And WE CALL OURSELVES MAHILA MILAN
The day the women gheraoed those two policemen sent to tear down their huts that October afternoon in 1986 was the first open act of revolt.
But the seeds had been sown well before. What happened that day in 1986 in Byculla was the culmination of a long and hard process that began when Sheela, Mona, Celine and a few other eager young social workers decided what they were doing simply wasn't working.
Sheela
Patel had trained as a social worker at the prestigious Tata Social Science
Research Institute in Chembhur, on the northern outskirts of the city. Her
first real job was in the Nagpada Neighborhood House, a community center slap-bang
in the middle of Byculla, in fact on Sophia Zuber Road, where Laxmi lives.
It was your standard welfare program - nursery school, immunizations, preventive health care for the babies of the poor. One of her clients was a teenage Rehmat Sheikh, whose baby had scabies. Rehmat was totally ignorant of how to treat the disease. Sheela and the others took the baby in, cured it, and taught Rehmat that the world outside the pavement might just be worth learning about, if it could solve what had, until then, seemed to her a matter almost of life or death.
But these worthy programs were dealing with the symptoms of poverty. Not its causes.
The year was 1984. Sheela remembers it as if it were almost yesterday.
"This was the time when all over the city, poor people were streaming in from the villages and settling down all over the city. All around our center people lived on the pavements. And the services we designed and dispensed so efficiently, seemed totally irrelevant to them."
Sheela felt, first, frustration, then anger. So along with several colleagues, they quit the Center to form their own organization. Their mission: to help the pavement dwellers - the poorest of the poor, whom nobody seemed to care about.
The trouble was: the poorest of the poor didn't seem very interested in these self-styled missionaries!
It was very frustrating. "When I look back on those first few months, it was a very difficult period," says Sheela, "because we were all so enthusiastic and excited about not being chained in by other people's designs of how poor people should be helped. And we had this lovely image that we were going to do exactly what poor people wanted. But the poor people whom we talked to didn't know what to make of us, what to do with us, because we didn't behave like all those other social workers who'd been visiting them all the time.
O.K. That's one side. Now listen to how Samina remembers these do-gooders.
Samina is living with her three baby daughters and sozzled husband Mulla in a hut next to the perimeter wall of Jhula Maidan municipal park. Directly opposite is the old nineteenth century stone stables that used to be the carriage house for the city's second Police Commissioner - one Frank Souter. It's long since been turned into a public health clinic. But round the side there's a garage, where the carriages were stored. And that's where Sheela and friends decided to set up shop. So every morning, Samina would watch the young women in their nice clothes, walk through the gates of the Dispensary and go down the courtyard to their hole in the wall.
"And
we used to wonder what they were up to? We saw them go in to this office,
then they'd come out and start singing songs with our kids. They'd pick them
up, hold them, hug them. We thought they were stark, staring mad: why should
anyone like that want to hold our black, dirty, filthy children? But as they
persisted, we started to wonder if maybe they weren't quite so mad, after
all."
Sheela thinks two things probably convinced Samina and the curious few that they were for real, "First, we didn't give up. We just walked up and down those streets. We tried to smile at all these women. We tried to talk with them. And when they wouldn't talk with us, we started playing with their kids. I mean, what else could we do?!?"
"And I think that's what made the difference. They realized that these people - WE - must have something if they just keep coming back and coming back. And this is how we made our first real contacts with them."
Samina's version is a bit less cut-and-dried.
"We were very, very skeptic about them in the beginning. Everybody used to come and make us all these wonderful promises Oh Great! Come, Sister, come sister! 1'11 build you a toilet. 1'11 give you running water. I'll get you a house. 1'11 do this. 1'11 do that!" Such promises, whenever they wanted our votes. But nothing ever came of any of it. So all of us were very, very skeptic about these newcomers."
"We were angutha types. People who only know how to sign our names with our thumbprints. We didn't know a thing! And we couldn't make head or tails of these women. So, we decided to gang up on them. After all, what could they possibly teach us, ah?"
Samina could be forgiven her asceticism. After all, here were this little band of well-educated, middle-class women, from the posh parts of town, coming to try and help those for whom every day was a new chapter in the art of sheer survival!
Samina was typically blunt to their faces: "I used to tell them to buzz off. Who are you to tell me how to build houses? You're bullshitting. We know better than you how to survive in this city."
But Sheela, Celine, Mona and the others kept on coming back, and back, and back. And they talked. They were always talking. And slowly, skeptic Samina stopped tuning them out, started listening.
Samina, Sagira, Medina, Munni and Laxmi, they'd all come and listen and talk in the afternoons, then report back to the curious on their streets.
Now, when Laxmi and the others had come to meetings with other social workers in Byculla, they'd been promised houses. So, they waited for the usual development "goodie." And that, according to Laxmi, is precisely what did not happen.
"They told us we would not be given anything like that. We wouldn't get any kind of welfare, no services. We'd have to fend for ourselves and find our own way. This was a big shock. But then, gradually, it started to, make sense. It really was We - Us - we had to chart our own direction.
Today, that old garage behind the health clinic has been taken over by the pavement dwellers themselves. It's their office, their headquarters, their haven - a beacon for the poor and the homeless, not just from Bombay, but quite literally from all over much of Asia.
But in the beginning, there were just a half-dozen or so women.
They had no identity, no self-confidence. They saw themselves as dirt kachra, as nobodies.
