Sewa founder Ela Bhatt pays tribute to Anasuya Sarabhai

Ela Bhatt, founder of SEWA (as Self-Employed Women's Association is known everywhere), says she does not like travelling out of Ahmedabad, her hometown, these days.

At nearly 80, that's only natural. But the eminent social activist made it a point to be present in the capital this week for the inauguration of an exhibition: 'Motaben — Anasuya Sarabhai (1885-1972)'.

The exhibition was, after all, the culmination of events set off by a lecture that Bhatt herself had delivered in 2011 on Motaben's life and contribution to the labour movement.

Moved by the lecture, Aparna Basu, leading historian of the women's movement in India, had spoken to Gira Sarabhai, Motaben's neice, suggesting that an exhibition of her life be organised.  

Motaben — moniker for "elder sister" in Gujarati — was Bhatt's mentor in the trade union movement. Bhatt remembers their first meeting in 1955, when Motaben had interviewed her for the job of legal office in Textile Labour Association (TLA).

The TLA, which Sarabhai and Mahatma Gandhi had founded in 1920, was the principal trade union of the textile industry in Ahmedabad. But it did not have the adversarial relationship that unions now have with the management; rather, it was known, says Bhatt, for its "non-confrontational attitude, emphasis on arbitration, and forward looking, agree-to-disagree culture".

It was also as a member of TLA that Bhatt came in contact with women workers in the informal sector — the headloaders, waste-pickers and chindi workers who stitched quilts from the waste cloth of the mills — which led her to found SEWA in 1972.

Ironically, Motaben died within months of SEWA being formed and TLA disassociated itself from SEWA a few years later. 

From the exhibition, it's clear that Motaben was an unlikely trade union leader. The daughter of Sarabhai Seth, one of the most prominent merchants of Ahmedabad, she was of a social class which was far removed from the labourers.

And yet, Motaben not only became their trusted leader, but she even battled the displeasure of her brother, industrialist Ambalal Sarabhai, to secure their dues.

Much of this, of course, was the result of her meeting and imbibing ideas of social equity from the suffragettes and the Fabians in England, where she lived from 1911 to 1913.

Back in India, she set up a night school for workers, a credit fund, creches and toilets for women, a maternity home and even a hostel for harijan girls in her home.

In her private life, too, she was pathbreaking. Married off at 13, she was unhappy with her husband because he didn't like reading and was dull at studies, and soon moved out of his house.

In her testimony to her niece Gira, which is reproduced as captions along with photographs from the Sarabhai family archives at the exhibition, Motaben says she confessed to Gandhiji that she did not want to go to jail, and found it difficult to wear khadi!

In the initial phase of her interaction with the mill workers, she bathed and cleaned Harijan children.

It is this spirit of Motaben that Bhatt tries to capture, her objective being to bring "Anasuyaben back to the city, among the women, and the workers of Ahmedabad".

But she also has a larger ambition. "Even before Motaben joined hands with Mahatma Gandhi to lead the well-known strike of 1917, she had already led a successful strike on her own in 1915," she says.

This exhibition is clearly meant to be Bhatt's attempt to secure Motaben a place in the history of India's labour and women's movements, a place that she had never cared to stake a claim to when alive.