Women from Assam are altering the hitherto misplaced notions about the State and also marking a paradigm shift in popular gender discourse.ANANYA BORGOHAIN talks to some of these incredible women who are weaving and flaunting their potential with élan

When women take it upon themselves to trail a pursuit with their inherently fierce passion, they unearth a treasure of endless possibilities and achievements. Women are bestowed with the strength of determination and integrity of emotional attachment. They are decisive, gritty, observant, and perceptive. And when they choose to flaunt their talents, magic happens. As Assam struggles in the aftermath of arguably the worst floods it has seen, this is a story of some of the strongest women from Assam who have altered a redundant paradigm hitherto attached to the State.

It’s a State that has not failed to establish its merit time and again, yet frequently its credibility is placed on the dock and reckless judgements are passed on it. In what they call the mainstream, references to Assam continue to be peripheral and at times ignorant; “deliberately ignorant”, as veteran filmmaker Jahnu Barua had once told me in an interview.

Over the years, although a film director like Reema Kagti, supermodel like Dipannita Sharma, actress like Seema Biswas, and now MlA Angoorlata Deka from the BJP have attained a certain space in popular discourse, there has been a false notion of belonging that people often tend to attribute to the State. Something on the lines of — Sushmita Sen, Anushka Sharma, Sakshi Dhoni etc studied in the State for some time; or that Sharmila Tagore’s mother was Assamese; or Parineeti Chopra played a girl from Guwahati in Shuddh Desi Romance; or that Vishal Bhardwaj recently shot Rangoon in Assam with Saif Ali Khan, Shahid Kapoor, and Kangana Ranaut, and so on.

However, there is infinitely more to Assam than such false and misplaced pride. And the best way of defending this argument is by exploring the women who have brought laurels to the State: From the 39-year-old Pulitzer winning Managing Editor of lA Times, Sanghamitra Kalita, to the teenage Miss India 2016, Priyadarshini Chatterjee.

Women from Assam are known to be resourceful and self-dependent. lalita Devi Jain is one of them. She started her company Madhushree in 1994 with five looms, and today runs around 50 of them. She manufactures and trades traditional Assamese silk, cotton and muga sarees, and dress materials. Jain, who grew up in the small town of Mankachar, employs only women and has a staff of 200. The looms are situated 65 kilometres away from Guwahati.

Jain says, “I wanted to provide the tribal people of Rajapara with provisions through which they could develop socio-economically and sustain themselves. I channelised the potential of the local women weavers and selected mostly widows, orphans and unemployed girls, and trained them to create rich fabric made of traditional muga. Muga silk is famous for its natural simmering golden colour. I blended traditional colours and motifs to give the saree a trendy and exotic look.”

Jain was fondly addressed as Madhu by people who knew her and so she named her company Madhushree. It went on to receive several reputed awards, such as the Award For Excellence by FICCI and FlO (2009), National Award by the Government of India (2008), one from the Ministry of Micro Small and Medium Enterprises for Outstanding Entrepreneurship (2008). It was felicitated by Millionaire Asia India Edition for receiving the IWEC Award in 2010, and International Women Entrepreneur Challenge Award hosted by Cape Town Chamber of Commerce, South Africa.

Another such inspiring woman is Meghali Bora whose company Meghali Food Products is a channel of redemption and reconciliation for the marginalised women. Her staffers are women who have been abused, are widows or looking for an identity of their own. This started when Bora met a girl who suffered from bipolar disorder and was manic depressive with suicidal tendencies. Bora counselled her to face adversity with grace and patience, and in turn, she ended up motivated herself to start her own food company. It’s an organic food products brand that makes juice, jam and pickle.

When Bora’s husband suffered a major health crisis, the family had gone broke with a saving of just Rs 500. In an interview, she had revealed, “With the Rs 500, I bought ingredients, borrowed a stove and made traditional pithas. They fetched me Rs 15,000 in less than a fortnight, and it partly helped repay my husband’s debts.”

Over time, her business flourished. She not only made hundreds of bottles of squash every day but it also earned her a turnover in lakhs every month. She also ran a radio programme to educate farmers on how to rightly utilise their resources. In 2010, she received a trophy for outstanding performance in entrepreneurship from the then President Pratibha Patil. She is now an honorary member of Nessia, UNO’s Solutions Exchange. She also works with some self-help groups that supply raw materials to her, which also eliminates the necessity of middlemen. Until 2014, Brindabon, another all-women self-help group, was one of them.  

Note that these are women who have not moved outside the State. They continue to live there and cultivate their hobbies and nurture their professions. Jahnabi Phookan’s Jungle Travels India (JTI) is one such example where enthralling voyages merge with the holistic chase of adventure.

Jahnabi and her husband Ashish Phookan created JTI in 1989, with Rs 1,000 as their house rent, a cousin with some experience in travel, and two delivery boys. Ashish was then a tea taster with tea broking firm J Thomas & Co. whereas Jahnabi was a journalist, who had graduated from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi, and Indiana University, USA. 

