My young friend, Nahid, was interviewed by a reporter from the local paper and a local FM station on the occasion of International Women's Day 2011. “I've never been interviewed by a journalist,” Nahid told me excitedly. “He asked me if I had changed my name to Azad because my Muslim surname got in the way of my work! Changing my name has nothing to do with my religion, I told him. I changed my name to Azad because I'm free and bindaas.”
Because she said she was free and bindaas, the reporter's next question was: Do you approve of Bollywood style skimpily dressed women? “How a woman dresses should be a matter of personal choice,” Nahid replied coolly.
Nahid told the FM radio station about her personal journey from the village to the city and about her women's sangathan: how if it were not for her sangathan, she wouldn't be Azad today. “I'd be married with two kids. I wouldn't be able to complete schooling, find a job, and resist my family's pressure to get married.”
But the journalist or the radio station had other things on their mind which they wanted to report about Nahid. They weren't interested in Nahid's sangathan or her personal freedom struggle. Any surprises given that this is the age of the glorification of the individual? There's no room for fusty success stories of solidarity among women or the wretched of the earth.
Fears about freedom
Fears about the power of the F word when applied to women beyond the kind of freedom Freedom sanitary pads promise; how non-traditional freedoms are a threat to age-old institutions such as the family; the growing failure of long-revered social, religious and cultural structures to keep women in their place, that is in the home and out of public spaces — the unspoken unease of all these fears was apparent in the story that was printed about Nahid on the occasion of the 100th year of International Women's Day. The Hindi daily carried a photo of Nahid Khan, but Nahid Azad had gone missing. A brief description appeared under her photo depicting her as a young working Muslim woman of Allahabad but without any of the distinctions and complexities of her liberation story. Nahid had been used to showcase successful women of Gen Next, the 21st millennium generation — a dazzling example of the beneficence of competitive individualism for womankind, but of the palatable kind.
Nahid called up the journalist and demanded a reason for the omission of her name and her sangathan's. Aren't you happy there's such a prominent photo of you? he asked. So many girls would love to have their photo in the paper.
“I can't believe he thought all I cared about was my photo,” Nahid gasped. I heard the bruised anger, the betrayal in her voice. “He wasn't happy with the idea of my calling myself Azad — the whole idea in calling myself Azad, all my struggles for my freedoms, none of that is in here,” she said, waving the paper at me.
She couldn't believe how a journalist could omit the most important details about the journey of her transformation. It had taken seven painful years for the teenaged Nahid Khan to become Nahid Azad: the village girl, orphaned, moves from village to city slum and reinvents herself with the force of her will and a helping hand from her women's organisation. Does so under the shoddiest of circumstances.
Personal struggle
What the reporter reported was what the readers wanted to read: the fairy tale of the straight road to success, a simple story sans messiness, twists of circumstance, societal prejudices, and struggles against family, class and culture, sans the steep emotional price paid — those passé details of women's emancipation in an age where even the word emancipation, we're reminded by the assertive, seductive women on TV, has a dated ring to it.
Here's an example of the freedom struggle Nahid wages every time her mother pressures her to stop working and get married. Her younger sister, a teenager, is already a wife and mother.
“I tell my mother it would be unfair if I don't do all the things a husband expects. He would want sex, he'd want me to cook and clean and keep house for him. He'd control me. Don't go out with your friends, don't do this, don't do that. I can't put up with all that! Why should I ruin a man's life and my own by getting married? If I have my own money, and god forbid something happens to my mother, I can take care of her. But if I get married, my husband won't allow me to do that. The only way for me to live is to live on my own terms.”
Idle men in her locality tease her, pass comments as she walks home through the basti at night, after visiting an ailing sangathan member or after a long day at her job: “People in my mohalla think I'm a loose-character just because I wear jeans and I don't wear a dupatta,” Nahid said. “And because I come and go as I please, any time of day or night. When I feel hurt by their gossip, I go and sit all night at the dargah. Or I sing and dance with my friends. If I worried about people's opinion, I could never be free. I would then just wait for an early death!”
If women weren't pruned into being good, they might have a chance to grow up bad. The unrelenting middleclass indoctrination in homes and schools that teaches girls to be good, to walk with crippling elegance, to speak but never of substance, to sit but without commanding presence, to giggle but never guffaw; thus, good women are not born. They are groomed into goodness.
Nahid escaped such indoctrination because of her inherent stubbornness or her fortuitous circumstances. When her father died, her mother moved to the city to find work, leaving her in the village where she grew up wild and uncared for among indifferent relatives. The wildness became an indelible mark of the unschooled village girl's personality by the time her mother brought her to the city.
I tell Nahid of another crusader for azadi, the revolutionary South Asian poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. 2011 is the centenary of his birth. In our increasingly patrolled times, where choice among limited options masquerades as freedom of choice, I express solidarity with rebellious Faiz as I quote these lines. He and the International movement for women's rights were born in the same year. Faiz wrote this for your azadi and mine, I say to Nahid. So we will never rest, never let our struggle for azadi end at us.
Bol ke lab azaad hain tere/Bol, zubaan ab tak teri hai/Bol, yeh thora waqt bohot hai/Jism-o-jaan ki maut se pehle/Bol, ke sach zinda hai ab tak/Bol, jo kuch kehna hai keh le . (Speak, for your lips are free/Speak, your tongue is still yours/Speak, this brief moment is enough/Before the death of body and soul,/Speak, for the Truth must live on,/Speak, and let rise what lies buried.)
Nighat Gandhi is a member of Stree Adhikar Sangathan, Allahabad. She's the author of What I am Today, I Won't Remain Tomorrow: Conversations with Survivors of Abuse (Yoda Press, 2009).
