With the demise of eminent activist and poet, Kamla Bhasin, India lost a key icon of the feminist movement. Khushbu Kirti pays a tribute to the pioneer who had been showing the world a new side of feminism since the 1970s

‘Ki hawaon si hoti hain ladkiyan,

Unhe behne me maza aata hai,

Unhe manzoor nahi unhe bewajah roka jane.

(Girls are becoming like the wind,

They delight in frolicking freely

They cannot accept being stopped for no reason.)

The chants of ‘Azadi’ wouldn’t sound the same anymore. Ever. The weekend brought heartbreak as the news that Kamla Bhasin, the renowned women's rights activist, author and poet, had passed away at 75, or maybe finally found freedom from cancer. Even as the cry that she raised , as a part of the feminist movement, continues to reverberate as it is yet to find its logical conclusion.

Born in Shahidanwali village of Pakistan, Bhasin grew up in a rather proggresive household. She rode bikes and played with boys. Having said that, Bhasin expressed sadness for all her female friends who were never allowed to play with boys or even outside, for that matter. The discrimination against men and women was ever since then embedded in her system and she wanted to change that. I can safely say that she did.

Activist Kavita Srivastava who thought Bhasin always celebrated life, no matter how great the adversity was, expressed, on Twitter, “This is a big setback for the women's movement in India and the South Asian region.”

I will tell you just why this is such a huge setback. The seminal feminist is known for popularising and improvising the ‘Azadi’ slogan in India, and for her poems like I’m A Girl, I Must Study.

After studying sociology from Germany, she returned to work with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. She worked there for 25 years, during which she organised numerous campaigns and participated and led countless protests and movements, while reaching out to women across the country. Bhasin was the voice of change. She founded Sangat, a South Asian feminist network, and co-founded Jagori, a resource centre for women. Besides this, she was the coordinator, from South Asia, of the campaign One Billion Rising.

Her house, with ex-husband late Baljit Malik, a well-known journalist and social activist himself, was located on Bhagwan Das road in Delhi. It was a centre of umpteen social activities and initiatives, along with standing as a refuge for many activists.

One of my friends, who worked with her in the One Billion Rising campaign, shared his experience, “I've visited her home a few times, and it never felt like she's such a senior or has some illness. She was always energetic, encouraging, and instead, made us question our energy levels. She would do a lot of masti-mazak but also would create a serious and engaging environment to help us focus and get engrossed in our projects. Her life-journey was so traumatic and even while carrying all that, she was so stoic and dedicated towards her goal to empower women in India and worldwide. She came up with literature to help us, and her songs, and books will always remain inside me to power me up.”

Even though Bhasin created a revolution while living, touching innumerable lives, she did not have it easy. A lesser mortal would not be able to put her head above water with the losses she experienced. 

She lost her daughter Meeto Malik, a brilliant activist, social worker and alumni of Oxford University, to suicide in 2006. Meeto suffered from manic depression, like her father. “That’s been the biggest tragedy of my life and I feel that if I didn’t have this work, I would have perhaps collapsed,” Bhasin had opened up in an interview. The same year, her marriage fell apart, too.

Jeet Malik or Chottu, her younger son, was six months old when they gave him a DPT vaccine. It had a reaction on him which destroyed almost all parts of his brain. He developed celebral palsy and is dependent on caregivers. Even the best treatments and prayers could not reverse the effects. Even with this, Bhasin had decided to learn on every step of the way, still traversing the path with her head held high. “I think Chottu has also added a lot to our personalities,” she had admitted in a video.

Bhasin wrote over 30 books and about eight children’s works. Besides some of her works like Understanding Gender, What Is Patriarchy?, Exploring Masculinity, and so on, she compiled rhymes in books like Geela Chotu, Housework is Everyone’s Work – Rhymes for Just and Happy Families, and many more.

She often highlighted and emphatically shared her opinion on the double marginalisation that women face. “Amongst the poor, the women were poorer. On all indicators I saw, women were behind men. Patriarchy sits in our bodies... Look at our body language. We’ve been messed up by patriarchy. We can’t stand straight, we can’t stand without our dupatta, we can’t show our breasts,” she had expressed in one of the interviews.

On an episode of Satyameva Jayete with Aamir Khan, Bhasin disclosed about the time she was sexually assaulted by men in her childhood.

In one of her books called If Only Someone Broke The Silence, she said she was always questioned why she, being an extroverted feminist, did not divulge about her sexual assualt earlier. She wrote, “I lived with my family with six brothers and sisters… How come I didn’t tell anybody about it? So when people ask now why women are speaking ten years later, I say it took me forty years to speak up. It’s because of the women’s movement that this is possible. Soon, this 10 will reduce to two, and one, and eventually young women will speak up on the same day and say, ‘Stop’.”

“I made a list of these thirteen fellows (attackers), and thought about what I’d do to them all the time. When I grew up and became strong, (I thought about) what I’d do to these fellows, and I still do not know the answer,” she added.

I was fortunate to have a candid conversation with Kajri Akhtar, a successful filmmaker and producer from India, who had created a documentary on Kamla Bhasin’s life called Kamla Bhasin — A Woman, By Choice. Kajri’s mother, Tarkeshwari Negi, currently a professor at the University of Delhi, had worked in a feminist movement with Bhasin.

On asking her what it was like working with Bhasin, Kajri noted, “I grew up watching the absolutely inspiring woman that she was. I followed her ideology and even achieving half of the life that she had created for herself would have been sufficient for me. The woman was bold and honest, the most open anybody can be. I was just out of college and I realised that there was no film around such a great person, and I realised it was high time someone did that. So my very first documentary was around her life, merely because I wanted to document it, to give a bit back to so much I had received. I remember she was so welcoming. Meeting her after college made me realise that the living legend was so real. She was extremely honest and vulnerable.”

“At first, I did not want to name the documentary anything but later I came up with the name A Woman, By Choice because that was literally it. Kamla Bhasin was a woman who lived on her own terms and took pride in being a woman. Not once did she claim that she did something ‘like a man’, no. She embraced the fact that she was a woman and lived by it,” Kajri concluded.

According to Bhasin, the biggest slogan that feminism rendered to the community was ‘the personal is political.’ She shared in the documentary, “It has various meanings and interpretations. For instance, when my children were born, I, like all mothers, went and looked for rhymes for children and found them either stupid or sexist. So, just playing around with these children, I started writing rhymes. I found that my feminism was coming out.”

In one of her feminist rhymes called Mama Dearest Mama, she wrote,

‘Mama’s back, Mama’s back

She’s brought me books and toys

She’ll tell me lots of stories..

She’ll teach me many new things...

She knows how rainbows form and

how cats see in the dark.

When mama comes from office

I want to shout hurray!...’

She saw that her ex-partner was deeply involved in raising the children but she realised that he was an exception. This was because she garnered a lot of criticism for writing gender-neutral rhymes. Many fathers were unhappy with them for they faced the uncomfortable truth and answer to the age-old patriarchy.

I got a recent opportunity to speak with one of the writer’s associates and well-wishers, Shanti ji.

“For me, Kamala Didi was everything. She never backed out, kept supporting us with all that she had in her. We were all in complete awe of her personality. I remember Didi would lead protests against violence, and would carry them as if every loss was personal to her. She felt deeply for every cause she stood up for. She has planted such seeds of humanity, feminism, and justice in the hearts of lakhs of people that I am certain these plants would be green till the end of the world. No storm or down-pouring would be able to shake the roots,” the 80-year old shared in an emotional message.

Bhasin will, undoubtedly, always live in the hearts of the lives she touched with her heart-rending efforts and revolutionary work.