Nourish in India: Female Representation in Community Leadership

Having read so much about the diseases one can get coming to India on the CDC website, being injected so many times and taking so many pills, I couldn’t help but chuckle when I was told the name of the village which would be the focus of the documentary film on which I am working: Malaaria.

It took about an hour to drive out to the village from Seva Mandir’s offices in the Fatehpurah section of Udaipur, a journey which took us from the cow and autorickshaw-filled city streets, to highways with the occasional camel walking down them winding through hills, to the bumpy dirt roads of rural Mewar (the name for the Udaipur region).

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell writes: “Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation.” Gladwell is discussing the significant role that social networks in the United States play in helping people advance their careers, ideas, and agendas, but I was continually struck by that concept while in Malaaria.

When people talk of the issues of inequality, they often speak of how India is a nation of extreme contrasts, how you see poverty and wealth side by side. This is certainly true in the big cities, but Malaaria is nowhere near the swank shops in Delhi or the corporate headquarters in Mumbai. It would be easy to ignore Malaaria’s problems because unlike city slums, they are very much out of sight (and out of most people’s minds).

Our project doesn’t really have a clear, tangible impact on the lives of the women in Malaaria. They showed us the irrigation system that Seva Mandir helped them build, the village school, and their new well. These things are concrete and their effects are easier to measure. Though the effects of our project on the lives of women in Malaaria may not be as clear-cut as an increased harvest due to better irrigation, I think (or at least hope) that our short documentary which examines the increased role of women in a traditional village council, will help raise awareness about what these women have accomplished and what work remains to be done. Awareness is more a part of the means to an end than an end itself. Though they are largely isolated from much of the outside world, the women in our film have used their connections with one another, their mutual interest in having their voices heard to come together to create change in Malaaria. Though the advancement of their rights is based on their own actions, Seva Mandir’s creation of a women’s resource center, childcare programs, and education initiatives have all been crucial to making their work possible.

My hope for our film is that it will inspire women in other villages to come together and work to create a space for women in their village leadership and that it will allow Seva Mandir to promote its work to a larger audience in order to increase support for their efforts.