Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

2 SUMI KRISHNA
some livestock (mainly goats) and a hectare of paddy fields or less. Officially,
this is forest land under the territorial jurisdiction of the Orissa
State Forest Department, but by paying taxes to the State Revenue Department,
the residents had wrested for themselves some measure of rights
to the land. There were also many individual cases of litigation over the
land, which seemed to have gone on interminably in the district and
sessions courts. The women’s daily work flowed across the threshold of
the household and fields. They cooked and cleaned; managed the fish
in the ponds as well as the homestead vegetable patches; tended children,
goats and poultry; and farmed their small fields with seemingly equal
attention. Many of the men had jobs in nearby areas, combining wage
employment and farming. Poverty and insecurity made life in this
scenically beautiful area very tough; the people literally lived a ‘hand-tomouth’
existence, surviving on meagre wages and the produce of the land
and water.
We were all up early on the morning of 15 August, Independence Day.
Women rushed to finish drawing water from the school hand pump
because a flag-hoisting ceremony was to take place. Everyone dressed in
their best set of clothes. The men assembled slowly and children, girls
and boys, scrambled around the flagpole. There were only a couple of
elderly women at the edge of the group. The younger women had gathered
at quite a distance; even further away was the lower-caste family, man,
woman and children, all watching the proceedings. As an urban educated
outsider in a position of apparent authority, my age, gender and caste
were not perceived as a barrier to my presence at the flagpole. Indeed, I was
invited to hoist and unfurl the flag. I suggested that women should also
participate and that one of them might do this instead. After some discussion
among the men, I was told that the younger women would watch
from a distance as that was the custom. But a few elderly women were
called and the oldest among them was chosen to do the honours. The flag
was unfurled, the national anthem was sung and everyone cheered.
Later, I talked to some of the women. For the first time in this hamlet,
a woman had performed such a formal public function as unfurling the
national flag, and this had created quite a stir. I asked the women what
independence meant to them. Their instant response was ‘freedom from
British rule’ and the ‘right to vote’. To this, they added the right to approach
government officials; the right to be ‘heard’ in court. But what they most