It is difficult to imagine that an Assamese
mahila samiti, a
women’s association, passed a resolution to have fixed meal timings at
home, in order to ease the lives of women otherwise confined to the
kitchen – that too, as far back as 1948. But that is just what took
place in the immediate aftermath of Independence, when the mahila samiti
in Tezpur – one of several in the province at the time – passed a
resolution stating:
Nowadays in
urban areas women without domestic help hardly have time to come out as
she is preoccupied with the kitchen. However to participate in cultural
activities one needs some leisure time. Considering these situations,
this sabha (meeting) proposes that the following timetable should be
accepted in all the towns of Assam as fixed meal times – Lunch 12 noon
and dinner 10 pm. No meal should be served after one hour of the
proposed time.
Meal preparation was also mandated in the resolution, again with an eye to freeing up women’s time:
It is also proposed that four times a
week, the afternoon snacks could be an uncooked one so that women have
leisure time. Thirdly to reduce spending a lot of time in the kitchen,
we must include one dish in every meal that ideally requires no cooking
or may be
prepared quickly.
Predictably, the Tezpur resolution raised a public storm, with letters
to the editor far and wide criticising the move. Meena Agarwala, a
member of the samiti at the time, kept some of these newspaper cuttings,
a collection of which were recently discovered in an old cupboard by
her daughter. Says Hemjyoti Medhi, assistant professor at the department
of English and foreign languages at Tezpur University, ‘Maybe this
resolution could not be enforced in practical terms, but what is
significant is that domestic work was equated with “labour” and this was
a sweeping idea in Assam during that period.’
The first mahila samiti was established in Dibrugarh in 1915. These
groups were formed as local associations in Assam’s urban centres and
particularly picked up momentum during the 1920s. Ever since, the samiti
movement has played a seminal role in women’s political mobilisation,
in both colonial and postcolonial Assam. Medhi explains that although
there were several mahila samitis active in the first and second decade
of the 20th century in Assam, these were for the most part local
organisations confined to discussions on education, culture and music
among the elite
bhadramahilas (‘respectable women’). The
crucial break came in 1926 with the establishment of the Assam Mahila
Samiti (AMS), and Chandraprabha Saikiani as its founding secretary. The
stated objective of this larger group was ‘overall development of
education, health and so on of the Assamese woman’.
One of the main objectives was to ‘rescue and rehabilitate widows,
exploited, and socially outcast women and kidnapped girls’, with
Saikiani herself the mother of a child born out of wedlock at the time,
facing social ostracism. Taking up this and similarly controversial
issues, the AMS’s actions led its members to court controversy on a
regular basis. In 1934, for instance, the group intervened in the
proposed marriage of a young girl to an older man in Guwahati. Given
that this was five years after the passage of the Child Marriage
Restraint Act of 1929, Samiti Secretary Rajabala Das issued a legal
notice to the groom. This led to a massive public outcry, finally
leading members of the local Congress party to get involved; ultimately,
they were able to force the AMS to withdraw its notification. Even so,
the group immediately formed a committee to mobilise people against
child marriages, earning it the nickname of ‘
biya bhanga’ (marriage-banning) samiti.
During the early years of the AMS, the large-scale mobilisation of
women, including establishing some 200 primary-health units in villages,
coincided with the Indian national movement. Mohandas K Gandhi’s call
for
khadi was immediately appropriated by the women of the AMS
as a positive role in which women could contribute to the making of the
new country. This renewed investment in spinning, weaving and handloom
work brought a sense of dignity to the women of Assam and, ultimately,
to women all over India.
Peripheral
Despite a strong start, the mahila samitis of Assam are generally
thought to have deteriorated in importance over the past half-century.
Today, some suggest that the NGO culture has changed the way that the
samitis function. During the freedom struggle of the 1940s, for
instance, there was a common bond of sisterhood and a holistic vision – a
unity that might no longer exist. While there has also been a growth of
small local-level mahila samitis, in reality these seem to function
more like recreation clubs that organise social gatherings – a far cry
from the politicised actions of past decades. For the most part, the
movement is dominated by a few large NGO-like samitis.
‘The mahila samiti movement is practically non-existent now,’ says
Aparna Mahanta, an academic at Dibrugarh University. ‘Earlier, it was
voluntary social service by women from affluent backgrounds – it was a
small sector with limited grants.’ The situation changed after the plans
for women’s development were incorporated in the national-level
five-yearly development plans, during the early 1950s. Whereas
previously the samitis’ activities were planned by untrained women in
their leisure time, the sector is now dominated by trained professionals
working within NGOs.
In functioning like NGOs, today’s large samitis tend to take on
projects from national and international organisations, following
agendas set by the donors and not necessarily taking up issues of
importance to local women. Although earlier the women’s groups did
engage in some government-funded work, this was undertaken based on
donations and voluntary work. Today, most women in the samitis have
become professionals, engaging in this work as their living, and thus
the organisations can no longer survive simply on donations. Also, notes
Medhi, ‘Earlier, though they might not have had professional training,
the women had different levels of exposure. For instance, Chandraprabha
Saikiani went for the Indian National Congress conference in Karachi
during the early 1930s.’ Her travels from the east of the Subcontinent
across to the West would have opened doors to a completely different
world.
Veterans of the samiti movement say that the earlier approach remains
relevant today. ‘With changing times, we have new emerging problems like
trafficking of women, climate refugees, etc,’ says Joylakshmi Bora of
the Assam Pradeshik Mahila Samiti. ‘Here, the government departments
should try to rope in the expertise of the mahila samitis. We still
command an appeal in the remote villages and the government should cash
in on this. However, we need the support of the authorities to carry on
our activities.’ In an earlier time, it would have been the mahila
samitis that might have intervened in the turmoil that characterises
present-day Assam. The insurgency and the continuing violence demands
interventions in the shape of conflict resolution and mediation, but the
mahila samitis of today might not be equal to the task.
As Assam’s mahila samitis have become increasingly peripheral to
women’s lives, a group of Assamese women have started a project called
‘Memory, Movement and the Mahila Samiti in Assam’. As part of the
project, a show recently opened at Tezpur University, where a range of
memorabilia was on display, including newspaper cuttings and the 1948
‘lunch’ resolution. The first phase of the project involved intense
collaboration between the project team and the mahila samitis to collect
and select documents to be digitally preserved. ‘Though many documents
have been lost permanently, preliminary research led me to interesting
documents scattered across various private collections and public
archives in India,’ says Medhi, one of the project’s coordinators.
The work was inspired by the fact that many women involved in the
samitis during their formative days are now elderly or have already
passed away. Medhi recalls Swarnaprabha Mahanta, a mahila samiti worker,
Congress leader and erstwhile minister, who died while the project was
coming together. ‘I was first inspired by her life fading before my very
eyes to record women’s memory,’ Medhi says. ‘We recorded an interview
with her in a great hurry with hired marriage-video professionals from
town, as she was leaving for Kolkata for treatment. The video quality is
bad but her voice remains with us – she died a few months after our
recording.’
Before the project, only a single historical overview of the movement
was available, in the form of a slim volume written in 1961 by the
founding secretary of the AMS, Chandraprabha Saikiani. The project is
now trying to address that gap, by developing an archive of material of
the mahila samiti for future research and inspiration. When the digital
version of the audio-visual archive was formally handed over to
representatives of the mahila samitis, Tezpur University Vice-chancellor
Mihir Kanti Chaudhuri noted, ‘In order to understand the present-day
problems of women, it is imperative to go back to the past when the
women felt the need to come together.’
~
Teresa Rehman is a journalist and media consultant based in Northeast India.
