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Take back the day

Updated on: 13 March,2011 07:14 AM IST  | 
Paromita Vohra | paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

There's an event that happens around the world called Take Back The Night

Take back the day

There's an event that happens around the world called Take Back The Night. Women walk around the street all night, doing fun things ufffd symbolically reclaiming the night as a space where they too should be able to walk without fear of violence. Well, before night falls, we may first need to do a Take Back The Day.

I'm talking about Women's Day.

March 8, 2011 was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. Who knew?



Definitely not folks who were sending me the pukey "woman you are strength and beauty" mass SMSes. The papers gave the impression it was just discount for women's day ufffd so plentiful were the (of course totally non-commercial) women's day packages offered by spas, plastic surgery clinics, weight-loss centres, gyms, supermarkets and other things that remind women that it's just not OK to be how they are.

Women's Day began as Working Women's Day among socialist movements in Russia and the US in the beginning of the 20th century. As it spread around the world, it has been a day to celebrate suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote (remember them next time you put on your iVote brand nail polish), remember underpaid immigrant women workers who'd died in the New York Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, feel one with women who protested the world wars and marched for peace, equal pay for equal work, education, abortion and the right to political office. Women who changed laws and lives and the world.

In India it could be a day to remember 19th century feminists like the scholar Pandita Ramabai, the first woman surgeon Rukmabai, RD and Malati Karve, family planning pioneers who espoused women's equal right to sensual pleasure in the 1920s, Satyarani Chaddha and Shahjahan Begum, who, having lost their daughters to dowry murders, fought for other parents and daughters in the 1980s, Kamlabai Gokhale, first woman to act on the Indian screen, BR Ambedkar and Jyoti Phule who wrote about and worked for greater gender equality, Kalpana Dutt and Roopvati Jain, militant nationalists of the Indian freedom movement ufffd hundreds of people who have dared to leap over boundaries into the unpredictable world of idealism and change. The intelligence, courage and selflessness of such people today allows all of us ufffd men and women ufffd to shape lives that are freer, richer and fairer.

I attended my first women's day rally 21 years ago ufffd it was a carnival of women from every background. I was shy to sing those funny, rousing feminist songs but I loved being with the crazy, diverse singers. I was too middle class to call out the slogans, but I believed in every one of them.

It is embarrassing that a day symbolising such powerful politics is reduced to some discount for divas. It's sad that young urban women and men don't know their debt to the feminist history that has given them so many choices and rights. It is ironic that when they say some actress is their role model, they don't question why that actress gets paid one fifth of what most male actors get paid.

The unimaginative and ignorant will immediately start jumping up and down to say, look feminists are haters who don't like spas and make-up and any nice, fun thing. Well, yawn. I like spas and clubs and red lipstick, especially when they're discounted and I also (used to) like Sex and the City. It's just that they have nothing to do with Women's Day. We need to take back this day and make it one we're proud of. Because free gifts are not the same as freedom.


Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with
fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.



The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.


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