Voices from the Indian Feminist Movement
Ketna Patel
Ketna Patel, a British-born, Indian-origin pop artist, has always been a rebellious soul. She tells me about her 20s, when her conservative, Indian grandmother tried endlessly to set her up with nice (read: boring) Indian guys. The long line of prospective suitors came for tea, as is the tradition with arranged marriages, and tried (to no avail) to impress Ketna. One day, her life flashed before her eyes; she had an epiphany. She thought: “if I ever end up with one of these ‘nice guys’, I’m going to have a semi-detached house, a maroon or burgundy Mercedes, and my kids will go to private school.” Predictability was her worst fear at the time, so this kind of life would have been complete hell. Being an architecture student at the time, she called up her university tutor and begged for any job, as long as it was outside the UK. As it happened, he was designing the Esplanade at the time: the iconic, durian-shaped theater in Singapore.
After transitioning from architecture to art, and doing various corporate art jobs in Singapore, Ketna traveled back to India and “fell in love with it”. But she recognized the problematic situation India was in. “India is trying to leapfrog from the industrial age in to the digital age, without having gone through all the different ideological steps that the West went through, like women's emancipation and equality
of all the different castes. So, while observing and studying all this I realized that the biggest divide in India came from the rural and the urban, because 70% to 75% of India still lives in villages.” Through various rural art projects, she attempts to capture the spirit of rural India, while also providing recreation and job opportunities for the people in the villages that she visits.
Every minute in India, 30 people move from a village to a city. And this paradigm shift, coupled with India’s progressive revolution, has caused some people extreme cultural dysphoria. “And at the same time, villages are being hollowed out and we’re losing a lot of the knowledge that is inherent in villages, you know, that that has been passed from generation to generation.” Ketna works tirelessly to try to protect these subcultures. I ask her how women are treated in these dramatically different ecosystems. She says, “I would say that I found women in villages a lot stronger. They might not have been literate or educated, but there was a quiet wisdom to them which came from years of teamwork, the ability to compromise with people, the ability to empathize with people.” Often times, as urban feminists, we can fail to understand the nuances of gender perception in villages. We are so focused on the disenfranchisement of women in rural areas (a serious issue, by all counts), that we can skip over certain types of empowerment that women in rural areas have. This is important to note, because the one-dimensional narrative of victimized rural women is degrading and unhelpful to the real women whom we are trying to empower.
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For direction in my own life, I ask her what the single biggest advantage is that an Indian--or any--woman can possess. “Without a shadow of doubt, the most important thing would be financial independence”, she states. Once a woman gains financial independence, she gains autonomy over her life; she doesn’t have to manipulate or stay in relationships as a safety net. Ultimately, I suppose, that’s what all feminists want: for women to be their own safety nets, in whatever way they choose, be they urban or rural. And Ketna Patel is one of the women helping achieve this reality.