Lady Driver: Stories of Women Behind the Wheel

Writers

Introduction

Beyond Boundaries

Jayawati Shrivastava

Thousands of years ago, the invention of the wheel radically changed the lives of ordinary people. The realization that movement – the act of going from one place to another – could be enabled and speeded up by this thing called the wheel must have created both bewilderment and excitement. Today the wheel is so widely used, we take it for granted, and tend to consider it almost ‘natural’. We forget how this one invention transformed the concepts of speed and access and opened the doors to a new world. The ‘wheel’ became a trigger to revolutionize human life. From bullock carts to airplanes, from watches to computers – none of these would have been possible without this one invention.

The stories we have collected in this book – allof them by women – revolve around a specific set of wheels – those of cars, that have now become integral to modern life, both urban and rural. As recently as a generation or two ago, car driving was largely a male prerogative. Few women knew how to drive, many were not allowed to drive, and those who could, belonged mainly to the elite classes. I recall that in the 1960s and 1970s, when I drove on the roads of Patna in Bihar and Sagar in Madhya Pradesh, heads would often turn at the sight of a woman driver. Today this is not the case – there are many more women on the road although, because cars still remain something of a luxury, most women drivers are upper class. But women taking up driving as a career, women from workers’ settlements becoming professional drivers to support themselves and their families – this is something relatively recent. This is partly because of a lack of opportunity and partly because people still look askance at ‘women on wheels’. The lady drivers trained by Azad Foundation, a Delhi-based not-for-profit, are changing this. Azad lady drivers are spelling out a new vocabulary of life on wheels.

The last few decades have seen a number of interventions that take different approaches to the question of women’s empowerment: education, skill building, institution building, local governance and more. Azad’s chosen method of intervention focuses on women in rapidly urbanizing modern settings. Here they have chosen to move away from a focus on skillslike tailoring, embroidery, knitting, papad and pickle making or training as beauticians, nurses, receptionists and so on. But why driving? For Azad, the choice of driving meant moving away from the beaten track, challenging patriarchal notions of women’s so-called inferior capabilities: this was crucial to their overall vision.

Driving – a bullock cart, a truck, a car or anything else – has largely been a male activity. A driver is one who leads, and in a patriarchal society, it is the man who is considered capable of this, and indeed ‘driving’ the lives of those around him. Women and children are meant to follow. Driving thus, is ‘natural’ to men.

Both mobility and technical knowledge – two things that are integral to driving – have also been the domain of men. They’re free to move about anywhere, almost as a birthright. Women, however, face hundreds of restrictions: ‘don’t go out after dark’, ‘don’t go alone’, ‘make sure you’re properly dressed’. Any breaking of rules is met with criticism and often, even punishment. Patriarchy controls women’s powers of (economic and social) production, reproduction (child bearing and caring), their sexuality (body and desires) and, closely intertwined with all these, their mobility. Control over their movements is critical to upholding the patriarchal structure, as it binds women to the house and to the men of the house in a fundamental way, inculcating fear, self-deprecation and dependence on men.

And then there is the question of technology. The general belief is that men are more intelligent than women, that they can understand complicated technical things that women cannot cope with. The patriarchal view, held by many men and even women, scientists and gurus, spells out the ‘truth’ that the feminine brain is smaller and less suitable for scientific and technical pursuits than the male. This, despite the fact that so many women are excelling in small and big ways as scientists and technicians all around the world. Then there’s the other binary – that men are rational and women impulsive and emotional – that reinforces this myth, as if men do not have feelings and women do not have original ideas!

A third argument that’s used to stop women accessing the public space as drivers is the safety issue. Roads are unsafe, these are bad times, keep the women indoors. Rather than reprimanding, and punishing roaming Romeos or teaching men to become better human beings, we punish women by curtailing their freedom. But actually, as experience and statistics from across the world show, the home is a much more unsafe place for women than the street, with more violence being perpetrated against them inside than outside.

The real story is that all these falsehoods are presented as truth because of the underlying fear among men and women that if women are allowed access to the public space, they will become free. Much better then to keepcontrol over their minds and mobility, keep them away from wheels and the steering wheel. When women become car drivers, they contribute to exploding many myths. For example, those who drive commercially can become economically independent. Many become technical experts at cars and their problems. Because they know how difficult it is to function in the public world, they may learn self-defence. And thus they burst the bubble of insecurity. Economically, socially and personally, they cross many boundaries or ‘Lakshman rekhas’.

At Azad, you will meet many women who have left the secure spaces of their homes and have chosen to negotiate public spaces. They’ve taken risks, dealt with roughness and violence, and with comments and jibes, both in the home and outside. Their journeys have not been easy, but they have for the most part, chosen to continue to move forward. As always, some have found the path difficult and have been pushed to walk back. But for those who have stayed the course, there have been many rewards. It is the stories of these women that we bring to you here.

For this book, the Azad Foundation decided to choose twelve out of many stories that were available to them. Choosing a small number out of a larger and rich resource is always difficult. Azad’s selection came to be based, after much discussion, on the following criteria: theyfelt that while it was important to document ‘success’ stories, it was equally important to map women’s struggles, the challenges they had faced, the difficulties they confronted. When women move out of the home, there are different thresholds – personal, economic, social, familial – that they cross to gain strength. The book needed to reflect these, just as it needed to reflect the different backgrounds of the women – whether they were single, those who lived with their families, young or old, working women and so on. In this way, a wide range of experiences was drawn in. Thus each story in the book has its own unique character, and together they enrich the broader context of empowerment through economic activity. The universal and the individual have come together to weave these tales into absorbing readings.