JTI became the first International Air Transport Association (IATA) accredited agent in the whole of Northeast in 1996. At the same time, it is also the only travel agency among all the States in the NE to win the National Tourism Award (2004). While it pioneered a climb of Mt Saramati in Nagaland, its sister company Assam Bengal Navigation Company (ABNC) started a long distance river cruising in the country with the passenger boat, ABN Charaidew. ABNC also added two more boats — ABN Sukapha for operation on rivers Hooghly and Ganga, and ABN Rajmahal for sail up to Varanasi.

Phookan recalls, “When I started, travel as a profession was unconventional, more so in Assam. Fortunately, in 1994 the iconic American Express Travel group sought a franchise partner in Northeast India and JTI fit their bill. After that, for me and Ashish, there was no looking back.”

Starting from 2000, they became the first travel agents to attend shows abroad. Along with foreign tours, they also started their resorts business. The Bansbari lodge at the Manas National Park open to national and foreign tourists is one of those. In fact, their upscale Diphlu River lodge in Kaziranga National Park is the only certified eco lodge in the State. It is where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Kate, stayed for two nights in April this year. Jahnabi was also the Founder and Vice Chairperson of FlO FICCI in the Northeast and also an FlO awardee.

In the same spirit of adventure, IPS officer Sanjukta Parashar’s image had gone viral on social media around the same time as Rani Mukherjee’s cop flick Mardaani. Parashar, a mother, who has a Phd in International Relations from JNU, scored the 85th rank in the All India UPSC exam, after which, she chose IPS instead of IAS. She is currently the Superintendent of Police at Sonitpur district.

Her work includes leading high-end anti-insurgency operations against Bodo militants. In fact, one of the first assignments of this Kalashnikov swinging officer was to control the ethnic clash between the Bodos and Bangladeshi immigrants at Udalguri in 2008. Although she is often threatened by terrorists, she has reportedly arrested 64 militants in the past 15 months. About being a woman in her field, she has been quoted as saying, “Gender is in the mind. There is never any constraint anywhere. So long as the mind and body are in sync and you know where your heart is, the concept of gender does not exist.”

In the field of media, women from the State have not shied away from establishing their merit either. Sanghamitra Kalita, before her lA Times team won the Pulitzer this year for breaking news reporting, was also a founding editor of Mint in India. She has also worked for The Wall Street Journal as well as been an executive editor for Quartz. She also worked as a reporter for The Washington Post and Associated Press. The author of two books, she did her Master’s from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she also teaches. Albeit, Kalita is an American born in Brooklyn to Assamese migrant parents.

On the other hand, CNN’s Senior Editor for Market and Economy, Pallavi Gogoi, is an Assamese who started her journey in India and forayed into the US. Gogoi recollects, “My first foray into journalism started when I got the opportunity to join The Telegraph in Kolkata. I had just graduated with an honours in English literature from SGTB Khalsa College and was enrolled for a Masters degree at Hindu College at that time. In Kolkata, I started as a sub-editor and helped craft what at that time was the simplest of pages — ‘Page 3’ — or the international page for the newspaper. About a year later, my mentor and Executive Editor Shekhar Bhatia helped launch The Asian Age in Delhi and offered me a job as an editor and writer. I jumped at that offer and moved back to Delhi. I finished my Masters while working.

“At The Asian Age, I grew by leaps and bounds. I was about 23 years old with obviously very little experience, but was eager to learn. I accompanied veteran journalists like Janardan Thakur and Seema Guha to big interviews with politicians or to press conferences of the Congress party and tried to learn everything I could. I was also responsible for Op-ed pages of the newspaper. That meant planning the content and talking to columnists like Nalini Singh or Arun Shourie and making sure they sent their columns on time, etc. I started reporting and writing and realised that I loved that more than anything else.”

Gogoi recalls a particular election that refined her journey. She says, “Any opportunity to travel anywhere to cover anything, I’d raise my hand. Soon I was covering whistle stop election campaigning in Karnataka and realised the power of shoe-leather reporting. I crisscrossed the State with politicians as they campaigned. And because of my extensive travels all over, I truly had the pulse of the populace and rightly predicted that the Janata Dal would win that year, against all odds. I was right — it was a sweep. Soon I was sent to the london bureau of the newspaper and then to Washington as a foreign correspondent.

“After that, I decided to try my hand at reporting and writing for an American publication, and got a break at Dow Jones as a financial journalist. Soon, I was published in The Wall Street Journal. From there I moved to Business Week magazine as a correspondent. After that, I covered the financial crisis at USA Today and then joined the Associated Press as a banking reporter before joining CNN. As the markets and economy editor here, I lead coverage of some of the biggest events affecting the largest economy in the world and how that impacts the world and vice versa,” she says.

She believes that what differentiates journalism for women in the US from that in India is that safety is a bigger concern for women journalists in India. In the US, she says that her challenges are more universal, for instance, the necessity to balance an accomplishing career with a fulfilling familial life. She adds, “As a journalist, whether it’s stories about politics, economy or health, ultimately what matters is stories that are real, that make a difference, that make people think. I take my role as a representative of the public, holding the highest institutions accountable, very seriously.”

