By Aheli Moitra
Goldman was a radical feminist. 100 years since she spoke of the rights of women, we are still talking about the ‘gender agenda gaining momentum’ this International Women’s Day. And it probably is. The number of reported cases of rape, if not all forms of sexual violence, has increased. Even then, there still remain scores of girls in Nagaland who silently abort the result of rape, or are silenced into the axone they will make this evening.
That said, Goldman’s times were not the Naga times, then or now.
Before nationality took root, Naga families produced their own food, its cultivation method applied from the top. The village council, a congregation of clan heads, decided which patch of land will undergo jhum. The final produce was to be from shared effort with shared gains. Accordingly, families got down to business, the woman taking as much part in cultivation as the man. Their roles were gendered through motherhood and defence respectively. In a small village, with shifting practices, the mother was an active participant in securing production. In the community, she remained an equal gainer. But the means of production, the land and tools, belonged to men.
While concentration on capital grew with the conception of the Naga nation, ideas related to motherhood did not. Capital still inherently remained with men. Structures that governed relationships as well as people solidified in a misplaced manner. Cultural context and tradition became the burden of women, their role and duty stuck in time.
With no hold or ownership over the key drivers of society, women continue in a binding relationship at home while the pretence of “Naga women are liberated” goes on outside.
Today, when young Naga men question the need for radical feminism, all the while showing contempt for girls playing a board of carrom “outside the house”, Goldman needs to be invoked. “If she wants to play, she should do so inside the house,” said an educated Naga chap. And you should roam the wild, hunting heads.
These educated men lend the cultural acceptance that perpetuates violence against women. Their words contribute every time she is physically violated in her lifetime, which is 70% of women around the world.
The Naga woman can no more be bequeathed to the language of the ‘minor’. She has to be better educated to reduce the likelihood of her exposure to sexual violence. She has to participate in politics from the local level, middle, all the way up. Not just carrom, she has to play football.
The pretensions of Article 371 (a) cannot be invoked to counter this. Both the Naga sense of society and law, as well as the stated article, have the space to discover and mould women’s rights.
If women are not prepared to take up roles to overhaul structures that have led the Naga people to continued violence, and the dominators will not allow them to, the gap between individual, women’s and civil rights will never be charted in this essentially evolving unique polity.
