Lingering misogyny prompts Kerala women to keep fighting for basic rights.
Kerala’s protest landscape has in the recent past seen numerous women’s collectives asserting themselves to demand their rights. Historically, the state has witnessed leftist as well as renaissance movements, where women resisted and agitated shoulder to shoulder with men. That legacy has made the landscape fertile for such women’s movements to sprout and grow. Today’s crop of women’s collectives, which seems to have shunned political ideologies to carve a space for themselves, are but a natural corollary to those early movements. True, some of these recent collectives have been torpedoed by muscular patriarchal forces, but these assertions show newer ways for emulation.
Perhaps, the most significant of these women’s protests came from Munnar’s poor women tea-pluckers, who called themselves the Pembila Orumai (women’s unity). On September 5, 2015, an unorganised group of those labourers in hilly Idukki district rejected the diktat of various trade UNIons to accept lesser bonus and wages offered by the Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Company. The small group simply plonked in protest right in the middle of the road, blocking vehicular traffic to the busy touristy hill-town. More and more women tea-pluckers from other tea companies joined in. Finally, then chief minister Oommen Chandy had to intervene to arrive at a settlement.
This story is from the October 23, 2017 edition of Outlook.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the October 23, 2017 edition of Outlook.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
The Propaganda Files
A recent spate of Hindi films distorts facts and creates imaginary villains. Century-old propaganda cinema has always relied on this tactic
Will Hindutva Survive After 2024?
The idealogy of Hindutva faces a challenge in staying relevant
A Terrific Tragicomedy
Paul Murray's The Bee Sting is a tender and extravagant sketch of apocalypse
Trapped in a Template
In the upcoming election, more than the Congress, the future of the Gandhi family is at stake
IDEOLOGY
Public opinion will never be devoid of ideology: but we shall destroy ourselves without philosophical courage
The Many Kerala Stories
How Kerala responded to the propaganda film The Kerala Story
Movies and a Mirage
Previously portrayed as a peaceful paradise, post-1990s Kashmir in Bollywood has become politicised
Lights, Cinema, Politics
FOR eight months before the 1983 state elections in undivided Andhra Pradesh, a modified green Chevrolet van would travel non-stop, except for the occasional pit stops and food breaks, across the state.
Cut, Copy, Paste
Representation of Muslim characters in Indian cinema has been limited—they are either terrorists or glorified individuals who have no substance other than fixed ideas of patriotism
The Spectre of Eisenstein
Cinema’s real potency to harness the power of enchantment might want to militate against its use as a servile, conformist propaganda vehicle