Vasanthi¹ is a young tribal woman in Dantewada. She once travelled from village to village in this conflict-ridden district, documenting atrocities. ‘We’ve gone all over these areas, deep into the jungles,’ she said. Her team usually stayed in anganwadis, wherever they hadn’t been destroyed. When we passed the dirt path to Samsetti village, her voice filled with scorn. In 2006, she visited the village after reports that Special Police Officers (SPOs) had raped four women there. ‘Wherever the SPOs, CRPF have reached, we learn about rape cases,’ she said. She recorded all the facts and helped the victims file FIRs (First Information Report). But in cases like these, police often pointed accusatory fingers at her or even the victims, charging them with Maoist links. Detention for questioning became a regular part of her work. ‘They asked me what work I do and whether I’m scared to go into the forest,’ she recounted. ‘I told them I’m not scared, so they asked, "Why aren’t you scared? When we go into the forest they kill us. Why don’t they kill you?"’ I told them, ‘You go with so many armed men into the forest; of course, they’re going to kill you.’

Vasanthi is no Maoist. Until August 2009 she was a member of the team that served as ‘human shields’ to villagers in Dantewada – one of the most significant and under-reported acts of nonviolence in recent years. The team first established themselves in Nendra, a village off the Sukma-Konta Road. The Salwa Judum had burned down the village in four separate attacks; the survivors fled to Andhra Pradesh or deep into the forests. Vasanthi was a part of the team from Vanvasi Chetna Ashram (VCA), an NGO based in Dantewada, that brought the villagers back home and helped them rebuild their lives. When the police arrived to intimidate and harass them, the young women and men from VCA stood between the guns and the villagers, declaring, ‘Kill us first.’ The raids soon ceased. Maoists once forced Vasanthi and the team to leave Nendra; apparently neither side in the conflict appreciated the peacekeeping efforts. She soon returned, only to watch members of her team being arrested by the police. Vasanthi avoided arrest, but under severe pressure from both authorities and Maoists, she and the rest of VCA’s activists halted their activities.

 

Vasanthi’s work with VCA represents the possibilities and frustrations of building peace in central India’s conflict zones. In an environment in which both battling sides cling to violence, Vasanthi demonstrates that peace will develop not only from appeals for ceasefires and fact-finding missions, but by embodying alternative pathways to justice and security. What forms might those pathways take if women were the force behind them? How might women successfully shape feminist expressions of non-violence amidst the bloodshed in central India?

Studies on women in conflict zones have extensively examined the sexual violence and other crimes committed against women in times of war. The mass rapes and killing of women in conflicts from Bosnia and Rwanda to Bangladesh and Peru stand out as evidence that, as Jennifer Turpin of the University of San Francisco has written, ‘Women, as civilians, are more likely to be killed in war than are soldiers.’² The Maoist conflict in central India has followed this pattern. Numerous reports of violence against women, perpetrated by both security forces and insurgents, have emerged from the conflict area.³

But accounts of vulnerability to violence do not complete the story about women and conflict. An important and growing body of scholarship explores women’s roles as peacemakers. These studies acknowledge women’s positions as victims while emphasizing their agency amidst conflict. They seek to conceptualize fundamental links between feminism, peace building, and non-violence. This research provides helpful insights into the potential theoretical foundations of a peace process shaped by women in Maoist areas.

 

One stream within the women and peace literature, encapsulated in the work of Sarah Ruddick, identifies the experience of motherhood as predisposing women toward peacemaking.⁴ Resisting violence is a natural corollary, these theorists posit, of the maternal commitment to care-giving and skill at negotiating the steady stream of conflicts inherent to childrearing. Women, through their potential or actual experience as mothers, thus bring unique capacities to the process of peace building.

Indeed, many of the world’s most prominent and daring movements for peace have been led by mothers. In Latin American countries, including Argentina, El Salvador, and Chile, mothers of ‘disappeared’ citizens organized powerful challenges to the former military dictatorships of the region.⁵ In Russia, the Soldiers’ Mothers Organizations have marched to the frontlines in Chechnya and engaged in hunger strikes for peace.⁶ These movements have proved transformative in the non-violent quest for peace because they channel women’s traditional roles toward subversive ends.

 

Many feminist thinkers have raised questions, however, as to whether ‘maternal thinking’ adequately accounts for women’s commitment to peacemaking. Betty Reardon, a professor of peace education at Columbia University writes: ‘Motherhood alone could hardly explain a woman’s fierce defence of peace, which involves many women who never have been, nor intend to be, mothers. More significant, I would argue, is the meaning and value of the work that fills their days… Women’s activities in defence of peace are at base a defence of the fruits of their lives and labours...’⁷

Yet others contend that any argument about women and peace that is grounded in their traditional roles and social experiences can only serve to perpetuate the subjugation of women within those roles. They point to post-conflict situations in which women who once emerged from private spaces to actively resist violence and oppression must return unwillingly to their traditional stations. How can we conceptualize a link, therefore, between the feminist concern with empowerment and a commitment to peace building? Any peace achieved without this concern will fail to comprehensively address the violence women face.

