COMMENTARY

A Feminist Way of Life

Trupti Shah (1962 to 2016)
Vibhuti Patel

Trupti Shah, feminist and

environmentalist, lived her life to
the fullest embodying her belief
that the feminist perspective is
not an ideology but a way of life.

rupti Shah, a leading human

rights and environmental activist,
founder of Sahiyar, a womens
rights organisation in Vadodara, Gujarat
dedicated to feminism and secular
humanism passed away on 26 May 2016
after a valiant battle against lung cancer. She was a great champion of gender
concerns such as declining sex ratio, violence against women and girls, rights of
women in the informal sector, sexual
harassment at workplace; environmental and livelihood concerns of poverty
groups and farmers; democratic rights
of Dalits, tribals and religious minorities. Her doctorate in economics from
M S University in Vadodara was on Economic Status of Women in Urban Informal SectorA Study of Baroda City.
She took a keen interest in the cultural
expression of womens rights through
songs, street theatre, poetry, posters,
music ballets and folk forms. She also
helped train members of Sahiyar to
perform in these expressions. Her training as a Bharata Natyam dancer as
a schoolgirl came in handy for this.
Trupti was also a successful trainer and
orator, who spoke with lucidity and in a
persuasive style,
The egalitarian ethos of the Marxist
ideology attracted her as much as the
simplicity of the Gandhian lifestyle
adopted by her parents and her feminist
heritage came from her Gandhian mother.
When Trupti was born, her mother,
Suryakantaben Shah who was working
in the remand home at Vadodara gained
fame for her fight for maternity leave of
three months and the matter had reached right up to the then Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru.
Early Initiation

Vibhuti Patel (vibhuti.np@gmail.com) teaches

at the Department of Economics, SNDT
Womens University, Mumbai.

32

In the early 1970s there was a new left

group in Vadodara to which Truptis
father, Thakorbhai Shah and I belonged.
She would attend the study circle on
june 25, 2016

Marxism with him and listen to

stalwarts like A R Desai, advocate
Sharad Zaveri, Ghanshyam Shah, and
the youth icon of the time, Tariq Ali,
with rapt attention. When student members of this study circle decided to
plunge into direct action, Trupti too
joined us. She became an active member
of the group, Study and Struggle Alliance and I still remember her singing
the Hindi film song that had become
very popular then, Nanhe Munne Bacche
Teri Mutthi me Kya Hai, with the working class children where we were running literacy classes and a health clinic.
This group conducted factory gate meetings against the ret renchment of workers, on issues of payment of bonus,
wages, etc, commemorated May Day (1
May) and expressed solidarity with the
liberation struggles in Vietnam, African,
Latin American and Asian countries. I
remember Trupti attending all these
programmes holding my hand. During
1973, in Vadodara, we had several agitations, sit-ins, hunger strikes (11-year old
Trupti also joined in) against price rise,
hoarding, and black marketing of essential goods.

Navnirman Agitation
In 1974, with the same gusto, she attended solidarity programmes in support of
the historic railway strike and all the
protest activities led by the students during the Navnirman agitation. When
leaders like Mrinal Gore, Ahilyatai
Rangnekar, Manjutai Gandhi, Taratai
Reddy called upon activists to start the
anti-price rise womens movement in
Vadodara, Trupti was always with me.
Whenever we were arrested, Trupti was
taken to the remand home as she was a
minor. The staff there would tell her to
use her mothers name and secure her
release. Inevitably, Trupti would vehemently refuse to do so.
During the 18 months of the Emergency (25 June 1975 to 21 March 1977),
most of the trade unions had stopped
functioning in Vadodara. The Study and
Struggle Alliance was approached by
industrial workers to take up their
issues. We formed factory-wise workers
committees to deal with issues such as
bonus, retrenchment, and wage and
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Economic & Political Weekly

COMMENTARY

occupational health of the workers.

