Charting a history: women’s organizations across three Campuses in Hyderabad

-Asma Rasheed and Madhumeeta Sinha

(In discussion with K. Lalita, Rekha Pappu, Suneetha A.,Kavya Krishna and Swathy Margaret)

Our understanding of “sexual harassment,” protests and agitations against violence/injustice or concerns over safety for women surely comes to us from all that has been said and done earlier, and shapes our continued struggles. While we have all vaguely heard or read about earlier attempts by women on campuses to raise gender concerns, it is always instructive to learn about how (far), if at all, we have journeyed in our attempts to raise issues and rally support for our causes.
In one such attempt, we spoke to individuals who were actively involved as students in movements across different campuses over the last four decades: K. Lalita, (Progressive Organization for Women, Osmania University in the 1970s), Rekha Pappu (Women Students’ Forum, University of Hyderabad in the early 1990s), A Suneetha (Progressive Students’ Forum, University of Hyderabad, mid to late 1990s), Swathy Margaret (Alisamma Women’s Collective, University of Hyderabad, in the early 2000s) and Kavya Krishna (Samvad, EFL University, Hyderabad, 2010s) to get a sense of the challenges they faced and the hurdles they could (not) overcome.

Beginnings

Usually, it is some minor or not-so-minor instance, sometimes a friend or even an incident that involves a friend that sparks off our involvement. So the first question we asked was about beginnings.
K. Lalita recalls that the POW on the Osmania University campus in the 1970s began as a Study Group, which read early feminist socialist texts such as Betty Freidan, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, etc. along with other political, Marxist and Maoist literature which influenced their discussions on sexual harassment and politics. Less than half a dozen women, among some forty-odd boys, these “English-speaking” girls who dared to go to the Canteen to drink chai or played table-tennis were branded “radical,” “notorious,” “advanced” and “modern.” They also acquired higher visibility, even though, points out Lalita, the girls only dared to walk around in a group.
A similar backdrop of readings and discussions amongst friends around the early 1990s, recalls Rekha Pappu, fuelled them to take a position when the election posters of a woman candidate during Students’ Union election were targeted. Obscene graffiti on the woman candidate’s posters, in an already inflamed campus scenario where security guards had made remarks about “prostitutes in hostels,” led to calls for a general body meeting of students where the group decided to introduce themselves not as individual students alone but as members of the Women Students’ Forum. The active core group came from the Department of English, but also included research scholars from Social Sciences and Sciences.
A. Suneetha talks of her lack of exposure to politics or membership in any organization before she came to the University. She says that though she’d heard about the WSF, it was by then largely inactive; moreover, her academic location in the social sciences and the teachers around her led to her involvement with human rights issues/organizations. There was an incident when some girls, students of the sociology department, were harassed and teased by their own classmates as all of them were watching a match in the LB stadium. A discussion organized thereafter about the incident in the Ambedkar auditorium made her think, she says, in terms of women and the harassment they faced. Suneetha was appalled by the language and the ideas that men, “decent men,” her own friends and acquaintances used and this spurred her into involvement with the Progressive Students’ Forum.

Swathy Margaret, on the other hand, traces two distinct strands that fed into her discomfort in a central university during her Masters’—her caste as a fundamental aspect of identity while growing up, and the readings and discussions of Dalit and feminist publications in Telugu during her undergraduate days. However, the University of Hyderabad of her MA days did allow for space and friendships that supported her efforts to articulate her unease, to think in particular ways. The campus itself, with Dalit students’ organizations, was a space where Dalit women like her could express themselves and their problems. The Dalit male students saw them as “our women” and the women could approach them for help, etc. Nonetheless, Swathy is vehement, Dalit women were not regarded as intellectuals or thinking women. The men would come over to talk to their upper-caste women friends, about issues or even about writing something, but neither the upper-caste feminists nor the Dalit men saw Dalit women as “important enough.” It was, she says, a “troubling alliance.”
Kavya Krishna traces the coming together of “Samvad” on her campus as a result of various hostel-related protests against the University administration as well as reading sessions that most of the core members, seven or eight research scholars, participated in, around gender and caste.