But
they'd reached the end of their tether. Their huts were being demolished several
times a week. They were angry and they wanted a house, a real house, of their
own.
Dreams are always
free. But figuring out how to make them real is quite another matter! You
can't run until you can walk. And you can't walk before you can crawl. But
once you learn to crawl, and then to walk, self-confidence begins to breed
self-confidence.
So, Sheela
and the others, who'd formed themselves into an NGO with the ungainly acronym
SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers) began with simple
first steps.
And the most
basic of all was obtaining ration cards for the pavement dwellers.
Now, in
India, the poor get subsidized staple foods, such as rice, lentils or cooking
oil from government ration shops. But to qualify you have to have a ration
card. And to get the ration card you have to prove a fixed and permanent address.
If you live in a slum that qualifies you. But if you live on the pavement and your house is demolished every two weeks, you don't qualify. Until Sheela, Celine and Company decided to make Laxmi and the others claim what was theirs by right. Until then, they'd always been turned away, to the point they'd stopped even trying. But this time, Laxmi, says, was different.
"Sheela told us to climb into an old ambulance she'd found for the day. She took all of us - we must have been fifty - down to the main Ration office in the city. She went inside and spoke to the chief Ration Officer. And then we were all called in, asked to fill out forms, and within a few days we got our ration cards. It was as simple as that."
Nothing unusual thus far. The social workers were still basically doing the work for them. But once the pavement dwellers formed their own organization, and new members signed up, and those newcomers needed cards, then things started to change.
Self-confidence
started busting out all over. People on the street began to sit up and take
notice. They came to the meetings out of curiosity, to find out what the hell
was going on. The social workers were forcing the pavement dwellers, in Laxmi's
words, to take charge of their own lives:
"Slowly
the girls from the office stopped coming every day. We started learning to
go to the Ration Office on our own. Every time we went, we'd take ten or fifteen
people from this area and get them cards. Simple empowerment by doing.
But would it have really gone much further without the missing ingredient? The catalyst that fizzles and pops and energizes everyone else.
In other words, Jockin.
Corruption of Jockin, a good catholic boy, originally from Bangalore, who came to Bombay when he was eighteen. Jockin's always lived in a slum. He's always been a grassroots activist. He's traveled the entire world, working as a labor organizer with United Nations credentials and protection in the Philippines, South Korea, South America. He's been to New York. He knows the homeless problem here, a bit.
He's five foot
nothing, an imp of a man, of inexhaustible energies, a born leader of men,
and of women, a human dynamo with three days stubble on his face that's only
ever shaved off for Holy Days, or when his wife Rita so wills it. Jockin is
the man who, if the Bombay pavement dwellers ever come to work with Spare
Change, will become a familiar sight on the streets here. If a man deserves
a Nobel Prize for helping improve the lives of of the homeless, then Jockin
should be the first recipient.
Jockin told the small group of pavement dwellers they had rights like everyone
else. And he also told them they could negotiate with the government, and
with the police. It was permitted. It was allowed. It was normal. It was their
right!
Before, Samina and the others were absolutely petrified of the police. See a policeman and they would run and hide. Jockin's simple suggestion was that they invite the local police chief Mr. Zende to afternoon tea on the street. They sent the Police Chief a written invitation. Five hundred women turned up.
So did Mr. Zende.
And so did Samina.
"He
came and told us about what laws are, how to file a First Information Report
(an official complaint). He told us that we were innocent until proved guilty.
That sounds ridiculous to you, doesn't it!"
"But poor, illiterate women don't know these things. If a criminal tried to rob one of us and we caught him and beat him up, it would be us who got punished. We didn't know how to talk to policemen or magistrates. But Mr. Zende said that if ever this happened again, he personally would make sure no harm ever came to us. The law would be on our side. You can't imagine the impact hearing this had on us."
Same story with the hospitals. Nobody had ever told the pavement dwellers they were entitled to free treatment if they only asked at the right office.
The middle class take this as normal and as their right. But if you're poor and illiterate and female, then learning to make the system work for you can be very, very hard. Laxmi admits it was very much a case of one step forward, two steps back.
"I mean, we went to the government to try and negotiate with them, to get some sort of housing for us. But their reaction was typical middle-class: Oh, you know, all pavement dwellers are too dirty. If we give them land or a house they'll sell it and move away and go and set up on another pavement and make money out of us. We were really depressed when they told us that to our faces. We felt very frustrated rated. "
Things are changing slowly now, and for the better. But back in the mid 1980s, a pavement dweller trying to get a loan for a house was like whistling for the moon. Sheela and Jockin, however, came up with a devastatingly simple solution. Laxmi is very proud of that little solution.
"Sheela-didi (sister) asked us: Can you save one Rupee every day? Of course, we replied. Because if you can, then we can help you set up a sort of housing bank that will eventually be able to help build your houses for you. We all agreed on the spot. And that's how the whole banking and credit system we have here was created."
It's been a very Long March since then, one of little victories, many defeats, but always a clear sense of the ultimate prize. The result: an extraordinary self-confidence, tempered with realism about how the world really works. They know that they have support if they need it. But they also know they have rights to sit down with officials. Just because they're poor doesn't take away any of those rights.
Essay
Episodes 1 - 4
Episodes 5 - 8
Episodes 9 - 12
Episodes 13 - 16
Episodes 17 - 20
Episodes 21 - 24
Episodes 25 - 28
Episodes 29 - 32
Episodes 33 - 35
Main
Episode List
Cast of Characters
Credits
MP 3
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