Aruna Roy’s Memoir, A Must-Read In Times of Shrinking Democratic Spaces
The boundaries of individual and collective blur in this account of her journey, as an individual, woman, and activist and the member of a unique collective
In early 1975, a young woman IAS officer, Aruna Roy, moved from Delhi to Tilonia village in Rajasthan to join the Barefoot College and work with the rural poor on literacy. Constitutional literacy work often assumes itself to be a one-way traffic where the privileged will ‘teach’ constitutional values to the marginalised.
Roy soon found that this hierarchical framing of constitutional education is a farce; people have their own sense and articulation of their needs and rights, and the potential and limits of laws to deliver on them. A few years later, the villagers of Devdungri, Aruna Roy, Shankar Singh, and Nikhil Dey established the Majdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) to develop a new model of politics, one based on rejection of abuse of power and corruption in ‘party politics’. Roy terms it an ‘alternative politics’ whereby rights emerge not only from elite spaces of constitutional texts and courts, but through the interconnectedness of rights and the experiences of people on ground.
Forty years since then, the MKSS and its collective strength have led the articulation of new rights under the Constitution: the right to information, the right to food, and the right to employment among many others.
Roy’s recently published memoir, The Personal is Political, is the documentation of and reflection on this journey. It is a deeply personal and even vulnerable account, documenting, challenges of settling in authoritarian and caste ridden feudal Rajasthan, the worries and guilt of one’s caste and class privilege, family needs, the challenges of working through disagreements in collective, the multiple dimensions of her life as a woman and worker, and daily moral dilemmas of her work. But the boundaries of individual and collective are seamlessly blurred in the memoir. It is both her personal account as an individual, woman, and activist and member of MKSS as a collective.
Two aspects give this book a feminist consciousness. First, the conception of democracy in the work of Roy and MKSS; and second, the continuum of personal and political, emotional, and so-called rational in participatory democracy.
Learning From Practice
For the past ten years, India has been ruled by a brute majority government that has used its numbers to legitimise its authoritarian actions, winning the title of ‘electoral autocracy’. In the process, the government has narrowed democracy to numbers. However, the experiences and practices of MKSS demonstrate that democracy is not its ‘lowest common denominator’ i.e. mere vote counts. Instead, democracy requires a participatory dimension involving ‘continued public action’. It is only through participation that people can bring their collective strength together and hold power accountable.
Roy argues that ‘democratic theory will have to learn from its practice’. She gives an example of a 1984-1985 study on the definition of ‘drudgery’ to explain the importance of participation. At the time, a policy research team had concluded that smokeless chulha and solar cookers should be encouraged amongst rural women as a ‘solution’ to drudgery. Women themselves were not consulted in the process. Ultimately, the so-called solution failed since the use of solar cookers required local millets to be replaced by rice and lentils which were more expensive and unaffordable for daily wagers. When finally, the women were consulted, they defined drudgery entirely differently.
They described drudgery as ‘hunger, arduous physical work, and unemployment’, all issues that require long-term and not ready-made solutions like ‘education’ and ‘encouragement’ for women to use solar cookers. Similarly, Roy also questioned the definitions of ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ work. She writes that perhaps, only those who did not have to do the backbreaking ‘unskilled’ work will define the physical labour as ‘unskilled’.
Participation, thus, is not merely a technical exercise, it is a fundamental dimension of democracy which can question our long-standing presumptions of law and policy.
Personal is Political
In MKSS’s work, democracy appears as a lived value, where rights are reimagined, repurposed, and expanded on a daily basis. In this conception of democracy, the slogan ‘personal is political’ finds new meaning.
Roy notes: “The personal is political is not merely a feminist slogan in origin but, as contemporary events have established, it has democratic logic behind it. The last two decades have been a gradual learning of how intimately connected our personal lives are with political events, processes, and the character of our institutions.”
The slogan ‘personal is political’, Roy asserts, implies that our most basic daily activities are deeply intertwined with the state of democracy in the country. How can there be democracy with empty stomachs? How can one get the minimum wage if they do not have the right to access bills and receipts of payments made? Personal and political are inextricably interwoven. As Shankar Ji and Nikhil write in the end of the book, they form a ‘natural and organic continuum’. Public action then relates to personal life.
Historically, a division has been drawn between the emotional and rational and the personal and political. Rational has been the male sphere: men can reason objectively, calmly without getting overpowered by emotions. Whereas women are seen as emotional and hence incapable of reason and objectivity. Men are seen as belonging to the public space, debating the state of democracy, whereas women belong in the private space. Roy and the women of MKSS question what counts as reason and where the boundary between emotion and reason lies.
Discussing work with daily wage-earning women, Roy notes that women workers’ vocabulary was holistic. She notes: “these women saw their political and personal-political as a continuum….The women did not segregate discussions into themes and topics: a wage protest and sexual assault would be discussed at the same time. The personal organically slipped into the political. This capacity to break artificial boundaries makes us women take on larger political issues as a natural corollary.”
These women spoke through experience and did not fit into easy binaries of emotions and reasons. Emotions give way to legal conceptions, and legal conceptions evoke emotions. And participation moves effortlessly between music, song, slogans, strong emotions, and legal actions through RTIs, social audits, public protests, jan sunwais (public hearings).
There are many reasons why this book is an important read, particularly now when our institutions of democracy are fragile and the space for protest and dissent continues to shrink, even literally. This book is an important reminder why as feminists we should resist this.
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