CHENNAI : An activist friend and I were talking about code-switching and covering of identities and wondered if the ways in which we self-censor and police ourselves on a daily basis — saying, wearing and being what is acceptable, and not challenging these notions simply because there is no bandwidth — even if we come from places of privilege, are in fact those.
It is not code-switching or covering we concluded for obvious reasons of privilege, but we agreed that having to watch over our shoulders as women and as activists is exhausting. And though we mourn nothing for the ways in which our spoken Tamil has improved so much so our dialects shock our grandmothers, it is walking on eggshells when we have to drink up the fourth glass of tea in an hour, when we are relegated to ‘organising women’, when men address only our male colleagues, when choosing the long-sleeved kurta on a sleeveless kind of day, when unconsciously desexualise ourselves, and all this, while realising, as Shehla Rashida once said, a lot the houses that invite us in and insist we eat there and are curious to know more will never want or ‘allow’ their daughters to become like us.
While the micro-aggressions that arise from the need to be taken seriously weigh down activists, not challenging the communities we work with or the very idea of ‘communities’, not calling out our colleagues and comrades to protect for a larger cause has its effects. And this was seen most recently when headlines screamed ‘Sex scandal hits Anti-Sterlite movement’.
A video of a senior activist who has given decades of her life to the people’s movement in ‘compromising positions’ with a peer was being circulated. That a video such as this would be ‘leaked’ at the height of a corporate accountability campaign and pro-factory people would go to all lengths to discredit the campaign is not surprising.
What is disappointing though, is that all it takes is the talk of sex between two adults to malign a woman’s lifelong fight for justice and that amidst this is no anger that their privacy has been infringed upon.
Thereon I blame myself, and each of us activists (because the onus of this is on us too) for not challenging the norms by which we are expected to work, and really, for not taking time out for self-care.
And even as the anger simmers, and the court case lingers on, with activists seeming to have as weapons only facts and figures, evidence and law, our weekends and hearts were warmed as activist and anti-caste crusader Gowsalya remarried. It gives me hope that we women will fight on, no matter what the world demands of us. In Gowsalya, whom I first met only a few months after Shankar had been murdered, I saw a fighter. Now as she marries Shakthi, I see the fight get bigger, but her, and with her, all of us, get stronger.