When we came together

It is difficult to imagine that an Assamese mahila samiti, a women's association, passed a resolution to have fixed meal timings at home, in order to ease the lives of women otherwise confined to the kitchen – that too, as far back as 1948. But that is just what took place in the immediate aftermath of Independence, when the mahila samiti in Tezpur – one of several in the province at the time – passed a resolution stating:

Nowadays in urban areas women without domestic help hardly have time to come out as she is preoccupied with the kitchen. However to participate in cultural activities one needs some leisure time. Considering these situations, this sabha (meeting) proposes that the following timetable should be accepted in all the towns of Assam as fixed meal times – Lunch 12 noon and dinner 10 pm. No meal should be served after one hour of the proposed time.

Meal preparation was also mandated in the resolution, again with an eye to freeing up women's time:

It is also proposed that four times a week, the afternoon snacks could be an uncooked one so that women have leisure time. Thirdly to reduce spending a lot of time in the kitchen, we must include one dish in every meal that ideally requires no cooking or may be prepared quickly.

Predictably, the Tezpur resolution raised a public storm, with letters to the editor far and wide criticising the move. Meena Agarwala, a member of the samiti at the time, kept some of these newspaper cuttings, a collection of which were recently discovered in an old cupboard by her daughter. Says Hemjyoti Medhi, assistant professor at the department of English and foreign languages at Tezpur University, 'Maybe this resolution could not be enforced in practical terms, but what is significant is that domestic work was equated with "labour" and this was a sweeping idea in Assam during that period.'

The first mahila samiti was established in Dibrugarh in 1915. These groups were formed as local associations in Assam's urban centres and particularly picked up momentum during the 1920s. Ever since, the samiti movement has played a seminal role in women's political mobilisation, in both colonial and postcolonial Assam. Medhi explains that although there were several mahila samitis active in the first and second decade of the 20th century in Assam, these were for the most part local organisations confined to discussions on education, culture and music among the elite bhadramahilas ('respectable women'). The crucial break came in 1926 with the establishment of the Assam Mahila Samiti (AMS), and Chandraprabha Saikiani as its founding secretary. The stated objective of this larger group was 'overall development of education, health and so on of the Assamese woman'.

One of the main objectives was to 'rescue and rehabilitate widows, exploited, and socially outcast women and kidnapped girls', with Saikiani herself the mother of a child born out of wedlock at the time, facing social ostracism. Taking up this and similarly controversial issues, the AMS's actions led its members to court controversy on a regular basis. In 1934, for instance, the group intervened in the proposed marriage of a young girl to an older man in Guwahati. Given that this was five years after the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, Samiti Secretary Rajabala Das issued a legal notice to the groom. This led to a massive public outcry, finally leading members of the local Congress party to get involved; ultimately, they were able to force the AMS to withdraw its notification. Even so, the group immediately formed a committee to mobilise people against child marriages, earning it the nickname of 'biya bhanga' (marriage-banning) samiti.

During the early years of the AMS, the large-scale mobilisation of women, including establishing some 200 primary-health units in villages, coincided with the Indian national movement. Mohandas K Gandhi's call for khadi was immediately appropriated by the women of the AMS as a positive role in which women could contribute to the making of the new country. This renewed investment in spinning, weaving and handloom work brought a sense of dignity to the women of Assam and, ultimately, to women all over India.

Peripheral

Despite a strong start, the mahila samitis of Assam are generally thought to have deteriorated in importance over the past half-century. Today, some suggest that the NGO culture has changed the way that the samitis function. During the freedom struggle of the 1940s, for instance, there was a common bond of sisterhood and a holistic vision – a unity that might no longer exist. While there has also been a growth of small local-level mahila samitis, in reality these seem to function more like recreation clubs that organise social gatherings – a far cry from the politicised actions of past decades. For the most part, the movement is dominated by a few large NGO-like samitis.

'The mahila samiti movement is practically non-existent now,' says Aparna Mahanta, an academic at Dibrugarh University. 'Earlier, it was voluntary social service by women from affluent backgrounds – it was a small sector with limited grants.' The situation changed after the plans for women's development were incorporated in the national-level five-yearly development plans, during the early 1950s. Whereas previously the samitis' activities were planned by untrained women in their leisure time, the sector is now dominated by trained professionals working within NGOs.

In functioning like NGOs, today's large samitis tend to take on projects from national and international organisations, following agendas set by the donors and not necessarily taking up issues of importance to local women. Although earlier the women's groups did engage in some government-funded work, this was undertaken based on donations and voluntary work. Today, most women in the samitis have become professionals, engaging in this work as their living, and thus the organisations can no longer survive simply on donations. Also, notes Medhi, 'Earlier, though they might not have had professional training, the women had different levels of exposure. For instance, Chandraprabha Saikiani went for the Indian National Congress conference in Karachi during the early 1930s.' Her travels from the east of the Subcontinent across to the West would have opened doors to a completely different world.

Veterans of the samiti movement say that the earlier approach remains relevant today. 'With changing times, we have new emerging problems like trafficking of women, climate refugees, etc,' says Joylakshmi Bora of the Assam Pradeshik Mahila Samiti. 'Here, the government departments should try to rope in the expertise of the mahila samitis. We still command an appeal in the remote villages and the government should cash in on this. However, we need the support of the authorities to carry on our activities.' In an earlier time, it would have been the mahila samitis that might have intervened in the turmoil that characterises present-day Assam. The insurgency and the continuing violence demands interventions in the shape of conflict resolution and mediation, but the mahila samitis of today might not be equal to the task.

As Assam's mahila samitis have become increasingly peripheral to women's lives, a group of Assamese women have started a project called 'Memory, Movement and the Mahila Samiti in Assam'. As part of the project, a show recently opened at Tezpur University, where a range of memorabilia was on display, including newspaper cuttings and the 1948 'lunch' resolution. The first phase of the project involved intense collaboration between the project team and the mahila samitis to collect and select documents to be digitally preserved. 'Though many documents have been lost permanently, preliminary research led me to interesting documents scattered across various private collections and public archives in India,' says Medhi, one of the project's coordinators.

The work was inspired by the fact that many women involved in the samitis during their formative days are now elderly or have already passed away. Medhi recalls Swarnaprabha Mahanta, a mahila samiti worker, Congress leader and erstwhile minister, who died while the project was coming together. 'I was first inspired by her life fading before my very eyes to record women's memory,' Medhi says. 'We recorded an interview with her in a great hurry with hired marriage-video professionals from town, as she was leaving for Kolkata for treatment. The video quality is bad but her voice remains with us – she died a few months after our recording.'

Before the project, only a single historical overview of the movement was available, in the form of a slim volume written in 1961 by the founding secretary of the AMS, Chandraprabha Saikiani. The project is now trying to address that gap, by developing an archive of material of the mahila samiti for future research and inspiration. When the digital version of the audio-visual archive was formally handed over to representatives of the mahila samitis, Tezpur University Vice-chancellor Mihir Kanti Chaudhuri noted, 'In order to understand the present-day problems of women, it is imperative to go back to the past when the women felt the need to come together.'

~ Teresa Rehman is a journalist and media consultant based in Northeast India.