Episode 11: Beginning with Ourselves
Kamla Bhasin is an Indian feminist, activist, author and facilitator. She is the Co-Founder of Sangat– A Global Feminist Network . She facilitates Sangat's annual South Asian Feminist Capacity Building Course on Gender, Sustainable Livelihoods, Human Rights and Peace. She is also the South Asia Coordinator of "One Billion Rising" - a global campaign to end violence against women and girls. Kamla worked with the FAO for 27 years where she focused on rural development and women's empowerment in Thailand, Bangladesh, India and other Asian countries. Kamla has written extensively on gender, women’s empowerment, participatory and sustainable development, participatory training, media and communication. Most of her books are written for activists and development workers. She has also written a large number of songs and slogans for the women's movement and books for children. She joins us from New Delhi, India.
She speaks to us about:
trickle down theory vs evaporation theory
top down development not reaching the poor
the importance of local knowledge and leadership in development
peoples participation
rural realities and her work in rural journalism in the 1970s
intersectionality
hierarchies in international development organizations
her life-long commitment to the training of change agents
collective learning experiences
capitalist patriarchy - and much more.
Transcript
Intro: I really do not think my university taught me the truth about development, the truth about international development. It was real life experiences which taught me what development was and what poverty was and what caste was and what class was. And most importantly, what was gender and patriarchy.
Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I will be your host as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all backgrounds and affiliations around the world. Each week, we aim to rethink ethical behaviour and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different practitioners. Our guest today is Kamla Bhasin. Kamla has been actively engaged with issues related to development and gender, education and media since 1970. Currently, she works at Sangat which is a global feminist network that she co-founded in India. She is the facilitator of the annual South Asian Feminist Capacity Building Course on gender, sustainable livelihoods, human rights and peace. The course has trained more than 900 Asian women activists and gender trainers on various social issues. She is also the South Asia coordinator of One Billion Rising — a global campaign to end violence against women and girls. She is also the co-chair of the worldwide network PeaceWomen Across the Globe and member of South Asians for Human Rights. Prior to this, Kamla worked with the FAO for 27 years where her work focused on sustainable agriculture, rural development and women’s empowerment in Thailand, Bangladesh, India and other countries. Kamla has written extensively on gender, women’s empowerment, participatory and sustainable development, participatory training, media and communication. Most of her books are written for activists and development workers. She has also written a large number of songs and slogans for the women’s movement , books for children and has created many posters and banners for various movements. Kamla, thank you so much for speaking for us today.
Kamla: My pleasure Safa.
Safa: Could you please tell us a bit about what drew you to study sociology and perhaps maybe some of the experiences in your childhood or maybe even in your university years that really drew or captivated you or motivated you to begin to work in the development sector?
Kamla: I was born in a tiny village in Punjab, which is now in Pakistan. My mother had gone there for some wedding and I was delivered there. After 14 months of my birth, India was partitioned and my village went to Pakistan. And we were in India. My father, at that time a young man, was a medical doctor. He had six children with my mother. I was the fourth child and he was a doctor in rural India in Rajasthan. So he used to be transferred every three years from one village to another. And once or twice, he was also in a small town. After my birth, most of the time, he was posted in villages, and those times- 40’s, early 50’s, in the village where I grew up, there was no electricity, only a government school, hardly any building, any education, sometimes the teachers had not been posted. So I went through these kinds of schools with very, very little formal education or good education. For example, I learned geography in class 8,9 and 10 without ever seeing a map or a globe. I did not even know on a map where is north and where is south. And