Comments on the Participation of women in 'Mahila mandals'
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Economic and Political Weekly December 9, 2000 4391MAITREYI DAS‘Mahila mandals’ or women’sclubs are traditional localorganisations of women. Atthe most basic level, mahila mandals areinformal community level associations ofwomen who come together in celebration,sorrow or crisis. While there are mahilamandals in urban areas as well as villages,it is the latter that are the focus of thispaper. Historically, women in rural com-munities have come together during fes-tivals, births, deaths, weddings, localfunctions (such as inauguration of a schoolbuilding), visit of a political leader, orcrises such as health epidemics, or watershortage.This paper is an attempt to analysewhether mahila mandals are traditionalassociations that consolidate gender in-equality or are movements for resistancethat enable women to enter into the publicdomain more successfully. The illustrativeethnologies of successful mahila mandalsin the rural areas of Thane district in Maha-rashtra, contained in this paper, are basedon my field experience in Thane. Duringthe period 1993-96, I interviewed mem-bers of several women’s groups, localleaders, government functionaries andpeople’s elected representatives.Mahila mandals have largely tended toaddress women’s ‘practical gender needs’,but have enormous potential in addressing‘strategic gender needs’, concepts dis-cussed later in the paper. I argue thatmahila mandals have become more rele-vant in the context of reservation of seatsfor women in elections to ‘panchayati raj’institutions. They have become the train-ing grounds for women standing for elec-tions and entering politics. They also serveas the arena where party politics is playedout for women.At the level of the individual, mahilamandals develop and enhance the politicalskills of women from privileged back-grounds. At the community level, theyhave contradictory processes and out-comes. For the majority of the women,their most significant role is in improvingaccess to government programmes, ruralinfrastructure and connections to theoutside or public realm. They also provideforums to articulate the practical problemsof village women including access to water,education, health facilities, income, andsometimes the fight against alcoholism.Their role during epidemics and crises hasbeen particularly important. While theymay covertly and even overtly resistwomen’s domination by male structures,at other times they may serve to consoli-date class, caste and sometimes genderinequalities. Mahila mandals bring out thecomplex issues of subjectivity, conscious-ness and resistance in the gendered con-text. Kandiyoti (1998) points to the inher-ently contradictory and context specificnature of such issues in analysing powerand contestation.The earliest mahila mandals wereorganised during the socio-religious re-form movements of the 19th century inIndia, where male reformers strove to givewomen “a space for socialising and edu-cation” [Shah and Gandhi 1991]. Theimpact of these earliest attempts to organisewomen was that for the first time therewas a realisation that women’s oppressionwas the result of society’s injustices andnot women’s destiny. Second, it broughtto the fore the earliest women profession-als – lawyers, doctors, teachers, socialworkers, who later took the lead in thewomen’s movement in India. The 19thand early 20th centuries thus saw the riseof a vast number of women’s groupsorganised with diverse memberships,agendas and political leanings [Shah andGandhi 1991]. Mahila mandals and otherwomen’s groups were also active duringIndia’s struggle for independence againstMahila Mandals inGender PoliticsMahila mandals, the traditional local women’s organisations, havetremendous potential to address women’s strategic gender needs.In rural areas they are increasingly acting as vehicles of resistancethat enable women to enter the public domain. A study of somemahila mandals in Thane, Maharashtra
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