Many feminist thinkers have located the link in resistance to domination. ‘Feminism and peace share an important conceptual connection,’ Karen Warren and Duane Cady write. ‘Both are critical of, and committed to the elimination of, coercive power over privilege systems of domination as a basis of interaction between individuals and groups. A feminist critique and development of any peace politics, therefore, ultimately is a critique of systems of unjustified domination.’⁸ In this framework, patriarchy lies at the root of war. Weapons are deployed by men as a part of the wider system of domination they exert. Thus, women must resist war not only because they are mothers, nurturers, care givers, and workers, seeking to protect society, but in the broader struggle to challenge patriarchy.

 

But is non-violence the only way to challenge that domination? What if the weapons were in the hands of women? Throughout the world, women have left the confines of their homes to join violent movements. Some feminists argue that these women are living powerlessly under patriarchal systems that co-opt them to participate in violence they would otherwise denounce. However, within India’s Maoist insurgency, women guerrillas serve in elite combat positions. Maoist women’s organizations, such as the Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan, vocally challenge patriarchy as a part of wider, class-based oppressions. ⁹ Adivasi and Dalit women thus encounter Maoism as a force claiming to counterbalance the deprivation, assault, and displacement they experience so commonly in their lives.

If a feminist peace movement is to take root in Maoist areas, it must assert an alternative path to empowerment, justice and security. It must acknowledge the validity of challenging class and gender oppression, while expressing a legitimate account of why non-violence is both more authentic and strategic in the lives of women.

 

Such voices can in fact be heard more and more frequently in Maoist areas – if one looks in unexpected places. Most audible are those belonging to the female devotees of the Adivasi Earth Goddess (Sarna Mata). They have spearheaded a religious movement that is re-enchanting the class politics of these regions, and extending it to include an ethic of care for both the human and non-human environment. The Sarna Dharam, as the movement is known, seeks to assert a non-violent class and ethnic consciousness rooted in heterodox faith traditions and practical devotion to the Earth.

According to participants, the movement emerged from a series of divine possessions that began in the region in the mid-nineties. The mostly Adivasi women involve, typically experienced altered states of consciousness, during which they would believe themselves to be possessed by the Earth goddess who resides in sacred groves. The movement first began amongst women of the Oraon tribe who knew the goddess as Sarna Mata and so the new religious movement came to be commonly called the Sarna Dharam. Its membership now represents several of the Adivasi communities in the Jharkhand region,¹⁰ as well as Dalits and other non-Adivasis.

The movement emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between women and the natural world. Devotees of Sarna Mata gather to worship her in sacred groves and use these spaces to speak out against environmental degeneration. Alongside the spread of the movement through the region, there is clear evidence of biodiversity conservation and afforestation. This devotion to ecological concerns also extends to socio-economic spheres. The movement encourages women to channel their energy into sustainable rural development and green income generation activities.

 

After worshipping on Thursday mornings at the sacred groves, groups of devotees (who are now trying to register themselves as official societies) gather to discuss issues related to village development, solve disputes, and collect chanda in the form of handfuls of rice or five rupees per family. The groups organize reformist campaigns against alcoholism and the persecution of women suspected of witchcraft. Some also function as self-help groups and are experimenting with masala preparation and mushroom cultivation. These activities emerge from an Advasi interpretation of Gandhi’s vision of rural self-sufficiency. In many senses, the Sarna movement can be seen as an attempt to take the teachings of the Mahatma further; it constructs itself as an extreme form of non-violent resistance to the oppression experienced by the marginalized peoples of the region.

As an alternative form of social engagement, grounded in faith and led by women, the movement has inevitably faced opposition. On one occasion, individuals motivated by Hindutva ideologies violently prevented a group of Sarna Mata devotees from entering a sacred grove and taking up positions of religious leadership. The devotees responded by publically asking the Earth goddess to pardon their opponents. This non-violent stance emerges from the very logic of the movement, which is perhaps most effectively interpreted within an eco-feminist framework.

 

Eco-feminism posits a theoretical linkage between feminism and environmentalism. These ostensibly distinct spheres of activism find mutual reinforcement through conceptualizing a ‘woman-nature connection.’ The terms of this linkage vary. Radical schools of eco-feminist thought theorize a psycho-biologistic connection between women and nature, with Susan Griffin asserting perhaps the most radical identification: ‘We are Nature seeing Nature.’¹¹ This relationship is derived from women’s ability to give birth to new life.

On the other hand, socialist strands of eco-feminist discourse elucidate the ‘woman-nature connection’ in terms of reciprocity, noting that ecological activism has involved a significantly larger proportion of women because they had more at stake. As Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva affirm, ‘We saw that the impact on women of ecological disasters and deterioration was harder than on men, and also, that everywhere, women were the first to protest against environmental destruction.’¹² In its interpretation within this context, the woman-nature connection is not essentialized. It is seen as socially constructed due to the massive engagement with the environment that marginalized rural women typically undergo.

