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Sometimes a casual sensory experience may trigger memories that the mind had tucked deep within. Writer Julian Barnes has a term for this – IAM (Involuntary Autobiographical Memory); memories that the mind had not saved voluntarily, but just tucked away in some deep recess of the brain. The trigger to remember these forgotten stories can be anything from a certain smell, taste, a line in a report or even a visual of a fast-fading past. 

This columnist came across two such instances almost simultaneously. Come Women’s Day on March 8 and the usual avalanche of misreporting and media-created myths about feminists is let loose.

One such instance was a smirking reference to assertive and stubborn feminists’ vocal push for equality. They were, as usual, labelled as ‘those bra- burning types.” The second was an iconic black and white photograph of a group of women from Raini village who participated in the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand, hugging forest trees they wished to save from loggers’ axes. 

‘The bra-burning feminists’

This was a much reported incident from 1968 reported in various New York papers. The bare bones of the story were that a bunch of feisty feminists took out a parade to condemn the beauty pageant culture popularised by the media and fashion designers. The women alleged that fashion parades that guzzled so much space in the media were no more than a presentation of women as eye candy for men who judged their rankings on the basis of their vital statistics on display in bikinis.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Three women demonstrators were reported to have been incensed enough to burn their bras in a drum near the Chicago river. The mainstream media in the 60s and 70s expectedly smirked and termed such incendiary feminism as a passing fad. But the media image of undergarments burning in a drum became a sort of mascot for feminism baiters through the decades even as beauty pageants first began to wither and then became almost irrelevant.

As I read the term ‘bra-burning’, it triggered a whole cascade of memories. I was in the US a year after the incident and by then it had been revealed that the whole story about women burning their garments in public was a man-made stunt, quite literally. A male disc jockey and his architect friend had hired three women to create a juicy side story to discredit what they considered a perverse fad of women seeking attention in the name of liberation and thereby ruining an annual gala parade of beauties viewed all over by millions on telly. 

Let’s now move to the photograph of tree huggers being waved in our faces to celebrate the dramatic gesture of poor rural women for saving the forests. Looking at it, one was reminded of how the 1975  report commissioned by the government of India on the status of women had startled the public with its grim findings about the socio-economic and political marginalisation of Indian women.

Politically, it meshed well with an age that was promoting justified dissidence and debating the centuries-old colonisation of India in politics. By the 90s, the debate had also embraced larger questions about the lives of rural women and how gathering fuel and fodder for family cattle and fetching water from distant areas had kept them home-bound, depriving young girls of education. 

This was when the famous 1991 Chipko movement took shape in a remote village in Uttarakhand under the initial leadership of a gutsy woman by the name of Gaura Devi. It started not with media reports that hardly reached that poor area but by real life experiences of men and women in one of the poorest regions in Uttarakhand.

Women, who spent most of their waking hours collecting fuel and fodder from the forests around were suddenly being threatened by the arrival of bands of loggers who wanted to chop down the trees and sell the valuable timber. The women led non-violent rallies and Dharnas under Devi.

This aging matriarch later told Chandi Prasad Bhatt, a male activist who later joined the movement, that her determination to stand up to the powerful lobby of timber sellers grew out of the visible decline of their fields and drying up of rivers around the area stretching from Joshimath to Malari. In March 1974, when Gaura Devi and her band of women chased away the loggers, there were no photographers present in the area. Many famous photographs with women actually hugging trees were organised and captured photographers who got the women to re-enact the scene.

Fifty years later, a Hindi journalist from Uttarakhand visited the Raini village. By the mid-90s, this area had became symbolic of the peoples’ power to mount a potent environmental protection movement. However, few remembered how since then the precariously located Raini village had been repeatedly by floods and landslides. Today. it has become a ghost village.

Jooti Devi, the daughter in law of late Gaura Devi, told Down to Earth reporter Raju Sajwan that in those days, one cry to rally around threatened trees prompted all women, herself included, to put out kitchen fires, leave half-cooked food and rush to save the trees. It seems, she said, that people no longer need trees. Kitchen gas and homes made with iron and cement have reduced the importance of wood among the locals. Children no longer want the old ways of living. They think we are primitive folk if we eat off leaf plates or use baskets made of bamboo instead of colourful plastic, Jooti Devi told Sajwan.

Ukha Devi, another woman who had participated in the Chipko movement, told the reporter that the road to the forest had been  damaged due to a natural disaster two years ago. There are few young women left in the villages here. The young no longer care about the forests and have migrated to cities. Fifty years after Chipko, we only look at the forest from our village, she said.

Mutations of re-telling

In the age of social media and fake news, voluntary memories prevail. The memories of moral actions and inactions that may have taken place during mass movements that spoke truth to power are fading in the mists of time. 

All the stories recounted here have been retold over the years and passed down through hearsay, mutating with each re-telling. Perhaps the scepticism that old school journalists like us feel today, at the official version of the war raging in West Asia and the leaders giving us gyaan on social media, is because reporters today subsist on hard bits of voluntary memory of people from ground zero. People who have not been participants but distracted witnesses to the events as they were unfolding. Their truth is more often than not spotty, unreliable, political ideology driven and contains a Boss-pleasing slant. 

No story of a long regime wise Herodotus reminds us, is a tragedy with a happy ending, despite what the religions promise. It is a farce with a semi-tragic ending mostly; and at best a light comedy that will not leave you smiling as it concludes. 

Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.

© The Wire