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“If you require a little space for prayer, I grant it: pray; but be not tedious, for the gods are quick of ear, and I am sworn to do my work with haste.” No noble ‘work’, you might know, if you’d overheard Leonine’s intimidating Marina before the pirates stormed in to take her away, in Act IV, scene I of Pericles, Prince of Tyre by Shakespeare.

We all need our own little spaces, be they measured in minutes or square feet, for more activities than prayer, for living and learning, for business or baatcheet. And, so it is never noble to deny one the right to his or her rightful space. But that was the problem the women faced when they wanted to come together, as this story about ‘sangha mané’ would tell you.

“The sangha mané, the hut or home of the ‘sangha’ (women’s group) in the Mahila Samakhya Karnataka (MSK) program, is a space where the women conduct meetings, develop action plans, implement income-generation programs and even take refuge,” begin Vinalini Mathrani and Vani Periodi in an essay included in ‘Women’s Livelihood Rights’ edited by Sumi Krishna (www.sagepublications .com).

An empowering initiative, this was, to enable the marginalised women bring up their views to the panchayat’s decision-making process. However, power was not to come easily.

“The women would conduct their meetings in public places, that is, the Samudaya Bhavan, temples, in a sangha woman’s house, schools, and sometimes even on the roadside or near the garbage dump. All these locations were open to the public, and hence did not provide them with any privacy,” narrate the authors, pooling in their findings from village-level studies.

“The men would hang around, smoke beedis, drink, and even throw stones at the women. They would taunt the women and cast aspersions on their character. Further, some of these places did not have a roof, so during the rainy seasons their meetings would get disrupted. The women would move from place to place, seeking some measure of privacy…

This left the women highly frustrated, as they felt that the existence of the sangha was in jeopardy.”

And there were also the unpleasant consequences of attending meetings. For instance, a snatch from Kameshwari Jandhyala’s write-up on http://portal.unesco.org reads: “A sangha woman in Tehri, Uttar Pradesh recalls, ‘my husband told me to stay at home and look after the housework, instead of going and gossiping. If I was late in cooking his dinner after a meeting, I was beaten.’ Another woman in Andhra Pradesh recalls the taunts she and her friends faced in the village, ‘today you could not cook because of the meeting, tomorrow you will ask men to wash clothes. What do you think you are going to do, rule the country?’…”

The essay by Mathrani and Periodi recounts numerous ‘tales of intrigue, perseverance, despair, hope and success’ behind the innocuous looking structures that now stand as evidence of sangha in operation.

D. MURALI

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