They were clear that they would focus on “gender” rather than “women’s” issues, on sexuality, LGBT issues, etc., through academic rather than activist means.  Their inaugural efforts were hugely successful, says Kavya, but they soon got involved in various cases of domestic violence, harassment, etc. on campus which after prolonged, intense months of emotional and other engagements, began to take its toll on the core members. The response to their focus on sexuality and LGBT issues was largely silence, Kavya feels, as maybe no one really paid attention to or understood what was being raised. On the other hand, there was a lot of pressure, she feels, to appropriate these articulate women into and by other student organizations who had their own agendas on different issues.

Space of Campus and Hostels

K. Lalita thinks that the political context of the 1970s was such that all student groups, whether left- or right-oriented, worked with a strong, moral sense. The usual ideas of women as ‘sati’ or ‘savitri’ prevailed and safety for women alongside certain values about how women were different was accepted. Lalita remembers that they achieved some notoriety for their travel on public transport buses, mobilizing women from the different affiliated colleges of OU over issues. Still, she thinks, the majority of girls were reluctant to travel outside their campuses into the larger public domain; a notion of the campus as a home away from home was strong. The differences over the decades she feels are, one, the sheer numbers of women coming out into public spaces has increased dramatically, and, two, there have been cultural changes in terms of how women are largely regarded. The idea of romance, for instance, she pointed out has shifted hugely.
Rekha recalls that the UoH campus did largely feel like an island far away from the city during the 1990s. She suggests that some incident or perception of harassment leads to women coming together, but there is a way in which politically active women attract a certain amount of hyper-visibility. For instance, she remembers that middle-class men without moral issues still didn’t like WSF working with groups such as the PSF, which maybe was part of a discomfort with talking about Dalit issues. Perhaps, she suggests, the “radical-ness” of POW came from its alliance with left organizations, and by the 1990s had to be retrieved with a “mainstream” radical-ness.
Suneetha remembers that the campus was a space where many girls could also experiment, whether in terms of clothing (wearing jeans, etc.) or in terms of the friendships that they could explore. There are a lot of individuals who come from suburban locations too, she says, and the campus is a cherished space to test and challenge themselves across many dimensions. However, it does require constant discussion and talking about what is appropriate as well. One cannot just assume a right, but also talk about what is involved in the whole process. While we are caught up in classes, assignments, etc., we have to remember that there is a world outside and we do need to negotiate with the logic and rationality of it too.
Kavya Krishna feels there is a perception, largely false, that there are no women’s issues on the EFL campus and women are “free” and “safe” on a “gender sensitive” campus. She disagrees, saying that at the time Samvad was formed, there was no properly functioning GSCASH. Neither student organizations nor the administration were invested in women’s issues. For instance, she recalls that the then Warden admonished women against hanging washed under-garments on clotheslines outside their rooms, inside the hostel, and advised them that women need to learn to “adjust,” given that they would be getting married eventually. The need, she feels, is to investigate ways of making the entire campus safer and not merely by locking up the women’s hostels. One cannot simply “punish” a person who may look at you for about five minutes, she says, but we need to enter into discussions about what every woman has to negotiate with in the public space of the campus. It cannot arbitrarily belong to men.
Swathy, on the other hand, remembers her hostel as being ridden with casteism of one kind or the other. On a day-to-day basis, there would be women who felt appalled at having to see the “inauspicious” face of a dalit woman first thing in the morning while queuing up for bathrooms. They would avert their faces, Swathy recalls, which may sound amusing now but most definitely was not; or, there were issues of food. Swathy remembers a very close friend, an “apolitical” dalit woman, who was a very good cook and made fish but was targeted for the “smell” of the fish. Her friend in retaliation took on these “other” girls about the bad smells of cabbage, etc. We were not really cooking something that was not edible, Swathy points out, and life is, actually, really really smelly. The problem was not with non-vegetarian food as such, she muses, as she remembers some Russian students being around who brought all kinds of foodstuff into the hostel. It was caste, she says, which was the issue.
A different dimension of casteism that Swathy picks up was the usual acceptance of only upper-caste women as thinking women, and Dalit women as “add-ons” which came out time and again on the campus. The most dramatic event occurred when there was a move to reserve seats for women in the Students’ Union. Dalit women suggested reservation for SC/ST and other minority community women (by rotation); the idea was put to vote and did not get the requisite two-thirds majority. Nonetheless, there was a sense of moral victory, since Dalit women did manage to push the issue onto the table. However, Swathy recalls a strong sense of resentment that she and her friends were advised, “strategically,” that since upper-caste women were anyway supporting the idea of reservation, such a demand would be perceived as more “valid” if it was voiced by upper-caste women. Since the issue was to be up for voting, they were told, it was all about numbers, a numbers’ game. Didn’t the demand for reservation have value on its own terms? she asks. Was there any commitment to a different kind of politics? In fact, these Dalit women were also not involved in the EPW write-up which came later. It is not all good-heartedness, she asserts—the relationships between women are deeply, deeply political. The alisamma women’s collective was formed, she notes, in the aftermath of these events.