we were perhaps the only lower middle class family whose children went there. Otherwise, most of the children were from very poor families. And only about 10% of students were girls. So I grew up there and all my friends were local boys. I did not enjoy playing with girls, and in any case, there were no girls outside to play with. Girls had to do household work and there were no girls of 8,9 or 10 who were allowed to be outside. I was the only girl. And that too was possible, I think, because we were not local people, we were Punjabis living in completely — well not completely, but a very difficult culture. So there was no large community which could tell my parents to lock me up and what are they doing with me and why am I playing? I was lucky that my parents did not do anything like that. So this is where I grew up, among the poorest and amongst poverty, we were six children, so just enough for clothing and food. And no money to send us to a proper school in some town. After I did my tenth with hardly — I mean not even a second division, I mean, like today in India, any child who wants to go to university must have at least 95% marks. I had got 58% marks. I was the best in my village but only 58% marks. Then my father sent four of us to the capital of Rajasthan, which is Jaipur, four of us took a room on rent and there was someone who helped us with our cooking and we went to different colleges in Rajasthan, Jaipur. So my college was again a government college, an ordinary college, and I was really not very much interested in studies. I was much more interested in sports. So I did my BA in humanities and when to university there again in humanities — no I took economics, but see Safa, I was not learning to analyze. I was not learning analytical stuff. It was just mugging up and giving exams and somehow moving on. After my MA, by chance, I met two women from Germany in my university and they arranged for me to get a fellowship to go to Germany to a professor who was working on sociology of development. So I took sociology only after my MA in economics because I felt I had not understood life, I had not understood society and I even had not understood economics. So actually it was not a university, it was not education, it was not academics which encouraged me to do that work. I I think it was my living in the villages of Rajasthan with people, ordinary people that I decided that I would work in the area of poverty removal, in the area of development. So I lived in Germany for two years studying sociology of development with the professor who worked on, you know, developing countries. And he always had three students, one from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Basically, you know, to decorate the university, to create an international atmosphere, to provide an opportunity to German students to see what we look like and to talk to us After that I was offered a job in Germany and that was also in development. The German government had a training center to train German experts who went out to the ‘Third World’ as development experts. My job was to interact with them and do some sessions on culture, on development, etc. And you know, I had picked up German and I spoke like a local. I mean, I spoke German very well, so they took me there. I was there for eleven months. I conducted three courses, three month courses. And then I thought to myself, I mean, do I want to stay on here? That was a permanent German government job. But do I want to go back? I decided I want to go back. Why should I first train white people who come and develop us rather than me going back and doing the same thing myself? So I resigned, came back to India, looked around for over a year. I looked at a university job, I looked everywhere and then I finally decided to go to an NGO. So in 1972, 47 years ago, after having lived in Germany for 3 years, I went and started working in Seva Mandir and my work was to remove poverty for education, etc. So this is how the life started and not through any university excitement, etc. And I believe my real university were the villages where I lived and worked in the next 4 years. I really do not think my university taught me the truth about development, the truth about international development. It was real life experiences which taught me what development was and what poverty was and what caste was and what class was and most importantly, what was gender and patriarchy.
Safa: I see, very interesting trajectory and process. So could you tell us a bit more about the the challenges you faced when it came to the social issues that you had to learn more about and become familiar with in those 4 years while living in villages and working with Seva Mandir?
