Pineapples and oranges, brahmins and shudras: periyar feminists and narratives of gender and regionality in south India.
POWER is housed in a Polytechnic school for girls, in the semirural outskirts of Tanjore, the “rice belt” district of south India. The Polytechnic is redolent with Periyar's ideology and rhetoric. Slogans such as “Chastity symbolizes slavery of women and makes her anybody's chattel,” for example, ar...
| Published in: | Anthropologica Vol. 45; no. 2; pp. 265 - 282 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA)
2003
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=510298440&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 510298440 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00035459 G2I jtl: Anthropologica issn: 00035459 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: 2003 vid: 45 iid: 2 pid: 12064 pub: Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) artinfo: ui: 510298440 ppf: 265 ppct: 17 formats: tig: atl: Pineapples and oranges, brahmins and shudras: periyar feminists and narratives of gender and regionality in south India. aug: au: George, Glynis R. ab: POWER is housed in a Polytechnic school for girls, in the semirural outskirts of Tanjore, the “rice belt” district of south India. The Polytechnic is redolent with Periyar's ideology and rhetoric. Slogans such as “Chastity symbolizes slavery of women and makes her anybody's chattel,” for example, are inscribed above the classroom doorways and along the interior courtyard. Since its formation, POWER has focused its activity on schools and some 50 villages that surround them. It has addressed infanticide amongst certain caste groups, and violence against women, and established income generating schemes, training programs and poverty alleviation schemes for destitute and abandoned women and widows. The Polytechnic itself, comprised of 150 staff and 500 students, offers commercial, architectural, engineering and computer training to girls aged 16 to 20. Some of these girls will continue their education at the nearby Periyar engineering college that offers degrees for young women, aged 18 to 25 and a few men. Others, will marry and get paid work, or return to their villages and tend to families. Most of the women included here are from rural, semirural or smaller towns. There are few Brahmin or “forward” caste women at the school, and “scheduled caste” women are represented, but mainly as support staff, (cleaners, sweepers, servers); as clients in villages, as well as young female students. A survey I conducted of 746 staff and students at both schools shows that 87% of them are Hindu, mostly from the Backward Caste, 36%, followed by Scheduled castes, 12.6%; Most Backward castes, 11%; Forward castes, 5.6%. There were no Brahmins in the samples I took. Over half of the respondents however, self-identified as “middle caste.” The women connected to POWER through the school represent a cross-section of women in rural and semi-urban Tamil society, and their relative education, class and caste position reflects emergent differences between women, and the uneven, changing status of women's lives in this region. Consider the narrative that followed the Pineapples and Oranges activity. A, a Periyar feminist leader, outlined the essential features of Periyar feminism, including the centrality of caste and religion in shaping the life of women and social inequalities that pervade in India. “Women's lives are shaped by caste, gender and class,” she argued, “but these forces are not of equal significance.” Rather, “women's fate” is determined by her caste and religious scripts which dictate that “our body is our destiny.” In spite of women's entry into higher education “she is still sent to her in-law's house.” Moreover, Indians, she argued, could theoretically change their language, their place of residence, their economic status--“everything but their caste.” “In other countries they say that class is the key element. But economic status is not rigid. In India? It is caste. Caste is fixed. How did this happen?” A completed her lecture by reminding participants to act individually, but in the collective of their “society,” their “community,” terms which are often used when referring to one's kin and caste-based social networks. By contrast, two local activists, who were not members of POWER, drew on the expression “the personal is political” to inspire participants to act. Their talks focussed on the religion and the history of women's political activism in south India as told through their own experiences. N declared to the women, “You all have good salaries, an education, a job, why should you worry about others? Why should you be activists?” Later, P, a 60-year-old activist responded that while “politics takes place in the tea shops and women remain in the kitchen...change is in the air.” She then detailed the extensive grassroots organizations and female-headed NGOs that operate in Tamil Nadu, some to protest, others to lobby government. P linked these local groups to the most recent conference on violence in Trichy, the National Alliance of Women's Organization, the Asia Pacific Women's Forum and called on women to think “globally and act locally.” pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: Undetermined refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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