Kashmiri women watch a rally from a window in Srinagar ~ Commons‘She Goes to War’ tells stories about women militants in India, but not through the prism of militancy
Journalist Rashmi Saksena’s ‘She Goes to War’ narrates stories about women militants in India, from Chhattisgarh to Jammu and Kashmir, but not through the prism of militancy.
She features women who faced discrimination, who were raped, who tried to juggle between the domestic and the public, who picked up guns, women who were revered and feared. Saksena’s stories are about ordinary women who made some extraordinary choices. Be it Nighat of Kashmir who fell in love with the separatist militant Khalid and was ready to do anything for his sake, or Purnima of Manipur who resolved to pick up the gun from a tender age, having seen her parents getting allegedly tortured at the hands of the Indian Army.
Having grown up in Umrangso in the North Cachar district of Assam and later in Shillong (Meghalaya) with a brief stay at Doyang in Nagaland, militancy was never an unfamiliar term. One remembers militants being referred to as ‘extremists’ in parents’ social circle. For kids, they were ‘bad people’.
After reading She Goes to War, one wants to laugh at her seven-year-old self, who had created monstrous images of militants — men with long, unshaven beard and unclean nails, carrying big guns, shooting at people at first sight. Even more so, after reading a book about women militants.
The book makes one see, just a little more clearly, that men and women with guns, against the State, are still just people. They have fears, they have insecurities, they love, and they ache too.
But the book never makes it through the journey that it promises the reader in its introduction. Amid characters which are hurriedly drawn, either the person is lost in too many facts, or too little is spoken for the reader to connect with the character. There is a constant, insatiated thirst to dig more into the person.
To be fair to the author, the book brings an entirely new perspective to seeing women in wars, either at the forefront or behind the bloodied scenes.
She Goes to War narrates stories of people who would otherwise be forgotten, like their assigned numbers which are struck out once any militancy operation ends.
‘She Goes to War : Women Militants of India’ written by Rashmi Saxena, has been published by Speaking Tiger, India
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