Kamla: You know the first thing was that this organization, Seva Mandir, started by a very well meaning, very nice man who was a diplomat, who was a vice chancellor of a university and who really wanted India to develop so he had started this organization. And he had decided on his own I suppose that the first thing the rural people needed was literacy. There was an international organization in Canada called International Literacy Canada. So there was a Canadian connection. So with their help and some money from this Literacy Canada people, he thought that rural people wanted, needed literacy the most. So I was told to go and do literacy. Go to a village nearby and talk to them and say they needed to be literate. After six months when people locally were not collaborating with me., not really cooperating, and I was getting frustrated, I finally said listen you promised you will come for this class, you will do this, you will do that. And you are not coming. They told me sister are you blind? I said what? No, no. Are you blind? Can’t you see that this is the worst drought year in our villages, we have no water. Haven’t you seen us walking for kilometers fetching water? Waterless villages and you want us to learn literacy? Tell us one reason why we should be literate. Is our style of living a literate style of living?What do we need literacy for- we have one or two children who can read and write and they manage our stuff. But without water we cannot exist. I said Oh my God! Why didn’t you tell me in the last six months, why did you wait for six months? He says we are afraid of people like you coming in clean clothes. I said why are you afraid of people in clean clothes? They said anyone in clean clothes means that you do not work with your bodies. You use your minds. And normally you use your minds to exploit the poor people. Every clean person, every clean clothed person in our area is someone who comes here to exploit us, to take something away from us. Even when he, at that time they were mainly he, is a government servant. My God, I mean I got the shock of my life. So I said, what would you like to do? They said, Madame Ji, if you have any money to spend here - you know I wanted to construct a literacy centre, a building, a room where they would do literacy, they said if we wanted to be literate, do we need a room? Why can’t we do it in the temple? Why can’t we do it under the tree? Why can’t we do it in a verandah of a villager. Why do we nee a room? So what I’m telling you is that the NGO decides everything sitting there, maybe in collaboration with people sitting in Canada. Local people are never asked what they want. So I said, they said we want a well. We have no well in this village and the other wells which we can go to are dry. I said what do you mean we can go to? They said we tribals are not allowed to go to upper caste villages and the tribal wells are all dry because the water channels underneath are all the same. If a rich man has a deeper well and has a machine, he can suck away all the water from underground. So what did I understand here? I understood class, that resources like water are exploited by the rich of the area. I understood caste, lower caste, upper caste, lower caste people not allowed to go into temples, not allowed to go to a well. The water gets polluted if a lower caste person takes water from there. And I understood gender because women were not sitting at home. They were running around for water all over etc. So all these concepts which I had studied but had not understood because they did not become part of my life or the life of real people. So then I went back to my organization, Seva Mandir, and I said, I am not doing literacy work. What would you do then? I said, if you agree, I will do water work. I will use the money for that roof for digging a well. And fortunately they agreed. I wrote to the donor and I said, sorry I will not be building a room I will be digging wells now. They said ok, and then I told the villagers, all right, we can do it. And the next day everybody was there to do that because it was their baby now. It was their project. It was not my project which they were doing. Now how do we know in a drought year, where is the water underneath? Where do we dig? I heard there was a British man who had stayed on after India became independent. He wanted to live in India, and he used to work as a gardener and a tourist guide in a posh five star hotel called the Lake Palace Hotel, which was in the lake. And that year that lake had no water. You could walk through that hotel in the middle of the lake. So people told me he is a water diviner. I had no idea what a water diviner was. I said who is the water diviner? He would hold a twig , a Y shaped stick in his hand, hold the two ends of the Y, the top Y, and wherever there was water underneath that stick would start shaking and he could say that there is water here. If you dig here, you can find water. So I went to him. I said, Mr Davenport, this is the problem. He said yes Kamla, I will give you my sunday morning, instead of going to church, I will go with you to the villages. And in those months, the temperature was 43, 44, 45 degrees. So at six in the morning, I would pick him up, take him to some villages, and we would divine water. We would find where their water is. So this is how I learned Safa, I mean, I learned none off this in any university and the universities were not teaching anything, and I’m not sure whether they’re teaching it now.
Safa: Very interesting. But this experience of realizing that perhaps what you were asked to do is not actually what the community you’re in needs or desires - is that something that you continued to experience in other locations, in other projects? How did you situate yourself within the work as you continued, as your career progressed?