 

Most significantly, eco-feminists see women and nature as linked in marginalization, with the oppression of both stemming from the same source. The capitalist impulse to ‘exploit’ natural resources to the maximum possible economic advantage disregards the effects of environmental degradation on the rural women who depend on nature’s ‘use-value’. Eco-feminists thus call for overturning capitalist patriarchy, with its ideology of nature as a resource to be exploited for economic growth, and its replacement with the ‘subsistence perspective’, a non-exploitative vision. Thinkers like Shiva and Mies contend that rural Indian women possess this vision and can offer it as a redemptive lesson to the rest of the world.

Eco-feminism thus constructs a feminist defence of peace by reconceiving peace as an opposition to the violent logic of patriarchy, seen as it is to lie at the root of both war and destructive capitalism. This struggle for peace is an attempt by women to protect both themselves (in their identification with the life-affirming/giving/nurturing forces of nature) and the fruits of their labours (in rural areas, their toil in multiple environmental sectors ranging from gathering to dairying, horticulture and agriculture). And importantly, this line of argumentation is not a celebration of essentialized femininity, as many thinkers have warned against in analyses of women’s defence of peace. Eco-feminism is one of the trajectories of the third wave of feminism; it affirms that gender and gendered discourses can indeed be fluid across biological boundaries.

Seen in this light, the ecofeminism of the Sarna movement is an attempt to convey, through gestures of female spirituality, how the foundations of peace could organically emerge in Maoist conflict areas. This eco-feminist defence of nature, encompassing within it society and its labours, takes on special resonance in these conflict areas, where land and livelihoods are under severe threat by mining and other industries. Sarna Dharam asserts a path to challenge that destruction through a non-violent, ecologically conscious form of resistance that affirms the spiritual worldviews of women who are paradoxically the most vulnerable and the most powerful.

 

The expressions of Sarna spirituality – women entering possession trances, swinging their hair in ecstatic identification with the goddess of the Earth and reciting litanies of husband-inflicted woes for which they invoke divine retribution – may not present the radical, feminist path to peace we were expecting. Some may wonder whether they in fact epitomize the irrational femininity dismissed by phallogocentric culture. Could even guerrilla-style warfare be more empowering than this?

Perhaps not, if we remember how systems of power subsume the resistance they inspire, often co-opting and even depending on that resistance to survive. Maoism may need capitalism more than we are led to believe (and vice versa), and patriarchy could have its reasons to thirst for the blood of female martyrs. How can we elude the gaze of patriarchy/capitalism/ violence? If we are marginalized, if we are subaltern, as are the rural women in Maoist areas, perhaps all we can do is use the gag that silences – to speak. The battle against the hysteria of violence will thus be won by the so-called hysteric.

 

Footnotes:

1. Name changed.

2. Jennifer Turpin, ‘Many Faces: Women Confronting War’, in Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin (eds.), The Women and War Reader, New York University Press, New York, 1998, p. 3.

3. Nandini Sundar, ‘The Trophies of Operation Green Hunt: When Rape is Routine and There’s a Paucity of Condemning Voices’, Outlook, 5 July 2010; and Rakhi Chakrabarty, ‘Raped Repeatedly, Naxal Leader Quits Red Ranks’, Times of India, 24 August 2010.

4. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Beacon Press, Boston, 1989.

5. Jaquette, Jane (ed.), The Women’s Movement in Latin America, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1994.

6. Elena Zdravomyslova, ‘Peaceful Initiatives: the Soldiers’ Mothers Movement in Russia’, in Ingeborg Breines, et al. (eds.), Towards a Women’s Agenda for a Culture of Peace, Unesco Publishing, Paris, 1999, p. 165.

7. Betty Reardon, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, p. 17.

8. Karen J. Warren, Duane L. Cady, ‘Feminism and Peace: Seeing Connections’, Hypatia, 9(2), Feminism and Peace, Spring 1994, pp. 4-20.

9. When pressed by women’s groups in Andhra Pradesh to articulate their positions on gender, the CPI (Maoist) released a detailed exposition on women’s oppression and empowerment. But feminists have still expressed serious concerns about the level of women’s leadership within the party and a commitment to women’s liberation on a par with liberation of the working classes. See Vasanth Kannabiran, Volga, Kalpana Kannabiran, ‘Andhra Pradesh: Women’s Rights and Naxalite Groups’, The Economic and Political Weekly 39(45), 6-12 November 2004, pp. 4874-4877.

10. Greater Jharkhand is the original Adivasi state demanded at the time of state formation post Indian independence. A much smaller version (Jharkhand) was granted in 2000. The area is witness to a large-scale Maoist insurgency.

11. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1978.

12. Maria Mies, Vandanda Shiva, Ecofeminism, Spinifex Press, Melbourne, 1993.