BehanVox: How Women Spend Their Time
Our weekly newsletter BehanVox brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.
Hello, and welcome back to BehanVox. We hope you are all caught up on our all-new newsletters, Postcards and Postscript. This week in our news round-up we bring you a lovely, off beat story on the vardi that binds ASHA workers together. We also bring you an analysis of what ails time use surveys that take a nuanced look at women’s days.
Story So Far
We are celebrating 2025 as the year of ASHA workers, 20 years of singular contribution to ensuring better health access for women, children and adolescents living in the country’s remotest corners. Our series this year, the ASHA Story is a feminist historiography of their lives that goes beyond the usual – it talks of their larger challenges but also delves into the nuances of their fascinating everyday life.
This week we bring you a delightful story by Saumya Kalia on the ASHA vardi or uniform. There is no standard outfit prescribed for the cadres, each state has its own. It could be the sari, the salwar kameez or the jainsem of the north east. It is coffee coloured in Madhya Pradesh, orange in Maharashtra and purple in Kerala and red and white in Haryana. But it is more than just a colour or a style. It is a symbol of solidarity, say the ASHA workers, a marker of their unique place in the community.
For Lakshmi Kaurav the two faded coffee coloured saris with beige borders sitting on her shelf are her pehchaan (identity) as a frontline healthcare worker. So not only does she wear it to work, the pallu draped over her shoulders, but also to events where she and her colleagues need to show solidarity. “We decided that whenever there is a protest or event, like a meeting with the chief minister, we will wear our uniforms, even if we aren’t on duty,” she says.
The uniforms are more than a few yards of fabric, stitched or unstitched. They reflect many underlying issues of politics and culture, some harking back to the national movement and others to issues of social hierarchy.
For the last 13 years ASHA workers have been fighting for the right to wear a uniform so that they are distinctly recognised as government workers with rights to a fair salary and benefits. Part of the demand has been fulfilled but the state still sees them as volunteers, doing seva in the prescribed mould of a selfless woman in a patriarchal home. But ASHA workers do not see them in this role, they work hard taking on multiple roles – often beyond their original mandate – and are demanding that they be seen as deserving of labour rights. The Kerala strike by the cadres – squatting outside the Secretariat in their purple sarees – is a potent symbol of this.
“Sab humein aam samajhte the pehele (everyone thought us common people earlier),” says Sunita, an ASHA facilitator from Haryana. “Now people see value in our work — be it giving polio vaccines or helping pregnant women with delivery.”
What they now want is that the divisions of colour be done away with – between rural and urban, one state and the next – so that no one ever stands apart in a campaign of solidarity.
Read the story here.
As we ask in our feminist puzzler in our newly launched Postcards newsletter, if a woman is shelling peas while on break at work, does that count as work or leisure? The answers we got are a riot of quips and sharp eyed observations. But the question is no less thought provoking even if it sounds lighthearted. And it is the sort of question that the folks who craft the method of questioning women’s time use in India are up against all the time. For there is nothing more complex than how women use their day, weaving in work, paid and unpaid, leisure and many things in between.
Shreya Raman analyses this week the reasons why India’s two official Time Use Surveys fell short of their intended aim because they did not deal with these complexities. How for instance do you account for proxy answering of questions by other members of the household which happens in 60% of cases? How can we link this survey to the larger employment centric labour force survey?
Read our analysis here.
Talking Points
“I am a woman…I am dark”: We at BehanBox never tire of pointing out how thin the veneer of progressivism is in the Indian states that think they hold a superior record of human rights. What else can you say of the fact that Kerala’s chief secretary and veteran bureaucrat Sarada Muraleedharan, with just one month left to retire, has had to hit back at the worst kind of colourism, sexism and casteism that pervades in a state that never tires of holding up its development indices. She was referring to digs about how “dark” her governance is compared to her husband’s, who was the chief secretary before her. In a moving essay for the Indian Express, Kani Kusruti, the luminescent Malayali actor from All We Imagine As Light, talks about how she dealt with the childhood trauma of being taunted for her skin colour.
Acclaimed but shunned: Santosh, the acclaimed film by British filmmaker Sandhya Suri, has been blocked for release in India by the Central Board of Film Certification, according to The Guardian. The report points to the board’s reservations about the portrayal of corruption, misogyny, casteism and Islamophobia in the film which is UK’s official entry to the Oscars. Responding to the ban, Sandhya said: “It was surprising for all of us because I didn’t feel that these issues were particularly new to Indian cinema or hadn’t been raised before by other films,” she said.
Pushback: President Donald Trump’s decision to disallow passports that specify the gender identity for transgender and nonbinary Americans has been questioned by a federal judge. In 2022, the Biden administration allowed passport applicants for the first time to choose “X” as a neutral sex marker on their passport applications, as well as being able to self-select “M” or “F” for male or female.
BehanVox Recommends
Letters To Nowhere: In Washington Post’s interactive read, get a glimpse into The Missing Post Office in Japan’s Awashima Island, a repository for 60,000-plus pieces of mail: letters, birthday cards and New Year’s greetings sent from all over Japan to those with no forwarding address. It is the destination for expressions of sorrow, hope and longing that have nowhere else to go.
Abandoned: As Jammu and Kashmir’s women’s support cells face shutdown, Dabirah Hassan highlights how the fate of survivors of gender-based violence hangs in balance. She asks what will happen to the women who rely on these support structures for justice and rehabilitation.
Dark Water: In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan explores how porn — crafted for the gaze of the heterosexual man — has altered human connections, intimacy, and desensitised society.
Way Outside The Margin: Scholar Disha Wadekar explores the manner in which India’s constitution has legitimised notions of hereditary criminality, and how the constitutional text and various post-colonial penal mechanisms, such as vagrancy laws, police registers, prison manuals, and the criminal justice administration, continue to target denotified tribes.
Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.
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