Kamla: If you make policies and plans and programs sitting in the capital of a country in collaboration with international organizations, which sit in Rome or New York or in Toronto, obviously you have no idea what is happening on the ground. And if you are now in UN and international Bretton Woods kinds of organizations, their mandate is to work only with governments. If the governments are top down, if the governments are not truly democratic, then obviously all your work and all your projects will be top down. And as far as agencies like UN and Bretton Woods, they mainly help their own countries. The World Bank, what it has done to the third world, promoting liberalism, promoting privatization, promoting globalization which means corporate control of resources. So I feel that after colonialism, when our colonial masters left, people from there came then as UN experts and as World Bank and IMF experts, that same thing of these rich countries continuing now their economic colonialism. The political colonialism stopped so we were no more political colonies. But till today we are economic colonies of the so called G7 countries. So how can you talk to a community when your government doesn’t talk to them and the whole project of development was really to bet on the rich. There was this concept called betting on the rich , betting on the strong. So these policies and rural development policies were betting on the strong. Who were the strong? Upper caste, upper class people. So if I went from the government for a project in the village whose house will I go? I’ll go to the house of the local leader. Who is the local leader? Upper caste, upper class man. So the concept was develop a village. But there was no harmony in that village, there was no unity in that village. A village was a small little world with exploiters and exploited. With untouchables. How can one scheme devised by the powerful help the poor? What was the theory then? In the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, even today, the theory is trickle down, invest in the rich and some profits, some benefit will flow to the poor. I saw as a young woman in Rajasthan that it was not a trickle down theory which was working. It was actually an evaporation theory. Evaporation theory. If I gave money to a poor lower cast family to dig a well and if they were successful and if they found water, then suddenly the money lender remembered Oh, I had given some loan to that farmer. Before that he had forgotten the loan because he knew that this pauper cannot return the loan. And now, when he had a beautiful green crop standing on his lands, he said, I came back- and of course you know how great the paperwork was, what he had leant, the people did not know. So he said, ok, now return my loan, if you have no money, I will take your land. I mean this happened to one of the wells I had helped with. So this is the evaporation theory. You give to the poor and it will reach the rich.
Safa: To follow up on that, you know, you speak about the exploitation that happens, whether it’s through relationships with government or donors or the unequal power relationships that exist. But in your own career, how did you, you know, reconcile that or continue to work knowing that these systemic problems existed?
Kamla: So while working in Seva Mandir at grassroots level for 4 years, which is what I have now described, I started writing. And my partner was from a very upper class background, and I was from a lower middle class background, so I did not know much English. So together we started writing about the rural realities, and that was in 72 ,73 ,74. So the first kind of rural journalism were we could look at the rural areas from the eyes of the outsider insider. So through that writing, I was now passing on the messages of what was happening through the country. I mean, we were writing for newspapers etc. And now there were organizations who were organizing conferences etc. So I was noticed. Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, a UN body organized a conference for young people like me who had left their fancy jobs and gone to work in the rural areas of India. I had no idea that like me, like I gave up a job in Germany, there were dozens. I mean, I met about 30 of them. Engineers, architects, educationists from MIT, from Indian institutes of technologies who felt that they did not want to work for the corporate world or the government. They wanted to work with the people. They started working in the rural areas and created non government organizations. So FAO had brought some of us together to meet each other, talk to each other etc. And it was FAO, which in 1975, after I had spent about 3.5 years in Seva Mandir, they offered me a job for three months. They said there’s a consultancy for three months and FAO had a unit called Freedom From Hunger campaign. This was the only UN unit in any UN agency which had the mandate to work directly with NGOs. Most other UN agencies can only work with government and only if the local government allows them they may collaborate with NGOs. But this Freedom From Hunger campaign believed that problems of poverty and hunger can not be removed by governments alone. That people’s participation and peoples willingness was totally necessary. So this unit of FAO invited me to work and the work was to identify people like myself, like I was working in Seva Mandir, people like me in different countries of Asia. NGOs like mine who are working at the grassroots level and learning from there and building there, and this program was called ‘Role and Training of Change-agents.’ Now I was very interested in that, mainly because I had always felt that why did I, as an Indian, go to Germany to study further? Why everybody from our countries, whether it is Iran or Pakistan or India, when we want to study something, when we want to learn something, why do we want to go to our colonial masters, to the white world? What can we learn there which will be useful for villages in India? Such a vast difference. Why don’t we go to the neighbouring countries, if there is a successful project in Pakistan, I can learn from there and that is much more relevant for me then to go to the US and learn anything. So this was an opportunity for me to realize that dream of mine. To go to neighbouring countries, to meet people who are working there and who wanted to do things there. This whole thing later on the UN started calling it south to south cooperation. You know, I believe Safa, that all these concepts are created at the grassroots level by people. And then once they are tested out, then they make theories in the UN and in the universities and those theories are coined by them, by the academics. So south-south cooperation. Now this whole business of top down and bottom up development. I mean, before I went to those areas, I had never heard these words. And then we started coining these words, talking about them - but we were not coining any words. We were describing reality. People’s participation. These concepts were not there in the UN but I found that all these different small groups in different countries were talking about how there is no people’s participation. Development is top down. It is not reaching the poor. Governments are betting on the strong, not betting on the weak, and unless you bet on the weak, there cannot be proper community development. So I took that job and my posting was in Bangkok and I was working now in eight countries. Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. For 4 years sitting in the UN office, FAO office in Bangkok, I would travel to these countries and the idea was I will organize a training program with 20, 25 young men and women who had decided to place themselves in the rural areas and do something innovative. I did not know anybody in any neighbouring country. This was the beginning of getting to know these kind of organizations in these countries. So I organized these, they were called training programs, which later on I changed the word, I said, nobody’s training anybody here, they are collective learning experiences. We are learning from each other. I am just a facilitator. That is when I started organizing these and I started documenting these gatherings. And how long were they? They were six to seven week long meetings with 25 people. First East Asia, then I did it in South Asia. So this is how it started and after four years in Bangkok, I realized that mine was a one person project. It was just me. I was a secretary doing this whole thing. And I felt this area was too big for me. Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand. I mean, I did not know the cultures, the languages, the politics of those countries. And I was spreading myself too thin. So I told FAO, brothers and sisters, if you want me to work with you, I would like to work in a smaller area. Only South Asia. Development is not a technical matter. It is a matter of culture. It is a matter of understanding people, foreigners coming from outside cannot do this. So I’m a foreigner here. I cannot do that. So send me where I’m a local. They fortunately agreed and I was posted in India and I worked there for the next 23 years in South Asia, which were 8 countries. I would never have worked with the governments of our countries. My contracts with the FAO were always three months or six months because there was no permanent money in this project. This project was a trust fund project. They said, why don’t you take up a job? Because here you are not certain about your future, because my contracts were extended every six months, every year. Why don’t you take up a proper job in the UN? And I said, I’m not interested in a proper job in the UN. I don’t want to become a development bureaucrat. I’m only interested in this work, which is role and training of change agents. And I realized that by doing this we were building networks in Asia. Now suddenly, in 4,5 years we knew hundreds of organizations in each others countries. I said, no, I’m continuing this. I’m not a UN bureaucrat. I’m just doing this project and I did that work for 27 years - learning from people, writing about those things, making networks, and I resigned in 2002 from the UN. Because there was a racist and a sexist head of FAO and I — he couldn’t tolerate me and I couldn’t tolerate him, and I resigned. And that is the beginning of SANGAT. It’s this same work I did through the UN for 27 years.
Safa: There are so many important points that you raised. But you know, the theme of working on gender issues, it’s something that you have been dedicated to for so many years. Could you tell us a bit about that commitment and perhaps how also your own identity, whether it’s as a woman or as a Punjabi woman or as German educated, how your own identity has also shaped or influenced the work you have been able to do?
