The ‘Lapata Ladies’ of news articles

NOTEBOOK

If you are part of a progressive newsroom, or have trained yourself to develop an intersectional feminist approach to reporting, then even in the hinterlands of the country, you traverse villages on the lookout for female voices; not to tick boxes but to add depth and meaning to your work. As a city dweller, who has parachuted to a far-off village and only has a couple of days to complete their reporting, it can be a tall task, especially if you happen to find yourself in north India. In the hinterlands of north India, giggles, banter between women and sharing opinions amongst each other is not rare. But sharing it with a stranger, especially in front of the men of their villages, is unseen and unheard of. At least, that has been my experience so far.

While travelling in Rajasthan’s Sawai Madhopur district for a story on human-animal conflict, my colleague, who is a female photojournalist, and I came back from the first day only to realise that we barely had any quotes from women. Barring one conversation with the lady who had lost her husband in a tiger attack, all the insights and the information were from the men. This included forest officials and the residents of the villages that we had visited. Was it that we did not spot a single woman on the roads or in the fields? Or, was it that they were not impacted by the human-animal conflict in the area? None of the above was true.

We spotted more women in the fields, taking animals out to graze or moving around their houses completing chores. Despite this, had I had gone ahead and written the article on the basis of our first day of reporting, readers would have got the impression that Sawai Madhopur has no women inhabitants or worse, tigers and other big cats were misandrists, targeting only men. Then why did the women’s presence in public space not translate into their equal presence in our reportage? Soon enough we realised why — that the women would immediately draw their ghoonghat and step away when they saw the male sarpanch accompanying us. In some cases, male relatives would quickly join in whenever we would approach the women and would soon silence them.

On the second day, we did not have any male villager accompany us on purpose. We stopped by the roads and spoke to women, who would tell us how their collective behaviour had changed after a tiger attack. A little giddy after finding a few women who were sharing anecdotes on how a woman was attacked by a tiger when she had stepped out of her home to defecate, her relative quickly stopped his tractor and joined our conversation uninvited. She stopped mid sentence and drew her ghoonghat to her chest.

It is not that it is only in Rajasthan that we found it difficult to hear female voices. In my reporting assignments in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, I have seen the men in the families sitting next to the women interviewees and constantly interrupting them. This is after we have found one or two women who agreed to speak. Many women in the hinterlands of north India do not believe that their thoughts, despite being coherent, even make sense. They often suggest that I speak to the husband or teenage sons to get a better idea of the subject at hand.

But this is not the case across the country. In civil unrest-hit Manipur, female relatives of those deceased have raged against the incidents despite their grief. They have come forward to share the traumatic events. Similarly, in remote villages in West Bengal’s Sundarbans, the survivors of trafficking have spoken to me without much hesitation despite the taboo and their continuous marginalisation by relatives and villagers.

Men speaking on behalf of women or cutting them off midway while speaking is not a particularly rural phenomenon. Nor is it limited to north India. However, with the limited time on hand and men hovering around women in north India, trying to monitor every word being uttered and every thought being conceived, it is a rather difficult task to access their raw emotions and their observations about the world they inhabit. However, reporters must go out of their way to ensure that women’s voices do not go missing from their news reports.

alisha.d@thehindu.co.in