Trupti accompanied us to address the
gate meetings, distribute leaflets and
visit the working class communities.
Later on, under the leadership of her
father, the Vadodara Kamgar Union was
formed so that workers grievances
could be addressed in the Labour Court
at Vadodara itself.
The United Nations (UN) declared
1975 as the International Womens Year
and that period was marked by a number of programmes. Neera Desai was a
member of the Committee on the Status
of Women which was to bring out a
report in 1974 known as Towards Equality
Report. It was also translated into Gujarati. When we fought for democratic
rights, we faced state repression and
ironically, at the same time as womens
rights activists we were invited as
resource persons to speak at official
functions. This dualism continued till
the end of Truptis life. For her funeral
procession on 27 May and for her memorial meeting on 5 June, representatives
of social movements and mainstream
political parties were present as Trupti
and her colleagues in Sahiyar worked
with women survivours of domestic
violence, dowry harassment, forced sex
selection irrespective of their class/caste
and religious backgrounds.
Feminist Network
In 1977, I moved to Mumbai and plunged
into feminist activism and Trupti began
visiting Mumbai more frequently to
attend workshops, conferences and meetings. Trupti contributed reports based on
her activities in the working class communities and highlighted womens specific concerns in the newsletters in English called Feminist Network and Stree
Sangharsh in Hindi.
Trupti played a pivotal role in initiating
an agitation against the Supreme Courts
judgment on the Mathura rape case in
1980. She translated into Gujarati the
open letter by four law teachers of Delhi
University, Latika Sarkar, Upendra Baxi,
Vasudha Dhagamwar and Raghunath
Kelkar, challenging Justice Chandrachuds verdict that cast aspersions on the
teenage tribal girl, Mathura while allowing the rapist policemen to go free. This
Economic & Political Weekly

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june 25, 2016

18-year-old college student galvanised

womens organisations in Vadodara to
protest under the banner of Nari Shoshan Virodhi Samiti (Committee to Resist Exploitation of Women). Trupti was
disillusioned by the conservative and
sectarian biases of the traditional womens institutions and womens wings of
political parties in this forum. Sahiyars
statement rightly captured her predicament in these words,
Disenchanted with the apathy of women
political leaders towards gender based
violence, she participated as perhaps the
youngest delegate in the first conference of
Autonomous Womens Movement organised
in Bombay in 1980. The proceedings sharpened the need in her to start something
afresh in Vadodara for womens rights. And
so she resolved: there is a need to have an
autonomous womens organisation in Baroda
which will uphold the interest of women
above all other issues and political affiliation
(2016).

Contribution to Womens Studies

Trupti also authored four volumes of a
pictorial history of the womens movement in India which used the storytelling method in which eight to 10
women raise issues, provide explanation
and analysis, and discuss approaches to
the womens question taking episodes
from history, epics, folklores, scriptures
and oral traditions. The book provides a
gender lens for the 19th century social
reform movement, the first half of the
20th century freedom movement of
India and contemporary womens movement. Trupti was a bridge between
womens movement and womens studies. She was active in the Indian Association of Womens Studies and Gujarat
Association of Womens Studies. She also
worked as a researcher at the Womens
Studies Research Centre of M S University, Vadodara in its initial years.
Establishment of Sahiyar
In 1984, when a tribal woman in
Sagbara, south Gujarat was brutally
gang-raped and paraded naked, Trupti
and a fellow feminist Heena Desai went
to her village, met a number of people
and wrote the account of the rape
victim during their return journey. It
was so moving that the highly respected
Gujarati magazine Akhand Anand