Kamla: You know, I heard the word feminism only when I was 26, 27 years old. But I think I was born a feminist because I could not be boxed into gender boxes. I refused to play a girl. Because a girl meant a gendered person who sat like this, who ran like that, who wore clothes like this. I mean, I did what I wanted to do, and most of it was what boys were doing and my brother in the same family was really more interested in doing things which normally they say girls do. Stitching, knitting, dancing, etc. So today, if I was born, I would be a transgender person, and I would be fighting with the world and say don’t call me she. I became a conscious feminist when I was 26, 27 and working in Rajasthan. And somebody gave me a magazine in which I heard that there are women working against patriarchy etc and at that time - I mean I realized a long time earlier that among the poor, women are poorer, among the blacks, women are blacker and more exploited, among the dalits, the lower caste people, women are more dalit, etc. So from me, the poorest of the poor were women. So I started focusing more and more on women and later on gender. I realized that gender is not about women. Gender is about women and men. Unless men change, gender relations cannot change. Men and women have to change together because we have to live together. So from the beginning, my feminism realized that men and women are not enemies. We are not anti men, we are anti patriarchy. And we realized that women are also patriarchal and sometimes some women can be more patriarchal than their men who are more educated, who travel all over, who see change. These women who are caught up in their homes, who have not seen that, obviously they are more patriarchal. Obviously they teach their daughters and sons the rules of patriarchy, the rules of Hinduism and Islam and all that. Secondly, gender has never been a separate issue, separate from class, caste, or heterosexuality which I understood much later. So this word which has been recently coined called intersectionality and which we are now learning, was something in the 70’s which I realized — that the woman had a caste, the woman had a class, the woman had a race, we had to look at all those things. Gradually I started working more with women. And I really don’t think it had anything to do with my university in Germany etc. Even there, there was patriarchy. I saw how patriarchal German language was. I saw capitalist patriarchy for the first time in a developed country. I thought people would be equal there — men and women. But in politics, there was no equality, in religion, there was none. And I thought the Western world was not religious but my God, when I went and saw that in Germany the German government collects religious tax and duty to churches etc, all the lies about the Third World I saw were bloody lies. I mean religion, like in the US, they do everything in the name of God, when they go and bomb Iraq this is in the name of God and God bless you and God do this - I mean all the time. In my country, no minister or president starts the thing in the name of God. We are a secular country . But they are, they continue to be Christian countries, and now look at Mr Trump denying women even abortion rights. Secularism, God, were is secularism there? So I saw that patriarchy was a global system and it exists everywhere. And I realized that women in India had also been fighting against patriarchy way before, around the same time. But of course, because our history is not written they think feminism was born in the U.S. Nonsense. Feminism is born wherever there is patriarchy. You know some feminist has said that perhaps the first feminist was born the day patriarchy was created, and I agree. And some men have fought against patriarchy. Men who believe in justice, men who believe in equality. And not just now. I have examples from Buddha’s life where he broke patriarchal norms. I have many examples from Prophet Mohammed’s life, were he challenged local patriarchy and supported women because of justice, because of equally. So all these things , you know, I started thinking, doing. But my work, Safa, has always remained capacity building of people and sharing with people insights, insights about capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, how these Bretton Woods, what they have done to the world, increasing inequalities. And I believe from my own life that what small NGOs and people’s organizations do at the grassroots, it takes 20 to 25 years for it to reach the UN and become concepts like children’s rights, like women’s rights. All these rights are given to us not by our government, not by the UN, but by grassroots movements, whether they are labor movements or black peoples movements, it is those movements which change laws, which lead to the creation of human rights declarations, which leads to the creation of national constitutions which say all human beings are born equal. Only after people, whether in the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, have shown that people matter. And even after that, when we have these things on paper, they have not reached our families, they have not reached our lives. Whether it is in the US or Canada, some countries are ahead because they have had more development, they have had more education and they had waves of feminist struggles. But we are all struggling at the global level to implement human rights for all, not just for women, for blacks, for the poor and unfortunately the rich countries, the educated scientific countries have really been basically exploiting the whole world and destroying the whole world. There are unfortunately — Indian rich are part of the global North, Iranian rich are part of the global North, so now North is global and South is global.
