Diamond India: Beyond The ‘Weak Woman’ Stereotype; An Excerpt

Shashank Mani's Middle of Diamond India: National Renaissance through Participation and Enterprise (Penguin Viking) reveals the hidden stories of those in the Middle, that is those in the tier 2 and tier 3 cities, who have been overlooked owing to their location and language.

An Excerpt

Beyond the ‘weak woman’ stereotype 

Our positive narrative often came up against a ‘weak woman’ story everywhere we went in Deoria. Almost every school function I attended had a play on a women’s theme. But inevitably, it had girls enacting tearful scenes of helplessness with the ‘rescue’ of women as its conclusion. But the women we saw in the Internet Saathi programme, and women like Parvati and Suvarna, were far from helpless. This is what Robert Caldini and others call a ‘big mistake’, wherein an overuse of a negative message, instead of solving the problem, inadvertently normalizes the situation.7 The ‘women as weak’ stereotype in Middle India is also a case of the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’.

Our emphasis was on a super-narrative which moved beyond the ‘weak women’ story, and this too was led by Suvarna. We were convinced that society does not have to emancipate women; actually, women would emancipate smaller towns and districts. This required a fresh language of women’s empowerment, one that believed that women were inherently strong. Once such a narrative was built, the ‘second leg’ whose lack Gandhi bemoaned would become active. 

We leaned on a local heroine from history to create our narrative. Rani Laxmibai is remembered for protecting Jhansi against the British, but as a girl, she was Manikarnika, born in Varanasi in eastern UP. Rani Laxmibai’s birth in Purvanchal could be used to make our point, we felt. She exemplified everything we knew the young girl in Purvanchal was—smart, energetic and as effervescent as Laxmibai’s childhood nickname, Chhabili, suggested. The many young girls we find roaming fearlessly in the villages of Deoria till they get to the age of ten or eleven are like the young Manikarnika. Then they get burdened by the norms of society and the lack of women-supportive infrastructure. 

This is when we created the Har Ghar Laxmibai programme in support of women-led development using the icon of a woman warrior from that region. Through our outreach programme, we attempted to communicate that every house had potential Laxmibais. Building on our work in the Internet Saathi, we sought to combine an iconic historical personality with economic activity through an apparel cluster. We created the largest cloth mural of Rani Laxmibai ever made using embroidery and stitching—a 30-by-20-foot picture of the rani on horseback, showing her fighting the British carrying her son on her back. This was a picture every woman in the Middle recognizes only too well, as this metaphor plays out in her daily life. Helpfully, the word Laxmi also denotes the goddess of prosperity. 

We organized tents in each of the sixteen blocks of Deoria where smaller cloth sections of a larger mural would be embroidered and stitched together. Hundreds of women embroidered her image, neatly broken down by Suvarna and her team into twenty-five separate pieces. Together, this was stitched into a giant cloth fresco on which her image appeared as a whole. This image was unveiled on a public ground in the virtual presence of Kiran Bedi. The impact was electrifying for both women and men. Almost 2000 women came forward as part of the unveiling; with them came 1500 men. The act of a large cluster of women creating a large mural of their favourite heroine together motivated many to start apparel enterprises, often helped by their husbands. This shows that once women-led development commences, the other half also joins in. An apparel cluster was given life that day, catalysed by the collective effort of women in that region. 

The inclusion of women as combat soldiers in the army and air force can be perceived as powerful demonstrations of women’s strength. The selection of a woman helicopter pilot, Shivangi Singh, by the navy from Deoria in 2021 made news across the region. The act of a woman police person carrying a carbine on a train station or airport sends a signal that they can also protect. Individual women athletes have consistently won more Olympic medals for India than men. There are many such examples which, once highlighted, will remove mental blocks, revealing that women are strong, even if their strength is different from men and even more in need now. 

Another ancient civilization, the Greeks, also recognized the powers in the feminine. Athena Doctrine, a book by John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, outlines this theory with deep research. 9 Athena, the Greek goddess of industry, arts and crafts, gave the Greeks the olive tree, their equivalent of the banyan. Athena sustained Greek economy and culture. She was venerated for her skills, civilizing influence and fairness. The authors of this book undertook research that polled over half a million people in twelve different countries, asking questions on ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits in the modern networked world. They found feminine traits most attributed to words such as interconnectedness, openness, adaptable, committed, creative, planning, imaginative, humble, empathetic, expressive, affectionate, caring, nurturing, etc.

‘Masculine traits’ were closely associated with words such as dominant, analytical, proud, self-reliant, resilient, competitive, direct, confident, competent, career-oriented, etc. These attributes actually exist in both genders and each are required in society. But an overwhelming number of those surveyed identified the first with the ‘feminine’ and the second with ‘masculine’. Once definitions were established, they polled respondents to link these attributes to three desired positive outcomes—leadership, success and morality. Which attributes were necessary to be a good leader, to be a successful person and to live a moral life? With minor variations, the survey showed that feminine traits in a networked world were more relevant in all three outcomes. 

The twelve countries were then assessed in having a ‘predominant feminine’ or ‘predominant masculine’ orientation. There was evidence that those countries that cherished ‘masculine’ traits were less developed than those that cherished ‘feminine’ traits. One can question what comes first—whether economic progress results in more respect for ‘feminine’ attributes or more ‘feminine’ attributes lead to a better economic situation. But the values of the feminine in a post-industrial economy were evident from this study. In the Indian cultural context, relevant for the Middle, one does not have to go very far back to discover that the idea of the Ardhanarishvara expresses that feminine and masculine balance. It exalts, rather than diminishes, the importance of women balancing a ‘man only’ world at the apex of the Indian pantheon 

Excerpted with permission from the author and publisher Penguin Random House India