In memoriam

Remembering Vasudha

IT is hard to believe that Vasudha Dhagamwar is no more. Prema and I had dinner with her at the Pride Hotel, Pune on 26 January. She complained of aches and pains in her back; obviously cancer had spread and she was a guest of life. Yet she came alive when she recited some poems and verses in chaste Marathi written by Geeta Sane, her mother.

Geeta Sane was among the first feminist intellectuals of Maharashtra. It is fitting that the Tata Institute of Social Sciences is publishing a well-researched monograph on four first generation feminists – Geeta Sane, Malati Bedekar, Krishnabai Mote, and Shakuntala Paranjpye. Geeta Sane’s non-fiction work in Marathi includes Chambal ki Daysu Bhumi (1965) and Bhartiya Stree Jevena (1986). I know that Vasudha was engaged in translating the Chambal work into English. She not only helped in completing Sane’s biography and followed in her footsteps, but also came to be regarded as a public intellectual in her own right, particularly in Maharashtra. But, above all, I think Vasudha would like to be remembered as Geeta’s daughter.

In several senses she also carried forward the subaltern legacy of her father, Narasimha Dhagmwar, a labour lawyer in Dhanbad. I did not meet either of her parents but felt that I knew them – such was the narrative power of Vasudha, for whom they remained ever present. Her disengagement with the law in later life was profound; at a recent meeting in Pune she not so gently exclaimed that I was still concerned with judicial review, the subject of my speech at Symbiosis law school! Her ability to renounce at will a subject, or even a passion, was as remarkable as her resilience.

But her fascination with law was real enough. She taught law at the postgraduate department of law, University of Pune, for a number of years and was regarded as a gifted teacher by her peers and class. Before and after that she was a legal activist par excellence. I recall how her academic leadership in the field of agrarian reforms was recognized as early as May 1975, as a member of the Delhi University Law Faculty, and the Indian Council of Social Sciences Workshop on the subject.

On her quitting from active law teaching, she founded an NGO at Delhi called MARG – multiple action research group, where she was a founder director for about a decade. Both R. Sudarshan (then at the Ford Foundation, Delhi, and subsequently with UNDP) and Harsh Sethi (now of Seminar) were her comrades in arms and provided support in every respect. Shahpur Jat (Delhi, where MARG was located) soon became a major hub for human rights learning.

What was perhaps most notable at MARG was her work on human rights learning. She (and her colleagues) produced several manuals on human rights literacy. She disagreed with my caption; she also did not quite agree with my maxim that the illiteracy of the literate is more pernicious than the illiteracy of the illiterate. What MARG produced by way of ‘what you can do to law without lawyers’ is indeed remarkable, and not only for the visuals and vernacular.

While at MARG, she also wrote a book (with social activist Subrata De and lawyer Nikhil Verma), Industrial Development and Displacement: The People of Korba (Sage, 2004) which is about displacement caused by industrial development. In this careful empirical study, Vasudha read, as always, the history of Indian economic and industrial development as furnishing a never-ending story of displacement of peoples. Relocation of peoples disorients their past as well as fractures their future. And it ambushes their present variously by callous, and at times cruel, indifference to processes of resettlement and rehabilitation.

Developmental Reason, she believed, is a menacing post-Enlightenment hybrid that produces belief in displacement as a necessary evil, in all its manifold impact on human lives. But it also reaches dimensions of Radical Evil, where (as Hannah Arendt reminded us) we can neither wholly forgive nor punish the continual reproduction of human rightlessness. Indeed, the struggle to achieve concrete rehabilitation policies invites the eternal labours of a Sisyphus! She believed in another development where people’s rights would not be wantonly sacrificed. Her intensive fieldwork in Korba, a multi-project area in Chhattisgarh, would now ‘justify’ her prosecution by an intolerant state for being a ‘Naxal’. But the charge of being a Naxal never really stuck, or survived, for her activism in Korba, or her yeoperson work among the tribals in Dhulia. It was based on a remarkably grounded understanding of the situation which, among other things, included living with the concerned people. It was this understanding which was also a cause for friction with celebrated activists. I recall here Vasudha’s insistence on the education and rehabilitation of Narmada oustees; Medha Patkar, whom she introduced to some Narmada people, adopted a wholly different view – of stopping the dam through judicial decrees.

I came to know Vasudha first through print; her Law, Power and Justice: Protection of Personal Rights Under the Indian Penal Code, which was first published by N.M. Tripathi, Bombay, in 1974, and later (1992) by Sage in a revised edition. This is a powerful book, well worth reading even now; and its message is rivetingly simple – that liberal law does not even care to hide its patriarchy. The appendix to the book provides a narrative of the chattel slavery of tribal women in Madhya Pradesh which resonates beyond its borders even today.

Vasudha wrote several empirical accounts of modern Indian law, including on the uniform civil code which was published under the auspices of the Indian Law Institute. She often said that the work was better known and cited because of my small yet critical introduction than what was actually written in her book! Her empirical study of marriage and divorce (Somaiya, Bombay, 1987) is a stunning account of middle class morality and insurrection against it. I have learnt a great deal from Vasudha’s works which are eminently readable even now, because they reveal the dark side of colonial and post-colonial legal liberalism.

We often disagreed and sometimes sharply. Vasudha called me an ‘Aussie’ when she was cross with me (the reference being to my stay there for several years, having actually begun my law teaching career in Sydney) and I in jest called her a ‘Memsahib’ (the reference being to her advanced legal education in England)! Her love for all things English was often as enchanting as infuriating. She was indeed a student of English literature which she taught at Miranda House, and maintained a close friendship with many of her colleagues in the Department of English at Delhi University. Memsahib that she was, she looked askance at my having graduated in the same field from Dharmendrasinhji College in Rajkot!

Vasudha had an immense capacity for restless critique, including of her own work. But at times she also stuck to her own firmly held positions. She believed in dialogue, but she also believed in the integrity of the dialogical self. I remember when I called her from Leamington Spa, England, about a report which Poornima Advani (then Chairperson of the National Commission for Women) and she had prepared. Vasudha seemed to find little fault with the Gujarat 2002 massacre and never resiled from her position that she was much misunderstood and maligned. Subsequently she explained her position in an article in The Hindu, maintaining that her fact-finding was fully justified even when she did not painstakingly visit the camps. Unsurprisingly, many feminist and activists did not agree with her; this was perhaps also the only time when we fundamentally disagreed.

Vasudha, throughout her life was opposed to all forms of appeasement and always presented a reasoned analysis of the public positions she took, even though inconvenient to many secular rationalists. She was not afraid, where necessary, to call a spade a spade, if not a bloody shovel. Persons of Vasudha’s integrity and courage are indeed rare; and in her demise the nation has lost an admirable scholar-activist, the like of whom, perhaps, we may never see. And for her friends, she has left the world a better place than she found it.

Upendra Baxi

Emeritus Professor of Law in Development,

University of Warwick, UK