Sunita Chaudhury is a smart, young woman — the kind that in today’s vocabulary would be described as ‘kick-ass’. She’s also Delhi’s first, and at the moment, only female auto driver. I meet her at a women’s college in Delhi; she’s there to participate in a panel discussion to mark International Women’s Day.

The panel is unique: apart from Sunita, there are three young women who drive taxis, Shanti, Lalita and Saroj, and Baby Halder, a domestic worker turned writer. Thunderous applause and rhythmic whistles greet their entry on to the ‘stage’ — at their behest, tables and chairs are moved off the raised platform to the floor so they can be closer to the students.

They begin by telling their stories of overcoming the most difficult of odds, of holding on to hope and aspiration at all times, of the occasional bout of despair, the regular fact of violence, and the excitement at feeling a sense of power, whether it comes from holding the handlebars of an auto, the steering wheel of a taxi, or the feel of a pen and notebook.

Sunita raises many laughs when she talks of how she uses the age-old auto-driver tactic of looking at his (actually her) passengers in the rearview mirror and sussing them out. “I can see them trying to figure me out,” she says, “and by the time we are at our destination, we are friends. So what if I did not have regular access to school, I have learnt a lot in the classroom of life.”

Shanti amazes when she describes how, to escape her home and impending marriage, she wrote a letter to a random man she knew, asking if he would be willing to help her get away, and how she then fought him and his family to make her own life. A single mother today, she looks after her two young children and earns a living as a taxi driver.

Baby is poignant as she speaks of how much she wanted to study, what it meant to her to have an employer who not only considered her as a human being but encouraged her to read and write. “My children used to be embarrassed when they had to describe what their mother did for a living. Today, they say with pride, ‘My mother is a writer’.”

There’s a sense of joy and delight in the room, a wonderful camaraderie — despite class differences, there’s a language in common, a connect that can only be said to have come because of the women’s movement.

A few days later, I attend two meetings: in one, a group of women writers from all over India speak about their work and what writing means to them.

There’s joy here too, but also sobriety, perhaps because this is a more formal kind of meeting. But it’s clear that despite the opening up of spaces for women writers in the last several decades, the struggle to be taken seriously isn’t over. Most of the writers come from the Indian languages: Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, Assamese, Marathi, and in each language, the literary establishment is firmly in the hands of men, usually upper caste men. Women’s admission into this world is still difficult.

At the second meeting, the atmosphere is different. There are poets, performers, activists, dancers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka — they call themselves gunehgar auretein , sinful women. As they describe their journeys, the audience — men, women, young, old — listen in pin drop silence, break into loud appreciation, and many tear up at the ways in which our countries have created such intractable borders to keep us apart.

At the end of this day-long meeting — from 10am to 10pm — people make their way home, holding dear what they have heard and learnt. We are high on the joy of International Women’s Day, on the sense of a shared history, a sense that the women’s movement is finally getting somewhere.

Half an hour later, a young German woman heading home in an auto is assaulted by the driver, and then robbed of her handbag by two other men driving past — very likely friends of the driver. Some things change and others don’t.

It strikes me that in many ways we’ve come a long way. The nature of the March 8 celebrations shows this. We haven’t allowed the ground to be taken over by manufacturers of cosmetics and washing machines. And we’re no longer speaking only to ourselves — there are men there, young and old, there are families and students and so many others.

There’s celebration.

But there’s also reality, the shock of rude reality. For despite everything that has happened in the Capital in the last year, a woman is still unsafe in public transport in the middle of the city. This dose of reality is an important corrective, one we’d do well to remember.

(blink@thehindu. co. in)

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