Safa: As you say, it’s a global process, global struggle and there’s a lot of complexities. But you mentioned earlier, you know, your negative experience with a racist and sexist supervisor. And unfortunately, this is something that is a bit common. I know many cases of different international development workers in different agencies in different countries where they’ve faced some kind of abuse or harassment from a coworker. What are your thoughts on the exploitation that happens amongst workers, the different treatment that perhaps national staff have versus international staff?
Kamla: We have a hierarchy between North and South. We have a hierarchy between whites and nonwhites. We have a hierarchy between men and women. And this hierarchy reaches the international organizations from our families. In my family and your family there is perhaps a hierarchy between your brother and you. And if that brother becomes a UN person, I mean he is not going to change his whole life training at home, that he is superior to his sister, his father is superior to the mother. So my focus, Safa, has always been we have to begin with ourselves. We have to begin with our families. Only then will these values of gender equality, class equality, caste quality, race equality, only then will it permeate up. Only then will it get into the government side, only then will ‘me too’ not happen. Me too happened to me when I was a child in my family, thirteen men touched me in four years in a wrong way and my silence was broken 40 years later while we were making a film, and that again was a Canadian film. The National Film Board of Canada was making a film on women’s movement in India, and I was the main person in that film. If you get a chance, go to the National Film Board of Canada, get that interesting film. It’s called ‘No Longer Silent.’ It was an all women team. Three women came from Canada. I really feel changes will not come to us in these agencies unless our families, our schools change. And you see what is happening in the US? Every two weeks, a man picks up a gun, a boy picks up a gun, goes and kills 5,6,10 people. Have you seen a girl ever pick up a gun and go and kill? No. So this — I’d almost say poor men have been brutalized, have been dehumanized by patriarchy. They’ve lost their bloody humanity and they have not even started looking at what patriarchy is doing to them. And that is why the World Health Organization says one out of every three women experiences violence. One out of every three means over a billion women in the world face violence every day. There is no peace time for women. Every day is a war time for us, and this gender war is the biggest war in the world. There is no other war which effects more than a billion women and girls. That is why, in my work, it is not limited to projects. I say I do three things. Capacity building, networking, and campaign building. So if you look at what you read about me, I am the South Asia coordinator of One Billion Rising — a campaign against violence against women going on in 207 countries. Then PeaceWomen Across the World, I’m the global co-chair of that. So for me, it’s not enough to run a project and make money for myself. For me, campaigns change the world, not projects. And that is three things we continue to do in our courses, and we do at the moment five courses a year. One is in English, four are in our own languages. And if we take about 35 per course, so that means about 175, 200 women per year go through these courses, discussing everything which I have just shared with you. They all — they come from NGOs or Women’s Studies Centers or they are lawyers or they’re journalists who have decided that this is what they want to do. We only take those who have taken a decision what their work in life will be.
Safa: That’s fantastic.
Kamla: Yeah, And with them then we build these campaigns. One Billion Rising, Peace, 8th March, sixteen days of campaigning against violence. All these things.
Safa: As you mentioned, you know, a lot of the social issues we are trying to address, we have to address them within ourselves, within our families, within our own organizations. But when you think about the last maybe 30 years and the work that you’ve been a part of, the work that you witnessed, the people you’ve met, what do you feel has changed for the better, if anything or what gives you hope?