Violence and Safety

In the context of recent emphasis on safety, violence, etc., Lalita wonders aloud about changing the system, which is one thing, and protecting oneself, which is quite another. She recalls a field trip to rural areas, where female colleagues wore shorts and their local guides, young men, tried to interact with them and at the same time not “look.” The dilemma of not restricting oneself and yet at the same time being sensitive to the context in which one finds oneself, she says, is something that requires a great deal of thought. However, both Kavya and Lalita pointed out that one doesn’t know how to talk about this to both the men and the women. Rekha points to the differing contexts and times: a protectionist mode may not be politically correct any longer, but we need to find ways of not getting into a panic mode of “danger,” while ensuring the safety as well as autonomy of women. The university is after all not an ivory tower but rather, a microcosm of the world and we need to balance individual tastes with local sensitivities. Suneetha points out that the increasing number of co-educational institutions, visibility and acceptance of friendship or light-hearted flirting or banter (over FM radio channels, for instance) between men and women and sexualisation of the culture around us have all led to a greater idea of “togetherness.” A mismatch between the increasing and shifting demographics on the one hand, and the infrastructure and staff on the other has increased pressure on administrations, feels Rekha. Staffs remain cut-off from these emerging new cultures and youth. The pressure on funds, the demand to “deliver” has increased the burden to “administer” and hence crackdowns are that much more ruthless. The need to experiment, it was pointed out by all of them, must be balanced with mediation on how to think, talk, etc. about the complexity of issues such as friendship, etc.

Swathy notes that violence against women gets discussed when incidents involving certain people take place. It is “sad,” she says, that the entire country is shaken to the core at murder, rape, etc. but everyday violence does not figure in discussions. It is not that the former ought not to be discussed, but why is the latter so under-discussed? Swathy recalls a poem by Challapalli Swaroopa Rani about work in a kitchen and points out that the poet’s own mother does not have a kitchen.
In other  words, different women have different problems, rooted in structural and historical issues. Swathy’s concern is that the feminism she met in the hostel saw no problems with itself; it did not question its assumption of being emancipated from casteism. The problem with a feminist and Dalit alliance, she points out, is that certain privileges are masked, and the politics which are shaped by that privilege are also masked. “Upper-caste feminist politics needs to examine its caste capital: what are the many forms in which it manifests itself, impacts the quality of life or the choices one makes, what one achieves, success, etc. need close, honest examination. It is only after all of these issues are laid out for examination and discussion that we can begin to comprehend the multiple dimensions of ‘violence’.”

The Editors would like to express their heartfelt thanks to all the discussants for generously sharing their memories, thoughts as well as their time; Swathy Margaret could not join the discussion  with the others, but nonetheless made time to speak with us.