Mumbai: An audience member asks Kamla Bhasin why she is angry with men. Ms. Bhasin replies, “I am not angry at men; I am angry at patriarchy and anyone who perpetuates it. I am angry when girls expect their boyfriends to pay for coffee, or women pack a heavy suitcase and expect someone else to carry it. If you had asked me 40 years ago if I would work with men in ending patriarchy, I would have raged. Now, with white hair on my head, I am able to work with them.”
Ms. Bhasin, 71, was born in a village in Punjab, Pakistan, a year before Partition and Independence, and her work for 42 years has covered both countries, and others in the SAARC region. A day after she was bestowed with the Lifetime Achievement Award by South Asian Laadli Media and Advertisement Awards for Gender Sensitivity, Ms. Bhasin sits cross-legged on a desk, regaling an audience of 75 at Akshara Resource Centre in Elphinstone Road with stories from her life.
With jokes, shayari and songs, she has them laughing with her while she makes serious points, segueing across topics from terrorism — “Did the man who killed Gandhi come from Pakistan? Was he a Muslim?” — to witnessing feminist triumphs and patriarchal practices across the SAARC region, to how we become habituated to bad things, including pollution, women standing crouched inside buses so that it wouldn’t give a man a chance to touch them, tying it all to feminism, which she says, is perhaps the only ideology that enters every person’s home and every relationship, enabling one to question other institutions.
She acknowledges spoke of her own unconscious perpetrating of patriarchy: “I address girls sometimes as beta . But I have never addressed a boy as beti .” One of the only two male students present, Maurya Rajkumar, from Nayaran Guru College in Chembur, asks, “Why is it that people get angrier when a woman is molested inside a religious space than anywhere else?” Ms. Bhasin replies, “Just because a man may not tease or molest a woman inside a temple, but does it outside, doesn’t make him a better man. But then there are places of worship too which are not safe for women: people like Asaram Bapu are injurious to health.” Speaking about a recent campaign on property rights for women, she recited: “ Beti dil mein bhi hai, will mein bhi . [A daughter is in the heart, as well as in the will.] When a woman owns property, she won’t become anybody’s property.”
Anjum Sheikh, who works with women facing domestic violence, has heard many speak on feminism. “She opened my eyes today. I used to think that men are bad because they have power over us. But she said that it is patriarchy that gives men control. It is up to us to reclaim control over our lives.”
For the students mobbing Ms. Bhasin to take selfies, it was her ability to understand the youth that made her endearing. “Usually in talks like these, people start fiddling with their phones. But not today,” says Harshala Sanghvi, student at SIES. When asked why so few boys were present, she says, “For us girls, a talk like this is about our lives. For boys, this is social work.” Her classmate, Suyash Jadhav, interjects: “It is social work, but she made it fun.”
When asked about her career, Ms. Bhasin says, “Which other work would allow me to write and sing songs, slogans and books, sit on a table crossed-legged to give a lecture, have friends in every city, and eat good food while traveling? I have had fun, and that’s what matters.”
