s first cover of Ms. Magazine had been a blue Kali, the female warrior goddess, with each arm holding a symbol of modern women’s impossible multitasking. Now I was walking with Gloria to Kali’s crowded temple in Kolkata.
The priest there showed us that Kali was not just the multihanded, bare-breasted, red-tongued ferocious goddess, but also a face painted on the ancient root of a banyan tree that still sprouted leaves. The tree priest blessed us to become better writers — which seemed to mean he could read our minds — but maybe he read the newspapers instead.
We left for the offices of The Telegraph, where I started worked as a trainee journalist in 1984. My first article — about three sisters committing suicide because their families could not afford to pay the dowry required for their marriage — was printed there.
I remember struggling to squeeze women’s voices into the political pages, and my copy being literally spiked regularly. Those were the days when we edited on real paper, and the news editor physically pushed discarded stories down an iron spike. What happened to women was considered cultural, and only what happened to men was considered political.
Now the question was how to mainstream feminism into the newspaper. Its debonair owner, Aveek Sarkar, invited us into his wood-paneled, elegant office to ask what impact the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton as the American president would have on feminist issues. Gloria replied that perhaps the question should be what impact the feminist movement had on creating the space for Hillary to run for president in the first place. Questions flew fast after that. This was the same office where an editor years before had told me feminism was dead.
Jan. 25, Saturday: We were speaking to the Kolkata Literary Meet inside the Victoria Memorial, a 100-year-old monument built by the British — perhaps to prove to us colonized Indians that they were better than the Mughals.
Our chairs were placed under the statue of Warren Hastings, the first governor general of the British Empire. Gloria joked with the feminist publisher Ritu Menon, our moderator, that we should hang a placard around his neck saying, “I am sorry.” Gloria had seen the worst of the legacy of the empire only the previous night when walking around Sonagachi, a huge brothel district created by the British a hundred years ago. They established this red-light district by licensing brothels on the condition that they provided disease-free women to soldiers and clerks in the service of the empire.
Today, an AIDS program funded by an American private foundation pays big salaries to brothel managers and pimps to distribute condoms to customers, though there is little evidence that women have the power to make men use them. Indeed, many brothel owners profit by charging more for sex without condoms. The aim is to protect male buyers from disease, rather than protecting low-caste and poor women and girls, often trafficked or lured by false job offers.
As on her last visit one year ago, Gloria was ashamed to see “sex worker,” the only English words amid Bengali, on signs in Sonagachi. She apologized for this American effort to give prostituted women or men some dignity, only to find that some governments said that if it’s “work,” then workers can’t get unemployment benefits unless they try it as a job option. She and others did their best to stop that and also regretted ever calling it “sex work.”
Jan. 26, Sunday: Over a lavish lunch in the home of a woman from Kolkata’s good-hearted elite, I heard Gloria appeal to donate to organizations like Apne Aap — to save themselves from living within blocks of sex trafficking. Money is boring in and of itself, she says half-joking, unless you do something interesting with it.
I saw friends from school, married into wealthy families, listening. They were caught in the prison of social conditioning and had never been to Sonagachi themselves. Maybe they did not realize that it would be as easy to make donations as it was to spend money on weddings and branded accessories, which was somehow more acceptable to their families than donating to women’s causes. This is the way women are kept away from supporting each other.
Jan. 27, Monday: Kolkata is about books and ideas. At the festival, we sit in a circle with students on the verdant green lawns of the Victoria Memorial. Two people give us two new magazines — one from Kolkata called Kindle and one from Mumbai called IQ. Gloria is happy and amazed to see magazines being born. As she says, “This may be the only country where new books and magazines are multiplying.”
Young women ask Gloria for autographs and cellphone photos. She tries to engage them by asking to trade autographs, and that leads to discussions.
As we’re talking, a young woman asks how to overcome her father’s resistance to her organizing with women and children in red-light areas. Gloria looks thoughtful and finally says, “Just do it.” We all laugh.
I recall my own impulsive decision to resign as a journalist and start my NGO, Apne Aap. I had no idea where I would get my own upkeep, let alone funding for the entire group. Now, Apne Aap has centers in four cities. As Gandhi always said, if you do what the people care about, the people will look after you.
Jan. 28, Tuesday: Sitting on the steps of a bank of the Hooghly River with Gloria, Uma Das, an Apne Aap youth leader from the red-light area of Kidderpore and the daughter of a prostituted woman, explained that when she had needed to silence the abuse in her life, she would come here to watch the river flowing. Gloria had been to her tiny cubicle in the brothel area, where she used to play on the floor while her mother served customers on the bed. Sometimes, the customers would reach out for her.
Then Uma and her mother both joined Apne Aap’s self-empowerment groups, where they sat in small circles of 10 on straw mats, sharing stories and eventually realizing that they were not to blame for their circumstances. It was here that Uma’s mother had found the courage to go with the other mothers in her group to the school principal and demand admission for her daughter.
She was soon admitted to a residential hostel and got far away from the brothel life. Now Uma is back as a youth leader and peer educator at the classroom in Apne Aap’s rickety community center to teach other girls the danger of trafficking. The girls also learn dancing, photography and computers.
Foundation experts had wanted me to start Apne Aap with the less vulnerable, so that Apne Aap could achieve easier success and “scale up fast,” in the words of foundation-ese. But Gloria saw why I was trying to reach the “last girl” by following Gandhi’s standard of making a difference in the life of the weakest.
And with 30 more years of activism experience, Gloria articulated what I was unable to explain: that change grows from the bottom up, that a person who experiences a problem is the one who knows its solution, and that only when the bottom moves does the whole hierarchy topple.
I had seen girls cast aside as hopeless, yet they were full of hope, and Gloria had believed in me and in them — perhaps because she herself had been the “last girl.”
That night, I saw a visibly moved Gloria at a cultural program where Uma and her friends dressed in beautiful costumes, freed from the oppression of the brothels, and put on their own dance performance. Gloria spoke about growing up in the working-class neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, and how dancing and dreams of getting out, and then finally a college education, had freed her.
I saw the girls flock around Gloria backstage as they would have around their mothers, but the brothel area still held them. The feminist movement is its own family, I realize. One day, these girls would know this too.
Next and last stop: Kerala.