vol lI nos 26 & 27

published it. Trupti and Heena felt the

need for an autonomous womens
organisation to effectively support
women survivors of violence and thus
Sahiyar was born. Its anti-rape campaign shook the then Gujarat government and Amnesty International also
took up the issue of the Sagbara rape
case for global campaigning.
Sahiyar has provided institutional
support to women in social distress,
produced cultural alternatives in terms
of feminist garbavali (Gujarati folk
songs), music ballets, street theatre,
advocacy and training material with
support of local resources, for the past
32 years. As Sahiyar does not believe in
accepting foreign funds, feminists from
Mumbai organised charity shows to
raise funds. The one act play of Italian
playwright Dario Fo, In Search of Womens History (Herstory), enacted by stage
and film actress Meenal Patel and feminist songs of Neela Bhagwat rendered in
classical ragas were performed as part of
one such effort. Trupti worked tirelessly
in the campaign against sex selection
initiated in 1986 by organising pickets in
front of nursing homes performing sex
selection tests on pregnant women,
attempting to change the mindset of
doctors through public dialogue, writing
against sex selective abortions and motivating young researchers to work on the
subject and get primary data to build the
campaign.
Feminist Quarterly
The feminist groups in Gujarat felt the
need for study circles and a publication
in Gujarati. Trupti volunteered to organise the first workshop to brainstorm
and at the end of a three-day meeting a
consensus emerged that a feminist
quarterly should be started. This was
started in 1986 and named Nari Mukti. It
was also decided that a study circle
should be held periodically to help members write articles/book reviews/poems/
reports for each issue of Nari Mukti.
Trupti also insisted that we should not
dilute its feminist content.
Members of the Nari Mukti collective
also translated the voluminous Shramshakti: Report of the National Commission
on Self Employed Women and Women in
33

COMMENTARY

the Informal Sector (GOI , 1988) into

Gujarati. Each of us took the responsibility of translating one chapter. Incidentally, members of Nari Mukti in
Mumbai, Surat, Valsad and Vadodara
had voluntarily helped in the data collection and field-based studies for the
original English version of the report.
Peace Building Efforts
In 1993 following the demolition of the
Babri Masjid, Trupti was at the forefront
of peace building efforts. She and her
husband Rohit Prajapati had chosen to
live, not in the caste-based residential
societies of Vadodara but in Tandalja,
the outskirts of Vadodara known as
mini Pakistan as it was predominantly
populated by working class Muslims.
Rohit, as a trade union and environmental activist and Trupti as a womens
rights activist played pivotal roles in the
formation of the Vadodara branch of the
Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).
During the Gujarat riots of 2002, Trupti
and Rohit provided protection to

members of the minority community

and contributed towards the documentation of human rights violation, deaths
and destruction of property of innocent
citizens during the riots.
During the past one decade Trupti
focused on environmental issues like
that of displaced people due to mega
development projects, insensitive and
anti-poor slum demolitions, and the
relocation policies of governments. She
had filed several public interest litigations and was using the Right to Information (RTI) Act to get official information to substantiate her cases. She took
up the cause of people affected by the
statue of unity project, the Garudeshwar
farmers plight and the last petition filed
by her was against the Vishwamitri Riverfront Development Project (VRDP). The
last 18 months were extremely painful
for Trupti due to the cancer that attacked
her body but it did not deter her from her
spirited engagement with social issues.
She was eagerly awaiting the court
order in her petition demanding the

stoppage of work on the VRDP and the

moment she was informed that the stay
order had been obtained, she responded, We have become serious about environmental and human rights issues,
but what about womens rights? She
went into coma immediately after that
and in a couple of hours, death followed.
Trupti made a permanent place in the
hearts and minds of thousands of men
and women, boys and girls across class,
caste, religious, ethnic lines whose lives
she touched. In an anthology profiling
feminists from western India by Neera
Desai (2006), Trupti was quoted as
saying, For me, the feminist perspective
is not an ideology but a way of life.
Indeed Trupti, yours was truly a feminist
way of life, both in the private and
public domain.
References
Desai, Neera (2006): Feminism as Experience:
Thoughts and Narratives, Sparrow, Mumbai.
Sahiyar and PSS (2016): Trupti Shah: A Tribute
http://feministsindia.com/trupti-shah-a-tribute/ accessed on 25 May 2016.

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