She says that the global financial crisis and the US recession that followed left a deep impression on her. It was a force that was hard to control or tame, and she got to write about many facets of it — from the White House — preparing to save a large bank to heartbreaking job losses that tore apart the essence of people’s beings.

As a woman, she accredits another woman for her success — her mother, who in turn partly grew up with her grandmother at Sibsagar in Assam. Based in New York, the mother of two says that a part of Assam continues to live with her, as she says, “It is as if my mother invented the British saying: ‘Keep calm and carry on’. One of her guiding philosophies in life is that love trumps everything. I believe that ultimately that is a very Assamese trait. We are loving and peaceful people by nature, despite all the political issues that we have faced in recent decades. I spent my childhood in Shillong and my friends were from different backgrounds — Khasi, Jaintia, Cachari, Bengali, Assamese. We celebrated all cultures and festivals — Christmas, Eid, Holi and Diwali. To me, that is my Assamese identity. Always accepting and full of love.

“My fondest memories were of celebrating Bihu and going for completely packed concerts of Bhupen Hazarika and hearing him belt out: Buku hoom hoom kore, Shillongore godhuli, Meghe gir gir kore. To me there was something so universal about the feelings that he sang about and I have always wanted to emulate that. I feel that it is one of the main reasons I feel at home anywhere in the world. I am of the world and I am also an Axomiya.”

On the other hand, based in Assam, fashion designer Sanjukta Dutta not only designs garments but also traditional jewellery. She was born in Nagaon and was an engineer working with the State Government until she designed mekhala chador and sold them at Shohum Shoppe in Guwahati. Within a year, she sold 3,000 more pieces there. In 2013, she set up two factories in Guwahati — Maa Durga Axomiya Pat and Muga Kapuror Boyon Protisthon. What started with six looms has extended to 300 today. She also started designing Assamese traditional jewellery — dug dugi, keru moni, junbiri etc, and in 2014, inaugurated her commercial boutique called Sanjukta’s Tradition Redesigned Studio.

At the same time, she is also the director of livestrong Health and Fitness Pvt ltd, Innovative Autocorp Pvt ltd, and SR Wellness and Beauty Pvt ltd. After showcasing at Women’s Era Miss India, she may showcase the Assamese traditional mekhala chador at the lakme Fashion Week soon, and will reportedly be the first Assamese to do so, if it happens. She also designed a special muga angavastram for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge during their recent Assam visit.

Dutta aspires to draw attention towards the textile and handloom industries of Assam, and to help the State be recognised as one that has wide resources to offer to both the country and the world.

Another name in the same vein is that of a graduate from Boston University, Tanushree Hazarika. She studied Business Management and then went on to work in the corporate sector. After working with companies such as Fidelity and Morgan Stanley in the US, she returned to India and founded an English magazine called Eclectic Northeast in 2007. Today, it is a leading regional magazine in English and seeks to offer a glimpse of multifarious facets of the Northeast. The magazine claims that its intention is to establish a strong association between the region and its people.

Tanushree started Tattva Creations in 2010. It provides brand and communication solutions. A few weeks back, she launched the Brahmaputra Foundation which organised the first edition of the Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival in July, which saw the presence of directors like Imtiaz Ali, Prakash Jha, and Reema Kagti. In 2010, she received the Young Communicator Award from the Symbiosis Institute. In 2013, she won the Outstanding Woman Achiever award by FlO (ladies wing of FICCI). She is also a member of the Aspen Global leadership Network.

She says, “I grew up in Guwahati and went abroad after completing schooling. I was happy about the exposure there but it became tedious after a while and I felt the urge to return and contribute to my State. I’m happy to see where Eclectic has reached today. The culture of reading in Assam has always been active and revered. Today, the youths are more inquisitive and the digital platform is picking up fast.”

The women mentioned above are only a handful of the plenty that have brought glory to their land. Scientists, artistes, danseuses, entrepreneurs, professors, models, and women from varied fields have represented the State and also the country at the international forum. Assam’s own TV and film industries are filled with gorgeous and talented female actors, writers, and directors. From the iconic folk singer Pratima Pandey Baruah to popular playback singer Kalpana Patowary (of Gandi Baat fame), these women have proven their credibility since time immemorial. In the 2000s, remixed songs were not only a rage but the mainstream norm. A pioneering remix song was Kaanta laga by DJ Doll, sung by Shaswati Phukan, an Assamese. She also sang the extremely popular remixed versions of Sajna Hai Mujhe, Koi Sehari Babu, and Kaliyon Ka Chaman.

On one hand are TV stars such as Devoleena Bhattacharjee (Gopi bahu, Saath Nibhaana Saathiya) and Rashmi Desai (Tapasya, Uttaran), while on the other hand, there are also the likes of Birubala Rabha from Goalpara district. Rabha, in her 60s, has been running an organisation called Mission Birubala since the 1980s, which launches campaigns against witch-hunting. She has finally succeeded in compelling the State Government to consider a legislation to stop the atrocious and regressive practice.

These women have not only boosted their State in various ways (socially, culturally, politically) directly or indirectly, but have also altered the oft-misinterpreted discourse on gender. Their stories carry implications for every one of us, and will hopefully continue to resonate with unparalleled vigour.

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