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| Kathmandu, Tuesday December 31, 2002 Paush 16, 2059. |
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Quixotic
rescuers of women
By SANGITA
RAYAMAJHI
If there is one novel
you should read before you die, it is Don Quixote," Nigerian author Ben Okri said at
the Norwegian Nobel Institute as he announced the results of history’s most expansive
authors’ poll organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo. "Don
Quixote has the most wonderful and elaborated story, yet it is simple." This
assertion was published in The Guardian in May, 2002. So when about hundred well known
authors including Dorris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soinka, Seamus
Heaney, Carlos Fuentes and others from altogether fifty-four countries voted for the
‘the most meaningful book of all time’, they chose to opt for Don Quixote. When
I read the above lines from The Guardian once again the other day it set me recalling
those days when I used to enjoy reading the escapades of Don Quixote, Don Quixote and his
knightly errands where he went about rescuing those in trouble and most of the time they
happened to be damsels in distress as he, we know, was a Knight errant who considered it
his mission to rescue people in trouble.
The chivalric errands
of Don Quixote captivated the hearts of many and still do today for they hold the wisdom
of all times even as the episodes elaborate more upon the rescue errands of the
‘fairer sex’ a term which was very very politically correct in Quixote’s
time. That was Don Quixote the chivalrous Spanish Knight, driven almost mad by reading too
many chivalric romances so that he began to live those chivalries in broad daylight. I
remember one Quixote episode very clearly. Quixote meets a man beating his servant by the
roadside, most probably for not carrying out his orders. Quixote the typical Spanish
Knight, comes riding on his steed and brings it to a stand still next to the man, gets
down and taking out his lancelet begins to strike the man. Little does Quixote understand
the relationship between the master and the servant. The man pleads guilty, vows never to
repeat his mistake and leaves the place shaken. The chivalrous Knight turns to the servant
and says in a high theatrical note, "Thou art rescued, go thy way!" Then he
mounts his steed and gallops off to the distance to rescue a similar one in a similar
distress. But did Quixote stop to think where that servant would go?
This episode speaks
volumes about the so called rescue operations and offers administered by many
philanthropic agencies that claim to be saviours of hapless women of Nepal. For many NGOs,
their model for the salvage of women is based upon a kind of very sentimental intervention
into the plights of women like domestic violence, trafficked children and women, women in
their own communities barred from working or from living a meaningful existence. There are
two types of such rescuers. One category comprises of those who come to the women,
especially the rural women, see their plight and readily administer whatever help and
support they can, in the form of training, literacy programmes, income generating
activities etc. Then once they believe, believe in themselves that their philanthropic
interventions have been satisfactory they ‘phase out’ of the place like Quixote
never returning to see what had become of the servant. The second category of rescuers is
the more real one, those more concerned about the fate of the servant boy, more
apprehensive about the impact their actions and operations could have had upon the boy,
rather than being only concerned about their own methods of intervention. So the feedback
about the programmes should come more from the often distant and unknown recipients of the
assistance rather than from Don Quixote’s mouth. But nevertheless the history of
philanthropy will be transmitted as a heroic tale about the conquest of the
underprivileged, a narrative of progress and the betterment of humanity in general.
But why is it that the
women become the subjects of rescue and are either so much romanticized about or tend to
create a series of ripples of apprehension among the social workers, concerned agencies
and others. After the woman in Kalaiya or Janakpur or Lahan is stigmatized as a witch and
abused by the locals, she receives justice later on through the intervention of social
workers and activists. What happens later on? Does the intervention bring about a change
in the minds, hearts and beliefs of the local people, is her self-respect salvaged. I
always wonder what happens to them? When a girl was gang-raped in Pakistan and while the
case was under consideration in court she received death threats. The President of the
country intervened in a Quixotic manner. He rescued her, but the question comes did he
return to see what the master, symbolically the society, has meted out to the hapless
girl. What is going to happen to her? The daughter who is the honour of her family has
lost her dignity, she has been defiled in the eyes of her community. After the case is
dismissed where does she stand? Similar other cases are seen and heard especially in this
part of the world. Or to take a more wider context what happened to the Kamaiyas, the
bonded labourers of Bardia, Nepal after they were rescued from bondage? Or what happened
to the sex workers of Nepalgunj after they were displaced from their original locale in
the name of rescue operation?
The concept of rescue
in itself is very altruistic, benevolent and very humanitarian whether it is Quixotic or
not, and is undeniably an essential aspect of development. But when it comes to women and
their deliverance from the present state of affairs what is still more important is to
create a consciousness among the men as much as in the women about the socio-cultural
construct of the country which is predominantly patriarchal. A woman is gang raped, or a
woman becomes a victim of domestic violence, but the question is why should she be
ostracized by the society for a crime that she did not commit? Why should she commit
suicide, why should she hide from the society for a fault she has not committed? Don
Quixotes should be made sure that they turn around to see what has been happening to the
rescued creatures after they leave. The majority of our women do not speak or if they do,
they are not heard; they wait silently for some rescuers to come and free them from
bondage of the mind, transform the social psyche which to them is more important than the
physical transformation which is brought about by material gains.
Somebody comes to a
rescue and somebody is rescued. This is the favourite pattern of social service as far as
women are concerned. But those who are rescued not necessarily women but others too who
need it, are invisible. One can only guess that they must be feeling the fear of freedom
like the boy rescued by the Knight errant somewhere.
Rescuers are celebrated
as saviours and the rescued as martyrs in human history. But the pattern of giving and
being given generates a sense of dependency. Reading some discourses related to
women’s capacity building recently, I have come to the conclusion that we should
learn lessons from the past Quixotic rescue operations which were only doled out to the
women, and come up with the agenda to help them realise their potentials. Returning to
assess women’s predicament is not to monitor nor to act as watchdogs. It is to build
up a solid and reliable basis for women to realise themselves that they are capable of
political leadership and are not as hapless as the roadside victims waiting for some
Knight errant with a head full of bizarre dreams to rescue them. The discourse should
change from being rescued to being a partner in power sharing and a party in the political
discourse.
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