While reading them, it’s important to remember that none of the stories here is ‘closed’ – in other words, the stories do not ‘end’. What we have here are slices from the lives of these women. The women themselves continue on with their journeys; for some their lives have moved on, for others there may have been setbacks not recorded here. None of the stories here should be seen as an ‘end product’.

Indeed, not only do the lives of women featured here continue to change but their stories connect the lives of ordinary people, those who live on the margins, to political economies both at the nationaland international levels. Today, urbanization and industrialization are the mantra of development the world over. Self-development of villages, self-reliance in agriculture – these have been thrown overboard in favour of building industry, roads, cities, a process that has further impoverished rural India, pushing people towards cities in search of livelihoods. But then, the city uproots the migrant, pushing him/her once again to the margins, in the interests of cleaning and beautification. Many people, both men and women, thus face the impact of migration and displacement repeatedly. Just as they settle in one place, they have to gear themselves to address new challenges. For women particularly, they have to deal not only with the changing and multiple patriarchies, but also the newer forms of neo-liberal, capitalist patriarchy that commodifies them through advertisements for selling and profit making.

How have the women featured in our book negotiated these multiple realities? How have they learned to independently walk the new roads of life, even as they dealt with modernity and tradition? What is this ‘walk’ that moves on four wheels? Does being in command of a steering wheel enable women to break the chains with which societies have bound them? Where did these women find the strength and resilience to deal with the fears they must surely have had, their hesitations, their desires and frustrations, the criticism from their families? How did they begin to make the journey to hope?

These were the questions that guided the six writers who have put together the stories that you will see here. The writers, and the editor of this book, have for long worked with people living on the margins of urban society. Each storyteller has her own style, a choice of language and words that works for her, and each is sensitive to the responsibility that representing someone else’s voice carries. As the women narrate their stories, they sometimes speak directly, sometimes through the voices of the writers – this can mean switching from the indirect voice to the direct, and sometimes bringing in a conversation. This two-way process of dialogue between the writer and the protagonist of the story, reflects the closeness of the women, as well as each one’s distinct personality.

In terms of personality, region, language, age, situation and culture, the women drivers are very diverse. Some, like Suneeta and Geeta, were very scared when they began learning to drive, others like Savitri and Khushi, did not know the meaning of fear. Among the drivers featured here are young women like Rabbunisha, Khushi, Lalita, Geeta and Prachi, as well as middle-aged ones like Savitri and Shanno. Each one’s family came to Delhi in search of livelihood opportunities and stayed on. Lalita, Suman, Savitri and Poonam come from the villages of Bihar. Khushi’s family migrated from Jhansi. Their languages, their eating habits, their customs vary greatly. But once in Delhi,things changed: they began to speak Hindustani, some even picked up a few words of English. All struggled hard to survive, taking on domestic work, piece-rate work in tailoring establishments, assisting nurses, working in anganwadis, running tea shops. One of them even took to begging to survive.

In each family, the flavour of relationships has been distinct. The mother-daughter duo of Savitri and Poonam received encouragement from the man in the family. Dayaram, the husband of one and father of the other, did not stop his wife from pursuing her dream. Too scared to drive himself, he told his wife that if she was keen to drive, she should go ahead and learn with the daughter. In Khushi’s family, there is mutual love and respect: each member has the freedom to choose what they want to study or do. Khushi and Lalita did not face any hurdle in learning to drive. Suman and Hemlata would not have been able to stand on their own if their brothers had not supported them.

It’s important to take note of the supportive role men can and do play. Listening to and reading about incidents of violence and injustice towards women, we tend to think that women never get support from men. But these lives show us that if we look around us, we can see that mutual respect between men and women is also a reality. If one woman faces violence, two others may not.

Relationships in Savitri and Poonam’s families are friendly; Rabbunisha, Suneeta and their mothers,Hemlata and her brother and father, and Shanno and her children are also friends. But Sakshi is acutely resentful of her mother, who never gave her any support and always considered her to be a burden. Prachi worked like a slave in the family household. Her parents sold her for Rs 200,000. Geeta had to finish household chores before going for her training classes. Her two good-for-nothing brothers just loitered around. Sakshi’s husband doused her with kerosene, ready to set her on fire. One of Hemlata’s hands is twisted and crooked because her husband was so violent, he broke it and she did not have enough money to get it properly treated.

Several of the women who are today confident drivers have suffered extreme forms of torture. Some have seen their mothers being humiliated and brutalized. Geeta cannot forget how her father used to drag her mother into the streets and beat her mercilessly, making her run like a terrified animal. Her mother was always sick and injured. The violence many of these women have faced is physical, mental, intellectual and economic. But sharing the hurt and the trauma has helped them to move forward in life. Generally, violence against women is shrouded in secrecy. Humiliation and social stigma forces women to keep it under wraps. But these women developed the courage to speak out, and that became the first step to moving