This week a friend told me about a gang of women who are gathering together and taking concrete action to avenge the simple and devastating imbalance of power between the sexes they experience. The Gulabi Gang.
The Gulabi [Pink] Gang is a group of Dalit (untouchable) women who live in extreme poverty and an environment of extreme oppression against women. The police and the government will not help them, and so instead of seeking redress of their grievances through the normal bureaucratic channels, they take matters into their own hands.
If a woman comes to their leader seeking refuge from an abusive husband, the gang will go to his house, all dressed in pink saris, and demand that he modify his behavior… or be beaten to a pulp. The group also takes on causes that affect all poor people, men and women. For example, “Last year… the Gang unearthed corruption in the local public food distribution system. A government-run shop was siphoning off tons of grain that was meant to be handed out free to the poor and selling it on the black market—until the night neighboring Gulabi Gang members, … stopped two trucks loaded with grain. … the women managed to deflate the truck’s tires and confiscate their keys. The pink vigilantes then successfully pressured their local government to seize the grain and properly distribute it.”
For my Feminist Jurisprudence class (yes, my school is awesome) I read “Toward a Theory of Law and Patriarchy,” where the author Janet Rifkin discusses the legitimizing of a patriarchal legal system by seeking redress through it. She says, “The reliance on litigation reflects the belief in law as a source of social change, while ignoring the ideological power of law to mask social reality and block social change.” She notes that while some token battles for women are won through the bureaucracy, “the basic sexual hierarchy is not changed.”
The Gulabi Gang does not buy into the ideology of law. They seem to intuitively understand the deep roots of their anger and oppression. The pink vigilantes do not accept that they must go to the police (all male) to have justice. They find power in women, and seek change, not by asking for power from men, but by wrenching it from their tight grasp themselves. They see to it that men suffer public shame, if necessary, so that women are not the only ones to suffer the consequences of abuse and shame.
I wish that we American women could learn a lesson from these courageous Indian sisters. I wish every woman had a group of pink-saried women to knock down the doors of oppressors and avenge the savage inequalities she experiences. I fear we, all too often, buy into what Rifkin calls the “mythological vision” of the world that law presents in relation to women. By buying into the patriarchy as a source of authority, we reinforce its legitimacy and dilute the momentum necessary for a true revolution. We think that a man (or the patriarchy) must give us legitimacy, or acknowledge our concerns out of benevolence. We have got to realize, like the Gulabi Gang, that we do not have to be given legitimacy; we must demand it.