Women’s Day has been celebrated since 1909 as a marker for the movement towards gender equality as a celebration and reminder of the issues women face. Utthan’s mission since 1981 has aligned with that, focusing on gender sensitive ways to approach justice and equality across Gujarat. What does celebrating Women’s Day look like for Utthan?
Being invited to my field office’s Women’s Day celebration was quite exciting, largely
because I had no idea what it would look like. Having been working with the team for the past six months, I have become familiar and close with the staff in my field site as well as the women entrepreneurs on my project. However, the cooperatives Utthan works with have upwards of 2000 members. This was one of the rare opportunities to witness the full scale of the work we did – even just in my field area.
Upon arriving (slightly late, due to yet another bicycle mishap), I was surprised that everywhere in the large crowd I saw familiar faces. Not just Utthan field officers from other sites, but people from the many self-help group meetings I had sat in on, people that I had talked to while doing fieldwork for the Agri Rental Services enterprise. Seeing their faces was a strong reminder of the community I have grown close to and how much I have learned in just six months of being here.
What I didn’t expect was government representatives from the District Hub for Empowerment of Women. I had never heard of the branch before, so hearing how Utthan, the cooperative, and the government all work together helped illustrate the level of stakeholder engagement and relationship building that made the day possible. These strong relationships don’t happen overnight – they come from executing projects together and aiming to achieve common goals of securing livelihoods and rights for women.
We continued with presentations from Sehnaz-ben, the lead women entrepreneur I work with, but also from many more women, all sharing stories about how their lives changed with the support of the other women in the co-operative. Many shared about the sense of dignity they had built through having their own store or business. Some shared about how they were securing the future of their children through the co-operative savings plans. This was a future that the women of Bhavnagar had built for themselves through working for and with each other.
It’s an ongoing theme in our office that my go-to refrain is Mahila Azadi, Mahila Zindabad – Women’s Freedoms, Long Live Women. Anywhere, anytime someone asks what I’m working on, usually that’s the response – partially because my Hindi and Gujarati are not good enough to say specifics, and also because that’s the ultimate goal of all the work at Utthan. At the Celebration, the same phrases appeared, chanted by the crowd with one small addition, Mahila Sashaktikaran – Women’s Empowerment. These three messages were core to the activities of the day – hearing from leaders about a shared vision of an equal world.
Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper Gujarati Women’s Day celebrations without the requisite garba. We closed out with enough songs to leave me sweating an embarrassing amount while trying to follow along everyone else’s effortless moves. It was a perfect end to a day that left me reflective on how feminism and equality appear different halfway across the world.
