What Rural Women Taught Me

A young professional left the classroom to work with women in rural Kashmir. What he found wasn’t just inequality. It was wisdom, strength, and a new way of seeing the world.

- Irfan Jaffer

I used to think I understood gender justice. In university, I studied it deeply. Books, journals, seminars. I could quote Foucault and bell hooks in the same breath.

I learned how patriarchy works, how class and caste shape experience, how power hides in plain sight. But something always nagged at me.

I kept asking myself: What does any of this mean to someone who's never sat in a seminar room?

That question didn’t go away. It followed me into the social sector, where I finally had the chance to work with communities. Not on paper, but in person.

I left the lecture hall behind and found myself sitting on mud floors in far-off villages, often in places where women had never spoken in front of men, never finished school, never even been asked what they wanted.

One of those places was Baramulla, a district in north Kashmir. I went there as part of a team working on women’s rights and development. At first, I thought I was there to teach. I was wrong.

The women in those villages taught me more than any book ever did.

They taught me how theory stumbles when it meets real life. How the word “empowerment” changes depending on who's saying it, and where.