Solidarity’s siren song

Words are magic. So you can do magic tricks with them. ASHA means hope, like in “dil hai chhota sa, chhoti si Asha”

This year, I spent March 8, yaniki International Working Women’s Day in Trivandrum, at a meeting of the Kerala Asha Health Workers Association (KAHWA), who have been on strike in front of the State Secretariat for over a month.

The sun was strong, the street busy with traffic, the secretariat white and inscrutable in the heat. A steady stream of people joined—representatives of the United Nurses Association, Dalit Human Rights Movement, tea plantation workers and fishers, academics, students, volunteers. Someone said they would sing a song. In the compressed quiet of hundreds of people, an old Hindi film song in a sole voice, “Mere naina sawan bhadon, phir bhi mera mann pyasa”. An unexpected song at a protest. Yet so apt, so powerfully affecting, so true to the political emotion of that moment. 

ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists) workers are community health workers meant to connect marginalized communities with the public health care system. Their responsibilities include but are not limited to, immunization, family planning, first aid, sanitation, data collection. They they do not even earn minimum wage, though they were recognised as Global Health Leaders for their frontline work during COVID. Talk about being paid with exposure, all puns intended.

Words are magic. So you can do magic tricks with them. ASHA means hope, like in “dil hai chhota sa, chhoti si Asha”. Asha, a common woman’s name, conjures up an image of gentle, caring womanhood. Designated activists, aka those who must care selflessly for others, hence, not needing to be treated as workers. That’s the sort of word play which allows you to be paid an honorarium, instead of a living wage. I guess bolstering the government’s reputation for service delivery is a way of preserving honor of the nation-family, which is a woman’s worth, sorry, work. 

I was there to shoot for a film I’m making. I enquired about the order of events and was told, “Everyone will arrive soon, then you will inaugurate the meeting.” “Sorry, what?” I said. Ek toh, it was news to me. And also, who am I, I thought, to inaugurate a meeting? My demurrals were ignored with smiles and laughs. My demurrals were wrong-headed. This was not stature or aggrandisement but about the chance to experience and express solidarity. You do what’s asked, haq se. So I sang a song I first heard at a rally.

I was 21, when I learned there was such a thing as International Working Women’s Day. At my first March 8th march, I was awkward to call slogans and sing amid that vivid group of organisations and people of all sizes and persuasions, but I memorised them with shy fervor.

Those marches were a door—into an expansive world of feminism as a lived political idea. A call to adventure away from prescribed paths, to link one’s questions to others, but not subsume others’ issues and identities in your own. Liberalisation brought us mixed messages of liberty. Now everyone knows Women’s Day – but do they know each other? Liberalisation—a loosening of boundaries—can obscure liberation--the breaking of those boundaries. Loosening those boundaries and branding it struggle is what enables people capable of great personal kindness to support systems of infinite cruelty. May siren songs of solidarity draw us all out of those wordy boundaries, and open our hearts and open the door to a fairer world.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at  paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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