Activism outside a straitjacket

Land Guns Caste Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary

Author: Gita Ramaswamy

Publisher: Navayana

Pages: 431

Price: Rs 599

A memoir is usually a celebration of one’s life, written after a milestone, possibly before starting on a new journey or settling into retirement. The beauty and problem with Gita Ramaswamy’s memoir is that it defies all formats and frameworks. It is honest to the core and lacks the gloss or romanticisation that could have been there in her life story. It spares no punches and is not veiled in its criticism of others. Nor does it contain juicy gossip or controversy that could be extracted as a teaser for the sale of the book. Yet the book leaves one depressed, not because it is badly written but because it is written so well. It offers an unvarnished account of the uphill task that the poor and deprived face and the severe limitations and perishability of any “success”. It shows that for the poor in India, life is like a monstrous treadmill: You sweat and shed calories mostly to stay in the same place and fight to ensure that you do not slip off.

Years ago, I had invited noted activist and founder of Self Employed Women’s Association Ela Bhatt to address my students. As a part of the interaction with her, one of the students had asked a question (which, possibly, was asked of her in her admission interview): “Madam, what was the goal you set out in your life, and how much of it have you achieved?”

Ms Bhatt responded in her usual self-effacing manner: “There were no goals; we just saw some problems and worked towards addressing them and as we addressed them, new problems arose and we continued. It was just a journey”. This sentence applies equally to Gita Ramaswamy’s life.

There are two aspects to the author’s life and in some sense, they do not square up. One aspect is of a publisher through Hyderabad Book Trust (HBT), which has produced some important and iconic books both in Telugu and English. The lists include books that spell out ideology (including translations of seminal works) and documentation of experiences. So, someone who is a publisher with a people orientation would be expected to have an underlying ideological argument about the structure of society and the intervention mechanisms. This is particularly so when the publisher is also an activist. For instance, Navayana — the publishing house that has published Ms Ramaswamy’s book— is an Ambedkarite publishing house and the people who run it also espouse that ideology. Similarly, it is reasonable to expect Ms Ramaswamy to have a strong ideological bias in her reading, training and action.

When we look at her life as an activist, however, there appears no strong ideological or theoretical framework driving her work, though it eventually veers around being pro-Dalit and fighting for people’s rights. She is moving from one problem to the other, seeking the best way out in a given situation. She admits that her actions were not guided by her readings, and in several instances the reading was a post-facto process. This actually moves into the Ela Bhatt framework of solving problems as one encounters them. In the process, Ms Ramaswamy is constantly groping for appropriate responses, from protests, to legal aid to negotiations to disruptions including propagating violence a couple of times. Her life’s journey also moves from being a member of a

Naxal group, being underground during the Emergency, to moving to over-ground work as an activist, building a Vyavasaya Coolie Sangham in Ibrahimpatnam on the outskirts of Hyderabad, and simultaneously running a publishing house.

Ms Ramaswamy’s book — which is a reflection of her life —challenges us to look at problems in their raw form and find a situational solution. For people who are used to frameworks, whether it is the incentive-punishment-motivation framework used in the corporate world, or a cause of action and expected outcome based on principled responses in the activist world, this book demonstrates a defiant set of alternatives. It indicates that issues defy ideology, or even if ideology might work in the long haul, there are here-and-now survival problems that need to be addressed. We need to wear oxygen masks first before assisting others, and the theory of selfless service is similar.

The book is disturbing because it does not give us easy solutions; nor a framework. Instead, it opens up a collage of possibilities and situations. It celebrates the nuance and completely defies pigeonholing. The only pigeonholing that can be done is this:

Ms Ramaswamy and her publishers believe that she is ultimately an Ambedkarite. That is the most powerful signal we get from her choice of the publisher, while she could have used her own HBT to publish the book. It is worth a read just to understand the complexity of the world in which we live, the complexity of the problems and the near impossibility of finding lasting and structural solutions. It is not a pessimistic book, but a realistic one.

mssriram@pm.me. The reviewer is faculty member, Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore