'I don't look upon myself as a charity worker'
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Shabana Azmi. Click for bigger pic!
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Are you a feminist?
Yes, absolutely.
How do you look at the status of women in India today?
There is a silent revolution taking place that people are not even fully aware of -- the 33 per cent reservation for women in local institutions, in the Panchayati Raj. Now we have got one million women who have now come into politics. And political empowerment is a very strong empowerment. I think this is something unique that India has done. And I think that time will reap the fruits of the harvest we have now sown.
But it is also true that there are still lots of areas in which women need to be empowered. Ours is a complex country. We live in several centuries simultaneously. We live from the 18th century to the 21st century side by side. On the one hand we had a woman prime minister. On the other we have so many dowry deaths per year. So our people encapsulate all the contradictions
that come from being in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguial society. It is difficult to understand this in the impact terms.
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Shabana Azmi with Nandita Das in Fire. Click for bigger pic!
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But as far as women are concerned, I think the women's organisations
have been very active in India. So the resistance that has been put up towards traditional stereotyping of women as being subservient, as being secondary in status. An active resistance to it is being put up by the women's movement... A society which looks upon the birth of a daughter with tears and calls for the distribution of sweets when a son is born still has a long way to go. But I think the process of empowering women has started very seriously in India and I feel very hopeful of their situation.
You seem a little obsessed with this issue of women's empowerment...
We have said that there are many ways in which women can be empowered. One of them we keep singing about is education. But we must also pay attention to the quality of education because, in many institutions, education only reinforces the gender divide and reinforces communal prejudices. We have to be very careful to see that the kind of education that we provide is meaningful.
Unfortunately, in our country the text books haven't been changed for the last 30 years. Whereas the world is moving ahead so fast that they badly need to be updated. In many instances, economic independence also does not lead automatically to empowerment, though of course it is extremely important.
Organising women and mobilising them together and making them active participants rather than passive recipients, instead of saying, "Oh, we know what is good for women, let's do it," I think it's important to have a dialogue with them and find out from them what they need.
What is that they need? Do they need water? Then let us first address ourselves to the need of water and then say let this water problem must be solved. And then we might get them into taking interest in literacy and other things.
When do you think India will be rid of dowry?
I think legislation can remove it. Of course, it is not just legislation and education alone that will help. It is basically the mindset of the people... And it will take a long time to change. Even so, there are efforts at resisting unfairness. That, I hope, will result in something positive.
You are also a very active social worker...
I work very actively with slums in Bombay with my organisation Nivara Hakk, which means the right to shelter. We argue against demolitions. We say they serve no purpose, they create worse slums out of existing slums because people don't go back to the village. They only move from slum A to slum B. In slum maybe they had water and electricity; in slum B they may have neither. So unless we can provide employment in rural areas, which is where 70 per cent of Indians live, people will migrate to the cities in search of work.
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Shabana Azmi with Aruna Irani in Saaz. Click for bigger pic!
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Once they come in the city, they get work. But they do not get houses, they don't get homes. So they are forced to park themselves in slums. Every person has a right to employment. It is guaranteed by our Constitution. The way to remove slums is to upgrade them, to give them better civic communities, to see that you give them sanitation, water, a clean, healthy environment, and unconditional land tenure.
If the government is serious about solving this problem, they must give land in the name of the slum dwellers. Then slum dwellers will build their own houses. But financial assistance should be provided in the form of soft loans; and that will not be provided till the land is in the name of the slum-dwellers. We also insist that the land should be in the joint names of husband and wife because then the wife's position becomes stronger. That's the work that I do.
What made you take up this cause?
I've been doing this work for the last 16 years now. It's because of my father (poet Kaifi Azmi). My father is a member of the CPI (Communist Party of India) and I've always seen a lot of things in at home -- poetry, theatre, literature, all that has been used as an instrument of social change. My mother is an actress, my father is the president of IPTA. He is also a writer and a poet.
Even today he goes to a small village, Mijva, in Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh, where he has been working for the upliftment of women. Single-handedly, he has put that little village called Mijva on its feet. I come from that kind of a background. It was, I think, inevitable that I would get involved in social work. I don't have to call it social work because social work has connotations of some kind of charity work. And I don't look upon myself as a charity worker. We look upon ourselves as catalysts for change because we make people self-reliant and stand on their feet; charity is a bottomless pit.
The Shabana Azmi interview, continued
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