Kamla: I feel on the economic site, I don’t get hope from anywhere. The kind of economic paradigm led by the World Economic Forum that is destroying the world. Inequality, where 1% of American people own 60% of the resources. A few Indian billionaires own 60% of India’s resources. It is only possible in this kind of neoliberal economic paradigm, where profit is God. And we have destroyed the planet and now young children from Sweden, like this Thunberg woman, my God, she’s my latest Shero - and girls like that who are, you know, throwing shit on our faces and telling us what we have done to their world. So there, I think this greed based — I mean just look at the television yesterday were Mr Miller is saying how the president of America worked with the president of Russia to make more money? I mean shameful things like that happening on our television. So that is one. As far as gender is concerned, a lot of good things have happened in the last 40, 45 years of my life. All countries of the world today have declared that men and women are equal and this is the first time after patriarchy started 2 to 3,000 years ago, it’s the first time that this has been said on paper. After colonialism and racism started, it’s the first time it has been said that blacks and whites are equal, so that is a big achievement. And that has happened because people’s movements all over the world have fought and said we want equality. You see that in every area, women have entered and showed they can — good areas and bad areas, like I’m never happy when I see a woman as the head of Pepsi Cola because I know what Pepsi Cola is doing to our children. So women have entered the mainstream, even if the mainstream is dirty. But they have entered. They have become pilots, they have gone to the moon — I mean they’ve done everything. Thirdly, today if a man, a powerful man, says something nasty about women, I mean the media have full condemnation for that man. Then some countries like Scandinavian countries have done us proud and there is you know gender equality, moving faster towards the goal of full equality. But no country in the world has achieved full equality. These are all positive things. They have happened because of the women’s movement largely and then UN Declaration of Human Rights. I feel there are three huge forces which are the pushing gender equality agenda back. Number one is capitalist patriarchy. A huge force. So, pornography and child pornography are billion dollar industries. Once again turning women into bodies, into sex objects. Toy industry. Guns for boys and Barbie dolls for girls. Cosmetic industry, fooling girls into becoming these pretty dolls. And obviously the power is such, the media and advertising is such that little girls are being fooled all over the world, who want to have flowing hair instead of being on cycles and motorcycles and running around - instead they are looking after their hair and coloring it here and there. Third, media. Bollywood, Hollywood, all these are once again stereotyping men as macho — look at the films — Godfather I, Godfather II, and in India, such horrible films. 90% of these films continue to spread stereotypes. And you look at advertising, you look at modelling, you look at beauty competitions. They are all continuing to spread gender stereotypes. Plus this paradigm also makes individualism so big. Everything is me, me, me. Feminists are saying my choice. How I dress is my choice. I am a feminist who says have a look at the politics of my choice. How is my choice helping people? That is my feminism. It’s not just my choice. It’s not just me, me, me. I like to wear this. No, what is the history of wearing these clothes? What is the history of lipsticks? What is the history of these heels? Three inch heels which we roam around in. There is a history to those and we need to look at it. But the paradigm is such that it’s just me, me, me, my choice, call me this, call me that. That’s it. Second big force after capitalist patriarchy is religious fundamentalism, Christian religious fundamentalism, Muslim religious fundamentalism, Hindu religious fundamentalists. They all push women back. Look at countries like Iran and others, they have the most modern jet planes which they own but the women still have to be covered. I mean, on the one side such tradition, which is in my opinion even anti Islam and on the other hand, the most modern of these malls and things like that. And this religious fundamentalism is like a noose in terms of families and people and communities. And the third is militarization, which again makes us more patriarchal, makes u more violent. So these forces are pushing this back, technologies are taking us forward. Big fight.
Safa: It is an ongoing process.
Kamla: Absolutely. We’re losing. You see the money they have. Like I write songs. My best song reaches maybe 100,000 people. The most horrible, sexist song from the Bollywood industry in Bombay reaches millions in a day. So I can fool myself, Oh, I’m a great writer. I’m a great songwriter. But who the hell hears it? Yeah.
Safa: Yeah. We have to, you know, vie for the attention, everyone’s attention is turned to so many things that are actually based on very harmful philosophies and practices.
Kamla: Right.
Safa: Thank you so much for all your reflections and your examples and your lessons. There is so much — so many valuable points to think of and ponder more so thank you so much.
Kamla: My pleasure, Safa I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you very much,
Safa: Thank you so much. Thank you also to our listeners. To keep up with our weekly podcast you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Google podcast platforms, where you can also rate and review the episodes and leave your comments. If you have any listener questions that you would like me to ask any future guests, please feel free to email them to us. I look forward to continuing similar conversations with you all in the weeks to come. Until then, take care.
