‘Ab Govind na aayenge’: Mallika Sarabhai

A public lecture at Pune on January 4, the Saturday before the attack on young students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in the national capital, was like a prophecy: “Suno Draupadi, shastra uthao, ab Govind na aayenge,” said Mallika Sarabhai, renowned dancer, quoting Hindi poet Pushpamitra Upadhyay. The poem urges Draupadi of the Mahabharat to defend herself, for Krishna will no longer come to her rescue.

Sarabhai read the whole poem right at the beginning of her lecture on the meaning of being a woman in India today. She said she was happy because the fear has lifted; for the past month, people have been taking over the streets across the country, in protest.

She said she felt fortunate to have been born in the family that she comes from – for four generations no one in the family had gone through an arranged marriage. There were Muslims and Christians and some Hindus too, she said. Her widowed great-grandmother, like other Nair women with a strong matrilineal culture, took care of the farms in her home in Kerala, and engaged Muslim cultivators, Moplahs.

“When the rebellion began, a vast number of people arrived at the house. Great-grandmother had been forewarned and asked to go into hiding. She instead got the household together and cooked a meal to feed hundreds. When the rebels arrived, she invited them to sit to a meal, seeing that they had been hungry long. She then told them to talk with the Moplahs who worked for her, and they testified that they were treated well. The large crowd then retreated, thanking her.”

That was from Mallika Sarabhai’s mother’s side of the family. Her father’s side was no less interesting. A traditional Jain trader family, the Sarabhais had got Anasuya, sister of Ambalal, the family patriarch and mill owner in Ahmedabad, married young and against her will. Anasuya slid away from the spouse and headed to England for further studies.

She returned after a taste of the Suffragette movement, the women-only movement in England that sough enfranchisement of women in the early 20th century, adopting civil disobedience as a method of action. Once back in Ahmedabad, she would join the workers at her brother’s mill in their demand for higher wages. The tussle between brother and sister, who lived harmoniously in the same house, was resolved only with the intervention of Mahatma Gandhi, who for the first time tested his Satyagraha in the struggle of the mill workers.

On Saturday in Pune, Sarabhai dwelt on her experience after the 2002 riots in Gujarat. “I had never intended to be an activist,” she said. She had earned an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad and had established Darpana, her dance school on the banks of the Sabarmati. “Right across the school, were bastis of Muslims. I was away in Calcutta in February 2002 when the violence began, and I got calls saying the basti was on fire, and what could I do to help.”

“Two journalists and I later took the matter to the Supreme Court. What happened in 2002 should not be described as a riot. It was genocide. On April 7, we planned a meeting at Gandhi Ashram to mull on the way forward, to prevent the hate from spreading. We sent out emails inviting people to the meeting, and over 100 different organisations had come together to organize the gathering. For the first time after the violence, elderly Muslims too had agreed to join us, shedding their fear. Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, who had earned the ire of the Narendra Modi administration in the state for her work among the dam displaced, messaged me saying she would come too. I asked her to please not arrive. After lunch, she came anyway. I tried getting her to leave soon, but a mob descended on us and all hell broke loose. I could see someone bash Medha Patkar’s head against the wall. I slid out and returned to the dance school, where too a large crowd was baying for our blood.”

“Ever since, I’m Enemy Number One. My old mother, my kids, my colleagues; I fear for them. Colleagues have been instructed to leave the school or face abduction of their kids.”

But the struggles are the same, whether man or woman, Sarabhai said.

“In the past five years, I’ve been working more with men. While women recognize their unfreedom, men seldom do. If a man cannot cry, if he cannot change his baby’s nappy, how free is he? Our social mores enslave men too, thrusting expectations on them that divorce them from their real humanity.”

Sarabhai underscored that Indian society is also enormously flexible, willing to change the norms and accept women once the norms are re-set. She spoke of how former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gradually accepted, and carved a niche for herself. She recalled that as a student at IIM, she too was expected to perform secretarial tasks once groups of students were formed as part of the needs of coursework. “I did it once, the photocopying and all that, and later insisted that since I had done it once, someone else ought to do it the next time. In a class of about 200, there were only seven girls. But once that norm was in place, I was not expected to perform the secretarial role again.”